startup-advisor
(29)
Tracy Pullman Took the Layoff Personally - Then Built the Job She Had Never Planned to Want
A pub job led her to HTML, HTML led her to Apple, and a layoff led her somewhere stranger: into a business of her own. Tracy Pullman’s career is a study in doing the uncomfortable thing before certainty arrives.
Jack Gierlich
Jack Gierlich is a Brooklyn-based growth marketing founder and fractional CMO who has spent 15+ years scaling healthcare, SaaS, and AI companies. He leads marketing and growth at Leal Health (formerly TrialJectory), an AI-powered platform that helps cancer patients find advanced treatment options, and he moderates several of the largest marketing and business communities on Reddit, reaching millions of readers a month. He describes his craft as building marketing systems that compound rather than one-off campaigns.
Eric Holmen
Eric Holmen is the CEO of Revenue Grid, an AI-powered revenue intelligence and sales engagement platform. Over a nearly 30-year run in marketing technology, he has served as CEO, CRO and CMO for fast-growing SaaS companies including Splash, Silverpop, Airship, SmartReply and Ortto. He is known for scaling go-to-market teams, doubling Splash's business through the pandemic, and advising startups and private equity and venture investors on operational execution. A self-taught childhood programmer turned operator, he holds three marketing patents and blends design, data and empathy in how he builds teams.
Chris Knape
Chris Knape is the CEO and co-founder of Rare Candy, a marketplace and toolkit for trading card collectors that has scanned more than five million cards. He spent a decade inside marketplaces and platforms - YouTube, Google Play, Thumbtack, Tempo - before turning a pandemic-era return to childhood card collecting into a venture-backed company built alongside Pokemon YouTuber Leonhart. Raised on a sailboat in the US Virgin Islands and trained at Dartmouth, BCG, and the youngest-manager ranks of early YouTube, he now spends his days authenticating, auctioning, and tracking the cards that nerds love.
David Hendren
David Hendren is the Chief Business Officer of QURA, Inc., a Massachusetts medical technology company building an implantable sensor that streams real-time blood-pressure data to patients and physicians. A lawyer by training who has spent more than 25 years working every side of the deal table - venture capitalist, entrepreneur, CEO, board chair, advisor and counsel - he co-founded QURA in 2013 alongside its CEO. He also runs the advisory firm Augmentum Advisors, mentors startups through MassChallenge, sits on a Massachusetts Life Sciences Center review board, and advises VIC Technology Ventures, focusing his career on financing and commercializing healthcare and biomedical innovation.
Martin Cannon
Martin Cannon is the founder and former president and CEO of Hemanext, the Lexington, Massachusetts company that turned an unproven idea - storing blood with the oxygen taken out - into an FDA-authorized, CE-marked medical device. Starting in the late 1990s with intellectual property licensed from Los Alamos National Laboratory and a handful of employees, he spent more than two decades building Hemanext into a recognized name in red blood cell transfusion, raising over $150 million in equity and NIH funding and securing more than 200 patents along the way. He retired in September 2023, handing the CEO role to longtime CTO Andrew Dunham, and now advises early-stage companies and mentors entrepreneurs.
Jennifer Lee
Jennifer Kristen Lee is the General Counsel and Operating Partner at Basis Set Ventures, the AI-native venture fund that closed a $250 million Fund IV in January 2026. A third-generation San Franciscan whose great-great-grandfather worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, Jennifer spent over 15 years advising founders and investors at global law firm DLA Piper - rising to partner and co-chairing its Corporate Venture Capital practice - before crossing over to the other side of the cap table. She brings a rare dual lens to venture: over 15 years guiding startups from formation to exit, combined with operational depth that makes her the firm's internal compass on legal strategy, deals, and governance. Named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's 2022 40 Under 40 list, she holds a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a JD/MBA from Santa Clara University.
Khaled Nasr
Khaled Nasr is a General Partner and Chief Operating Officer at InterWest Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm with over 40 years of history investing in healthcare and information technology. A Cambridge-educated mathematician turned Silicon Valley dealmaker, Nasr joined InterWest's IT team in 2005 and became COO in 2016, overseeing all financial, fundraising, investor relations, and administrative operations. Before InterWest, he spent 16 years in networking and telecom startups - including stints as CEO of FlowWise Networks and COO of Advanced Computer Communications - then made the jump to venture investing at Alta Partners. Born and raised in Lebanon, Nasr co-founded LebNet and is a charter member of TechWadi, bridging Silicon Valley capital with Arab and MENA entrepreneurs. In January 2026, he published 'Rule Arbitrage,' a book on evading regulatory, tax, and accounting rules.
