startup-mentor
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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.'