Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.
Asheem Chandna is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he has spent over two decades backing category-defining companies in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and AI. Since joining Greylock in 2003, he has never lost capital on a single investment he led - a streak spanning Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.85B), Rubrik (IPO 2024), Abnormal Security, and Wiz. A Mumbai-raised engineer who cut his teeth at Bell Labs and scaled marketing at Check Point Software from $10M to $550M in revenue, Chandna brings an operator's instinct to early-stage bets, often writing checks before a deck exists. Named to the Forbes Midas List nine times, he is among the most respected cybersecurity investors in the world.
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), one of the most decorated venture capitalists in the world with 13 consecutive appearances on the Forbes Midas List - peaking at #3 globally. A Taiwanese immigrant who moved to Los Angeles at 13, Stanford-trained, and one of the first Silicon Valley VCs to relocate full-time to China in 2005, Hans has backed over 16 unicorns including Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Anthropic across three decades and three waves of technology: internet, mobile/cloud, and now AI.
Jennifer Fonstad is a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Owl Capital Group, with a 25+ year career that spans DFJ, Aspect Ventures, and her current early-stage fund. She helped grow DFJ's AUM from $150M to $3.5B, co-founded Aspect Ventures with Theresia Gouw in 2014, and is a champion of diverse founding teams. A Kauffman Fellow mentored by Tim Draper, she has backed companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Athenahealth, and ForeScout, racking up 8 IPOs and 23 M&A transactions. She co-founded Broadway Angels, is a founding member of All-Raise, serves on the Mastercard Foundation board, and was named to Forbes 50 Over 50 in 2025.
Jenny Lee is a Singapore-born venture capitalist and co-founder of Granite Asia, formerly Senior Managing Partner at GGV Capital, where she spent nearly two decades building Asia's most formidable tech investment franchise. A Cornell-trained electrical engineer who bought out her government scholarship bond for S$300,000 to chase her VC calling, she has backed over 21 unicorns and facilitated 16 IPOs across five global stock exchanges, including early bets on Alibaba, Xiaomi, Didi, and Grab. The first woman ever to crack the top 10 of Forbes' Midas List, Lee now runs Granite Asia - a $5 billion multi-asset platform investing across Asia's next technology wave.
Jim Goetz is a legendary venture capitalist and former partner at Sequoia Capital who became one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors by backing WhatsApp — the only outside investor in the company — delivering a $3.5 billion return when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. A five-time consecutive Forbes Midas List #1 (2013-2017) and TechCrunch VC of the Year (2015), Goetz also nurtured Palo Alto Networks from inception and led investments in HubSpot, GitHub, and AdMob. A Strongsville, Ohio native who described himself as a 'scattered and ill-prepared freshman' at the University of Cincinnati, he now runs Casimir Holdings (family office) and Mae Philanthropies, having donated $25 million to UC in honor of his transformative professor mentor.
Joel Cutler is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Since co-founding the firm in 2000 with David Fialkow - a partnership forged at summer camp at age 8 - Cutler has backed transformative companies including Airbnb, Warby Parker, Venmo, Lemonade, and KAYAK, which he literally conceived and assembled from scratch. A law school graduate who never practiced law, a self-described non-visionary who keeps a 'Wall of Shame' of deals he missed, and a travel obsessive who attended Phocuswright for 20+ consecutive years, Cutler operates with a contrarian philosophy: he only wants 'exciting, different, and risky' bets, believes great teams beat great ideas every time, and insists that if you don't fail, you're a bad investor.
Josh Kopelman is the co-founder and managing partner of First Round Capital, one of the world's most influential seed-stage venture firms, and a serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay for $300 million in 2000. A Wharton grad who started his first company as a sophomore in 1992, Kopelman has backed over 500 startups including Uber, Square, Warby Parker, and Notion. Known for the legendary Half.com/Halfway-Oregon PR stunt and the 'Penny Gap' essay, he is a consistent Forbes Midas List honoree who describes his career as a deliberate effort to stay permanently in the first 18-24 months of company-building - the phase he loves most.
