Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Chang Li is the Marketing Partner at Greylock Partners, the storied Silicon Valley venture firm behind LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Workday. An electrical engineer turned marketing strategist, she has spent her career translating deeply technical products into market-defining narratives. Before Greylock, she helped HashiCorp manage pricing and monetization across a $500M+ ARR portfolio, then led product marketing at Metronome where she helped define usage-based billing as an emerging software category. Now she brings that zero-to-one positioning expertise to Greylock's founders at the exact moment it matters most.
Semil Shah is the Founding General Partner of Haystack, a seed-stage venture capital firm he started from scratch in 2013 with $1M and zero management fees. Through seven funds totaling over $200M, he has backed companies including DoorDash, HashiCorp, Figma, and Instacart at seed stage. He also serves as Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Named to the Forbes Midas Seed List four consecutive years (2022-2025), he built his career the hard way — through writing, blogging, and relentless deal-flow generation after being repeatedly turned down by top VC firms.