Harry DiFrancesco is the CEO and co-founder of Carda Health, a New York-based virtual care company rebuilding heart and lung rehabilitation for the home. A philosopher turned coder turned operator, he taught with Teach For America, helped found a school, did business operations at Stripe, and started Carda in 2020 after caring for a parent who could not access prescribed recovery care. He blends human clinicians with AI to remove friction from care delivery, and runs ultramarathons and climbs mountains in his spare time.
Michael Manapat is the co-founder and CEO of Rowspace, an AI platform that turns a finance firm's proprietary data into compounding decision-making edge. He built the machine learning behind Stripe Radar, the fraud engine that scans every card payment across the Stripe network, then spent three and a half years as CTO of Notion driving its push into AI. A mathematics PhD from MIT and former Google engineer, he launched Rowspace in February 2026 with $50M backed by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, already serving roughly ten top private equity and credit firms managing hundreds of billions in assets.
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Alex Nichols is a General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. He invests in companies reinventing large markets through novel economic or distribution models, then compounding through scale - a thesis carved out across deals like Stripe, Duolingo, Whatnot, Rippling, UiPath, Waymo, Odoo and Zach Dell's Base Power. Promoted to GP in January 2026 alongside Jill Chase, the first time CapitalG named two GPs at once since the firm's 2013 founding.
Numeral is an AI-native sales tax compliance platform that automates the entire lifecycle of US sales tax and global VAT for e-commerce and SaaS companies — from nexus tracking and registration through filing, remittance, and exemption certificates. Founded in 2022 by Sam Ross and Matt DuVall and based in San Francisco, the company raised a $35M Series B in September 2025 led by Mayfield, bringing total funding to $57M and valuing the company at $350M.
Alex Immerman is a General Partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads growth-stage investments across AI, consumer, fintech, crypto, and the physical world. Promoted to GP in January 2026 after seven years with the firm, he has spearheaded investments in category-defining companies including ElevenLabs, EliseAI, Flock Safety, Hebbia, Kalshi, Revolut, Sardine, Stripe, and Waymo. Before a16z, Immerman worked at General Atlantic as a growth-stage investor, served as Chief of Staff for the CFO of Facebook and CEO of Gainsight, and was an investment banker at Allen & Co. He graduated summa cum laude from Wharton and earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.
Tomas Barreto is an Operating Partner for Engineering at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms. He was the 5th engineer and 14th employee at Box, where he scaled engineering through IPO and past $500M in revenue, eventually leading 150+ person teams as VP of Engineering. He later joined Checkr as its first VP of Engineering, then co-founded Okay - an engineering analytics startup backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins that was acquired by Stripe in 2023. Now at Kleiner Perkins, he advises 20+ portfolio companies on building and scaling world-class engineering organizations, drawing on two decades of experience that spans IBM, Microsoft, Box, Checkr, and his own startup.
Vu Pham is an Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. As a deal operations partner supporting the Venture teams, he bridges strategy and execution at a firm that has backed companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, and Roblox. His career traces a methodical rise through fintech and enterprise tech - from being the second support agent at WePay to leading product programs at Chime, technical programs at Palantir, and operations at Stripe - before landing at a16z where he helps portfolio companies scale and operationalize their ambitions.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Hemant Taneja is the CEO of General Catalyst, a $40B+ venture capital firm, and one of tech's most unconventional thinkers. Born in Delhi, India, he earned five degrees from MIT before co-founding Livongo Health - sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion, the largest digital health merger in history. As an early backer of Stripe, Snap, Anthropic, and Canva, and the architect behind GC's audacious move to acquire an actual hospital system, Taneja has spent two decades arguing that building responsibly isn't just the right thing to do - it's the winning strategy. He's signed the Giving Pledge, written four books on technology and capitalism, and is worth an estimated $3.6 billion.
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'
Diane Greene co-founded VMware and built it into the company that pioneered x86 virtualization, leading it through the largest tech IPO of 2007. After being ousted from VMware in 2008, she co-founded Bebop, sold it to Google for ~$380 million, and became CEO of Google Cloud - growing it from $2.1B to $8B in annual revenue. A naval architect and competitive sailor before turning to software, she is the first woman to chair the MIT Corporation and sits on the boards of Stripe, SAP, Intuit, and Maersk.
John Collison is the President and co-founder of Stripe, the Irish-American payments giant he built with his brother Patrick from their rural Tipperary roots into a $159 billion fintech colossus processing $1.9 trillion annually. He sold his first company at 17, dropped out of Harvard at 19, and by 26 was the world's youngest self-made billionaire - all while maintaining the understated disposition of someone who grew up in a village of a few hundred people on Lough Derg.
Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital who bridges the worlds of theoretical physics and venture capital. With a PhD in quantum gravity from Caltech under John Preskill, he co-founded the cybersecurity company Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks for over $1 billion) while completing his doctorate. At Sequoia, he leads investments in deep tech, aerospace, defense, and AI, backing companies like SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Before Sequoia, he was a partner at Google Ventures, where he led investments in Stripe, IonQ, and Opendoor. His unique background combines rigorous theoretical physics research on multiboundary wormholes with a track record of building and backing billion-dollar companies at the frontier of technology.
