Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.
R. David Andrews is the Founder and Co-CEO of Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based middle-market private equity firm he launched in 1995 with a distinctive 'Deal-Ops' model that integrated deep operational expertise into every investment long before it became industry fashion. A triple Stanford alumnus (B.A. Economics, J.D., M.B.A.), Andrews spent his early career at Salomon Brothers, Shearson Lehman Brothers, and Oak Hill Partners before charting his own course managing $10+ billion in assets across healthcare, business services, industrials, consumer products, and software - serving as chairman or director of over 50 companies along the way.
Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source - a compact, megawatt-class reactor designed to run in the vacuum of space. Founded by two physicists who met in grad school operating a spherical tokamak, the San Diego-based startup uses a levitated dipole magnetic confinement approach with high-temperature superconductors. Their bet: space makes fusion easier, not harder. With launch costs down 10x and mass-produced HTS tapes providing 10x more field per kilogram, Zephyr Fusion aims to power the industrial revolution that humanity is about to have off-planet.