Katie Mishra is a Partner at Khosla Ventures focused on AI's impact across enterprise, infrastructure, robotics, and consumer. A Stanford CS graduate with an AI concentration, she started coding after joining her high school robotics team for the free t-shirt, founded a nonprofit coding education org at 16, co-founded AI consumer startup Kangaroo (raising $3.3M alongside actress Kiernan Shipka), was an early hire at Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, and published three books before she could drive. She competes in the World Series of Poker, once performed on stage at a 3-Michelin-star restaurant, and presented space research at the United Nations.
Leigh Marie Braswell is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where she backs early-stage founders building the next wave of AI infrastructure and ML applications. A rural Alabama native who became MIT's top competitive female mathematician, she cut her teeth as an early engineer and the first product manager at Scale AI, helped label data for GPT-2, then sharpened her investment instincts at Founders Fund before joining KP in 2023. Her bets - Windsurf (acquired by Google), Neon (acquired by Databricks), Chronosphere (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), and a first angel check into Ambience Healthcare at a $1.1B valuation - reveal a pattern: she backs fast-moving technical founders before anyone else does, using a poker-trained lens for probabilistic decision-making.
Haseeb Qureshi is the Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, one of crypto's largest VC firms with $4B+ AUM. A former professional poker player who turned $50 into seven figures by age 19, he walked away from the game, gave away his earnings, taught himself to code at a bootcamp, worked at Airbnb, then bet everything on crypto. He is one of the most distinctive voices in Web3 - part philosopher, part strategist, part contrarian - known for rigorous long-form essays, sharp market predictions, and an improbable career arc that no resume template could contain.
Ezra Firestone is a self-taught ecommerce entrepreneur who dropped out of high school, played poker in NYC underground clubs, and went on to build and sell multiple 7-, 8-, and 9-figure brands - most notably BOOM by Cindy Joseph, which crossed $200 million in cumulative revenue. He runs Smart Marketer (his education platform), Zipify Apps (serving 18,000+ Shopify brands with $600M+ in facilitated upsell revenue), and has acquired and turned around brands like oVertone Haircare. His philosophy - 'Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit' - is backed by results, and his operating principles around content-first marketing, brand mission, and sustainable growth have influenced an entire generation of ecommerce operators.