Jennifer Cygan
Jennifer Cygan is a seasoned biotech executive and Chief Business Officer at EpiBiologics, where she helps advance a pipeline of novel bispecific antibodies designed to selectively degrade extracellular protein targets in oncology and immunology. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and over two decades of business leadership in biotechnology, she has been a pivotal force at Genentech, Calico Life Sciences (managing a $2.5B AbbVie alliance), and has co-founded and served as CBO for multiple emerging biotech companies including Broadwing Bio, Eikon Therapeutics, GenEdit, and Plexium. Her career sits at the intersection of science and strategy - translating cutting-edge biology into deals, partnerships, and companies that matter.
Stacy D'Amico
Stacy D'Amico is an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads a16z Apex - the firm's CEO partnership platform connecting Fortune 1000 leaders with a16z's growth-stage portfolio - and the Growth Advisory Platform helping portfolio companies scale market impact. A Silicon Valley native with 10 years at Gartner under her belt, she brings a rare blend of enterprise go-to-market expertise and institutional venture know-how to the operators and founders she serves.
Aaron Epstein
Aaron Epstein is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most prestigious startup accelerator. A serial founder who built his first software product in a college dorm room, he went on to co-found Creative Market (YC W10) — a design asset marketplace he grew to a 2014 Autodesk acquisition in under 16 months, then spun back out as an independent startup in 2017. At YC, he has reviewed over 8,000 applications, advised companies now collectively valued at $57 billion, and helped define how the accelerator thinks about marketplaces, business models, and pricing.
Brian Roberts
Brian Roberts is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he works across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. Known as BK to those in the know, Roberts is a serial CFO turned investor who took Lyft public at a $24 billion valuation, helped Splunk get acquired by Cisco for $28 billion, and was OpenSea's first CFO during the NFT boom. With 30+ years spanning investment banking at Evercore, corporate development at Microsoft and Walmart, and C-suite finance roles at some of tech's most pivotal companies, he joined a16z in October 2024 to bring an operator's lens to early and growth-stage investments in enterprise software, fintech, and America's strategic tech infrastructure.
Fareed Mosavat
Fareed Mosavat is a Visiting Partner at a16z Speedrun, a 12-week founder accelerator at the intersection of technology and entertainment. He came to venture capital after a career arc that started in physics simulation at Pixar and wound through product and growth leadership at Zynga, RunKeeper, Instacart, and Slack, before he ran product education for thousands of PMs as Chief Development Officer at Reforge. Today he backs AI-native B2B startups, co-hosts the Unsolicited Feedback podcast with Brian Balfour, and writes about what it actually takes to build products people love.
Hal Paz
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.
Joubin Mirzadegan
Joubin Mirzadegan is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins and CEO/co-founder of Roadrunner, the firm's first incubation since Glean. A former sandwich artisan turned elite sales operator, he scaled Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M ARR in four quarters, then joined KP in 2019 to help technical founders build go-to-market machines. Along the way he launched Grit, a top-1%-worldwide podcast where he interviews the builders behind breakout companies - guests have included John Doerr, Evan Spiegel, Michelle Zatlyn, and Bret Taylor. Now he's betting his own chips on Roadrunner, an AI-native CPQ platform rebuilding enterprise quoting from the ground up.
Lee Haney
Lee Haney is Partner and Head of Corporate Partnerships at Greylock Partners, the storied Silicon Valley venture firm behind LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Workday. A Naval Academy graduate who served as a Marine Corps Human Intelligence Officer with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Haney took the long road to venture capital - through Goldman Sachs investment banking, then Hewlett Packard Enterprise where he served as COO of Vertica and helped engineer the spin-off that became DXC Technology. Since 2018 he has run Greylock's CXO Program, a matchmaking engine that connects early-stage portfolio companies with the senior technology executives at the world's largest enterprises, turning cold introductions into lighthouse customers and proof-of-value pilots.
Raphael Schaad
Raphael Schaad is a Swiss designer-engineer and Visiting Partner at Y Combinator who built three generation-defining products: iA Writer (the minimalist writing app), Flipboard (the original social magazine), and Cron (acquired by Notion in 2022). Raised in the Swiss Alps, trained at MIT Media Lab, he brings a rare combination of technical depth and design taste that has made him a go-to mentor for founders navigating the AI era.
Suzanne Holloway
Suzanne Holloway is the Operating Partner for Go-to-Market at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. A hands-on marketing leader who helped Miro scale from pre-Series A to a $17.5 billion valuation, she now advises Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies on building marketing strategies and high-performing teams. With deep roots in early-stage B2B startups - from Greenhouse Software to Zugata (acquired by Culture Amp) - Holloway brings rare operational credibility to a firm better known for writing checks than rolling up sleeves.