Patrick Collison is the Irish-born CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the payments infrastructure company valued at over $90 billion. At 21, he and his brother John built Stripe from a prototype hacked together on holiday into one of the most influential fintech companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute for biomedical research, launched Fast Grants that distributed over $200 million for COVID research, and championed Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen. A former teenage programming prodigy who won Ireland's Young Scientist Exhibition at 16, he dropped out of MIT to pursue entrepreneurship and became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires at 28.
Matt Huang is co-founder and Managing Partner of Paradigm, the research-driven crypto investment firm he launched with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam in 2018. With $12.7 billion in AUM and foundational investments in Uniswap, Optimism, Flashbots, and dozens of other protocols, Huang transformed venture capital by treating his firm as a hybrid research lab, engineering organization, and fund. The son of a Goldman Sachs derivatives head and a pioneering computer science professor, he turned a $500K bet on a language-barrier pitch from Zhang Yiming into an estimated $500M windfall. In 2025, he added founding CEO of Tempo - the Stripe-Paradigm blockchain for global payments - to his portfolio, while raising a new $1.5B fund to expand into AI and robotics.
Sir Michael Moritz is a Welsh-born billionaire venture capitalist who spent nearly four decades at Sequoia Capital turning early bets on Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube, Stripe, and Klarna into some of the greatest returns in VC history. A former Time journalist who wrote one of the first books on Apple, he arrived at Sequoia in 1986 and never looked back - topping the Forbes Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Knighted in 2013, he departed Sequoia in July 2023 and remains chairman of Klarna. His Crankstart Foundation has donated hundreds of millions to Oxford, the National Gallery, the ACLU, and the Booker Prize. In 2026, the son of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany applied for German citizenship - protesting the rise of antisemitism in Britain.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
Lachy Groom is an Australian-born serial entrepreneur turned Silicon Valley solo capitalist who built and sold multiple companies before turning 18, spent 6+ years as employee #30 at Stripe rising to Head of Stripe Issuing, then became one of tech's most prolific angel investors (200+ companies including Figma, Notion, Ramp, OpenAI, Anduril) before co-founding Physical Intelligence in 2024 - a robotics AI company building general-purpose foundation models for robots that has since reached a $5.6B+ valuation.
Laela Sturdy is the Managing Partner and CEO of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth equity fund. A first-generation American born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida, she played Division I basketball at Harvard, earned an MBA from Stanford, and built a track record at CapitalG where every one of her early investments became a unicorn — including Stripe, Duolingo, UiPath, and Webflow. She became sole leader of CapitalG in March 2023, making her one of a tiny handful of women running an established multibillion-dollar venture firm.
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'
Vedika Jain is General Partner at Weekend Fund, a pre-seed/seed fund with 350+ LP operators from Stripe, Figma, and Airbnb. She broke into VC by writing fantasy investment memos on public deals - standing out among 600+ applicants with zero capital deployed. Before Weekend Fund, she was the first PM at TrueLayer in London, scaling the fintech from 8 to 80+ employees. She co-founded Signature Block (a newsletter for emerging fund managers) with Ryan Hoover, and writes 'Draft mode' on Substack covering AI products, investing, and life. Her path ran from Bangalore to Berkeley to Stripe to London to San Francisco - five cities, multiple passports, one very deliberate climb.
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.
Nelson Elhage is a systems engineer turned AI safety researcher who has left fingerprints across the modern software stack. At Anthropic, he co-authored foundational work on mechanistic interpretability and transformer circuits that shaped how the field understands language models. Before that, he was employee ~30 at Stripe and a founding engineer of Sorbet, the Ruby typechecker now used across one of the world's largest payment platforms. His open-source tools - reptyr, livegrep, and ministrace - are staples in the Linux hacker's toolkit. He blogs at 'Made of Bugs' and runs a Buttondown newsletter on computer systems.
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a writer, software entrepreneur, and strategic advisor at Stripe who spent two decades bootstrapping software companies in Japan before becoming one of the internet's most influential voices on fintech, career development, and software business strategy. He writes Bits about Money, a deep-dive newsletter on the plumbing of financial systems, hosts the Complex Systems podcast, and co-led VaccinateCA - America's shadow COVID vaccine location infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives. With 4.7 million words published since 2006, his essays on salary negotiation, software marketing, and financial infrastructure have shaped how a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs think about building and getting paid.
Raylene Yung is an engineering leader, organizational designer, and public servant who scaled teams at Facebook and Stripe before co-founding U.S. Digital Response - the nonprofit that mobilized 10,000+ volunteers to help governments navigate COVID-19. She later served as Executive Director of the GSA's Technology Modernization Fund, overseeing $1B+ in federal tech investments, and as Chief of Staff at the Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Now a board member at USDR and SolarAPP+, she writes 'raylene's field notes,' a Substack newsletter on climate, tech, and complex systems.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.