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Max Cohen’s case for taking the long way
Before co-founding Sprinter Health, Max Cohen helped put virtual reality into a backpack. His next act began with an old colleague, Wednesday dinners, and a willingness to be a beginner again.
Aizada Marat and the cost of standing still
A Harvard-trained lawyer lost a year and a half to her own immigration case. The experience helped turn Aizada Marat from a client waiting for answers into the co-founder of Alma.
John Pimentel and the business of making the unlikely ordinary
Before co-founding 280 Earth, John Pimentel helped build wind projects and rebuild California freeways. His career keeps returning to the same awkward question: how do you turn a promising idea into something people can actually use?
Jim Labe and the price of buying time
Before venture debt became a familiar line on a startup’s balance sheet, Jim Labe was helping build the business of it. His career runs from equipment leases to public markets, with one question following him: how much time can borrowed money buy?
Larry Cohen and the business of beginning again
Before he ran a venture studio, Larry Cohen spent years turning research into companies. His career offers a close look at the money, people, and patient repetition that an idea needs before it becomes a business.
Mateusz Szeszkowski and the value of a longer clock
From European software deals at KKR to founder-led businesses at Norland Capital, Mati Szeszkowski has made time part of his investment proposition. His work runs through the software that keeps banks, councils, and security teams moving.
Emily Bailard and the arithmetic of showing up
Before she worked on missed school days, Emily Bailard worked on wasted electricity. At EveryDay Labs, she brought the same behavioral lens to a different household habit - and helped build an attendance company that joined Newsela in 2026.
Raz Rafaeli Has Spent 30 Years Making Passwords Look Old
Long before passwordless became a category, Raz Rafaeli was building network tools and running infrastructure companies. His latest act is a ten-year campaign against the credential that refuses to retire.
John McLane Is Making the Back Office Impossible to Ignore
The Plooto CEO has spent a career moving between art, private equity, enterprise software and payments. His current bet is that the quiet mechanics of cash flow deserve the same attention as growth.
Vahid Saadat
Vahid Saadat is a serial medical device entrepreneur and co-founder and co-CEO of Inquis Medical, a Menlo Park, California company building the AVENTUS Thrombectomy System for treating venous thromboembolic disease and pulmonary embolism. With more than 25 years in medtech and over 200 issued and pending patents, he has founded or led a string of companies including Voyage Medical, USGI Medical, AngioTrax, Baxano and Arrinex (maker of ClariFix, later acquired by Stryker). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and runs Inquis alongside co-CEO Mojgan Saadat.
Prat Moghe
Prat Moghe is the CEO of Promethium, a Menlo Park data fabric and self-service analytics startup he took over in October 2024 after founder Kaycee Lai moved to Chief Strategy Officer. A UCLA-trained electrical engineer, Moghe started at Bell Labs, ran product and strategy at Netezza through its $1.7B IBM acquisition, founded cloud data-as-a-service company Cazena (later acquired by Cloudera, where he became EVP), and served as president of TiE Boston.
Xuandai Nguyen
Xuandai Nguyen, Ph.D., MBA, is Vice President, Head of Global Program Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Beacon Therapeutics, an ophthalmic gene therapy company working to restore sight in people with inherited and prevalent retinal diseases. A scientist-turned-strategist, Nguyen has spent more than two decades moving medicines from bench to market, with senior roles at Genentech, Forma Therapeutics and ACELYRIN spanning immunology, ophthalmology, respiratory and sickle cell disease. Trilingual and Berkeley- and Cornell-trained, Nguyen sits at the intersection of hard science and commercial strategy, translating complicated biology into the plans that decide which therapies reach patients.
Brittainy Lovett
Brittainy Lovett is a Meta operator who works inside the Office of the CEO, one of the highest-trust seats in a 77,000-person company. A Northwestern-trained mechanical engineer who started in consulting at Deloitte, she has built a career on privacy critical incident response - the unglamorous, high-stakes work of keeping user data safe when something goes wrong. Based in New York, she is the kind of behind-the-scenes operator who makes very large machines run quietly.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Baris Karadogan
Baris Karadogan is the co-founder and CEO of Jingle, a Menlo Park startup that turns local stores and services into roving mobile vendors that drive through neighborhoods and ping nearby shoppers through an app. An Istanbul-raised, Stanford-trained engineer who spent a decade as a venture capitalist at firms including ComVentures, Fuse Capital and U.S. Venture Partners, he traded the investor's chair for the founder's seat to attack the high fees and long waits of conventional delivery. Jingle raised a $2.9 million seed round in 2023 with Bessemer Venture Partners. Off the clock he is a serious birdwatcher who spent nine years on the board of California Audubon.
