founder-support
(30)
Samantha Andonian
Samantha Andonian is a San Francisco-based executive business partner who has spent more than a decade as the operational right hand to founders and C-suite leaders. She started as a stage manager and theater producer before turning that backstage discipline into a career supporting CEOs and chief product officers at Google, Slack, Bumble, Render and Splice. Beyond her own desk, she is an active voice in the executive-assistant community through eaMAFIA/eaRISE, mentoring EAs and pushing the field to be treated as a strategic profession rather than clerical support.
Arielle Zuckerberg
Arielle 'AZ' Zuckerberg is a General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, a San Francisco seed firm that backs the 'magically weird' - founders pursuing unconventional ideas at the earliest stages. A former product manager turned investor with stops at Wildfire Interactive, Google, Humin, Kleiner Perkins, and Coatue, she pairs a product-first lens with a hands-on, founder-friend approach. In March 2025 the firm announced a $181.8M fund (the number nods to chai - 18, life).
Eric Wiesen
Eric Wiesen is a General Partner at Bullpen Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm specializing in post-seed and early-growth investments. A two-time founder, former corporate attorney at Fenwick & West, and ex-General Partner at RRE Ventures, Wiesen brings a rare trifecta of legal, entrepreneurial, and investment experience to backing companies that don't fit the standard seed-to-Series-A mold. His track record includes exits through Braintree/PayPal ($800M), Venmo, Makerbot, and TapCommerce, and he's known for hunting non-obvious, non-consensus opportunities where value is obscured from the investment herd.
Gordon Ritter
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.
Joseph Ros
Joseph Ros is US Partner and General Manager at Entrepreneurs First (EF), the global talent-first investor that backs exceptional individuals before they have a co-founder or company. An EF alum himself - he founded edtech startup HowCloud during EF's third London cohort - Ros joined the team in late 2017, led expansion into Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangalore, deployed over $20M via EF's Seed SPV, and now runs EF's North American operations from San Francisco, identifying and investing in the country's most ambitious founders from day zero.
Jeremy Schneider
Jeremy Schneider is General Partner at Webb Investment Network (WIN), the San Francisco-based single-family investment office founded by Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay. Since joining WIN in 2011, Schneider has helped build a portfolio of 121 companies including unicorns Ironclad, IPOs like Okta, PagerDuty, and AppLovin, and 48 acquisitions. A Dartmouth and Oxford-trained historian turned venture capitalist, Schneider is known for betting on founders over ideas, building WIN's affiliate network of 90+ seasoned operators, and offering hands-on support that one founder described as worthy of a statue.
Joe Eandi
Joe Eandi is a General Partner and Co-Founder of Cyber Mentor Fund, a mentorship-driven early-stage venture fund exclusively focused on cybersecurity startups. A former attorney turned tech executive turned founder turned investor, Eandi brings an unusually wide arc to his work: he started as a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini, served as General Counsel at Inktomi through its Yahoo acquisition, spent seven years as SVP and GM at LiveOps, founded and ran BrightPoint Security (acquired by ServiceNow in 2016), and then co-founded Cyber Mentor Fund in 2018 alongside Tim Eades. CMF deploys $100K-$5M from pre-seed through Series A into cybersecurity startups, with over 35 portfolio companies, three unicorns, and four successful exits including Okera (Databricks), Revelstoke (Arctic Wolf), Message Control (Mimecast), and LeakSignal (F5).
Joe Horowitz
Joe Horowitz is the founder and Managing General Partner of Icon Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm with over $1.4 billion in assets under management. With more than four decades in venture investing - beginning with the seed financing of Sun Microsystems - Horowitz has backed iconic technology companies across cybersecurity, digital health, and enterprise software. He built Icon into a disciplined growth-stage firm focused on Series B and C, built on the belief that human capital is more precious than financial capital.
Jon Auerbach
Jon Auerbach is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in the US. A former Pulitzer Prize-nominated technology journalist who covered conflict zones for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, Auerbach pivoted into venture capital in 2000, co-founding M-Qube (acquired by VeriSign for $275M) before joining CRV in 2004. Over two decades at CRV, he has backed transformative companies including Zendesk, DoorDash, and Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft for $1.35B), earned a spot on the Forbes Midas List (ranked #16 in 2020), and now leads the firm's founder support operations spanning legal, finance, marketing, and talent.
Maria Palma
Maria Palma is a General Partner at Freestyle Capital, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture capital firm. With over a decade of venture experience and investments in 35+ companies, she focuses on early-stage AI investments across application and infrastructure layers. Before Freestyle, she was a General Partner at Kindred Capital in London and a Principal at RRE Ventures in New York. She co-founded NYC Blend, a nonprofit connecting underrepresented founders to venture capital, and was named to Business Insider's 'The Seed 40: Best Women Early-Stage Investors of 2025.'
