Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.
Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, a social-impact venture firm that has invested in 200+ startups founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs while outperforming 75% of peer VC firms by financial returns. Long before #MeToo, she co-founded the first U.S. organization dedicated to combating workplace sexual harassment (1976), earned a Ph.D. studying harassment in federal employment, and built diversity programs at Lotus Development Corporation. She co-founded SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), the Level Playing Field Institute, Project Include, and the DAIR Institute, and co-authored 'Closing the Equity Gap' (HarperCollins, 2023). Former NAACP National Board member and Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council member, she has spent five decades dismantling the belief that fairness and financial return are mutually exclusive.
Jeff Jordan is a General Partner (now semi-retired) at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he spent over a decade backing marketplace and consumer companies including Airbnb, Pinterest, and Instacart. A rare operator-turned-investor, he was President of PayPal, CEO of OpenTable (steering its 2009 IPO through the financial crisis), and SVP at eBay where he oversaw the acquisitions of PayPal and Half.com. His framework on marketplace dynamics - built from running some of the most important digital marketplaces in history - became a foundational body of thinking in Silicon Valley.
John Lilly is a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where he oversaw Firefox's growth from 7 million to 450+ million users. A Stanford-trained engineer turned VC, he has backed transformative companies including Dropbox, Figma, Instagram, and Discord, while staying rooted in civic technology as Board Chair of Code for America. He currently serves as a lecturer at Stanford GSB and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Manan Mehta is the Founding Managing Partner of Unshackled Ventures, the only venture capital firm in the US built exclusively to back immigrant founders at the pre-seed stage - before product, before revenue, and often before incorporation. A first-generation American born to Indian immigrants in Sunnyvale, CA, Manan turned a personal experience of watching his H-1B co-founder get shackled by visa constraints into a $35M+ fund that has sponsored 200+ founders, completed 231+ immigration filings, and helped build a portfolio that has collectively raised $730M+ and created 1,200+ jobs. He sits on the Nasdaq board, once helped ink the $1.9B Skype acquisition as a banker, and brings to every pitch meeting the lens of someone who knows exactly what it costs to build from scratch.
Shruti Gandhi is the General Partner and Founding Engineer of Array Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing technical founders building enterprise data, AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. A former IBM engineer turned startup founder turned VC, she made the leap from Mumbai to Manhattan to the Bay Area armed with a Columbia CS degree and a Chicago Booth MBA. With 100+ investments, 15+ exits (to Apple, Amazon, PayPal, ServiceNow, and others), and 25,000+ Substack subscribers, she is one of a vanishingly small cohort of women of color who raised and run their own VC fund - and she teaches AI at Columbia on the side.
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied seed-stage venture funds, where he backs pre-seed and seed-stage founders building B2B SaaS, AI, and enterprise products. His path to the table was anything but conventional: he helped build Gmail from beta to 200M users at Google, rewired Facebook's News Feed under Zuckerberg, built and sold a 2M-user Android app (Cover) to Twitter, and led Dropbox through its 2018 IPO as its first VP of Product and Design. He created First Round's widely cited Product-Market Fit Method, a rigorous four-level framework that has guided 75+ early-stage founders. Rare among VCs, Jackson holds all three operator lenses - big-tech product leader, startup founder, and public-company exec - and deploys them in service of the founders he backs.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner of Theory Ventures, a $680M early-stage fund focused on AI, data infrastructure, and Web3. A former Redpoint Ventures partner with 14+ years backing unicorns including Looker ($2.6B to Google) and Kustomer ($1B to Meta), Tunguz is one of Silicon Valley's most widely-read VC voices - his daily blog tomtunguz.com reaches 150,000+ founders and operators with data-driven analysis of SaaS metrics, AI trends, and startup strategy.
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.