In Sik Rhee is the Founder and General Partner of Vertex Ventures US, a Palo Alto-based venture firm focused exclusively on early-stage enterprise software. He co-founded two companies that sold for a combined $1.8 billion - Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape in 1997) and Opsware (acquired by HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion) - before transitioning into venture capital. At Vertex Ventures US, he backs pre-revenue founders in enterprise infrastructure, data platforms, and open-source software at the Seed and Series A stages, with notable portfolio wins including LaunchDarkly, Cyberhaven, and Evisort (acquired by Workday).
Eric Vishria is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most selective venture firms, where he has led investments in companies like Confluent, Cerebras Systems, Benchling, and Amplitude. Before venture, he co-founded RockMelt (acquired by Yahoo in 2013) and spent years at Loudcloud/Opsware through its $1.65B HP acquisition - an experience he describes as a graduate education in startup warfare. Known for his 'slope over starting point' framework for evaluating founders and his early warnings about AI capital implosion, Vishria brings rare operator depth to a firm built on equal-economics, no-hierarchy partnerships.
Frank Chen is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he has been a foundational force since the firm launched in August 2009. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who studied AI before it was fashionable, he has worked alongside Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz across more than 25 years and multiple companies including Loudcloud and Opsware. At a16z, he built the Deal & Research Team, led the Seed Fund, launched the Talent x Opportunity (TxO) initiative, and now heads Early Stage Venture Programs — building the Founder Library and an LLM-based chatbot that delivers a16z institutional knowledge to founders. He is also Silicon Valley's most acclaimed explainer of complex technology: his 2016 AI Primer video became the canonical introduction to deep learning across the industry.
Ben Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world managing over $90 billion in assets. A former CEO who took Loudcloud public during the dot-com winter and sold Opsware to HP for $1.65 billion, Horowitz brings an operational depth to VC that most investors lack. He's also a bestselling author, a genuine hip-hop head who wrote his famous management blog posts with rap epigraphs, and one of the most candid voices in Silicon Valley on the psychological realities of leadership.