Maxine Minter
Maxine Minter is Australia's first solo female General Partner at a venture capital fund, and the Founder & GP of Co Ventures - a $5M pre-seed fund dedicated to backing software-led companies with at least one Australian founder building for global scale. Based in San Francisco, she started her career as a tech lawyer, pivoted into startup founding and operating, and began angel investing with $2,500 cheques before raising her own fund. She co-hosts the 'First Cheque' podcast with Cheryl Mack, champions a 'belief capital' philosophy, and has built a portfolio with over 50% women founders.
Medha Agarwal
Medha Agarwal is a General Partner at Defy VC, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California, where she partners with founders from day zero through Series A. With roots at Redpoint Ventures (7 years as Partner), Bessemer Venture Partners, and two founder stints of her own, she brings a rare blend of operator instinct and institutional investing muscle to sectors including vertical SaaS, fintech, AI-first companies, healthcare technology, and marketplaces. A Harvard College and Harvard Business School alumna, Medha is also a prolific writer—her Medium essays on vertical SaaS and AI pricing have become required reading in startup circles—and was named one of Business Insider's 66 Rising Stars of Venture Capital in 2023.
Sathya Sampat
Sathya Nellore Sampat is the General Partner and co-founder of BoldCap, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund backing AI-native B2B startups built by Indian-origin founders for global markets. An engineer by training and entrepreneur at heart, Sampat built and scaled a data modernization startup to $3M in revenue before pivoting to venture capital in 2021. At BoldCap, he writes $250K-$1M checks into companies in Data/AI, developer infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and cybersecurity - and goes far beyond capital with Bracket, a proprietary GTM network connecting Indian founders to North American and European revenue leaders.
J. Seth Strattan
J. Seth Strattan, PhD is a General Partner at Two Bear Capital, a Whitefish, Montana-based venture capital firm investing at the crossroads of life sciences and technology. With a PhD in Structural Biology and a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Strattan spent years at Stanford building and leading the engineering and data science teams behind landmark genomics consortia - ENCODE, the Human Cell Atlas, and the International Human Epigenomics Consortium - before pivoting to back the founders tackling biology's hardest problems. He is based in Silicon Valley, leads Two Bear Capital's Menlo Park office, and splits his remaining time between Montana and a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
Viviana Faga
Viviana Faga is a General Partner at Felicis, the early-stage venture firm behind breakout companies like Shopify, Fitbit, and Canva. A first-generation Mexican-American who grew up dismantling appliances to understand how things work, she spent 20+ years building category-defining brands at Salesforce, Yammer (acquired by Microsoft for $1.2B), Zenefits, and Platfora before making the leap into investing. At Felicis she leads investments from seed to Series B across AI infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and enterprise software - bringing an unusually hands-on operational lens to portfolio companies like Runway, Supabase, and Exowatt.
Will Robbins
Will Robbins is a General Partner at Contrary, the San Francisco-based venture firm that built a national network of 100+ student venture partners across 50+ universities to source and back the most talented early-stage founders in the US and India. Joining in 2017 as an early team member, Robbins helped scale the firm from a $2M experiment into a fund managing hundreds of millions in AUM, with a portfolio spanning unicorns like Ramp, Rippling, Zepto, and Hallow. A University of Illinois CS alumnus who left Stanford to go all-in on venture, he writes prolifically on generalist investing, geopolitical tech themes, and the architecture of the modern startup ecosystem.
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.
Susan Hobbs
Susan Hobbs is the Global Operations Chief of Staff to the CEO at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and a portfolio of open-source web infrastructure. A veteran Silicon Valley operator who started as a public school teacher, she has spent two decades at the intersection of technology, media, and startups - as first hire at acquired companies (Codian, CoTweet), programming architect behind TechCrunch Disrupt, a partner at CrunchFund, and an operations leader at Cloudflare before landing at Automattic. An active angel investor, board member, and arts patron, she brings rare cross-functional range to high-stakes organizational roles.
Adina Tecklu
Adina Tecklu is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where she bets on early-stage software, AI, and fintech founders before the market catches on. A Stanford-trained engineer turned investor, she built Canaan's seed practice from zero, survived Zenefits' rocket-ship chaos as an early employee, and learned customer obsession at Oracle - then channeled all of it into backing breakout companies like Lovable, Aven, Basis, Rain, and Stuut. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital, Tecklu is known for backing exceptional founders with rare conviction, before there's consensus - and staying close through product-market fit to breakout growth.
Brett Berson
Brett Berson is a Partner at First Round Capital, the early-stage venture firm behind Uber, Square, and Notion. Starting as a college intern in 2008, he spent over 15 years rising through the ranks to co-lead the firm. He is the architect behind the First Round Review (the firm's widely-read editorial publication), the In Depth podcast, and Angel Track — a program that trains operators to become better angel investors. Named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2015, Berson holds NYU degrees in economics and film, and credits studying filmmaking with teaching him to notice the thousands of micro-decisions that compound into company-defining outcomes. His key portfolio bets include Clay, Persona, and Stedi.
