Christian Keil is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the American Dynamism team, backing startups that build for the national interest - from aerospace to defense to infrastructure. Before turning investor, he spent seven years as a top executive at Astranis, the satellite company he helped scale from a 50-person R&D shop to a 500-person aerospace-grade factory with over $1 billion in sales. He may be the only venture capitalist who has personally bought a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket. A proud Midwesterner who moved to Silicon Valley in 2017, Keil writes, podcasts, and thinks deeply about what it means to build things that matter for America.
Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of Square (now Block, Inc.), a serial entrepreneur, master glassblower, author, and philanthropist from St. Louis. He built Square after losing a $2,000 sale at his glass studio because he couldn't accept American Express - and turned that frustration into a payments company that beat Amazon when it tried to copy them. He's also founded Invisibly, co-founded LaunchCode (a nonprofit that guarantees tech jobs), serves as an Operator Advisor at Redbud VC, and is a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Jordan Lewis is the General Counsel of Redbud VC and Vice President & General Counsel of The Premiere Group, both based in Columbia, Missouri. A dual-licensed attorney (Missouri and Illinois) with a decade-plus of experience, he bridges the worlds of law, tax, and venture capital - handling M&A, fund structuring, governance, and legal strategy for a pre-seed VC firm that bets on founders shaped by struggle. Before Redbud, he cut his teeth as a litigator at Carmody MacDonald in St. Louis and has been a published voice in Missouri In-House Counsel on biometric privacy and employment law.
Kiley Grimes is the Head of Ecosystem at Redbud VC, the early-stage venture fund co-founded by the founders of EquipmentShare, based in Columbia, Missouri. A 2025 Mizzou BSBA graduate, she built Soundcheck - a 24/7 on-demand music practice studio in Columbia's North Village Arts District - from a $6,500 seed check to profitability in under a year, winning $10,000 at Entrepreneur Quest along the way. Equal parts operator and community builder, she now channels that founder instinct into growing Redbud's startup ecosystem across the Heartland.
Maria Heyen is an early-stage investor at Lightbank in Chicago, previously the first hire at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, where she helped deploy $5M+ across 35+ companies. A Pacific Northwest native who worked 80-100 hour weeks to fund her own education, she went on to co-found the Husker Venture Fund at UNL and build a reputation as one of the emerging voices in Midwest venture. She invests at the intersection of vertical SaaS, fintech, and infrastructure in overlooked industries, and writes the Soapbox newsletter on career, culture, and capital.
Scott Andrew Shane is one of the most cited entrepreneurship scholars alive, holding the A. Malachi Mixon III Professorship at Case Western Reserve University while simultaneously running Comeback Capital, a pre-seed VC fund backing Heartland startups, and advising Right Side Capital Management. He has written or edited 16 books, published over 94 scholarly articles, won the 2009 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, and manages a personal angel portfolio of 50+ companies - all while arguing, with data, that most things people believe about entrepreneurship are wrong.
Jane Friedman is one of publishing's most trusted independent voices - a Cincinnati-based author, educator, and industry analyst who has spent two decades demystifying the business of writing. Through her newsletters Electric Speed (30,000+ subscribers, running since 2009) and The Bottom Line (8,000+ paid subscribers), her book The Business of Being a Writer, and her widely-read site janefriedman.com, she helps authors navigate a publishing landscape that keeps reinventing itself. She came to prominence beyond publishing circles in 2023 when AI-generated fake books appeared on Amazon under her name, making her an unlikely but authoritative voice on AI, authorship, and copyright.