Jordan Birnholtz is a serial founder turned intellectual-property litigator who keeps building at the seam between law, finance, and technology. He co-founded PawnGuru, a marketplace that brought 1.5M+ underbanked Americans online to pawn shops; helped progressives organize through The Tuesday Company's Team app; and as co-founder and CMO of Neon put the world's first NFT vending machine on a New York sidewalk. After earning his J.D. cum laude from Northwestern, he now practices IP litigation at Kirkland & Ellis while co-founding Trarian, a venture underwriting patent-invalidity risk across what he calls the trillion-dollar patent asset class.
Raheel Zubairi is a Pakistani-born, Malaysia-based technology founder and product builder who has bounced from mobile games to fintech to deep-tech medical imaging. He is the CEO of Pixelence, a Cyberjaya startup using AI to produce contrast-like brain scans without injected dyes, which won the Deep-X track of the 2025 Selangor Twin Accelerator. Before that he founded the mobile gaming studio The Game Loop and led BMN Enterprise Solutions, and he has logged stints around Antler, MYPINPAD, EBP and GoodCore Software as an AI/ML product manager working across the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
Sage Wohns is the CEO and Co-Founder of Jericho Security, a New York-based AI cybersecurity company that trains humans and AI systems to defend against AI-powered attacks including hyper-realistic phishing, deepfakes, and voice cloning. A Seattle native and 10-year AI industry veteran, Wohns previously built and led Agolo, a Google- and Microsoft-backed NLP summarization company, before co-founding Jericho Security in 2023. The company made history by winning the Pentagon's first-ever generative AI defense contract through AFWERX in December 2023, and has since raised $18M in total funding, including a $15M Series A in April 2025. With 39 employees and 30+ enterprise clients, Jericho Security is at the frontier of AI-versus-AI cyber defense.
Jeffrey Finkle is the CEO of The Arcview Group, the vertically integrated firm that has bankrolled and brokered the legal cannabis, hemp, and psychedelics industries for over a decade. A software entrepreneur turned venture investor since 1999, he co-founded the $115M Odeon Capital Partners during the dot-com peak, spent years as a fixture of New York's angel scene, and now runs Arcview's events, capital, ventures, consulting, and research arms with social equity written into the charter.
Jake Winebaum is an American serial entrepreneur who has spent more than three decades turning observations into companies. He built the business plan for Disney's first internet push and ran Disney Online, co-founded the dot-com incubator eCompanies with EarthLink's Sky Dayton, founded and sold Business.com for $345 million, launched the healthcare marketplace Brighter (acquired by Cigna), and now serves as Executive Chairman of Applied Cognition. A self-described accidental entrepreneur, he is also a serious endurance athlete and the author of a business strategy and growth newsletter, the Strategy Letter.
Jason Calacanis is a Brooklyn-born angel investor, serial entrepreneur, and podcaster who turned a $25,000 check into Uber into a roughly $100 million windfall. He hosts This Week in Startups, co-hosts the chart-topping All-In podcast, runs the LAUNCH accelerator and Founder University, and invests in roughly 100 startups a year. A former dot-com journalist who founded Silicon Alley Reporter and sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL, he wrote the bestselling playbook 'Angel' and is one of the most visible bridges between scrappy founders and the venture world.
Ross Kennedy is the Global Vice President of AI Startups & Emerging Growth at Microsoft, based in New York. With two decades of experience scaling technology organizations from startup to hyperscale, he leads Microsoft's efforts to help AI startups innovate, grow, and become market makers. Before Microsoft, he was a key force behind Google Cloud's expansion from $5.8B to over $30B in revenue, leading the global Strategic Deal Pursuit division for four years. Earlier, he scaled Liferay's international operations from 200 to 900 employees across 30+ countries. His guiding philosophy: culture beats strategy.
Moses Lo is the co-founder and CEO of Xendit, the Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that became Indonesia's first Y Combinator unicorn. He runs it from San Francisco and Jakarta, and built it after pivoting away from a bitcoin remittance idea six weeks into YC.
AngelList is the software platform behind a meaningful slice of U.S. early-stage venture capital. What started in 2010 as a way to introduce founders to angel investors has become the infrastructure layer for fund managers - the place where funds, SPVs, syndicates, and rolling funds get formed, administered, and reported on. Today thousands of investors run capital through AngelList, and a sizeable share of every new American startup round touches its rails.
Mercury is a San Francisco fintech that builds banking and financial software for startups and growth-stage companies. Through partner banks, it offers FDIC-insured checking and savings, corporate cards, treasury, venture debt, bill pay, and an API - aimed at founders who would rather not call a branch manager.
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Shawn Mullahy is the Chief Executive Officer of Zumper, North America's largest privately-held rental marketplace. Promoted to CEO in March 2026 after serving as Chief Revenue Officer and before that General Manager and SVP of Sales, Mullahy brings a rare combination of legal training, real estate brokerage experience, and tech-company operational chops. He leads a company that has raised $178M+ in funding and is pushing the rental experience toward a future where finding an apartment feels as seamless as booking a hotel.
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Asher Siddiqui is a General Partner at Sukna Ventures, a Riyadh-based early-stage venture fund backing software and data-infrastructure startups across MENA. He spent a decade running global M&A and corporate venture at Etisalat (around $15bn in deals), then joined 500 Startups as a partner and investment committee member before settling into the GP role at Sukna. He advises a constellation of funds from Palo Alto to Pakistan and splits time between the San Francisco Bay Area, Dubai, and Riyadh.
