Babak Nivi is the co-founder of AngelList, the platform that rewired how startups raise money and find talent. Alongside Naval Ravikant, he turned a casual email list of angel investors into a $3.5B+ funding infrastructure that backed over 7,000 startups and produced 200+ unicorns. Before AngelList, Nivi co-created Venture Hacks, the blog that demystified term sheets and negotiation for a generation of founders. An MIT-trained engineer who once co-invented the first printed inorganic transistor, he brings both scientific rigor and street-level startup pragmatism to everything he builds.
Susan Hobbs is the Global Operations Chief of Staff to the CEO at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and a portfolio of open-source web infrastructure. A veteran Silicon Valley operator who started as a public school teacher, she has spent two decades at the intersection of technology, media, and startups - as first hire at acquired companies (Codian, CoTweet), programming architect behind TechCrunch Disrupt, a partner at CrunchFund, and an operations leader at Cloudflare before landing at Automattic. An active angel investor, board member, and arts patron, she brings rare cross-functional range to high-stakes organizational roles.
Hazim Mohamad is the Co-Founder and CEO of CoffeeSpace, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cofounder matching platform that functions like Tinder for entrepreneurs. After spending four years managing a $40 billion portfolio at the World Bank, he traded financial risk for startup risk - building a mobile-first platform that has amassed 25,000+ users and 2M+ swipes by connecting founders, early hires, and collaborators across the global startup ecosystem. CoffeeSpace raised $1M in pre-seed funding and was featured at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
Kathleen Forte is an Investor Relations Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. With over two decades of experience across investor relations, business development, and fundraising, she has held senior roles at Lightspeed Venture Partners, SVB Financial Group, ADM Capital, and Clearwater Capital Partners. Known for her deep expertise in LP relationships and fund management, Forte joined Sequoia in July 2022, bringing a rare blend of financial acumen and relationship-driven dealmaking to one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious platforms.
Natalie Miyake is Partner, Marketing at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. A seasoned communications strategist who grew up in Japan and studied in Madrid before working in New York and San Francisco, she shapes how Sequoia tells its story to the world. With a career spanning crisis PR at Brunswick Group, corporate communications at Twitter during its most turbulent acquisition years, and nearly a decade steering Sequoia's voice across its portfolio of unicorns and breakout companies, Miyake brings a rare mix of global perspective and Silicon Valley fluency to the intersection of finance and narrative.
Lucas Hoffmann is a Partner at Outlander VC and Head of Business Operations at HavocAI, a maritime autonomy company. A Wake Forest and Emory Business School graduate with corporate roots at ExxonMobil and Delta Air Lines, he pivoted to venture capital in 2021 and built a pre-seed and seed investing practice focused on AI, SaaS, hardware, robotics, fintech, and govtech. He also founded RiskyBreakfast, a media and content venture, and was recognized as a Siemens National Semifinalist in 2010 for ALS research conducted at Columbia University Medical School.
Paul Sethi is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder of 2048 Ventures, a New York-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm he co-founded with Alex Iskold in 2019. With a career spanning hedge funds, operational leadership, and over two decades of early-stage angel investing across 50+ companies - including unicorns like Flexport, SeatGeek, and Notion - Sethi brings rare dual credibility as both operator and investor. He scaled and sold Redbooks (spun out of LexisNexis) for a 10x+ return and co-founded Robuzz, an ML/NLP platform exited in 2022. His firm, which has grown from a $27M Fund I to an oversubscribed $82M Fund III, backs founders building in vertical AI, deep tech, healthcare, and fintech - with a Founder NPS of 100 and a commitment to review every single pitch.
Sarah Gowe is the Platform Operations Manager at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading pre-seed B2B SaaS funds and accelerators. Based in New York, she came up through hospitality, experiential events (The Yacht Week), and tech platforms (Airbnb, Bumble, NHL XP) before landing in venture — where she now works directly with early-stage founders navigating the zero-to-one journey. At Forum, she's part of a team that has funded 430+ companies and helped unlock over $1B in follow-on capital.
Gigi Levy-Weiss is a General Partner and co-founder at NFX, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm managing $875M+ across 577+ portfolio companies with 25 unicorns. A former Israeli Air Force attack helicopter pilot turned serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Playtika (sold to Caesars for ~$180M; later valued at $4.4B), served as CEO of 888 Holdings (a London-listed online gaming company), and made 150+ angel investments before co-founding NFX in 2015. Known for combining military-grade rigor with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor, he leads NFX's Israel office and focuses on gaming, bio, space, and generative AI.
Kat Manalac spent over 11 years at Y Combinator, where she built the Female Founders Conference, ran Startup School, and opened YC's doors to founders worldwide who had never heard of Paul Graham. She left YC in 2024 to join Convective Capital as Partner, where she now builds communities and tells stories at the intersection of technology and wildfire/disaster resilience.
Laurel Woerner is a venture capital platform strategist, consultant, and founder-success leader who has spent a decade building the connective tissue between investors and founders. After co-creating the community function at Work-Bench Ventures and defining the brand voice at AI scheduling startup x.ai, she became Platform Manager and then Director of Platform at RRE Ventures, where she transformed 25 years of firm relationships into a living, self-organizing network. Through her consultancy LTW Consulting, she has advised firms including Union Square Ventures, Bessemer, and Frontline Ventures on platform excellence. Today she serves in founder-success and platform roles at both Quiet Capital and Infinity Constellation, the self-described first AI holding company, with a mission she keeps simple: get founders from zero to one to one hundred.
Pankaj Jain is the Founder and Managing Partner of Saka Ventures, a seed-stage VC fund based in New York City focused on Indian fintech, SaaS, and data-analytics startups targeting large global markets. A pioneer in India's startup ecosystem, he was a Partner at 500 Startups for four years, made early bets on unicorns like Innovaccer (533x) and ShipRocket (240x), co-founded HeadStart Network Foundation, and helped bring Startup Weekend to India before most Silicon Valley investors even knew the subcontinent's startup scene existed.
Touseef Ikram is a 20+ year marketing technologist, serial entrepreneur, and digital product leader currently serving as Associate Director of Digital Products at Interlink Multimedia (Geo TV / Jang Media Group) in Karachi. From building Pakistan's pre-Facebook social network Stop.pk (100K+ users) to helping HarPalGeo become the world's #1 YouTube channel for three consecutive months, he operates at the rare intersection of technology, marketing, and product thinking. He founded Taxlytics (open-data tax analytics), PakSatire.com (political satire animations), invented the GPLLG life-prediction framework, and secured a Google News Initiative grant — making him one of Pakistan's most quietly disruptive digital builders.
Adeo Ressi — full name Adeodato Gregory Ressi di Cervia — is an Italian-American entrepreneur, systems architect, and the man who has been manufacturing founders and venture capitalists at scale for over two decades. Born in New York City in 1972, he co-founded one of the internet's first commercial websites (Total New York, sold to AOL), built and sold methodfive for $88 million, created TheFunded to democratize VC transparency, founded the Founder Institute (7,000+ companies across 250+ cities), launched VC Lab (responsible for ~50% of all new VC firms in 2023), and now leads Decile Group as CEO. He pioneered free legal frameworks used by millions of founders (FAST Agreement, Class F Shares, Convertible Equity). He was Elon Musk's college roommate at Penn, tried and failed to talk him out of SpaceX, and has been publicly wrong about exactly one thing. He calls himself a 'societal engineer.' He means it.