Christina Edling is Chief Business Officer at Flex, the New York fintech that lets renters split a month's rent into smaller payments instead of fronting it all on the first. She joined in February 2022 and grew into the role from VP of Strategy & Chief of Staff to SVP of Strategy & Operations, building the operating spine of a company that has raised over $225M. A Georgetown finance grad, she came up through Houlihan Lokey, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Next Street and the social-enterprise advisory Incandescent before betting on consumer fintech.
Christine de Wendel is the co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, the QR-code checkout company that shrinks the worst part of dinner - waiting for the bill - from roughly fifteen minutes to about ten seconds. She spent two decades scaling European e-commerce unicorns Zalando and ManoMano out of Paris before founding sunday at age 40 with Big Mamma restaurateurs Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, then moved home to Atlanta to plant the company's U.S. flag. A Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate who once wanted to run the United Nations, she now runs a hospitality-payments business that has processed billions in restaurant transactions.
Diana Heldfond DiGia is the founder and CEO of Parallel, the first tech-forward provider of special education care in the United States. Diagnosed with severe dyslexia and ADHD at seven, she built Parallel to deliver virtual psychoeducational assessments, teletherapy, and specialized instruction to K-12 school districts. The company now serves more than 10,000 students across 25 states, has raised $48.9M including a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital, and reports that 98% of its students meet or exceed their IEP goals. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 (Education, 2024) honoree.
Michelle Larivee is the co-founder and CEO of WTHN, the New York wellness company turning acupuncture from a months-long waitlist into a walk-in ritual. A Georgetown and Wharton graduate who spent 13 years in healthcare finance - Merrill Lynch, the World Bank's IFC, Deloitte, and a secondment to the World Economic Forum - she traded debt financings for needles after Traditional Chinese Medicine resolved pain that Western medicine could not. Since 2018 she has built WTHN into a chain of New York studios, an e-commerce line of acupressure tools and herbs stocked in 200+ retailers including Ulta, and a brand backed by a $5M Series A led by L Catterton.
Monica Belsito is the CEO of Function of Beauty, the made-to-order personal care company that turns an online quiz into a custom bottle of shampoo. She took the top job in July 2025 after a career spent building consumer brands that get acquired: founding CMO at feminine-care brand LOLA, CMO at hummus maker Sabra (bought by PepsiCo in 2024), and senior brand manager at Dollar Shave Club before its $1 billion sale to Unilever. A Georgetown grad and Harvard MBA who started in crisis PR and Colgate's management program, she now steers Function of Beauty's push from DTC into shelves at Target, Sephora, Walmart, and Amazon.
Neal Shenoy is the CEO and co-founder of BEGiN, one of the fastest-growing early childhood education platforms in the world, the company behind HOMER, codeSpark, Little Passports and Learn with Sesame. A serial entrepreneur, he has built, run and sold a $3B+ portfolio of subscription ventures spanning education, music, sports and data, including JioSaavn, the largest South Asian music streaming service, which Reliance Industries acquired in a deal valued above $1 billion. He is also a founding partner at [212]MEDIA.
Sedarius Tekara Perrotta is the co-founder and CEO of Shelf, a New York-based knowledge management and AI data-quality platform. A former Peace Corps volunteer turned serial software entrepreneur, he has spent two decades applying machine learning and NLP to the unglamorous problem of finding the right answer fast - building knowledge systems for the World Bank, Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford before turning that craft into a company that raised $52.5M in Series B funding led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.
Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she has shaped conservative thinking on the Middle East, Iran, and national security for more than two decades. A former senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer under Jesse Helms, she co-hosts the AEI podcast 'What the Hell Is Going On?' with Marc Thiessen, teaches at Georgetown, and appears regularly across major print and broadcast media.
Sarah Madden Armstrong is Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google, where she leads global marketing infrastructure across one of the world's most complex and far-reaching advertising ecosystems. With over 25 years in global marketing - including two decades at The Coca-Cola Company overseeing agency operations across 200 countries and a stint as a McKinsey partner - she brings rare operational depth to a role that touches every corner of Google's marketing machine. Named one of Advertising Age's 'Women to Watch' in 2009, Armstrong is also a published author of two books: 'The Mom's Guide to a Good Divorce' and 'The Art of the Juggling Act: Bite-Sized Guide for Working Parents' (2024). A former Georgetown University volleyball player turned global executive, she mentors across industries and volunteers with multiple nonprofits while raising her daughter Grace.
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.
Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor and bestselling author who has shaped how a generation of knowledge workers thinks about attention. He coined the modern usage of 'deep work,' argued for 'digital minimalism,' and most recently introduced 'slow productivity.' He has never opened a social media account.
Brian Yee is a General Partner at Saints Capital, a San Francisco firm that has spent 25+ years building one of the oldest direct and GP-led venture secondary platforms in the market. He invests across SMB software, e-commerce, marketplaces, and digital health, with a working range of $100K to $5M and a sweet spot near $1.5M. His background runs through Goldman Sachs (TMT investment banking), General Atlantic, and ACME Capital before settling into the secondaries seat at Saints.
Sumeet Singh is the founder and managing partner of Worldbuild, a thesis-driven venture capital firm investing in creative technologists building the post-software era. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he led investments in companies like Sardine, Carry1st, and Adaptive. His portfolio includes Brigit (acquired for $500M) and Revolut (valued at $45B). A Georgetown graduate, Singh co-founded The Hilltoss, a student-run restaurant, and Creature/Of, a sustainable streetwear brand. Based in New York, he's known for his disciplined research ritual - spending Friday and Saturday mornings at a Brooklyn cafe, diving deep into AI research papers on his iPad. His investment thesis centers on two winning paths: building infrastructure that enables AI to scale (compute, data, energy, security), or creating entirely new workflows that only AI makes possible.
Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the American Dynamism practice - a $1.1B+ fund focused on startups that serve the national interest. A former Washington Post journalist turned VC, she champions defense tech, manufacturing, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies. She sits on the boards of Anduril Industries and The Free Press, and is widely regarded as one of tech's most important bridges between Silicon Valley and Washington.