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.
Mary Jane (MJ) Elmore is a pioneering venture capitalist who joined IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) in 1982 and became one of the first female General Partners in American venture capital history. Over a four-decade career spanning eight IVP funds, she backed transformative technology companies in software, communications, and computer-aided engineering. Now a Limited Partner and active angel investor through Broadway Angels and Sand Hill Angels, she has reinvented herself as an oil painter - applying the same mathematical precision that made her a formidable investor to abstract landscapes and architecture.
Shravan Narayen is a General Partner at IVP (Institutional Venture Partners), one of Silicon Valley's most storied late-stage venture capital firms. Promoted to General Partner in May 2026, he focuses on enterprise infrastructure and AI applications, backing technically sophisticated founders building products that make hard things simple. A former product manager at Snowflake, Confluent, and C3.AI, he brings rare operator depth to IVP's growth-stage portfolio. He holds degrees from Stanford University and Harvard Business School, runs a Substack newsletter on venture and product, and describes himself as a 'hyper-caffeinated new dad' fueled by homemade chai.
Reid Weaver Dennis (1926-2024) was the founding father of institutional venture capital in Silicon Valley. As founder of Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), he pioneered the model of raising venture funds from institutional investors - insurance companies and endowments - at a time when VC was barely a cottage industry. His 1974 fund raised nearly half of all private venture capital in the U.S. that year. Over seven decades, he backed companies like Seagate, Netflix, TiVo, and Juniper Networks, served 37 years on the San Francisco Opera board, and built IVP into a firm managing $7 billion with a 40-year IRR of 43.1%.
Catherine 'Cack' Wilhelm is a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), where she focuses on cloud infrastructure, data infrastructure, and information security investments. A former Nike-sponsored professional runner and seven-time All-American at Princeton, she was the first American finisher at the 2007 World Cross Country Championship in Kenya. Wilhelm is the first woman promoted to general partner at IVP since 1983, having led major investments in companies like Perplexity, Cribl, CircleCI, and Monte Carlo Data. Her unconventional path from elite athletics to enterprise sales at Oracle and Cloudera to venture capital has shaped her approach to partnering with technical founders building transformative infrastructure companies.