Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.
Nihal Mehta is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist and Co-Founder & General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, one of New York's leading seed funds. Known as the 'Human Rolodex,' Mehta has backed early investments in Uber, Airbnb, AdMob (acquired by Google), and SwiftKey (acquired by Microsoft) while building a reputation as a founder-first investor who connects people without keeping score. He founded Pitch & Run NYC, a community blending startup pitches with morning runs, and hosts the Human Unicorn Podcast. A UPenn dual-degree graduate who once filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in his 20s, Mehta channels that hard-won empathy into backing the next generation of founders through ENIAC's $160M sixth fund.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm with $400M+ under management across two funds. A Princeton molecular biology graduate turned venture capitalist, he previously spent eight years at Shasta Ventures where he backed Canva, ClassDojo, Frame.io, and The Farmer's Dog. He writes the 'Next Big Thing' newsletter on Substack with 18,000+ subscribers, publishes public investment theses before backing founders, and built his career on a 'traction-first' philosophy and obsessive focus on founder learning velocity. An Indian-American from a family with deep public service roots, he co-founded Artsy as a Princeton sophomore and has been a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.