Shivkumar Thiagarajan, known as Shiv, is Co-Chief Executive Officer of DynPro Inc., a global IT consulting powerhouse he helped build over more than two decades. Based in Santa Clara, California, Shiv leads an organization of 1,600+ professionals spanning North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, delivering enterprise transformations across SAP, Salesforce, cloud, data, and AI platforms. With 30 years of institutional momentum behind DynPro and a newly minted partnership with Turgon AI that compresses year-long modernization projects into weeks, Shiv is steering one of the IT industry's most enduring firms into its AI-native chapter.
Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at Y Combinator and serial founder who went from Oxford law to Silicon Valley startup culture. He co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers (Patrick and John, later of Stripe fame) in 2007, sold it for $5M in under a year, then became YC's first non-founder partner in 2010. He co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, co-founded technical hiring platform Triplebyte in 2015 (acquired by Karat in 2023), and returned to YC in 2020 as a Group Partner before becoming Managing Partner. He has advised over 1,000 companies across 17 YC batches and worked with more than 20 unicorns including Coinbase, Instacart, and Gusto.
Alfred Lin is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of venture capital's most storied firms, where he co-steers a $7 billion AI-focused expansion fund alongside Pat Grady. A Taiwanese immigrant who resold Tony Hsieh's pizza by the slice at Harvard, Lin went on to be CFO, COO, and Chairman of Zappos - guiding it to its first profitable year and a $1.2 billion Amazon acquisition - before joining Sequoia in 2010. His portfolio reads like a decade of defining bets: Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Instacart, Reddit, and OpenAI. A three-time Forbes Midas List #1, he is the rare investor who has lived the operator's grind and brings that lens to every founder he backs.
Dalton Caldwell is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist best known for co-founding imeem (one of the first legal music social networks), launching App.net as a principled alternative to ad-supported social media, and spending over a decade as a Managing Partner at Y Combinator advising 1,000+ startups. He is now co-founding Standard Capital, a $425M AI-native Series A fund with Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg.
Jeff Richards is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), where he has been backing enterprise software, vertical SaaS, SMBTech, and fintech companies since 2008. Before venture, he lived both sides of the founder equation - building QuantumShift (a TPG-backed telecom startup that failed spectacularly) and R4 (a supply chain SaaS acquired by VeriSign). That dual experience of building and failing informs his unusually empathetic, operator-first approach to backing founders. His portfolio includes Coinbase, Handshake, Brightwheel, Homebase, BigCommerce, and Tile, with investments ranging from seed to Series B+.
Haseeb Qureshi is the Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, one of crypto's largest VC firms with $4B+ AUM. A former professional poker player who turned $50 into seven figures by age 19, he walked away from the game, gave away his earnings, taught himself to code at a bootcamp, worked at Airbnb, then bet everything on crypto. He is one of the most distinctive voices in Web3 - part philosopher, part strategist, part contrarian - known for rigorous long-form essays, sharp market predictions, and an improbable career arc that no resume template could contain.
Laela Sturdy is the Managing Partner and CEO of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth equity fund. A first-generation American born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida, she played Division I basketball at Harvard, earned an MBA from Stanford, and built a track record at CapitalG where every one of her early investments became a unicorn — including Stripe, Duolingo, UiPath, and Webflow. She became sole leader of CapitalG in March 2023, making her one of a tiny handful of women running an established multibillion-dollar venture firm.