Tagged: entrepreneurship
30 results
ODF (On Deck Founders)
ODF (On Deck Founders) is a San Francisco-based founder fellowship that helps aspiring entrepreneurs go from idea to conviction. Its signature offering is an intense one-week in-person experience in SF where 80-100 pre-vetted builders meet potential co-founders, pressure-test ideas, and commit to starting a company - followed by lifelong access to an alumni community, mentorship, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in startup perks. Unlike a traditional accelerator, ODF takes no equity. More than 1,000 startups have launched through On Deck, collectively raising over $2 billion from investors including Sequoia, a16z, Khosla and Founders Fund.
Tom James
Tom James is a Certified Franchise Consultant and the founder of Prophecy Consulting, a Fort Worth, Texas advisory practice that helps corporate executives and military veterans decide whether to buy a franchise, and if so which one. A FranServe affiliate and member of the International Franchise Association, he matches candidates across 700-plus franchise brands through a free, structured coaching process. His approach is shaped by having owned a franchise himself, a SpeedPro large-format printing operation in the Los Angeles area, and by a corporate career spanning HR, IT, operations, project management, finance, and sales and marketing.
David Senra
In this episode, podcaster and biography obsessive David Senra (host of the 'Founders' podcast) sits down with Brian Halligan (HubSpot co-founder and Sequoia partner) to distill what more than 400 studied founders have in common. Senra argues the single defining trait is extreme focus bordering on obsession, captured in his maxim 'mute the world and then build your own.' The wide-ranging conversation covers founder archetypes, the influence of fathers, why co-founder duos rarely endure, disagreeableness versus taste, the myth of the broken-home genius, whether AI is genuinely a different kind of platform shift, and the sobering finding that of the 400+ founders Senra has studied, only about three had genuinely well-balanced lives.
Kayla Rodriguez Graff
Kayla Rodriguez Graff is the co-founder and CEO of SweetBio, a Memphis-based medical device company bioengineering Manuka honey, collagen, and hydroxyapatite into FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered wound care products (APIS and VERIS). She runs the company with her brother, scientist Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, and has raised more than $10M to expand access to affordable wound care, especially in communities hit hardest by diabetes.
CoffeeSpace
CoffeeSpace is a mobile-first, AI-powered matchmaking platform that helps founders, talent, and startups find each other - swiping their way to a cofounder, a first hire, or a team to join. Often described as 'Hinge for cofounders,' it uses granular filters and dual-sided compatibility matching to pair ambitious builders by skills, working style, time commitment, and equity preferences. Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, the app has grown to 30,000+ users across 100+ countries.
Hanz Panther
Hanz Panther is listed as Co-Founder and CEO of NewCo, a business-event production company built around an 'inside-out' festival format that swaps the convention-hall stage for the open doors of working companies. Operating at the intersection of media, publishing, and live events, NewCo turns cities into temporary campuses where the public walks into real offices instead of watching keynotes. Panther's public footprint is thin, but the role places him inside one of the more distinctive experiments in how modern business gatherings are produced.
Simon Glass
Simon Glass is the founder and CEO of Qodeo, a UK and US based platform that uses proprietary algorithms to match entrepreneurs with venture capital and private equity firms - with a deliberate focus on diverse, regional and female founders who sit outside the traditional venture network. A Cambridge BA, MA and MBA who trained in corporate finance at London Business School, Glass spent years in venture capital (including Amadeus Capital Partners, the first backer of ARM), banking, academia and media before building Qodeo to end what he calls the needle-in-a-haystack approach to finding investment. The platform now tracks tens of thousands of organizations and connects 20,000+ entrepreneurs with 7,400+ investors across multiple markets.
OneValley
OneValley is a San Mateo-based global entrepreneurship platform that helps founders launch and scale startups while giving universities, accelerators, enterprises and governments the software to run their own innovation communities. Born from the Silicon Valley accelerator GSVlabs, it rebranded to OneValley in 2020 after its online Passport platform exploded in growth, and today it pairs that software with OneValley Ventures, a $25M seed and pre-seed fund. The mission: take the resources and connections traditionally locked inside Silicon Valley and make them reachable to innovators anywhere in the world.
Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
David Lester
David Lester is the co-founder and former President of OLIPOP PBC, the prebiotic soda brand that grew from a $100,000 bet into a $1.85 billion company in under seven years. A former Diageo brand marketer who worked with Smirnoff, Gordon's Gin, and Johnnie Walker across three continents, Lester paired his CPG expertise with co-founder Ben Goodwin's scientific formulation genius to create a soda that supports gut health without sacrificing the nostalgia of a cold fizzy drink. OLIPOP now generates over $425 million in annual revenue, holds 65,000+ retail doors, and controls 87% of the functional soda category - a category it essentially invented.
Gadi Shamia
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Lauren Myrick
Lauren Myrick is the CEO and Co-founder of Found, a San Francisco-based fintech company building the all-in-one financial platform for self-employed workers and small businesses. After eight years at Square - joining as the company's second product manager and eventually running Square Payroll as General Manager - she co-founded Found in 2019 alongside Connor Dunn. The company has raised $125M+ across six rounds (most recently a $50M Series C led by Sequoia Capital in 2024) and now serves 770,000+ small business owners with integrated banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools.
Kshitij Jain
Kshitij Jain - widely known as KJ - is the Founder and CEO of Joveo, a Menlo Park-based AI-powered programmatic recruitment advertising platform that serves Fortune 500 employers including Wells Fargo, Barclays, Rolls-Royce, and Sony. A two-time founder with 20-plus years in the recruitment industry, he previously built MoBolt, a job application optimization startup acquired by Indeed in 2014 for a double-digit million dollar sum in under two years of operation. Before that he spent roughly eleven years at Monster Worldwide across roles spanning Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and India. KJ's driving mission - delivering the right job to every person - is embedded in Joveo's name itself, and his 4-3-2-1 model (four clicks, three applies, two shortlists, one hire) defines his philosophy on making recruitment humane at scale.
Paulo Martins
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Rushi Patel
Rushi Patel is the Co-Founder and COO/CRO of Homebase, the all-in-one workforce management platform serving 100,000+ small businesses and 2+ million hourly workers. With a background spanning McKinsey, KKR, and Microsoft, Patel co-founded Homebase in 2014 alongside John Waldmann to give local business owners - restaurants, retailers, and service businesses - the same quality workforce tools that enterprise companies take for granted. Under his leadership, Homebase has raised $198M in funding including a $60M Series D in April 2024, and grown to 1,900 employees while generating approximately $180M in annual revenue.
Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Stanford Graduate School of Business is the graduate business school of Stanford University, headquartered at the Knight Management Center in Stanford, California. Founded in 1925, it offers the two-year MBA, the one-year MSx, a PhD, and Executive Education, and is consistently ranked among the most selective business schools in the world. Its mission is to change lives, change organizations, and change the world.
Giulianna Crivello
Giulianna Crivello is the Founding General Partner of DSH Ventures, the pre-seed investment arm of Draper Startup House — the global co-living and coworking network for entrepreneurs backed by legendary VC Tim Draper. A 2018 valedictorian from Sierra Nevada College, she went from research analyst in Nevada to directing investments across 14 countries in her first year at DSH Ventures. She co-manages the fund with Vikram Bharati and has facilitated over 215 investor introductions to startups spanning the US, Singapore, India, and beyond, while helping build Draper Startup House into a presence spanning 25 embassies across 5 continents.
Michael Fanfant
Michael Fanfant is a General Partner at Runa Capital, a $200M+ early-stage VC firm, where he backs B2B SaaS and regulated-industry startups in fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before turning investor, he co-founded Octane Lending — a point-of-sale financing platform for powersports vehicles that hit a $900M+ valuation in 2021. A Stanford economics graduate, Kauffman Fellow (Class 27), and Events & Community Chair at BLCK VC, Fanfant brings the operational credibility of a builder and the pattern-recognition of an investor to every check he writes.
Ilana Stern
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'
Jon Eberly
Jon Eberly is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing thought leader turned venture capitalist, serving as General Partner at Sentiero Ventures, a Dallas-based $10M AI-focused seed fund. He founded Clock Four in 2006, built it into a 50-person San Francisco digital agency serving U.S. Bank and Juniper Networks, then sold it to Hero Digital in 2018 — one of multiple self-funded exits in his career. Today he backs early-stage AI-enabled SaaS companies alongside David Evans and Kishore Khandavalli, bringing deep operator experience in digital strategy, customer experience, and adtech to founders navigating the earliest chapters of company building.
