investment-banking
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Marco Chisari Has Worked Every Side of the Chip Table
An engineer who learned the language of deals now runs a microLED company trying to solve AI's unglamorous problem: moving data without wasting power.
Rohan Parikh Is Teaching AI to Show Its Work
The Keye co-founder spent years inside the spreadsheets that drive financial decisions. Now he is building an AI diligence platform around a stubborn Wall Street rule: every important number must survive a second look.
Brian Mokoro’s Career Has One Recurring Move: Learn the System From the Inside
Before finance, private equity and technology, Brian Mokoro taught ninth-grade algebra in Washington. His career since has been a study in entering complicated systems, learning their machinery and moving closer to where decisions get made.
Jeffrey Amling and the Discipline of Saying No
For four decades, Jeffrey Amling has worked where judgment matters more than motion. His career links Wall Street's media deal boom, FTI Consulting's selective acquisition strategy, and a patient second life breeding racehorses built for the long run.
The Brand Builder Behind Mizuho's American Rise
She joined a bank few Americans could name and spent a decade making its brand impossible to ignore - one campaign, one hire, one employee network at a time.
The Brand Voice Behind Wall Street's Quiet Powerhouse
He built brands for Apple, Cisco, and CNET before deciding the most interesting marketing job left was making an investment bank memorable. Inside the long game of Scott Waltz.
TJ Ross
TJ Ross is the co-founder and co-CEO of Splash Sports, a peer-to-peer sports gaming platform he built with Joel Milton by acquiring and merging established brands like RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool into a single home for survivor pools, pick'em, one & done and tiers contests. The platform now serves more than two million players and 80,000 commissioners. A Bay Area native who grew up with sports at the center of family life, Ross studied finance and entrepreneurship at USC before working in technology investment banking at Raymond James and Houlihan Lokey, founding the maker marketplace 43Layers, and leading strategic partnerships at STRV. He describes his work as building products that gather people around shared passions, and treats community, authenticity and enjoying the journey as the real measures of success.
Danyal Özdüzenciler
Danyal Özdüzenciler is the co-founder and CEO of Capsa AI, a London- and New York-based startup building what it calls an AI operating system for the private capital industry. A former private equity and investment banking professional with Turkish-German roots, he founded Capsa AI in 2024 with Callum Downie after a first failed startup taught him hard lessons about grit. In June 2026 the company raised an $18m Series A, bringing total funding to about $20m, on the back of 14x year-on-year revenue growth and a 100% customer renewal rate.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.
Peter Lehrman
Peter Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Axial, a New York based online platform where owners of small and lower middle market private companies meet buyers, lenders and financial sponsors. He also hosts the Masters in Small Business M&A podcast. Before Axial, he was on the founding team of Gerson Lehrman Group and worked in private equity at SFW Capital Partners.
Samuel Schloss
Samuel Schloss is the co-founder and CEO of Annie Aesthetic, a medical-aesthetics platform incubated by Tucker's Farm Corporation that consolidates leading U.S. medspas under one operating umbrella. Since launching in May 2022 with roughly $30 million in seed capital, the company has grown to twelve brands and a $65 million revenue run-rate, closing a Series B in 2025 led by InterAlpen Partners. Schloss came from investment banking and private equity, including Reverence Capital Partners.
Laz Fuentes
Laz Fuentes is the founder and CEO of SQOR.ai, a New York-based AI-native decision intelligence platform that turns scattered SaaS data into real-time KPI signals for executives. A former US Army infantry officer with the 10th Mountain Division and a five-year Salomon Brothers investment banker, he has spent the last two decades building, advising, and turning around technology and media companies, including roles at Warner Bros., YouGov, and Synup. He launched SQOR in 2022 to give operators the kind of single-pane intelligence he wished he had as an executive.
Matthew Gitelis
Matthew Gitelis is the founder and CEO of PatientIQ, a Chicago-based healthcare analytics platform that automates the collection of patient-reported outcomes and turns them into actionable insight for providers. A former BMO Capital Markets investment banking analyst who then enrolled at Rush Medical College, he founded PatientIQ in 2016 after watching clinicians extract outcomes data by hand. He left medical school in 2019 to run the company full-time. Under his leadership PatientIQ has grown into a national network reaching hundreds of healthcare organizations, thousands of care sites, and millions of patients, and raised roughly $26M in venture funding through a 2022 Series B.
Nina Eiböck
Nina Eiböck is the Finance & Strategic Ops Lead in the Office of the CEO at Ello, the San Francisco edtech building the world's first AI reading coach for young children. An Austrian-raised, Oxford- and Stanford-trained financier, she left investment banking at J.P. Morgan and energy-sector finance to help run the numbers and the strategy behind a Series A startup teaching kids to read. She is the kind of operator who names her pet rabbits after Napoleon and Warren Buffett.
