Harry DiFrancesco is the CEO and co-founder of Carda Health, a New York-based virtual care company rebuilding heart and lung rehabilitation for the home. A philosopher turned coder turned operator, he taught with Teach For America, helped found a school, did business operations at Stripe, and started Carda in 2020 after caring for a parent who could not access prescribed recovery care. He blends human clinicians with AI to remove friction from care delivery, and runs ultramarathons and climbs mountains in his spare time.
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.
Kris Nóva (1987-2023) was a principal engineer at GitHub, co-founder of The Nivenly Foundation, author, alpinist, and transgender activist who shaped the cloud-native infrastructure world. Best known for creating kubicorn, the Aurae runtime, and co-authoring Cloud Native Infrastructure with O'Reilly, she lived a life of radical generosity - growing Hachyderm from 700 to 40,000 users, founding the Privilege Escalation Foundation to support gender minorities in STEM, and writing Hacking Capitalism to help marginalized technologists navigate an industry that had once left her unhoused. She died on August 16, 2023, in a climbing accident in Seattle.