Mohan Iyer
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Roman Beloded
Roman Beloded is a General Partner at Yellow Rocks!, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm investing in fintech, edtech, gaming, AI, and web3 globally. A serial IT entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience, he co-founded e-Legion, one of the world's top mobile app development companies, and FitStars.ru, a fitness video platform with 1.8M YouTube subscribers. His investment thesis centers on backing globally ambitious founders from underserved markets at the pre-seed and seed stages.
Skyler Fernandes
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Fedor Pak
Fedor Pak is the CEO of Chatfuel, the no-code AI chatbot platform trusted by 7 million businesses for over a billion monthly conversations on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Russian oil and gas before founding coin-machine networks, ride-hailing operations in Pakistan, and e-commerce ventures, Pak joined Chatfuel in October 2022 and has since steered the company from a chatbot builder into a full AI sales and engagement engine - Meta's top automation partner and a platform that saves clinic owners 30+ hours of admin per month.
Henrique Andrade
Henrique Andrade is the CEO and co-founder of CEFIS, Brazil's largest corporate education platform for accounting, tax, and labor law professionals. Founded in Goiânia in 2013 and launched in 2014, CEFIS has scaled to over 400,000 students and 5,000+ courses, reaching its first million reais in revenue within 14 months. Under Andrade's leadership, CEFIS expanded internationally to Redwood City, California in 2018, inspired by Silicon Valley's best practices in e-learning and talent management. Based in San Francisco, Andrade blends a meritocracy-driven culture - drawing inspiration from Goldman Sachs and the 3G Group - with a Google-style workplace designed to attract top engineering talent.
Igor Repeta
Igor Repeta is the CEO of Empat Tech, a Kyiv-based software development and outsourcing firm with nearly 200 engineers serving clients across 17 countries. He rose from Project Manager to Chief Executive Officer in four years, formally taking the helm in February 2026 after co-authoring the company's operational playbook as COO. Empat ranked #5 globally on the Clutch 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list in 2026 and holds back-to-back #1 Best IT Employer rankings in Ukraine (DOU 2024 and 2025). Beyond commercial growth, Repeta launched two civic tech projects during Russia's invasion of Ukraine: RevengeFor, a military fundraising platform channeling funds to ComeBackAlive, and HealUA, a peer-to-peer medical consultation platform for Ukrainian doctors.
Steve Reardon
Steve Reardon is the CEO of Alpine Software Group (ASG), a Walnut Creek, California-based acquirer and operator of vertical SaaS businesses. Born in Durban, South Africa, he is an alumnus of the University of Cape Town and Stanford GSB's MSx Sloan Fellows program. Before leading ASG, Reardon founded multiple businesses including Peldon Technologies, ran South Africa's largest cycling retail chain, then pivoted to software M&A — overseeing 60+ acquisitions across legal tech, marketing tech, and other vertical software niches. Under his leadership, ASG has grown to ~160 employees and ~$25M in annual revenue, with a 65%+ growth rate and notable exits including Innovative Systems sold to GTCR for $400M enterprise value in 2025.
Lauren Roberts
Lauren Roberts is an Associate at Forum Ventures in New York, where she evaluates hundreds of pre-seed B2B SaaS startups each year and coaches founders on market positioning, storytelling, and early traction. A University of Oklahoma alumna who co-founded her school's first student-run venture fund, she came to VC through a transformative summer in Tulsa during the centennial of the Greenwood Race Massacre - an experience that turned a pre-law finance student into one of the more distinctive voices on inclusive investing in early-stage tech.
Valerio Adrián Anacleto
Valerio Adrián Anacleto is the co-founder and CEO of Epidata, Latin America's first innovation outsourcing company, which he built from a three-person startup in Buenos Aires in 2003 into a 900-person firm operating across 10 Latin American countries and the United States with $30M in annual revenue. A product of Argentina's public university system who started working at age 10 in the La Matanza district, Anacleto also serves as First Vice President of CESSI, Argentina's software industry chamber, and is a longtime professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad Católica Argentina.
Ryan Buckley
Ryan Buckley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shovels, a Lafayette, California-based startup that turns fragmented government building permit records into a searchable intelligence layer for the construction and climate tech industries. Armed with degrees from UC Berkeley, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School, Buckley spent years building parallel B2B ventures before co-founding Shovels in 2022 with Luka Kacil. The company now processes 180+ million building permits, covers 30 million US addresses, and raised a $5M seed round in June 2025 led by Base10 Partners. A prolific blogger, part-time college professor, and author of 'The Parallel Entrepreneur,' Buckley is building what he calls the 'Pitchbook for the construction industry.'