Evan Armstrong writes about profit and power in technology. He spent four years as lead writer at Every, where his column Napkin Math turned finance terms like revenue, COGS, and net income into deeply reported, deeply funny explainers for an audience of more than 100,000. In April 2026 he walked away to launch The Leverage, a solo publication promising rigorous, actionable, beautiful analysis of tech markets for founders, investors, and senior operators. He had never been paid to write before joining Every, and went on to publish almost 500,000 words there.
Alex Hormozi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and author who built and exited seven companies without outside capital before founding Acquisition.com, a holding company with 16+ portfolio businesses generating $200M+ in annual revenue. His $100M book series has sold over 5 million copies, including $100M Money Models which broke the Guinness World Record for fastest-selling non-fiction book in August 2025. He co-runs Acquisition.com with his wife and CEO Leila Hormozi and is a co-owner of Skool.com.
Steven Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, author, and podcast host who dropped out of university after a single lecture to build Social Chain - a social media marketing company that went public at a $200M+ valuation before he turned 28. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, the second most-listened podcast globally on Spotify Wrapped 2025, with over 15 million YouTube subscribers. He is the youngest-ever Dragon on BBC's Dragons' Den and the founder of Steven.com, a creator holding company valued at $425 million.
Chris Abbott is the Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Bio, a Berkeley-based agricultural biotechnology company pioneering microbial nitrogen solutions that replace synthetic fertilizers. A Minnesota native and University of Minnesota graduate, Abbott built his career at the intersection of agriculture finance and agtech investing - from Wall Street sell-side research at Piper Jaffray to co-leading Continental Grain's Conti Ventures. He joined Pivot Bio's board in 2018, and in August 2023 stepped up as CEO, guiding the company past $100 million in annual revenue while scaling its gene-edited microbes to over 5 million acres. Under his leadership, Pivot Bio achieved 60% year-over-year revenue growth and has helped farmers reduce synthetic nitrogen use by over 129,000 metric tons.
Andre Bliznyuk is a General Partner at Runa Capital, where he leads North American investments in software for regulated industries: fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before VC, he spent a decade in capital markets at Goldman Sachs and UBS, running 20+ IPOs. He has backed Brainly, Mambu, Lendio, Smava, and Zopa, with exits at Cloudflare, Goldman Sachs, and Colt Telecom.
Brian Yee is a General Partner at Saints Capital, a San Francisco firm that has spent 25+ years building one of the oldest direct and GP-led venture secondary platforms in the market. He invests across SMB software, e-commerce, marketplaces, and digital health, with a working range of $100K to $5M and a sweet spot near $1.5M. His background runs through Goldman Sachs (TMT investment banking), General Atlantic, and ACME Capital before settling into the secondaries seat at Saints.
Tim Ferriss is a five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (1 billion+ downloads), early-stage investor in Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, and 50+ companies, and founder of the Saisei Foundation funding psychedelic research. Known for popularizing 'lifestyle design' with The 4-Hour Workweek, he is also a Guinness World Record holder in tango, a national kickboxing champion, and a polyglot who speaks five languages.
Dave Zilberman is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, where he focuses on early-to-late-stage investments in enterprise software, SaaS, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, data, and media. With over 20 years building companies as operator, advisor, and investor, he spent 15 years at Comcast Ventures before joining Norwest in 2020. His portfolio includes landmark wins like Slack (acquired by Salesforce) and DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU), and his current bets span AI infrastructure plays like LlamaIndex and security companies like Orion Security.
Jay Simons is a General Partner at BOND, the growth-stage venture firm co-founded by Mary Meeker. Before joining BOND in 2020, he spent 12 years at Atlassian - nine as President - helping grow the company from $20M to over $2B in ARR and through a landmark $5.8B IPO in 2015. He is one of the most influential practitioners and advocates of product-led growth in enterprise software, and now backs the next generation of category-defining SaaS companies from his perch in San Francisco.
Jeremy Schneider is General Partner at Webb Investment Network (WIN), the San Francisco-based single-family investment office founded by Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay. Since joining WIN in 2011, Schneider has helped build a portfolio of 121 companies including unicorns Ironclad, IPOs like Okta, PagerDuty, and AppLovin, and 48 acquisitions. A Dartmouth and Oxford-trained historian turned venture capitalist, Schneider is known for betting on founders over ideas, building WIN's affiliate network of 90+ seasoned operators, and offering hands-on support that one founder described as worthy of a statue.
Jim Adler is the Founder and General Partner of Toyota Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Toyota with $800M+ in assets under management and 90+ portfolio companies. A rocket-engineer-turned-serial-entrepreneur, Adler built the fund from a $100M seed in 2017 into a powerhouse backing frontier technologies in AI, autonomy, robotics, climate tech, and mobility. Known for his 'geek, suit, wonk' identity, he bridges deep technical expertise with sharp investment philosophy, insisting financial returns must precede strategic ones.
