Ilan Bajarlia is the CEO and co-founder of nocnoc, a Montevideo-based cross-border e-commerce facilitator that connects more than 2,500 global brands and sellers from the U.S. and China with shoppers across Latin America's fragmented marketplaces. A former dLocal and AstroPay business developer, he built nocnoc from a $300,000 friends-and-family seed into a company that has raised roughly $22 million, led by PayPal Ventures, and operates the largest cross-border stores in the region across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina.
Incognia is a location identity and fraud prevention company that uses device intelligence, location behavioral analytics, and AI to help platform businesses — from food delivery to financial services — detect fraud without compromising the user experience. By processing signals from GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth without capturing PII, Incognia identifies legitimate users from fraudsters across multiple devices with 99.999999% accuracy, a 0.0001% false-positive rate, and no friction for genuine users. Deployed on over 200 million smartphones and protecting nearly 1 billion devices, Incognia has become the go-to fraud layer for platforms like Grubhub, Delivery Hero, and Upwork.
Chad Byers is co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, a San Francisco seed-stage firm he started in 2013 with Leo Polovets and Seth Berman. He wrote one of the first institutional checks into Robinhood at age 26 - a $250k bet that grew past $400M - and has led Susa into Flexport, Andela, Newfront, Mux, Stord and Viz. In March 2025, Susa closed its fifth fund at $175M. He focuses on marketplaces, fintech, healthcare and logistics, and describes himself as a quiet introvert in a loud business.
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Matt Lee is the Founder and General Partner of Progression Fund, a pre-seed and seed-stage consumer technology VC firm co-founded with alumni from musical.ly and TikTok. Based in Oakland, California, he backs visionary founders building AI-native products for everyday consumers and prosumers, with a particular thesis around generational behavior shifts - specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha. His portfolio spans consumer tech, gaming, entertainment, social platforms, live streaming commerce, and digital health, with notable investments including Perplexity AI and Dapper Labs. He brings a global perspective from prior roles at ChinaRock Capital Management, Pereg Ventures, and engineering and consulting stints at Macquarie Group and Capco.
Raj Sandhu is a General Partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital, one of the most active seed-stage investors in the United States with a portfolio spanning 345+ companies and 14 unicorns. Armed with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a double-major BS in Computer Science and Economics from Yale, Sandhu brings a rare blend of technical depth and financial acumen to early-stage investing. Over more than two decades, he has backed companies from pre-seed through Series A with check sizes ranging from $50K to $500K, focusing on enterprise software, SaaS, marketplaces, healthcare, and fintech. Before joining Great Oaks, he managed $2 billion in assets at the Chatterjee-Soros Group, led technology banking at Cowen & Co., and co-founded Modulus Video — a video compression company acquired by Motorola in 2007. His portfolio includes breakout names like Hinge, Peek, Acorns, Allbirds, Bolt, Flatiron Health, and Ibotta.
Rexhep 'Rexhi' Dollaku is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has become the first Black-led VC to cross $1 billion in assets under management. Born in Ulcinj on the Montenegro-Albania border and raised in Pittsburgh, Dollaku studied economics, global health, and health policy at Harvard before building his career in venture. He joined Base10 as an early team member, architecting the firm's thematic research methodology that now drives 90% of its investments and growing it from a seed-stage firm to a $1.3B AUM powerhouse. His focus: backing founders who automate the 'real economy' - food, logistics, retail, fintech - solving problems for the 99% while donating half of the firm's profits to HBCU scholarships.
Richard 'Rich' Boyle is a General Partner at Canaan, a leading venture capital firm, where he focuses on real estate technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and marketplaces. With over 25 years building companies in Silicon Valley - including serving as President, Chairman, and CEO of LoopNet, which he took public in 2006 before a $900M acquisition by CoStar Group in 2012 - Boyle brings rare operator depth to his investing. He joined Canaan in 2016 after a stint as Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, and has since backed companies including ApartmentList, Berkshire Grey, Diligent Robotics, Dusty Robotics, Hermeus, and Tomorrow.io.
Tripp Jones is a General Partner at Uncork Capital, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm with over 260 early-stage startup investments. A Princeton psychology grad who spent a decade at August Capital before joining Uncork in 2021, he backs consumer, B2B, and frontier tech companies at the seed stage. Known for his contrarian view that consumer VC is far from dead, he has backed companies ranging from BARK to GPTZero, and champions supply-driven marketplace models with hard-to-access inventory.
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.
Isaiah Boone is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, focusing on enterprise applications, infrastructure, commerce, and marketplaces. A Pomona College math and statistics graduate, he cut his teeth at RBC Wealth Management and Leonard Green & Partners before joining Sequoia in December 2020. His portfolio includes category-defining companies like Ramp, Rippling, Mercury, Meter, Faire, and Island - businesses reshaping how companies manage money, people, and infrastructure.
