Finbarr Taylor is a Scottish-born software engineer turned startup founder and investor, best known for co-founding Shogun, an e-commerce page builder platform that raised $115M and reached a $507.5M valuation. After nearly 11 years building Shogun - including roughly 8 as CEO - he transitioned to a board role in early 2026 and rejoined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner. A prolific angel investor with 60+ portfolio companies including Deel and Fathom Video, Taylor is now a vocal advocate for lean, AI-enabled teams and the rise of what he calls 'nanocorns' - small but highly efficient companies capable of billion-dollar outcomes.
Jeremy Schneider is General Partner at Webb Investment Network (WIN), the San Francisco-based single-family investment office founded by Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay. Since joining WIN in 2011, Schneider has helped build a portfolio of 121 companies including unicorns Ironclad, IPOs like Okta, PagerDuty, and AppLovin, and 48 acquisitions. A Dartmouth and Oxford-trained historian turned venture capitalist, Schneider is known for betting on founders over ideas, building WIN's affiliate network of 90+ seasoned operators, and offering hands-on support that one founder described as worthy of a statue.
Aaron Sisto is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronicle Studios, a content intelligence platform that uses proprietary agentic AI to help creators launch and scale global IP franchises. A PhD quantum chemist turned deep-tech investor turned entertainment entrepreneur, Sisto blends hard science and pop culture instincts in a company that raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round in 2025 backed by Patron and Point72 Ventures. Previously a partner at First Spark Ventures and Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures, he co-founded Chronicle alongside entertainment veteran Chris deFaria, former president of DreamWorks Animation.
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.
Jean-Denis Greze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, an AI-powered tax platform for small businesses that raised an $18M seed round led by First Round Capital in March 2025. Previously, he served as CTO of Plaid, where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 350 people, and before that as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. A Columbia CS grad and Harvard Law JD, he brings an unusually cross-disciplinary approach to building technology companies at the intersection of finance, law, and software.
Justin Sherlock is the Co-Founder and CEO of Caspian, an AI-native trade advisory platform tackling the $130 billion in unclaimed duty refunds sitting in global supply chains. A Harvard economist and Wharton MBA, he spent five years at Flexport scaling its financing arm past $1 billion before going out to build what he saw was missing: automated customs intelligence that actually gets importers their money back.
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.'
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Karttikeya Mangalam is the Founder and CEO of SigIQ.ai, a Berkeley-based AI tutoring startup that raised $9.5M in seed funding to make elite-level, personalized education accessible globally. A PhD graduate from UC Berkeley's BAIR lab with 40+ published papers and 10,000+ citations, he grew up in Muzaffarpur, Bihar and built an AI tutor that set the all-time record on India's notoriously brutal UPSC civil service exam — scoring 175/200, beating 1.3 million candidates in under 7 minutes.
Tero-Pekka Alastalo is a Finnish-born physician-scientist turned serial entrepreneur who trained as a pediatric cardiologist, completed his postdoctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine, and has spent the last 15 years building life science companies in Silicon Valley. He co-founded Blueprint Genetics in 2012 - a clinical genetic testing company later acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2020 - before launching Avenue Biosciences in 2023, a transatlantic AI-powered protein engineering company that uses signal peptide libraries and machine learning to unlock the secretory pathway and dramatically boost therapeutic protein yields. Based in Menlo Park, California, Alastalo is turning a fundamental cellular mechanism overlooked by the industry into a platform that could accelerate every class of next-generation biologic.
Pramod Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Napkin AI, a generative-AI platform that converts plain text into editable business visuals - diagrams, flowcharts, infographics, and charts - in seconds. A farmer's son from Rajasthan who cracked IIT Delhi on self-study, he went on to earn a Master's from Stanford, architect Google Books' scanning machines, and then co-found Osmo, the award-winning educational-gaming company sold to Byju's for $120 million in 2019. In 2021 he and co-founder Jerome Scholler turned their frustration with corporate slide decks into Napkin AI, which emerged from stealth in August 2024 with $10 million in seed funding from Accel and CRV.
Paul Graham is a programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, the seed accelerator that launched Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and OpenAI. He sold his first startup Viaweb to Yahoo for $49.6 million in 1998, then used that platform to build one of the most influential idea-factories in tech history. His essays at paulgraham.com have become the de facto canon of startup culture, read by millions of founders seeking clarity on how to build, think, and live.