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Pulley is an equity and token management platform that helps founders, finance teams, and employees run cap tables, fundraises, valuations, and tax-compliant token distributions from one place - without spreadsheets or paralegal time.
Florian Leibert is a German-born software engineer turned venture capitalist who co-founded 468 Capital, a Berlin-based VC firm managing $1.3 billion across 100+ technology companies. Before VC, he co-founded Mesosphere (later D2iQ), which raised $252M and built the infrastructure layer for companies like Apple, Netflix, and SAP - and before that, he was the engineer at Twitter who helped slay the Fail Whale by architecting the distributed systems that kept the platform from collapsing under its own weight.
Alyssa Bernstein is the co-founder, President, and CEO of wrrk, an Austin-based company that provides fully managed, fractional customer support solutions for fast-growing brands and startups. With a background in product management at RetailMeNot and Main Street Hub, she launched wrrk in 2016 to give entrepreneurs access to experienced, embedded support teams without the overhead of building in-house. Under her leadership, wrrk has grown to serve 125+ brands including Bombas, Taylor Stitch, and Supergoop, offering omnichannel support via US-based and offshore teams in the Philippines.
Selene Casabal is the Managing General Partner and Chief Venture Officer at Fuel Venture Capital, a Miami-based firm managing approximately $550 million across five funds. A former Silicon Valley founder whose retail tech startup was acquired by b8ta, she became an AI super angel with investments in Perplexity, Replit, Impulse Space, and Serve Robotics before joining Fuel VC in October 2025 to lead its $100M+ AI-focused deployment strategy. A Sequoia Capital Scout and South Park Commons fellow, she is on a mission to rewrite the gender imbalance in artificial intelligence one investment at a time.
Spencer H. Greene is a General Partner at TSVC (清谷资本), a certified women- and minority-owned seed-stage venture firm in Los Altos, California built on the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club network. He leads the firm's healthtech practice after three decades as an operator, M&A executive, and two-time founder in Silicon Valley. Greene holds patents across graphics, networking, and encryption; ran M&A at Juniper Networks (buying the kinds of startups he now backs); and developed the 'Design for Exit' framework to help founders understand what makes them genuinely acquirable - not just successful.
Andre Haddad is the CEO and All Star Host of Turo, the world's largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace. A Lebanese-born, HEC Paris-educated entrepreneur who survived Beirut's civil war, co-founded and sold iBazar to eBay for $140 million, and then spent a decade inside eBay before taking the helm of Turo in 2011. Under his leadership, Turo has grown from a niche car-sharing startup into a global platform operating in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Australia, generating nearly $1 billion in annual revenue and empowering hundreds of thousands of hosts worldwide.
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.
Niles Lichtenstein is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nestment, a San Francisco-based platform helping first-time homebuyers purchase property through co-buying and expert coaching. Shaped by watching his immigrant mother rent rooms in their Berkeley home to stay afloat after his father's death, Lichtenstein spent a decade quietly co-buying properties with friends and family before formalizing the model into Nestment in 2021. The company has since raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding and facilitated over $200M in real estate transactions, with 74% of buyers being first-timers and 62% identifying as BIPOC or immigrants. Before Nestment, he founded The History Project (later Enwoven), a digital storytelling platform backed by The New York Times Company that powered Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's history into an HBO documentary.
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Mark Chung is the co-founder and CEO of Verdigris Technologies, a Mountain View-based AI company that provides circuit-level electrical intelligence for mission-critical data centers and commercial buildings. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent 15 years designing chips at AMD, PA Semi (Apple), and NetLogic (Broadcom), Chung founded Verdigris in 2011 after a $560 electricity bill sparked an obsession with making buildings as transparent as spreadsheets. Today, Verdigris monitors 2+ gigawatts of peak demand across 20 million square feet of facilities for clients like T-Mobile, Verizon, NVIDIA, and Google, using 8kHz waveform sensors that detect equipment failures up to 21 days before they cause outages.
Riley Reese is the CEO and co-founder of ARRIS Composites, a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding - a patented process combining 3D printing and compression molding to produce continuous carbon-fiber composite parts at commercial scale. A materials scientist who once built biodegradable heart tissue scaffolds at UC Berkeley, Reese pivoted that same obsession with fiber architecture into a $157M-funded company whose technology now shows up in Brooks running shoes, Skydio drones, and bicycle spokes. He previously co-founded AREVO, worked at medical device giant Stryker, and led additive manufacturing programs in Amsterdam at TNO - before returning to Berkeley to tackle what he calls 'a new manufacturing category.'
Ryan Scott is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he helps portfolio companies build durable, compounding growth. He made his name as Etsy's first-ever CMO and Head of International - scaling GMV from $3B to $14B, tripling active users, and expanding the brand to 220 countries while earning AdAge Brand of the Year in 2020. Before Etsy, he drove Grubhub Seamless from $100M to $6B in GMV and through its IPO. A Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 honoree with seats on Google's Retail Advisory Council and Meta's Leadership Council, Scott brings two decades of consumer marketing, e-commerce, and business leadership to the deepest end of deep tech.