Karim Faris is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he leads investments in enterprise software, AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and frontier technology. A self-described 'grounded optimist,' he brings a rare combination of deep engineering roots - he published peer-reviewed neural network papers at Brown University and was a product manager for the Pentium processor at Intel - and decades of venture experience. He joined GV at its inception, and has backed companies including DocuSign, Duo Security (acquired by Cisco), Cohesity, FullStory, and SecurityScorecard, while serving on 25+ boards across his career.
Ran Ding is a General Partner and Co-Head of the Growth Equity team at Norwest Venture Partners, one of the most active multi-stage venture and growth equity firms in the world. The son of Chinese immigrants who came to America when he was three years old, Ran joined Norwest in 2011 as the third member of its growth equity team and was elevated to General Partner in February 2024. He focuses on B2B software and tech-enabled services companies across AI, data, SaaS, fintech, and marketplaces, partnering with founder-led businesses scaling from double-digit to triple-digit revenues. A two-time GrowthCap Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investor honoree, he has overseen 10+ successful exits and holds board seats at 8+ portfolio companies. Beyond finance, he spent his twenties producing music that accumulated roughly two million YouTube views and once hit a game-winning shot at Madison Square Garden.
Srini Akkaraju, MD/PhD, is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Samsara BioCapital, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm he founded in 2016 to translate cutting-edge biology into transformative therapeutics. With a Stanford MD/PhD in Immunology and a computer science foundation from Rice University, Akkaraju has spent over 25 years at the intersection of science and capital - from corporate development at Genentech to partnership roles at J.P. Morgan Partners, Panorama Capital, New Leaf Venture Partners, and Sofinnova Ventures. Samsara has built a portfolio of 93+ companies with 32 IPO exits, backing breakthroughs in immunotherapy, cell therapy, kidney disease, and gene therapy. His conviction-driven approach is evident in moves like a $19M personal stake in Scholar Rock, and his belief that biotech is entering an 'unbelievable innovation cycle' over the next two to three decades.
Shelley Perry is a seasoned software executive with nearly three decades of experience scaling technology organizations. As CEO and Founder of ScaleLogix Ventures and Operating Partner at Insight Partners, she specializes in helping SaaS companies navigate the 'messy middle' - the critical growth phase between product-market fit and full-scale maturity. Her career spans VP Engineering at TicketMaster, CTO of Industry SaaS Solutions at HP, Chief Product Officer at NTT, and Operating Partner at Insight Partners, where she built their Product Center of Excellence and launched the CPO Accelerator program. She is a keynote speaker, board director at multiple SaaS companies including Chargebee, and founder of the Path to CPO initiative.
Fatima Husain is the Chief Business Officer at Numeral, a San Francisco-based AI-powered sales tax automation platform that raised $35M in Series B funding in September 2025. A Yale-educated operator-turned-investor originally from India, she spent six years leading growth and product at Airbnb - achieving 20x+ YoY growth on the supply side - before co-founding Mosaic General Partnership with NBA champion Andre Iguodala. She was an early angel investor in Numeral and joined as CBO to build again, bringing two decades of operational instincts and venture capital pattern recognition to one of fintech's most unsexy yet massive problems.
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
Carra Wu is a Partner on the a16z crypto investment team, where she leads investments in gaming, media, consumer, and infrastructure. She became the youngest check signer in the firm's history at age 23, ascending from intern to deal partner in under a year - a trajectory that started with a six-sentence cold email to Arianna Simpson. A Harvard applied math dropout fluent in three languages, former HoloLens AR/VR engineer at Microsoft, and one-time ballet dancer, Wu brings a builder's instincts to some of crypto's biggest bets, including Axie Infinity, Friends With Benefits, Yield Guild Games, Story Protocol, and CCP Games.
Cornelius Menke is a former Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he spent roughly three years building the firm's European investment portfolio from London. A German national educated at the Stockholm School of Economics, Menke moved from management consulting at Boston Consulting Group to venture capital after an earlier stint inside Klarna's CFO office - one of Sequoia's landmark European bets. At Sequoia, he backed companies across industrial automation, AI infrastructure, and enterprise fintech, co-investing in Robco, Tacto, LangChain, Flow, Pennylane, and Rillet while also running the firm's Arc accelerator cohorts for European pre-seed and seed founders. He departed Sequoia in 2025/2026 and his next move remains to be announced.