Eric Chiu
Eric Chiu is the founder and CEO of SolidCore.ai, a Menlo Park startup that helps enterprises deploy generative AI with real-time monitoring, an immutable record of every LLM interaction, and built-in compliance. A veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur, he previously founded HyTrust, the cloud security company acquired by Entrust, whose technology protected the virtual infrastructure of Bank of America, United Healthcare, Honeywell, and U.S. Central Command. SolidCore emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $4M in seed funding led by Runtime Ventures, reuniting Chiu with his longtime collaborator and CTO Hemma Prafullchandra.
Gretchen Salyer
Gretchen Salyer is the founder and CEO of The June Care Company, a community-based childcare platform she launched in June 2021 after 15 years in technology, ending as a general manager at Intuit. Born out of pandemic childcare swaps she organized among neighbors, June Care connects parents who need care with vetted, background-checked stay-at-home parents who can earn income watching other children nearby. The company - whose name stands for Joining Up Neighbors Everywhere - has raised about $3.6M in seed funding led by Craft Ventures, and operates on Salyer's belief that the childcare crisis is solved by helping every family build its village.
Madhu Yalamarthi
Madhu Yalamarthi is the cofounder and CEO of Modak, a fintech company building a Visa debit card and gamified family app that teaches kids and teens to manage money through chores, allowances, savings goals, and rewards. A first-generation high school graduate from rural India, he earned an MBA and MS from Stanford, where he made Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%), then spent years as a Vice President at GGV Capital deploying roughly $200 million across 14 startups, five of which became unicorns. He left the investor's chair to build the thing he believed in: turning financial literacy into something kids actually want to practice.
Abhishek Ramkumar
Abhishek Ramkumar is the founder and CEO of Abram Scientific, a Menlo Park medtech company building CoagCare, a handheld point-of-care platform that reads the full blood-clotting story from a single drop in under ten minutes. A biomedical engineer with a PhD from Cornell and a B.Tech from IIT Bombay, he spent years at PARC and Blue Highway inventing diagnostic and surgical devices before turning a hard physics problem - measuring blood viscoelasticity and density in a vibration-proof wireless meter - into 17 granted patents and an $11.75M Series A led by Octapharma in 2026. His pitch is simple and life-or-death: get the right transfusion to the right patient at the right time, whether that patient is on an operating table or in a MEDEVAC helicopter.
Dave Welch
Dave Welch is the founder and CEO of AttoTude, a Menlo Park deep-tech startup building the world's first terahertz interconnect that runs over wire instead of fiber or photonics, aimed at unclogging the data-movement bottleneck inside AI and hyperscale data centers. A co-founder of Infinera, where he pioneered large-scale photonic integrated circuits, and former CTO at SDL, Welch holds more than 200 patents, has authored roughly 300 publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In April 2025 AttoTude raised a $50M Series B, pushing total funding past $90M.
Dmitry Turbiner
Dmitry Turbiner is the founder and CEO of General Radar Corp., a Silicon Valley deep-tech company building what it calls the world's first 100% commercial AESA phased-array radar with defense-grade performance. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who designed flight-grade satellite antennas at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Turbiner left a Stanford master's program to start the company in 2016. General Radar has raised more than $47 million across seed and Series A rounds from backers including Kleiner Perkins and Octave Ventures, and pioneered a 'Radar-as-a-Service' model that aims to deliver high-resolution, long-range threat detection in a fraction of the usual time and cost.
Maureen Hillenmeyer
Maureen Hillenmeyer is the founder and CEO of Hexagon Bio, a Menlo Park drug-discovery company that mines the genomes of fungi for hidden small molecules and engineers yeast to brew them into potential medicines. A former competitive swimmer turned computational biologist, she holds a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford and built the company out of a Stanford research program she led, raising more than $270 million to turn DNA sequence data into cancer and infectious-disease therapeutics.
