kirkland-ellis
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Jordan Birnholtz
Jordan Birnholtz is a serial founder turned intellectual-property litigator who keeps building at the seam between law, finance, and technology. He co-founded PawnGuru, a marketplace that brought 1.5M+ underbanked Americans online to pawn shops; helped progressives organize through The Tuesday Company's Team app; and as co-founder and CMO of Neon put the world's first NFT vending machine on a New York sidewalk. After earning his J.D. cum laude from Northwestern, he now practices IP litigation at Kirkland & Ellis while co-founding Trarian, a venture underwriting patent-invalidity risk across what he calls the trillion-dollar patent asset class.
Ashley Caldwell
Ashley Caldwell is Partner and General Counsel at Sapphire Ventures, the Menlo Park venture capital firm with more than $11B in AUM across its Ventures, Partners, and Sport platforms. She runs legal across all three strategies — deal execution, governance, regulatory, exits — for a firm that backs growth-stage technology companies globally. A former Kirkland & Ellis private equity associate and Bluevine in-house counsel, she joined Sapphire in 2019, was elevated to General Counsel in 2021, and now wears the Partner title too.
Federico Baradello
Federico Baradello is the Founder and CEO of Finalis, an AI-powered investment banking platform he built from his frustration with a 30-year-old technology stack while executing M&A deals at Kirkland & Ellis. An Argentine-American multilingual attorney with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, LSE, and UC Berkeley, Baradello launched Finalis in 2020 and has grown it into one of the fastest-growing investment banking platforms in history - now powering over 900 bankers across 24 countries with $22.5B+ in closed transactions.