mill-valley
(8)
Boldin
Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) is a Mill Valley, California fintech that makes comprehensive financial and retirement planning software affordable and self-directed. What began as a spreadsheet built to help founder Steve Chen's mother draw down her retirement savings has grown into a platform where more than 350,000 people have built plans covering over $300 billion in assets. Boldin sells a low-cost consumer subscription (PlannerPlus) plus a free planner, live classes, coaching, and CFP advice, and licenses its planning engine to enterprises like Nationwide and RTX.
Schiller Bikes
Schiller Bikes (Schiller Sports, Inc.) is a Mill Valley, California company that makes the S1-C, a premium human-powered water bike. Built on a corrosion-resistant anodized aluminum catamaran frame with a Gates Carbon Drive belt, a proprietary gearbox and a retractable propeller, the bike lets a rider pedal across lakes, coastlines and open water at over 10 mph. Founded by Jessica Schiller after she became the first person to bicycle across San Francisco Bay in 2013, the company built a small, design-led business around a niche it largely invented: a real cycling experience on the water for fitness, exploration and fun.
Pierce Washington
Pierce Washington is an enterprise consulting firm that untangles the messiest part of B2B selling - the journey from quote to cash. Since 2005 it has implemented CPQ, eCommerce, and subscription billing on Salesforce and Oracle platforms, then wired those systems into the ERP backbone so deals price correctly, ship cleanly, and bill accurately. With 100-plus complex CPQ projects behind it and a 'Total Commerce' maturity model guiding clients, the firm helps manufacturers, hi-tech, and life-sciences companies turn slow, error-prone sales processes into self-service revenue engines.
Avochato
Avochato is a Mill Valley, California SaaS company that gives sales, support, marketing, and operations teams a shared inbox for two-way business conversations over SMS, MMS, RCS, voice, live chat, and WhatsApp. Built for enterprise security and HIPAA compliance, it plugs into Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Okta, and Zapier, and layers in AI agents (Avo AI) for auto-replies, routing, and sentiment detection. Founded in 2016 and backed by a $5M Series A, Avochato has helped 1,000+ businesses run millions of customer conversations.
Alex De Simone
Alex De Simone is the CEO and co-founder of Avochato, a business messaging platform that lets sales, support, and operations teams talk to customers over text. He launched it the summer after his first year at Stanford GSB, grew it to seven-figure revenue in under a year, and raised a $5M Series A led by Amity Ventures in 2018. Before Avochato he co-founded Jobr, a Tinder-style job-search app acquired by Monster.com. A self-taught coder with a mechanical engineering background, he turned a side project into a product used by 1,000+ businesses for millions of two-way conversations.
Eric Norman
Eric Norman is a General Partner at Pioneer Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that pools resources from 500+ Y Combinator alumni to back top-performing YC startups. A former hardware founder himself - he built and led Cinder Precision Cooker through Y Combinator - Norman brings firsthand operator experience to his investing, with recent portfolio activity in AI identity, healthcare AI, and enterprise tooling.
Maximilian Ventilla
Maximilian (Max) Ventilla is a General Partner at Offline Ventures, a venture studio and early-stage fund based in Mill Valley, California. A four-time serial entrepreneur and technology executive, he co-founded the social search engine Aardvark (acquired by Google for $50M in 2010), was a founding member of Google+, founded and led AltSchool (a personalized education technology company), and served as VP of New Frontiers at Dropbox before moving into venture investing. His career spans AI, product strategy, personalized learning, and venture building, with a deep conviction that technology can be made more human.
Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.