Yoko Li is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on AI and infrastructure investments. A former software engineer and product manager, she brings hands-on technical depth to her investing work - building open source AI demos like AI Town and AI Tamago, creating cartoon explainers about machine learning, and writing benchmark analyses like TetrisBench. She sits at the crossroads of engineering craft and capital, backing companies like Resend, Mintlify, Clerk, Stainless, and Phota Labs while remaining an active contributor to the developer community.
Lilly Iskold is an Analyst at 2048 Ventures, a New York and Boston-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on Vertical AI, Deep Tech, Healthcare, and Biotech. With a B.A. in Biology (minor in Chemistry) from Brandeis University, she brings a rare bench-to-boardroom perspective shaped by hands-on research at the New York Genome Center and Humane Genomics, where she studied RNA's role in cancer development and CAR-T cell therapies. Raised in Livingston, NJ, Lilly fuses scientific rigor with entrepreneurial instinct - she co-founded Crafty Hour, a handmade jewelry business that donated proceeds to the NAACP.
Max Heald is an investor at Boldstart Ventures, the enterprise-first seed firm behind Snyk, BigID, and Tessl. Based in Miami and steeped in the early-stage game since his days at Union Square Ventures, Heald zeroes in on developer-first infrastructure, AI-native tooling, and the emerging protocols he describes as 'toll roads for the internet.' He came up through Phillips Exeter and Northwestern, cut his teeth analyzing board decks at USV, and has since backed and advised founders building the unglamorous but essential plumbing of the modern internet.
Monica Woo is a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a $67M seed-stage VC fund in New York, where she backs early-stage companies in AI, cybersecurity, edtech, and e-commerce. A Wharton MBA with a career spanning four continents, she has held CMO and president-level roles at 1-800-Flowers.com, Bacardi, Diageo, Nutrisystem, Sears, FreshDirect, and Mozido - generating over $5 billion in incremental revenue across her career. As founder of WooWorks, she channels that operator experience into advising and investing in the next wave of emerging tech companies.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Don Valentine was the founder of Sequoia Capital and one of the most consequential venture capitalists in American history. A working-class Bronx kid who paid his Fordham tuition in cash, he parlayed a career in semiconductor sales at Raytheon, Fairchild, and National Semiconductor into a firm that backed Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle, Google, and YouTube. His contrarian philosophy - bet on markets, not founders - and his Socratic boardroom style made him one of the architects of modern Silicon Valley. He died in October 2019 at age 87, leaving behind a legacy that shaped the entire venture capital industry.
Nicole Quinn is a Managing Partner at Connect Ventures and former General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where she spent a decade building one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive consumer investing portfolios. A former British 100-meter sprinter who traded the track for Wall Street, Quinn worked on the Facebook and Groupon IPOs at Morgan Stanley before pivoting to venture capital. Known as the 'Celebrity Whisperer,' she's backed Lady Gaga's Haus Labs, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and companies like Calm, Cameo, and Rothy's. With a mathematics degree from York University and an MBA from Stanford, Quinn combines analytical rigor with an athlete's competitive drive and a certified coach's empathy for founders navigating the long game of company building.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most storied early-stage venture firm, where he has spent nearly two decades backing audacious founders building transformative technology companies. A Stanford philosophy graduate who once dug sanitation trenches in rural Brazil, Fenton has a gift for identifying the exact moment when a company's rising adoption curve meets its declining risk curve. His track record - Twitter, Yelp, Zendesk, New Relic, Elastic, Hortonworks, and now Sierra and Exa - places him consistently on the Forbes Midas List, peaking at #2 in 2015, and he was named VC of the Year at the 2014 Crunchies.
Theresia Gouw is a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who became America's first female billionaire venture capitalist. A Brown-trained engineer turned Stanford MBA, she rose to become the first female investing partner at Accel Partners, where she helped back Facebook at a $98 million valuation in 2005. She co-founded Aspect Ventures and then Acrew Capital, managing ~$1.7 billion with a firm where 85% of employees are women or BIPOC. Beyond VC, she holds minority ownership stakes in the Buffalo Bills, Bay FC, and Golden State Warriors, and is Lead Investor and Executive Chair of an incoming Major League Volleyball franchise in Northern California.
Robert 'Tre' Sayle is a Partner at Thoma Bravo, one of the world's largest software-focused private equity firms, where he has spent nearly two decades building the Growth platform - a minority equity investing practice targeting breakout software companies. He orchestrated roughly 22 deals worth ~$50 billion in transaction value, led the $1B Thoma Bravo Advantage SPAC as CEO through its $11.1B merger with IronSource, and was named one of GrowthCap's Top 25 Software Investors of 2021. A Harvard economics graduate who started his career in tech investment banking at Hambrecht & Quist and JPMorgan, Sayle is known for his patience, his preference for informal first meetings over stiff boardrooms, and a global outlook that includes aggressive investment in Israeli cybersecurity.