Brian Pallas
Brian Pallas is the Italian founder and CEO of Opportunity Network, a private business-matching platform where vetted CEOs and investors anonymously connect on commercial, fundraising, investing and M&A deals above $1M. What started as an anonymous newsletter he circulated at Columbia Business School to help his father's Milan family business grew into one of the world's largest communities of CEOs and investors, with tens of thousands of vetted members across 130+ countries and hundreds of billions in transaction flow. A former Boston Consulting Group consultant with private equity and investment banking experience, Pallas also co-founded Collective Equity Ownership and the Milan real estate firm Medhelan Capital.
Max Hammer
Max Hammer is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdVolt, a Y Combinator (W24) startup building a bid-ask marketplace for live event tickets - pitched as 'what StockX did for sneakers, for tickets.' A Westport, Connecticut native and University of Pennsylvania graduate, he left an investment banking career at UBS to chase the rave-ticket resale problem he and his co-founders kept hitting after attending 80-plus shows in a single year. CrowdVolt launched in Brooklyn in early 2024, raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Brickyard VC, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and is expanding from EDM into broader live-events infrastructure.
Peyton Marshall
Peyton Marshall is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of LeveragePoint, a Newton, Massachusetts SaaS company that helps B2B firms quantify, communicate, and capture the economic value of what they sell. An economist by training with a PhD from MIT, he spent twelve years in investment banking in London at UBS and Goldman Sachs, then fifteen years as a CFO and operator in healthcare and IT companies, before founding LeveragePoint in 2009 to turn value-based pricing from a theory into an everyday sales tool. He has grown the company to multi-million-dollar revenue without raising venture capital.
William Feeley
William C. Feeley is the founder and managing officer of Barometer Trading, LLC, an equity long/short fund built on a single obsession: not losing money. A 44-year capital markets veteran who helped corporate issuers raise tens of billions through IPOs and secondary offerings at firms like Bankers Trust, Kemper Securities and Wit SoundView, Feeley later ran the experiment most of Wall Street would never try - he hired and trained formerly incarcerated, prison-educated people as analysts and traders, and the desk beat its hedge-fund benchmark by more than 18% per year for 39 months. A Georgetown BSBA with a Loyola Chicago MBA and a CAIA charter, he is part trader, part operator, part believer in second chances.
David Tuttle
David Tuttle is the cofounder and CEO of Rune Technologies, an Arlington-based defense software company building TyrOS, an edge-first, AI-enabled predictive logistics platform for military and contested environments. A former U.S. Army field artillery officer who deployed to Afghanistan, he later worked in aerospace and defense investment banking, led software teams within the JSOC enterprise at Fort Bragg, and ran command-and-control hardware work at Anduril before co-founding Rune in 2024 with Peter Goldsborough. He still serves in the National Guard. Rune raised a $24M Series A in July 2025 (over $30M total), and TyrOS has been deployed with U.S. Army and Marine Corps units.
Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox is the CEO of OpenNode, a Bitcoin payments infrastructure company that lets businesses in 126 countries accept Bitcoin and send payouts over the Lightning Network with a few lines of code. A Dartmouth graduate who began his career in investment banking at Jefferies and later founded NGU Ventures, Fox took the helm of OpenNode in October 2022, months after the company closed a $20M Series A at a $220M valuation backed by Twitter, Tim Draper, Kingsway, and a Fidelity-affiliated fund.
Oleksiy Lubinsky
Oleksiy Lubinsky (also known as Alex Lubinsky) is the co-founder and CEO of Rentberry, a San Francisco-based platform that automates the long-term rental process from search and custom-offer negotiation to digital leases, rent payments and maintenance. A Ukrainian native and UC Berkeley economics graduate who came out of investment banking, he sold his first company, the networking app City Hour, in 2015 before launching Rentberry that same year. He has pushed the company through one of crypto's most-talked-about ICOs, an AI rebrand, and serial equity-crowdfunding rounds, framing Rentberry as a bid to strip the friction, fees and middlemen out of renting.
Randy Wang
Randy Wang is the CEO of Wingz, a healthcare transportation marketplace that pivoted from airport rides into non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for vulnerable populations. A UC Berkeley economist who started in investment banking at Jefferies (as its first Shanghai employee) and co-founded the Shanghai mobile-games studio Camigo Media, he now runs a network of credentialed, vetted drivers who get patients to the care they need - and lets those drivers earn with flexibility and purpose.
