startup-mentor
(10)
James LaLonde Built a Career by Learning the Room
The sixth-generation Texan spent decades reading markets, languages and people across Asia. At Yodo1, that habit became a business model: make the distance between a game and its next audience feel smaller.
Richard April Built a Career Making Difficult Software Easier to Buy
Across cybersecurity, mobile software, cloud CAD and financial technology, Richard April has kept accepting the same hard assignment: build the marketing machine while teaching a complicated product to speak plainly.
Wally Haddick Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Products Matter
From operating rooms and 3D ear scans to trusses, software and skilled trades, MiTek's chief marketing officer has built a career around one stubborn question: what does the customer actually need?
Dirk Lueth Built a City Game Around the Hard Part: An Economy
The Upland co-founder spent a career studying currencies, building media and fintech companies, and mentoring startups. Then he turned those habits toward a persistent city game where ownership, trade, and economic restraint matter as much as play.
Kevin Baum Put the Farm’s Whiteboard in a Pocket
A city-raised rower followed a friend to an Australian sheep farm and found a stubbornly useful idea: make livestock software behave like the whiteboard in the shed. A decade later, Kevin Baum’s lesson is still the same - start with the work already happening.
Benjamin Tuff Is Teaching the Home to Behave Like a Power Company
After helping turn a three-person travel startup into a business acquired by Airbnb, the Montreal marketer moved from selling escape to explaining energy independence. His latest challenge is making the electric car feel less like transportation and more like part of the house.
Giselle Bisson
Giselle 'Gigi' Bisson is a Silicon Valley go-to-market and narrative strategist who has spent roughly four decades turning breakthrough technology into stories people trust. Trained as a technology journalist at InfoWorld, she moved into product marketing and PR, working on launches at HP, Adobe, Apple, Sun, Citrix and others, and helping take companies through a NASDAQ IPO and acquisitions by Google, Intel and McAfee. She is a partner at Chain Reaction PR, the first female mentor at Founder Institute Silicon Valley where she has guided more than 100 founders, and a writer who publishes on Medium and Substack under the Visibility Shift banner.
Edith Harbaugh
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform trusted by over 5,500 organizations including 25% of Fortune 500 companies. She helped pioneer the feature flag category in 2014, scaling the company to $100M ARR, raising over $330M in venture capital, and building infrastructure that evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily. A Harvey Mudd engineering alumna, patent holder, ultramarathoner, and co-host of the 'To Be Continuous' podcast, Harbaugh returned as CEO in 2025 to lead LaunchDarkly into the generative AI era.
Evan Stites-Clayton
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Ilana Stern
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'