Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Barrett Boston is the former Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ), a San Francisco-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform. Appointed CEO in October 2021 following FTV Capital's majority investment, Boston transformed the company from a restaurant-focused invoice tool into a multi-industry AP automation leader serving hospitality, healthcare, grocery, retail, construction, and manufacturing sectors. Under his leadership, Ottimate rebranded from Plate IQ, raised $160 million in Series B funding, launched an industry-first AI engine for AP, and introduced Conversational AP - an AI assistant for finance teams. Boston stepped down in March 2026, passing the CEO role to Shawn Lane. His career spans IBM, TravelClick, TriNet, and Merrill Lynch, with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Duke University.
Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.
Abhishek Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Material Security, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company that pioneered zero-trust protection for cloud email and collaboration environments. A Princeton-trained engineer who attended college at 16 and later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar (top 5%), Agrawal co-founded Material Security in 2017 alongside former Dropbox colleagues Ryan Noon and Chris Park, inspired by the 2016 John Podesta email breach. Under his leadership, Material Security reached unicorn status ($1.1B valuation) after a $100M Series C in May 2022 led by Founders Fund, with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Snowflake Ventures. The platform protects organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Reddit, Lyft, Roblox, and DoorDash against email-based threats and data loss in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
Marc Friend is the CEO of Sift, the leading digital trust and fraud prevention platform serving 700+ global enterprises. A Silicon Valley veteran with 30+ years spanning venture capital (US Venture Partners, Summit Partners, Partech) and operational CFO/CEO roles at high-growth tech companies including PubNub, Sun Basket, and Rapid (sold to Nokia in 2024), Friend brings an unusually broad toolkit to the fraud-detection space. He also competes in Ironman triathlons and funded an annual full-tuition merit scholarship at MIT, his alma mater.
Sasha Novakovich is the Founder and CEO of Alchemy Cloud, a San Francisco-based enterprise SaaS company bringing AI-powered lab management and product development software to the specialty chemicals and applied sciences industries. Born in Russia and raised in Los Angeles after immigrating at age five, she built her first company in 1999, sold it to CNET, spent years as an angel investor backing female-led startups, and then spotted a glaring gap - brilliant chemists stuck doing brilliantly manual work with spreadsheets. Alchemy is her answer: a connected lab platform that merges ELN, LIMS, DOE, and AI into one system to help companies like those in beauty, food, building materials, and industrial chemicals bring better products to market faster.
Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Signos, the company behind the first FDA-cleared over-the-counter glucose monitoring system for weight management. A Princeton computer science graduate and Harvard MBA, he played NCAA Division I ice hockey before building a career spanning VC at Sierra and Shasta Ventures, co-founding PR tech company AirPR (later Onclusive), and ultimately creating Signos in 2018 after his own lifelong struggle with weight and the death of his diabetic grandmother inspired him to ask: why wait until someone is sick to give them metabolic data?
Tassos Gianakakos is a Greek-American biotech entrepreneur and the co-founder, CEO, and Chair of Kardigan, a cardiovascular drug discovery company he built from the ashes of MyoKardia — the precision-medicine heart company he led to a $13.1 billion acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb in 2020. At Kardigan, he is applying the same playbook: marrying real-world clinical data, AI tools, and deep cardiovascular biology to deliver personalized medicines for heart disease — a field he believes is where oncology was 20 years ago. With $554 million raised and three late-stage clinical programs underway, Gianakakos is on a mission to make cardiovascular disease preventable and curable.
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.