notre-dame
(4)
Cole Riccardi
Cole Riccardi is the founder and CEO of Authentic, a New York based insurtech startup that lets software platforms and affinity groups launch their own branded insurance programs. A former investor at Aquiline Capital Partners and a Notre Dame finance graduate, he left the investing side of insurance in 2022 to build what he calls 'captive-in-a-box' - turnkey infrastructure that brings captive insurance, once reserved for large corporations, to gyms, restaurants, salons and other small businesses. Authentic has raised roughly $16 million, including an $11 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital.
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.
Sam Fahmy
Sam Fahmy is the President and CEO of Ripcord, the Hayward-based robotic digitization company turning paper archives into searchable, structured data. A physics major turned enterprise-software operator, he previously helped take Cvent from $2M to $400M+ in revenue and led commercial strategy at WorkFusion before taking the top job at Ripcord in February 2022.
David George
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'