Turn/River does not sell founders on money alone. Its pitch is a laboratory for revenue - embedded operators, weekly tests, and a concentrated portfolio where one company’s lesson can become another company’s play.

Jack Gierlich is a Brooklyn-based growth marketing founder and fractional CMO who has spent 15+ years scaling healthcare, SaaS, and AI companies. He leads marketing and growth at Leal Health (formerly TrialJectory), an AI-powered platform that helps cancer patients find advanced treatment options, and he moderates several of the largest marketing and business communities on Reddit, reaching millions of readers a month. He describes his craft as building marketing systems that compound rather than one-off campaigns.
Katie Kirsch is an Ecosystem Growth Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she builds the connective tissue of one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms - designing programs, products, and spaces that bring together the most ambitious founders, operators, and technologists. A 4x startup founder, ex-IDEO product leader, Stanford engineering graduate, and Harvard Business School MBA, she made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2024 for consumer tech. Before joining a16z, she founded the mentorship platform Twenty and the coaching startup lume, taught entrepreneurship at Stanford's d.school and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and volunteered in Uganda and India working on women's health and education. She launched the inaugural a16z Growth Engineer Fellowship in 2025, selecting 65 fellows from thousands of global applicants.