Tomas Barreto
Tomas Barreto is an Operating Partner for Engineering at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms. He was the 5th engineer and 14th employee at Box, where he scaled engineering through IPO and past $500M in revenue, eventually leading 150+ person teams as VP of Engineering. He later joined Checkr as its first VP of Engineering, then co-founded Okay - an engineering analytics startup backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins that was acquired by Stripe in 2023. Now at Kleiner Perkins, he advises 20+ portfolio companies on building and scaling world-class engineering organizations, drawing on two decades of experience that spans IBM, Microsoft, Box, Checkr, and his own startup.
Tim Brady
Tim Brady was Yahoo's first non-founding employee, hired by his Stanford roommate Jerry Yang in 1994 when Yahoo was still a grad-school side project. He wrote the business plan that landed Yahoo's first VC money, helped invent the banner ad format, and served as Chief Product Officer through eight years of internet history. After Yahoo, he co-founded Imagine K12 (an edtech accelerator that funded 80+ education startups), served as CEO of QuestBridge, and then spent six years as a Partner at Y Combinator working with hundreds of early-stage companies. He is one of Silicon Valley's most respected operator-turned-investors, known for his integrity, self-effacing candor, and genuine commitment to education.
Monica Woo
Monica Woo is a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a $67M seed-stage VC fund in New York, where she backs early-stage companies in AI, cybersecurity, edtech, and e-commerce. A Wharton MBA with a career spanning four continents, she has held CMO and president-level roles at 1-800-Flowers.com, Bacardi, Diageo, Nutrisystem, Sears, FreshDirect, and Mozido - generating over $5 billion in incremental revenue across her career. As founder of WooWorks, she channels that operator experience into advising and investing in the next wave of emerging tech companies.
Paul Swiencicki
Paul Swiencicki is a Growth Partner at Right Side Capital Management (RSCM), the quantitative pre-seed firm that has backed over 2,000 startups including Compass, ClassPass, and DigitalOcean. A four-time exit veteran and one-time founder, Paul spent 25+ years as a sales leader and growth executive at companies like SurfControl (IPO), WorkMetro (acquired), Remix, and Swiftly (acquired by JMI in 2020) before pivoting to investing. At RSCM, he advises portfolio companies on sales team building and revenue strategy, writing checks in the $50K-$200K range and working hands-on with founders at the very earliest stage.
Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist best known for co-founding imeem (one of the first legal music social networks), launching App.net as a principled alternative to ad-supported social media, and spending over a decade as a Managing Partner at Y Combinator advising 1,000+ startups. He is now co-founding Standard Capital, a $425M AI-native Series A fund with Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg.
Heidi Roizen
Heidi Roizen is one of Silicon Valley's most iconic figures — a serial entrepreneur who co-founded T/Maker in 1983, led Apple's Worldwide Developer Relations during a pivotal transition, and became a venture capitalist at Threshold Ventures. She is the subject of a landmark Harvard Business School case study on networking and the famous 'Heidi vs. Howard' gender bias experiment. Today she is a Partner at Threshold Ventures, a Stanford lecturer, board director at Planet Labs and Upside Foods, and host of 'The Startup Solution' podcast.
Reid Williams
Reid Williams is a venture partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures and co-founder of WE3, a Web3 design collective. With a PhD in biophysics from UCSF (from Wendell Lim's renowned lab) and bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, he bridges science, engineering, and product design. Previously, he led the AI portfolio at IDEO CoLab, headed design and product engineering at Kindred, and served as head of product at Computable Labs. He also mentors early-stage biotech founders at IndieBio.
Bill Campbell
Bill Campbell is the founder and CEO of Barefoot Media LLC, a global advisory firm specializing in digital strategy, content licensing, and fundraising for startups in the music, streaming, and entertainment tech space. With over 30 years of experience, he previously served as Senior Vice President of Global Digital Business at both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, where he structured landmark deals with Spotify, Apple Music, Google, and Amazon. His client roster includes TikTok/Bytedance, SoundCloud, Square, and United Masters, making him one of the most influential behind-the-scenes operators in digital entertainment.
Sriram Krishnan
Sriram Krishnan is the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence under President Trump, appointed January 2025. A Chennai-born engineer turned VC, he is one of few tech operators to have held senior product roles at Facebook, Snap, and Twitter simultaneously. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) from 2021 to 2024, he opened the firm's first international office in London. He co-authored the American AI Action Plan and co-hosts The Aarthi and Sriram Show podcast with his wife. Named a Time 'Architect of Artificial Intelligence' in 2025.
Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan is the founder and partner of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), widely credited with defining modern tech product management. A former SVP of Product at eBay and veteran of Netscape and HP Labs, he has spent two decades coaching the world's leading tech companies - Google, Apple, Netflix, Airbnb - through his books INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, and TRANSFORMED. His core conviction: great products come from empowered teams of missionaries, not mercenaries executing feature lists.
Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.