network-effects
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Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremiah Owyang is a General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, where he leads early-stage AI startup investments and co-manages the Blitzscaling AI Fund. A two-decade Silicon Valley veteran who has tracked five major technology waves from Web 2.0 to the current AI era, he is also the founder of Llama Lounge, the Bay Area's most prominent AI startup event series, which has hosted 24+ gatherings since April 2023 and turned away 900+ applicants at a single event. Previously co-founder of Altimeter Group and Kaleido Insights, Owyang combines rigorous tech analysis with hands-on community building, and is known for working from a 22-foot Airstream trailer parked 29 steps from his back door.
Valerie Mahoney
Valerie Mahoney is a Principal at NFX, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed-stage venture capital firms managing ~$1.5B across four funds. A Materials Science engineer from Imperial College London who earned both an MBA and MPP from Stanford as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, she brings an operator's lens to early-stage investing after stints at Funding Circle (through IPO), SumUp, Tala, and Cash App/Block. At NFX she focuses on AI, fintech, enterprise software, and marketplaces - backing founders at the pre-seed and seed stages where network effects can be built from the ground up.
Gigi Levy-Weiss
Gigi Levy-Weiss is a General Partner and co-founder at NFX, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm managing $875M+ across 577+ portfolio companies with 25 unicorns. A former Israeli Air Force attack helicopter pilot turned serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Playtika (sold to Caesars for ~$180M; later valued at $4.4B), served as CEO of 888 Holdings (a London-listed online gaming company), and made 150+ angel investments before co-founding NFX in 2015. Known for combining military-grade rigor with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor, he leads NFX's Israel office and focuses on gaming, bio, space, and generative AI.
James Currier
James Currier is a five-time founder turned General Partner at NFX, a $1.5B seed-stage venture firm built on a single thesis: network effects drive 70% of all value created in tech. He built Tickle into the 18th most-visited website in the world, pioneered viral marketing and A/B testing before those terms existed, and has since co-founded NFX with Pete Flint, Gigi Levy-Weiss, and Morgan Beller to back the next generation of network-effect-driven companies. An angel in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, he is also the author of the Network Effects Bible and a speaker who translated an arcane econ concept into the operating language of Silicon Valley.
Morgan Beller
Morgan Beller is a General Partner at NFX, the seed-stage venture firm known for backing network-effects businesses. Before VC, she co-founded Facebook's Libra (later Diem) digital currency project at age 25, making her one of the most consequential figures in crypto policy history. A Cornell statistics graduate, she cut her teeth at Andreessen Horowitz before stints at Medium and Facebook, where her geopolitical alarm about China's digital currency ambitions drove her to attempt something audacious: rebuild global money on a blockchain. She now backs founders in crypto, fintech, AI, and space from San Francisco.
Pete Flint
Pete Flint is a British-born serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Trulia, the real estate search platform that sold to Zillow for $3.5 billion in 2015. Before that, he was part of the founding team at lastminute.com, which IPO'd in London and sold for $1.1 billion. He is now General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage VC firm built around the thesis that network effects drive 70% of all technology value creation. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to entrepreneurship.
Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.