Arena is a San Francisco-based audience engagement platform that turns publishers' and brands' own websites into social-network-like communities. Through live blogs, group chats, comments, AI-powered content feeds and audience analytics, Arena helps over 20,000 organizations - including Fox Sports - keep readers on-site, collect first-party data and monetize attention they used to give away to social platforms.
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Peter Thompson is the Cofounder and CEO of LucidLink, a San Francisco-based cloud-native file streaming platform that turns object storage into a native file system accessible from anywhere in real time. A Minnesota farm kid who spent 15 years navigating storage markets across Asia and the Americas at DataCore Software before returning to Stanford's GSB at age 48, Thompson teamed up with engineer George Dochev in 2016 to build what users still describe as 'magic.' LucidLink has since raised $120.6M in total funding including a $75M Series C led by Brighton Park Capital in 2023, grown ARR nearly 5x in two years, counts Warner Bros., Paramount, Adobe, and Shopify among its customers, and earned an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award from the Television Academy.
John Kremer is the CEO of Rizzle, a San Francisco-based AI video platform that turns written content into broadcast-quality video for publishers and media companies. A 30-year Silicon Valley veteran, Kremer brings operational depth from senior leadership roles at Yahoo!, Adobe, and JP Morgan Chase - having helped Adobe's Digital Media business scale from under $3B to over $12B in revenue. At Rizzle, he leads a platform reaching over 1 billion viewers across MSN, Yahoo, NewsBreak, and social media, cutting video production time by up to 98% and costs by 80% for media clients.
Stewart Alsop is a veteran technology journalist turned venture capitalist who co-founded Alsop Louie Partners and, in 2024, TK MediaTech Ventures. One of the first journalists to become a full general partner at a major VC firm, he backed Twitch, TiVo, and Sonos, founded the legendary DEMO Conference, and spent 20 years shaping tech journalism at InfoWorld, Inc., and Fortune before pivoting to investing. A proud member of one of America's most storied journalistic dynasties - son of columnist Stewart Alsop Jr. - he now operates from Santa Fe, New Mexico, writing on Substack and co-hosting a podcast with his son.