Kevin Efrusy is a Stanford-trained engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist best known for personally sourcing Accel's $12.2M Series A investment in Facebook in 2005 - widely cited as one of the most profitable VC bets in history. A former co-founder of Corio (SaaS pioneer, IPO'd, acquired by IBM) and first CEO of IronPlanet, Efrusy joined Accel in 2003 and ranked #6 on the Forbes Midas List in 2011. He pioneered Accel's Latin America investment thesis after a year-long family sabbatical across South Africa, Brazil, and Japan in 2012, and has since backed unicorns including QuintoAndar ($5.1B), Gympass ($2.2B), and Nuvemshop ($3.1B). He transitioned to Emeritus Partner at Accel in 2019 and continues as an active angel investor and philanthropist through the Efrusy Family Foundation.
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most storied early-stage venture firm, where he has spent nearly two decades backing audacious founders building transformative technology companies. A Stanford philosophy graduate who once dug sanitation trenches in rural Brazil, Fenton has a gift for identifying the exact moment when a company's rising adoption curve meets its declining risk curve. His track record - Twitter, Yelp, Zendesk, New Relic, Elastic, Hortonworks, and now Sierra and Exa - places him consistently on the Forbes Midas List, peaking at #2 in 2015, and he was named VC of the Year at the 2014 Crunchies.
Rich Wong is a General Partner at Accel, one of the world's premier venture capital firms, where he has invested since 2006. A self-described 'accidental' venture capitalist with roots in mobile technology operations, he was the first outside investor and board member at Atlassian and led bets on UiPath, Rovio (Angry Birds), AdMob, and dozens of enterprise software companies globally. Known for his 'prepared mind' investment philosophy, his belief that the best companies can hide anywhere on earth, and his conviction that great VC is fundamentally a human business, Rich is one of Silicon Valley's most globally-minded and relationship-driven investors.
Sonali De Rycker is a General Partner at Accel's London office, one of the most influential venture capitalists in Europe. Originally from Mumbai, India, she joined Accel in 2008 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Atlas Venture, and has since backed some of the continent's most defining tech companies — Spotify, Monzo, BeReal, Synthesia, and Speak among them. Ranked No. 2 on Forbes Midas List Europe in 2019 and consistently in the top 15, she is known for her founder-first investment philosophy, her global deal-sourcing across 45+ cities, and a sharp conviction that Europe's next chapter will be written in AI.
Devdutt Yellurkar is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and Co-founding Partner at Propeller VC, a $100M ocean-climate tech fund. A former early Infosys employee who helped sell the offshore software model, and co-founder/CEO of Yantra Corporation (acquired by Sterling Commerce/IBM), Yellurkar has spent 15+ years as a venture investor backing iconic companies including Zendesk (first institutional investor), Airtable, and Postman. He was named to the Forbes Midas List in 2020, 2021, and 2022. His investing style blends deep operator empathy with a team-first philosophy forged on cricket pitches in India.
Murat Bicer is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied early-stage venture firms. Born in Turkey and educated at Middle East Technical University and Babson College, he has spent two decades hunting for the next breakout enterprise software company. His signal achievement: backing Datadog at the seed stage in 2011 - before cloud monitoring was a recognized category - and riding it to a $30B+ public company that burned under $25M to get there. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked #24 in 2024), Bicer is known for investing in developer-first companies, his contrarian willingness to back pre-product teams, and a portfolio that spans Datadog, Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly for $775M), Iterable, Voyage AI (acquired by MongoDB), LanceDB, and Gorgias.
Saar Gur is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture firms, where he has backed some of the most iconic consumer and SMB software companies of the past decade. Before turning investor, he co-founded BrightRoll, the video ad network that Yahoo acquired for $640 million. Known for betting early on 'weird' ideas before the world caught up, his portfolio includes DoorDash (seed in 2013), Patreon, Ring, Dropbox, Airtable, Mercury, and Niantic. He has ranked on the Forbes Midas List (#22 in 2023), taught at Stanford's StartupGarage, and summits mountains with founders for fun.