Emily Bennett
Emily Bennett is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investing for a16z speedrun - the firm's high-velocity startup accelerator that has deployed over $180M to 150+ startups since 2023. A neuroscience graduate of Middlebury College (magna cum laude) turned Harvard MBA, she carved a winding path through product roles at Spotify, The New York Times, and Facebook before pivoting fully into venture at Owl Ventures, where she rose to Partner with a focus on edtech. At a16z, her investment thesis centers on AI-native tools that allow single founders to operate what once required entire teams, and she is a vocal advocate for the first AI-native university - an institution where learning paths, schedules, and research adapt in real time through continuous data feedback loops.
Glen Evans
Glen Evans is Partner of Core Talent at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. A veteran recruiter who built Facebook's engineering recruiting team from scratch and served as Slack's first Head of Global Recruiting, Evans now helps Greylock's portfolio companies build world-class teams. He advises founders on hiring strategy, recruiting operations, compensation benchmarks, and talent pipelines - translating the hard-won lessons of hyper-growth into practical playbooks for startups.
Holly Rose Faith
Holly Rose Faith is the Executive Talent Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. Specializing in C-suite, VP-level, and board placements for Greylock's portfolio companies, she has placed top executives at Roblox, Nextdoor, Databricks, Abnormal AI, Gem, PayJoy, Snorkel, Casper, and Transfix. With roughly eight years in VC talent roles spanning Khosla Ventures, NEA, and now Greylock, Faith brings a founder-first philosophy that goes beyond transactional recruiting — coaching founders on hiring strategy, building interview frameworks, and staying involved through references, compensation, and the close.
Jason Risch
Jason Risch is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he bets early on founders reshaping cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. A Stanford math-and-statistics graduate who grew up tracking baseball statistics in Marin County, Risch cut his professional teeth at McKinsey, Opendoor, and Andrew Ng's AI Fund before joining Greylock in 2019. He approaches every investment like an applied statistician - 'shifting the distribution to increase a founder's odds of success' - and has backed breakout companies including Wiz, Cribl, LlamaIndex, Kodem, and Blockaid.
Kelly Kinnard
Kelly Kinnard is Operating Partner and Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. She leads the talent function across 500+ portfolio companies, advising founders and CEOs on how to recruit and retain exceptional leaders. With a career that spans elite retained search firms, Oracle's cloud transformation, and Battery Ventures before landing at Khosla, Kelly has helped shape the executive teams driving some of tech's most ambitious bets. She is known for treating recruiting like relationship-building - equal parts strategy, empathy, and persistence.
Mayowa Ajayi
Mayowa Ajayi is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the Capital Network team, focused on consumer, AI apps, and speedrun companies. He brings over 15 years of investment banking experience - most recently as Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners and eight years at Barclays in the Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications group - to the firm's effort to identify and support the next generation of high-growth startups. Since joining a16z in December 2024, he has become a key figure in the a16z speedrun accelerator program and an educator on startup finance fundamentals, translating Wall Street rigor into founder-friendly insights.
Sophia Luo
Sophia Luo is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she backs early-stage founders building AI-native applications and enabling infrastructure. A Bay Area native who triple-majored at MIT in four years, she was a nationally ranked chess player by age eight and carried that competitive instinct into the AI startup world - first as an early engineer at Scale AI, then as a founding product engineer at Character.AI. She joined Greylock in 2024, made angel bets on Cognition and Mercor before they were household names, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital within her first year as an investor.
Stephanie Zhan
Stephanie Zhan is a General Partner on Sequoia Capital's early-stage team, where she has been backing founders from the first check since 2015. A Stanford computer science graduate who grew up across Hong Kong and Beijing during the early internet era, she brings a global lens and a deep technical instinct to bets on AI, developer tools, and the physical world. She was first partner to Linear, Reflection AI, Skild AI, Ricursive Intelligence, Mach Industries, Middesk, and Tavus - a portfolio that reads like a map of the next decade of computing. Her TED AI talk on superintelligent AI captures what makes her unusual among her peers: she's not just predicting the future, she's actively funding the people building it.
Tom Hammer
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Sarah Gowe
Sarah Gowe is the Platform Operations Manager at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading pre-seed B2B SaaS funds and accelerators. Based in New York, she came up through hospitality, experiential events (The Yacht Week), and tech platforms (Airbnb, Bumble, NHL XP) before landing in venture — where she now works directly with early-stage founders navigating the zero-to-one journey. At Forum, she's part of a team that has funded 430+ companies and helped unlock over $1B in follow-on capital.