pomona-college
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Marco Lobba
Marco Lobba is a chemist turned CEO who co-founded CatenaBio (Catena Biosciences), a UC Berkeley spinout building a new way to staple proteins together. Trained in the labs of Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and chemist Matthew Francis, he turned a graduate-school enzyme trick into the CysTyr platform, where an engineered enzyme called Catenase forges a durable tyrosine-cysteine bond - the C-Y Bond - to assemble multi-payload conjugates that single-molecule chemistry could not. He was named to the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 in 2025.
Nicholas D'Andre
Nicholas D'Andre is the CEO and co-founder of GridMatrix, a San Francisco-founded software company that turns a city's existing traffic cameras and sensors into a real-time, AI-driven nervous system for roads, tunnels, ports and airports. A supply-chain operator turned infrastructure entrepreneur, he spent years buying sensors and RF components at Apple and forecasting demand at Amazon and Google before deciding the bigger problem was the analog infrastructure those devices lived inside. GridMatrix was selected from more than 150 global startups by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and now runs on landmarks like the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, spotting near-misses, congestion and emissions before they become headlines.
Julia Stiglitz
Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and co-founder of Uplimit (formerly CoRise), an AI-native learning platform that lets companies build, run, and personalize training programs for thousands of employees at once. A fourth-grade teacher turned edtech operator, she was one of the first ten employees at Coursera, where she founded the enterprise business and helped grow the company past 40 million learners. She later managed Google Apps for Education and was a partner at GSV Ventures before starting Uplimit in 2021 with fellow Coursera alumni. Her bet: that AI can finally make high-quality, personalized education a renewable resource rather than a scarce one.
An-Yen Hu
An-Yen Hu is Operating Partner and General Counsel at Benchmark, the storied Sand Hill Road venture firm. He handles the legal and operational machinery so the investing partners can focus on companies. He joined in July 2020 from Goodwin Procter, where he made partner in 2014, led the Silicon Valley office's hiring, and ran point for the underwriters on Snap's $3.4 billion IPO.
Tristan Zajonc
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Isaiah Boone
Isaiah Boone is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, focusing on enterprise applications, infrastructure, commerce, and marketplaces. A Pomona College math and statistics graduate, he cut his teeth at RBC Wealth Management and Leonard Green & Partners before joining Sequoia in December 2020. His portfolio includes category-defining companies like Ramp, Rippling, Mercury, Meter, Faire, and Island - businesses reshaping how companies manage money, people, and infrastructure.