harm-reduction
(3)
Xin Du
Xin Du (Steven Xin Du) is the founder and CEO of WONZ Technology, a medical-device and digital-health startup building consumer devices for smokers and non-invasive bioelectronic products. A trained scientist with postdoctoral research experience tied to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Du crossed from the lab into venture capital as a founding partner of Niniu Capital and founder of Neeo Fund before starting WONZ in 2020. He splits his world between a San Francisco base and a Hong Kong-registered company, running a small team that has filed more than a hundred patents and raised through Series A.
Madeline Hilliard
Madeline Hilliard is the founder and CEO of DopaGE, a gamified overdose-prevention education platform built by physicians, neuroscientists, and video-game engineers for colleges and healthcare organizations. A USC computational-neuroscience graduate and Nationally Registered EMT who treated overdose patients in ambulances and ERs, she founded the nonprofit Team Awareness Combating Overdose (T.A.C.O.) in 2020 the same day a college friend died from a polysubstance overdose. T.A.C.O. now runs on roughly 300 student volunteers nationwide and is credited with saving lives in the four digits. She and co-founder Amanda Grennan were named to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Education.
David Renteln
David Renteln is the co-founder and CEO of Lucy, a Los Angeles consumer brand making tobacco-free nicotine gum and pouches built around a stated mission of reducing tobacco-related harm to zero. A Harvard human evolutionary biology graduate and former Harvard Rugby president, he deferred a Caltech bioengineering PhD to help build Soylent, where he served as co-founder and chief marketing officer. In 2016 he started Lucy with Soylent alumni John Coogan and Samy Hamdouche, raised a $10M Series A in 2020 from RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures, Greycroft and Y Combinator, and has since pushed nicotine into the productivity-and-wellness conversation.