Melody McCloskey is the founder and CEO of StyleSeat, the largest online marketplace for beauty, grooming, and wellness services, connecting over 350,000 independent beauty professionals with 10 million+ consumers across the United States. She co-founded StyleSeat in 2011 alongside Dan Levine, bootstrapped the company for 18 months before raising $40.7 million in venture funding, and has helped power over 200 million appointments while generating $12+ billion in total revenue for small businesses. A San Francisco native who studied French and International Relations at UC Davis, McCloskey built StyleSeat out of her own frustration with booking beauty appointments, turning a personal pain point into a platform that fundamentally reshaped how independent beauty professionals run their businesses. She is also an angel investor and Cleo Capital scout, focused on backing female-led startups at the pre-seed through Series A stages.
Winnie is a San Francisco-based childcare marketplace that connects millions of parents with licensed daycare centers, preschools, and early education providers across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall - two former Google and Postmates engineers who were also parents - Winnie has grown from a local San Francisco app into a national platform covering 200,000+ licensed providers in over 7,000 cities. The platform combines comprehensive data (tuition costs, licensing status, inspection reports, availability) with community reviews and a SaaS layer for providers called Winnie Pro. Ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list and #1 in Consumer Services, Winnie sits at the intersection of a 500-billion-dollar childcare crisis and a generation of parents who expect the same search experience for daycares that they get for restaurants.
Luis Hernandez Garrido is the co-founder and CEO of Uptodown, the world's largest alternative app store, which he launched in 2002 as a university project in Malaga, Spain. Over two decades he has grown it into a platform with 130 million monthly active users and 450 million APK downloads per month - all without a single outside investor. Now based in Berkeley, California, he champions open internet principles, device neutrality, and democratized software distribution, and is an active voice in the Coalition for App Fairness pushing back against Google and Apple's app store dominance.
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Hazim Mohamad is the Co-Founder and CEO of CoffeeSpace, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cofounder matching platform that functions like Tinder for entrepreneurs. After spending four years managing a $40 billion portfolio at the World Bank, he traded financial risk for startup risk - building a mobile-first platform that has amassed 25,000+ users and 2M+ swipes by connecting founders, early hires, and collaborators across the global startup ecosystem. CoffeeSpace raised $1M in pre-seed funding and was featured at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Peter Blackwood is a Partner on the Capital Network team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Consumer vertical and manages the firm's global investor, corporate strategic, and advisory relationships for consumer and gaming companies. A former investment banker with over 15 years in the technology sector - spanning SoundView Technology Group, Janney Montgomery Scott, and JMP Securities - Blackwood brings deep capital markets expertise to a16z portfolio companies navigating equity raises, debt financing, and strategic partnerships. He is co-author of a16z's widely-read '16 Commandments of Raising Equity in a Challenging Market' and joined the board of gaming platform Overwolf following a16z's $75M Series D investment. Off-hours, he chases trout on rivers.
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer best known as co-founder and former CTO of YouTube, which he and his PayPal colleagues built in 2005 and sold to Google for $1.65 billion just 18 months later. Born in Taipei and immigrating to the U.S. at age seven, Chen dropped out of the University of Illinois computer science program to join PayPal as one of its first 10 employees. After revolutionizing online video sharing with YouTube, he co-founded AVOS Systems, launched the video app MixBit, joined Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and eventually returned to Taiwan to nurture the island's startup ecosystem and connect Taiwanese entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley.
Ryan Broderick is an internet culture journalist and the founder of Garbage Day, a thrice-weekly newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers that chronicles the 'daily joys and horrors of internet culture.' After nearly a decade at BuzzFeed News, where he rose to Deputy Global News Director, he went independent and built Garbage Media Inc. into an 8-person operation spanning a newsletter, a podcast (Panic World), and a media intelligence research arm. Known for his deeply human voice in an era of AI slop, he argues that the line between 'internet culture' and just 'culture' has long since dissolved.
Wahaj us Siraj is the co-founder and CEO of Nayatel, Pakistan's leading fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) telecom company. A mechanical engineer by training who pivoted to entrepreneurship out of frustration with government bureaucracy, he sold a Suzuki car to fund his first venture and went on to build Pakistan's first FTTH network - a first for all of South and Southeast Asia. Under his leadership, Nayatel has grown to 170,000+ customers, 2,500+ employees, and operations in 17+ cities, while also launching Pakistan's first HD TV channels and partnering with Facebook to expand fiber across 8 cities.