Roy Mill
Roy Mill is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joshu, a no-code insurance product platform that lets carriers and MGAs launch digital distribution channels in weeks rather than years. A Stanford PhD economist who pivoted into product, he spent years at Ancestry and At-Bay before founding Joshu in 2020. The company has raised $11.7M in total funding and was named to the InsurTech100 list in 2024.
Web Augustine
Web Augustine is the founder and CEO of HiWire, a Menlo Park outfit that runs high-end executive search and fundraising help for early-stage startups at entrepreneur-friendly terms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned marketer, he was the first product manager on HP's DeskJet inkjet line, Sun Microsystems' employee 152, and the founding VP of marketing who helped spin VeriSign out as a standalone company in 1995. Four decades in, he splits his time between recruiting CEOs and VPs for founders, advising on pitch decks and financial forecasts, and writing books - including a 2020 political satire and a 1,400-entry quotations collection.
Avinash Misra
Avinash Misra is the CEO and co-founder of Skan AI, a Menlo Park-based enterprise AI company pioneering process intelligence and agentic automation. A serial entrepreneur who graduated from IIT Kanpur, he previously co-founded Endeavour Software Technologies — acquired by Genpact in 2015 — before launching Skan in 2018 with longtime partner Manish Garg. Skan has raised $54M in total funding, landed on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and launched the Agentic Ontology of Work (AOW) — a first-of-its-kind semantic framework for human-AI collaboration — positioning the company as the context infrastructure layer for the enterprise AI era.
Jonathan Trevor
Jonathan Trevor is a Co-Founder of Observe, Inc., an AI-powered observability platform built on a streaming data lake that unifies logs, metrics, and traces to help engineering teams detect, investigate, and resolve incidents faster. He came to Observe from Wavefront (now VMware Tanzu Observability), where he served as Frontend Lead, and before that led frontend engineering at Shocase. Trevor holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University. Observe - co-founded with Jacob Leverich (ex-Splunk), Jon Watte (ex-Roblox), and Philip Unterbrunner (ex-Snowflake) and incubated by Sutter Hill Ventures - raised $156M in Series C funding in July 2025 before Snowflake announced its intent to acquire the company for approximately $1 billion in January 2026, its largest acquisition to date.
Kannan Kothandaraman
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Kshitij Jain
Kshitij Jain - widely known as KJ - is the Founder and CEO of Joveo, a Menlo Park-based AI-powered programmatic recruitment advertising platform that serves Fortune 500 employers including Wells Fargo, Barclays, Rolls-Royce, and Sony. A two-time founder with 20-plus years in the recruitment industry, he previously built MoBolt, a job application optimization startup acquired by Indeed in 2014 for a double-digit million dollar sum in under two years of operation. Before that he spent roughly eleven years at Monster Worldwide across roles spanning Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and India. KJ's driving mission - delivering the right job to every person - is embedded in Joveo's name itself, and his 4-3-2-1 model (four clicks, three applies, two shortlists, one hire) defines his philosophy on making recruitment humane at scale.
Maayan Cohen
Maayan Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Heart, a Menlo Park-based digital therapeutics company focused exclusively on cardiovascular health. A former Israeli tank platoon commander turned strategy consultant, she built Hello Heart from a 2013 startup into a platform covering 1.6+ million members across Fortune 500 employers, backed by $148.5M in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, IVP, and Stripes. Named to CNBC Changemakers 2024 and Inc. Female Founders 500 in 2025, Cohen is recognized for her empathy-driven leadership style - including managing her company from Tel Aviv bomb shelters during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war while providing housing and support for both Israeli and Palestinian staff.
Si France
Si France, MD is the Founder and CEO of WelbeHealth, a Menlo Park-based healthcare company operating PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) programs across California. A physician-entrepreneur with dual MD/MBA degrees from Dartmouth, he previously founded GoHealth Urgent Care, scaling it to 150+ centers before selling to TPG Growth in 2014. At WelbeHealth he pioneered the first four for-profit PACE organizations in the United States, building a model that enables low-income, medically frail seniors to remain in their homes and communities rather than enter nursing facilities - while saving taxpayers $10,000 per patient annually.