Ateeq ur Rahman
Ateeq ur Rahman is a London-based founding partner of Sovereign Stone Capital Partners, a private investment firm backing mid-market businesses across the UK and Southern Europe. After nearly 30 years in international banking, including a stint as Country Head and Managing Director for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in Qatar where he led the merger with Union National Bank, he turned operator and investor, building ventures spanning Portuguese real estate, venture capital, and specialty coffee. He commits personal capital to deals and prefers hands-on partnership to passive checks.
William Hicks
William Hicks is the co-founder and CEO of Magic Mind, the mental-performance shot that wants to retire your second cup of coffee. A Princeton cum laude grad who left Barclays after deciding investment banking was too soulless to stomach, he went on to co-found the lupini-bean snack company BRAMI before partnering with James Beshara to build Magic Mind into a brand poured into the morning routines of tens of thousands of people. He preaches '90-day trailing average emotions' as the only sane way to survive the violence of startup life.
Julio Martinez
Julio Martinez is the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform he launched with Jorge Lluch during the first week of Spain's COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. A former M&A lawyer turned Citigroup banker turned fintech venture builder, he built the product he wished he had had during two decades inside finance. Abacum has raised more than $100 million from investors including Atomico, Creandum, Scale Venture Partners, Cathay Innovation and Y Combinator, and now serves hundreds of mid-market companies across more than 30 countries from offices in New York, London and Barcelona.
Shensi Ding
Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies offer hundreds of product integrations by integrating just once. A Columbia computer science graduate who detoured through investment banking at Credit Suisse and Silver Lake before becoming Chief of Staff at Expanse, she co-founded Merge in 2020 with college friend Gil Feig after they spent six months talking to 100+ companies about integration pain — without pitching a single solution. Merge has since raised $75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition, serves 7,000+ customers including Calendly, Gong, Ramp, and Brex, and has become critical infrastructure for the AI era as LLMs need real-time access to third-party data.
Jason Kong
Jason Kong is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based Black-led venture capital firm that backs founders automating the 'real economy' - the large, often overlooked industries that make the world run. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2021 while at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Kong backed breakout companies including Attentive, Brex, Datadog, Discord, Figma, and UiPath. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Penn's elite M&T program who qualified twice for USAMO and won the We the People national civics competition, he joined Base10 in 2023 to lead Series B+ investments, bringing a singular blend of investment banking, late-stage VC, and hedge fund analysis discipline to growth-stage bets on vertical SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech.
John Delfino
John Delfino is Partner and General Counsel at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), the Menlo Park-based growth equity firm behind transformative investments in Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, and over 350 technology companies. Joining TCV in 2014 after nearly a decade at elite law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Delfino sits at the intersection of law and venture capital - structuring deals, executing investments and exits, and managing the full legal and operational footprint of one of tech's most storied growth investors. With a J.D./M.B.A. from Santa Clara University and undergraduate roots at the College of the Holy Cross (including a year abroad at Oxford), he brings a rare dual lens of legal rigor and business strategy to a firm that has backed category-defining companies since 1995.
Ed Meyercord
Ed Meyercord is President, CEO, and Director of Extreme Networks (NASDAQ: EXTR), a publicly traded enterprise networking company with 2,700 employees and over $1.1 billion in annual revenue. He took the helm in April 2015 after serving as Chairman of the board since 2011, steering Extreme from a hardware-centric also-ran into a cloud-managed, AI-native networking platform. Under his watch the company now powers the wireless networks at Old Trafford, the Burj Khalifa, Taylor Swift concert tours, and Samsung's global operations, while its SaaS ARR has grown dramatically. Before Extreme, Meyercord ran Talk America (a publicly traded telco), Cavalier Telephone, and Critical Alert Systems, after starting his career as an investment banking VP at Salomon Brothers. He is also known for bringing improv comedy principles into corporate leadership and for his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities through SKIT Programs.
Gary Little
Gary Little is President and CEO of Foursquare, the world's leading independent location technology platform. A rare operator-investor hybrid, he spent six years running internet monetization at Yahoo, then pivoted into investment banking at Credit Suisse, Lazard, and UBS before co-founding Buckthorn Partners and rising to Managing Director at The Raine Group. At Raine he led the $150M Foursquare investment and negotiated the company's transformative acquisitions of Placed and Factual - then stepped into the CEO seat himself in January 2021. Under his leadership, Foursquare has evolved from a nostalgic social check-in app into the dominant infrastructure layer for location intelligence, covering 190 countries, indexing over 200 million points of interest, and powering the geospatial stacks of enterprises across retail, advertising, real estate, and urban planning.