Mike Duboe is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied venture firms. A former operator who scaled Stitch Fix's growth org from zero to 20 people and helped take the company through IPO, Duboe brings rare depth to the investor seat - having managed nine-figure marketing budgets and built scrappy product-led growth teams. He focuses on commerce, marketplaces, and vertical software, with an investment philosophy rooted in learning velocity and disciplined, sustainable growth over vanity metrics.
Lucas Hoffmann is a Partner at Outlander VC and Head of Business Operations at HavocAI, a maritime autonomy company. A Wake Forest and Emory Business School graduate with corporate roots at ExxonMobil and Delta Air Lines, he pivoted to venture capital in 2021 and built a pre-seed and seed investing practice focused on AI, SaaS, hardware, robotics, fintech, and govtech. He also founded RiskyBreakfast, a media and content venture, and was recognized as a Siemens National Semifinalist in 2010 for ALS research conducted at Columbia University Medical School.
Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's $1 billion Apps practice investing in fintech, payments, e-commerce, and enterprise software. A serial entrepreneur who started selling shareware at age 10 (and got banned by AOL), he co-founded TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), co-founded Affirm with Max Levchin (now NASDAQ: AFRM), coined the term 'O2O' (Online-to-Offline), and has backed companies including Mercury, Earnin, Descript, and Rocket Companies. He is perhaps best known for the investment framework: 'The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation.'
Deepak Kamra is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most enduring venture capitalists with over 33 years at a single firm. An Indian immigrant who grew up in Canada, he has backed landmark companies including DoubleClick (acquired by Google), Match.com, SuccessFactors (acquired by SAP), Skybox Imaging (acquired by Google for $500M), and ON24 (IPO at ~$3B in 2021 after a 22-year journey from a $12M investment). He is a passionate immigration advocate who has testified before Congress, a microfinance champion funding entrepreneurs in the Global South, a bass guitarist, avid cyclist, and world traveler who has visited over 80 countries.
Anna Piñol Mediano is a Partner at NFX, a $450M seed-stage venture capital firm, where she leads investments in AI, marketplaces, fintech, and consumer companies across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. A founder-turned-investor, she co-founded Jupiter (YC S19) after her Stanford MBA and was recruited to NFX - the very firm that had backed her startup. Promoted to Partner in May 2024, she is widely recognized as one of Silicon Valley's leading voices on AI agents and the emerging AI workforce, having authored influential essays and spoken at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
Valerie Mahoney is a Principal at NFX, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed-stage venture capital firms managing ~$1.5B across four funds. A Materials Science engineer from Imperial College London who earned both an MBA and MPP from Stanford as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, she brings an operator's lens to early-stage investing after stints at Funding Circle (through IPO), SumUp, Tala, and Cash App/Block. At NFX she focuses on AI, fintech, enterprise software, and marketplaces - backing founders at the pre-seed and seed stages where network effects can be built from the ground up.
Gigi Levy-Weiss is a General Partner and co-founder at NFX, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm managing $875M+ across 577+ portfolio companies with 25 unicorns. A former Israeli Air Force attack helicopter pilot turned serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Playtika (sold to Caesars for ~$180M; later valued at $4.4B), served as CEO of 888 Holdings (a London-listed online gaming company), and made 150+ angel investments before co-founding NFX in 2015. Known for combining military-grade rigor with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor, he leads NFX's Israel office and focuses on gaming, bio, space, and generative AI.
James Currier is a five-time founder turned General Partner at NFX, a $1.5B seed-stage venture firm built on a single thesis: network effects drive 70% of all value created in tech. He built Tickle into the 18th most-visited website in the world, pioneered viral marketing and A/B testing before those terms existed, and has since co-founded NFX with Pete Flint, Gigi Levy-Weiss, and Morgan Beller to back the next generation of network-effect-driven companies. An angel in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, he is also the author of the Network Effects Bible and a speaker who translated an arcane econ concept into the operating language of Silicon Valley.
Sarah Tavel is a venture investor and product thinker best known as the first female General Partner at Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious and selective VC firms. Before Benchmark, she led core discovery products at Pinterest during its hypergrowth years, having first backed the company as a VC at Bessemer Venture Partners. She is the creator of widely-cited frameworks including the Hierarchy of Marketplaces, Happy GMV, and the 'Sell Work, Not Software' thesis for AI startups. As of April 2025, she transitioned to Venture Partner at Benchmark, focusing on AI tools at the edge and broader exploratory work.