Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Perry Patel is President and CEO of Radiate Hospitality (formerly BPR Properties), the Palo Alto-based hotel management and development company his father founded with a single motel in 1973. Under Perry's leadership, the firm now operates a portfolio of branded and lifestyle hotels across the West Coast - from the Crowne Plaza Cabana in Palo Alto to the Hi-Lo Autograph Collection in Portland - with 500+ employees and a reputation for restoring historic properties.
Anyplace is a San Francisco-based housing platform that rents fully furnished, work-ready apartments for stays of 30 days or longer. Built for remote workers, relocating professionals, and corporate teams, every unit ships with a dedicated workspace, fast Wi-Fi, and a no-lease, move-in-ready setup in cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, Miami, and Tokyo.
Homebound is a tech-enabled homebuilder headquartered in San Francisco that manages the entire home construction process from design to move-in. Founded in 2018 in the wake of the devastating California wildfires, the company combines a proprietary software platform with a vetted trade partner network to offer semi-custom homes at fixed prices. Homebound handles everything from lot sourcing and permitting to interior design and construction management, compressing what typically takes years into an industry-leading timeline. With over $308 million raised and 500+ homes built across markets in California, Texas, Colorado, and Florida, Homebound is rewriting the rules of residential construction for a new generation of homebuyers.
Proper AI is a San Francisco company that pairs machine learning with a global team of accountants to run the books for property managers - everything from rent reconciliation to owner statements - at roughly 30% less than an in-house team.
Shawn Mullahy is the Chief Executive Officer of Zumper, North America's largest privately-held rental marketplace. Promoted to CEO in March 2026 after serving as Chief Revenue Officer and before that General Manager and SVP of Sales, Mullahy brings a rare combination of legal training, real estate brokerage experience, and tech-company operational chops. He leads a company that has raised $178M+ in funding and is pushing the rental experience toward a future where finding an apartment feels as seamless as booking a hotel.
Zumper is North America's largest privately held rental marketplace, making it as easy to rent a home as it is to book a hotel. The company aggregates millions of long-term, short-term and monthly listings across the U.S. and Canada, layering instant tours, digital applications and tenant screening on top.
Steve Satoru Naito is the Co-founder and CEO of Anyplace, the San Francisco-based platform redefining long-term rentals for remote workers and digital nomads. Armed with a one-way ticket from Tokyo and $5,000, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015 speaking minimal English, turned a failed first startup into a learning opportunity, and built Anyplace into a $35M+ funded company offering fully-equipped, work-ready furnished apartments across major US cities and Tokyo. Named to Forbes Japan's 30 Under 30 in 2018, Naito is on a mission to give professionals the freedom to live and work anywhere without sacrificing productivity.
Yonas Fisseha is the Co-Founder and CTO of Juniper Square, the San Francisco-based private markets platform that manages over $1 trillion in LP capital across 40,000+ funds. A Michigan State-trained computer engineer whose career spans Motorola, Shopping.com, and Huddler.com, Yonas joined Juniper Square in 2014 at the invitation of co-founder Adam Ginsburg, who called him one of the best engineers he had ever worked with. Under his technical leadership, Juniper Square has grown to 950 employees, raised $576M in funding at a $1.1B valuation, and launched JunieAI, the first enterprise-grade AI platform purpose-built for private markets GPs.
Freemodel is a presale home renovation company that designs, manages, and pays for renovations before a homeowner sells - then collects from escrow at closing. Local project directors run the job; the homeowner sells for more.
Sidekick is an AI assistant built for real estate agents and brokerages. It pulls real-time market and property data, runs valuation analyses, drafts marketing copy and contracts, and automates the back-office grunt work, giving agents the equivalent of a virtual assistant at roughly one-tenth the cost.
Vendoroo is an AI-powered property maintenance coordination platform that automates the full lifecycle of maintenance work orders for property managers. By combining AI triage, vendor management, and workflow automation, Vendoroo eliminates up to 95% of manual maintenance coordination tasks, enabling property managers to handle more units with less staff. Their platform includes a 24/7 AI virtual front desk, automated work order routing and vendor scheduling, and deep integrations with leading property management systems like Rent Manager and Rentvine.
Vesta is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company building the next-generation loan origination system (LOS) for the mortgage industry. Founded in 2020 by ex-Blend engineers Mike Yu and Devon Yang, Vesta replaces legacy mortgage software with a cloud-native, open, rules-driven platform that lets lenders configure workflows, automate compliance checks, and integrate with 40+ ecosystem partners - all without custom code. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Pennymac, Vesta tripled its loan volume and customer count year-over-year through 2025.
