oil-painting
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Leon Backes Builds Real Estate Like He Paints: One Layer at a Time
A $3 drawing prize, an orange Volkswagen Rabbit and a nearly 10-foot easel all belong to the same career. The founder of Provident has spent four decades turning patient land bets into places - and treating every plan like a composition still in progress.
Shana Sood
By day, Shana Sood turns customer signals into clearer financial choices. By night, she paints the memories and migrations that data cannot hold.
Mary Jane Elmore
Mary Jane (MJ) Elmore is a pioneering venture capitalist who joined IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) in 1982 and became one of the first female General Partners in American venture capital history. Over a four-decade career spanning eight IVP funds, she backed transformative technology companies in software, communications, and computer-aided engineering. Now a Limited Partner and active angel investor through Broadway Angels and Sand Hill Angels, she has reinvented herself as an oil painter - applying the same mathematical precision that made her a formidable investor to abstract landscapes and architecture.
Joon Sung Park
Joon Sung Park is the CEO and Co-founder of Simile, a Stanford-spinout AI company that raised $100M Series A in February 2026 to build digital twins that simulate human behavior and predict consumer decisions. A PhD in Computer Science from Stanford (2025), Park pioneered the concept of 'generative agents' - AI actors with memory, reflection, and planning capabilities - through a landmark 2023 paper that earned a Best Paper Award at UIST and became one of the most-cited works in HCI. Before launching Simile, he was an oil painter trained in hyper-realism, a background that infuses his research with a rare sensitivity to what makes humans human. His digital-twin platform has already signed CVS Health and Telstra as customers, and his model correctly forecast 8 out of 10 questions asked at a real earnings call.