
Christina Diiorio is the founder and CEO of The Yay Company, the Charlottesville-based startup behind Yay Lunch, a modern K-12 school lunch program that partners with local caterers and chefs to deliver fresh, kid-approved meals directly to schools at no cost to the school. A former food editor at Goop, MindBodyGreen and Zagat and a Georgetown graduate, she launched Yay in 2018 after her own son came home hungry and unhappy with his cafeteria options. She has raised roughly $15.5M+ across Series A and later rounds from investors including Valor Siren Ventures, Reach Capital and FJ Labs, growing the company past 200% year-over-year and into markets from Atlanta to New York.

Nicole Quinn is a Managing Partner at Connect Ventures and former General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where she spent a decade building one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive consumer investing portfolios. A former British 100-meter sprinter who traded the track for Wall Street, Quinn worked on the Facebook and Groupon IPOs at Morgan Stanley before pivoting to venture capital. Known as the 'Celebrity Whisperer,' she's backed Lady Gaga's Haus Labs, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and companies like Calm, Cameo, and Rothy's. With a mathematics degree from York University and an MBA from Stanford, Quinn combines analytical rigor with an athlete's competitive drive and a certified coach's empathy for founders navigating the long game of company building.