Ian Schmertzler is co-CEO and co-founder of Dispel, an operational-technology cybersecurity company he started in 2015 with his brother Ethan. A Yale-trained industrial engineer and former crew coxswain, Ian helped build Dispel's zero trust platform around Moving Target Defense - a system that keeps shifting network access points so attackers never find a static target. He serves as a principal investigator on three NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence projects and as vice president of the National Defense Industrial Association's NY-CT chapter, working to keep factories, water utilities, and power grids running quietly and safely.
Sean Engel is General Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Top Tier Capital Partners (TTCP), a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with $8.1 billion in regulatory assets under management. A UC Berkeley alum and former varsity rower, Engel joined TTCP's predecessor Paul Capital in 2010 and has spent over 15 years building expertise in LP secondary transactions, direct co-investments, and fund of funds strategies. He co-led the firm's landmark $925M capital raise in 2022 - the Venture Velocity Fund 4 - which included a dedicated $421M climate tech separate account. Engel oversees a global investment team, serves on the Investment Committee, and is known for a data-driven, relationship-first approach to identifying high-growth venture-backed companies across pre-seed through Series B.
Matt Marcus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based payment operations platform that processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for companies like Gusto, Navan, and Procore. A Dartmouth computer science grad and former competitive rower, Marcus spent a year at LendingHome building the payment system that processed over $3 billion in mortgage loans - and that experience became the blueprint for Modern Treasury. He co-founded the company in 2018 with Sam Aarons and Dimitri Dadiomov, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, and has raised $183M in total funding. In July 2025, he transitioned from CPO to CEO, steering Modern Treasury toward unified fiat and stablecoin payment rails following the acquisition of Beam.
Zabie Elmgren is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism investing team, where she backs founders building companies at the intersection of AI and the physical world - from industrial infrastructure to defense technology. Before a16z, she was a Partner at Index Ventures leading early-stage B2B and B2C software investments. Her career started unconventionally: as part of the founding team at Human Capital, she helped grow a recruiting firm into a $600M+ venture fund while studying computer science at Harvard, personally placing early engineers at Brex, Robinhood, Snowflake, and Nuro.