Jennie Moser is the founder and CEO of Stagetime, a networking and portfolio platform built for performing arts professionals. A coloratura soprano trained at Northwestern and Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, she spent years running Jennie Moser Design, building hundreds of websites for artists before turning that insight into a venture-backed company. Stagetime lets singers, instrumentalists, agents and composers build multimedia profiles, showcase performance video and audio, and connect with opportunities without maintaining separate websites. Moser has raised roughly $1.5 million in seed funding from investors including Hyde Park Angels, M25, Elevate Ventures and the IU Angel Network, reframing the messy gig economy of the arts in terms venture capitalists could understand.

Reid Weaver Dennis (1926-2024) was the founding father of institutional venture capital in Silicon Valley. As founder of Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), he pioneered the model of raising venture funds from institutional investors - insurance companies and endowments - at a time when VC was barely a cottage industry. His 1974 fund raised nearly half of all private venture capital in the U.S. that year. Over seven decades, he backed companies like Seagate, Netflix, TiVo, and Juniper Networks, served 37 years on the San Francisco Opera board, and built IVP into a firm managing $7 billion with a 40-year IRR of 43.1%.