Vijay Gopineedi is the CEO and serial entrepreneur behind Rootshell Inc, a Santa Clara-based IT consulting firm he has led since 2010. Starting his career as a software developer in 1999, he went on to found EZ Info Systems, consult at PwC and Deloitte, and eventually build Rootshell into a ~93-person global IT services company specializing in CPQ, ServiceNow, Salesforce, DevOps, and digital transformation. He is also an early investor in Deepfactor, the developer application security platform acquired by Cisco in August 2024.
John Eng is the Funding Ecosystem Partner at Right Side Capital Management, a San Francisco-based VC firm that has deployed $250M+ across 8 funds into 2,200+ early-stage B2B startups since 2012. With 25 years in B2B marketing and partnerships leadership at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Parallels - plus CMO stints at Tradeshift, Remix, NewVoiceMedia, and Swiftly - Eng brings rare operator-investor credibility to RSCM's sprawling portfolio. He writes $50K-$200K checks into pre-seed B2B startups with real traction, helping founders navigate fundraising and growth through RSCM's operating platform.
Leslie Riley is an Analyst at Right Side Capital Management (RSCM), a quantitative pre-VC investment firm in San Francisco that has made 2,000+ early-stage bets since 2012. She brings a rare combination: West Point grad, seven-year Army Aviation officer who flew CH-47D Chinooks over Kosovo and South Korea, then reinvented herself as a facilitator, keynote speaker, and leadership coach for Fortune 500s and federal agencies before landing in venture. She's also a published author, founder of The Penny Project (which has raised $4,800+ for charity), an ultra-marathoner, and creator of the Lead Like a Girl community for women in leadership.
Joel Cutler is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Since co-founding the firm in 2000 with David Fialkow - a partnership forged at summer camp at age 8 - Cutler has backed transformative companies including Airbnb, Warby Parker, Venmo, Lemonade, and KAYAK, which he literally conceived and assembled from scratch. A law school graduate who never practiced law, a self-described non-visionary who keeps a 'Wall of Shame' of deals he missed, and a travel obsessive who attended Phocuswright for 20+ consecutive years, Cutler operates with a contrarian philosophy: he only wants 'exciting, different, and risky' bets, believes great teams beat great ideas every time, and insists that if you don't fail, you're a bad investor.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.
Sheryl Sandberg is a technology executive, author, and philanthropist who served as Meta's COO for 14 years, transforming Facebook into a profitable advertising powerhouse and becoming one of the most influential voices in business leadership. The author of 'Lean In' and founder of LeanIn.org, she's a champion for women's leadership and currently runs Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, investing in AI-native companies while serving on Meta's board and advising early-stage founders.
Gili Raanan is an Israeli cybersecurity pioneer turned venture capitalist who invented CAPTCHA, co-created the world's first Web Application Firewall, and then built Cyberstarts — a seed-only VC that turned $54M into over $1B and backed Wiz, the $32B cloud-security juggernaut acquired by Google in 2025. A decade in IDF Unit 8200, two successful exits, nine years as a Sequoia Capital Israel GP, and $1.4B+ in capital raised makes him arguably the most influential figure in the Israeli cyber startup ecosystem.
Jared Friedman is Managing Director of Software at Y Combinator, one of the world's most influential startup accelerators. A Harvard dropout, he co-founded Scribd - one of YC's earliest bets - and grew it to 80M+ users as CTO before joining YC as a partner in 2015. He has read over 12,000 startup applications, advised 20+ YC unicorns, and championed hard tech, biotech, and AI at YC. In 2024 he became one of the loudest voices on vertical AI agents being '10X bigger than SaaS.' He spends roughly 4% of his waking hours in Waymo robotaxis, which he uses as a mobile office.
Azeem Azhar is the founder of Exponential View, a weekly newsletter and podcast read by 150,000+ subscribers that maps the collision of technology and society. A former Guardian and Economist journalist who helped launch BBC Online in the 1990s, he went on to build and sell PeerIndex (acquired by Brandwatch in 2014), write the Financial Times Best Book of the Year 'The Exponential Age' (2021), and host a Bloomberg Originals series. He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Martin School, and a Digital Fellow at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab - spending his time translating the logic of exponential technologies for executives, policymakers, and curious minds worldwide.