managing-partner
(16)
Penny Pennington and the advantage of starting over
She left a banking career to open a financial advice practice in Michigan. Now, as Edward Jones’ managing partner, Penny Pennington is asking a century-old firm to learn a few new habits of its own.
Jeffrey Matisoff
Jeffrey Matisoff is North America CEO and Managing Partner of The Brandtech Group, the self-described world's number one generative AI marketing company. Named to the regional CEO role in early 2026, he runs Brandtech's largest market and leads its pitch to help brands turn AI into a competitive advantage through tools like the Pencil Gen AI platform and its 'Share of Model' work on how large language models describe brands. Matisoff joined Brandtech in 2021 from WPP, where he was global president of EightBar, IBM's dedicated agency, and he helped lead the acquisition and integration of digital marketing company Jellyfish. His career spans two decades in media and creative, with earlier stops at Accuen, PHD, and Universal McCann.
Paul Eccles
Paul Eccles is a molecular biologist turned healthcare strategy consultant who leads Basis Health, the New York-based life sciences division of London-headquartered insight consultancy Basis Global. He joined Basis in September 2022 as Managing Partner after a career spanning Trinity Life Sciences, BluePrint Research Group, Cello Health, and Opinion Health, and has spent more than fifteen years advising pharma, biotech, and clinical incubators on commercialization, licensing, forecasting, and portfolio positioning.
Srini Akkaraju
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.
Vincent Diallo
Vincent Diallo is a French-born, trilingual (French, English, Mandarin) venture capitalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who brings a rare tri-continental lens to consumer and commerce investing. He is General Partner at Progression, a TikTok-alumni-led fund backing AI-native consumer products, and founder and Managing Partner of Interlace Ventures, a $14M debut fund dedicated to commerce technology. Before moving into venture, he served as CFO of Sinodis in Shanghai — scaling the largest independent Western food distributor in China from $50M to $200M in revenue before its exit — and spent seven years at Deloitte across Paris and Shanghai auditing global giants including LVMH, WPP, and Pernod Ricard. He is also co-founder of Bleu Capital, a transatlantic climate-focused family office.
Shivkumar Thiagarajan
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
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.
Douglas Leone
Douglas Leone is an Italian-born American billionaire venture capitalist and former Global Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the most storied VC firms in Silicon Valley history. He joined Sequoia in 1988 after stints at Sun Microsystems, HP, and Prime Computer, rose to Managing Partner in 1996, and led the firm's global expansion into China and India. With investments spanning ServiceNow, RingCentral, Nubank, Medallia, and Wiz, Leone helped shape the modern cloud and enterprise software landscape. He stepped back from the senior operational role in 2022 but remains a general partner. As of late 2025, his net worth is estimated at $10.8 billion.
Alfred Lin
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
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
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+.
Roelof Botha
Roelof Frederik Botha is a South African-American venture capitalist and former Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied VC firms. Grandson of South African foreign minister Pik Botha, he rose from PayPal CFO at age 28 - overseeing the company's IPO and $1.5B sale to eBay - to become one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors. He wrote the original investment memo for YouTube when the company had 3 employees and a valuation of $11.5M; Google bought it 14 months later for $1.65B. Over two decades at Sequoia, he backed YouTube, Instagram, Block (Square), MongoDB, Unity, Natera, and dozens more, generating over $50 billion in returns for limited partners. He stepped down as Sequoia's Senior Steward in November 2025.
Haseeb Qureshi
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.
Sundeep Peechu
Sundeep Peechu is a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most consistent early-stage VC firms. A former IIT Madras engineer who went through Intel before pivoting to venture capital, he has backed transformational companies including Plaid, Canva, Notion, Cruise, Runway, and Mercor. Known for a decade-plus holding philosophy, hands-on founder support, and a particular obsession with AI and health tech, he has helped guide Felicis from a $41M debut fund in 2010 to a $900M Fund X in 2025.
Ulili Onovakpuri
Uriridiakoghene 'Ulili' Onovakpuri is a trailblazing venture capitalist who spent 10+ years at Kapor Capital, rising from analyst to Co-Managing Partner and co-raising the firm's largest-ever fund - $126M Fund III in 2022. One of very few Black female managing partners in VC history, she backed 70+ companies with a focus on digital health, health tech, and people operations, while also founding the longest-running VC fellowship program for underrepresented individuals. Her own childhood diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in Hunter's Point, San Francisco, where she grew up, directly shaped her conviction that healthcare access is a systemic justice issue. In May 2025 she departed Kapor Capital for what she called 'a purposeful pause,' and has since joined Motley Fool Ventures as a Venture Partner.
Laela Sturdy
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.