Hannah Greenberg is the CEO of Eleven Software, the cloud-based Wi-Fi authentication platform powering connectivity for 25,000+ hotel properties across 140+ countries - processing over 10 billion authentications per year for brands like Hilton, Marriott, Accor, and Wyndham. She acquired Eleven in 2022 through a search fund she built after her MBA at UC Berkeley Haas, then led the 2023 acquisition of UK-based Airangel to create the world's leading hospitality Wi-Fi management company. A Cornell Hotel School alumna with roots in PwC consulting and $1 billion in hotel development at Seaview Investors, Greenberg brings the rare combination of an owner-operator's instinct and a technologist's ambition to one of hospitality's most infrastructure-critical categories.
Patrick Sullivan is the Co-Founder and CEO of EV Realty, a San Francisco-based company building grid-scale private charging hubs for commercial electric truck fleets. Drawing on 15+ years developing nearly 9 GW of renewable energy projects at firms including Clearway Energy Group, NRG Energy, and BrightSource Energy, Sullivan identified that the real barrier to fleet electrification wasn't the trucks - it was the real estate and grid access. EV Realty's 'Powered Properties' model acquires strategically located industrial sites near freight corridors, locks in large grid capacity, and offers fleets reserved or on-route DC fast charging up to 1.2 MW. The company has raised over $103 million, including a $75M growth equity commitment from NGP in September 2025, and operates or has in development five charging hubs across California.
Ryan Buckley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shovels, a Lafayette, California-based startup that turns fragmented government building permit records into a searchable intelligence layer for the construction and climate tech industries. Armed with degrees from UC Berkeley, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School, Buckley spent years building parallel B2B ventures before co-founding Shovels in 2022 with Luka Kacil. The company now processes 180+ million building permits, covers 30 million US addresses, and raised a $5M seed round in June 2025 led by Base10 Partners. A prolific blogger, part-time college professor, and author of 'The Parallel Entrepreneur,' Buckley is building what he calls the 'Pitchbook for the construction industry.'
Josh Stech is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sundae, a San Francisco-based real estate marketplace that connects homeowners selling as-is properties directly with qualified property investors through a competitive auction process. A Stanford graduate with degrees in Economics, Spanish, and Latin American Studies, Stech has spent his entire career at the intersection of real estate and technology - from fixing and flipping homes in post-crash Las Vegas to scaling LendingHome into the largest institutional bridge lender in its category, before co-founding Sundae in 2018 with former Airbnb CFO Andrew Swain. Under his leadership, Sundae raised $138M+ in total funding including an $80M Series C in 2021, with a mission to bring transparency and fairness to the historically opaque off-market home sale.
Reza Keshavarzi is the Founder and CEO of Vendoroo, a San Francisco-based AI startup that automates maintenance coordination for property managers. A Harvard-trained engineer who previously built WipeHero and Tulu, Reza turned a childhood memory of watching his father struggle with property maintenance costs into a mission to put AI in charge of the front desk. Vendoroo now processes millions of maintenance workflows, cutting work order backlogs by 42% for its clients.
Pete Flint is a British-born serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Trulia, the real estate search platform that sold to Zillow for $3.5 billion in 2015. Before that, he was part of the founding team at lastminute.com, which IPO'd in London and sold for $1.1 billion. He is now General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage VC firm built around the thesis that network effects drive 70% of all technology value creation. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to entrepreneurship.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
Barbara Corcoran turned a $1,000 loan into a $66 million real estate empire, sold it, then went on national television to bet on strangers with big dreams. The founder of The Corcoran Group and an original Shark on ABC's Shark Tank, she has made 130+ deals and invested ~$62 million in startups - including The Comfy, which grew to a ~$468 million valuation. Dyslexic, a D-student, one of ten kids in a two-bedroom house, she credits every single setback as the fuel that got her here.
Nick Huber is the founder of the Sweaty Startup brand and creator of Bolt Storage, a self-storage private equity firm managing 68+ facilities across 11 states. A Cornell track athlete turned anti-Silicon-Valley entrepreneur, he built a $25M+ net worth by 34 through boring, service-based businesses - self-storage, offshore staffing, and cost segregation - while preaching contrarian gospel to 820,000+ followers across social platforms.
Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Wayline is an AI voice and text platform purpose-built for property managers. Branded as 'Operator,' it replaces the receptionist, leasing agent, and maintenance coordinator with a single always-on AI that answers calls and texts 24/7, converts leads, books showings, triages maintenance requests, dispatches vendors, and closes tickets - all without a human lifting the phone. Backed by Y Combinator (S25) and built by two repeat founders with deep roots in real estate and enterprise software, Wayline targets the 46 million rental units in the US where overworked property teams are perpetually one missed call away from a vacancy.