Tyler Cowen is an American economist, author, and public intellectual who has turned relentless curiosity into a public utility. He is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and chairman of the Mercatus Center, the co-author of the long-running economics blog Marginal Revolution, the host of the Conversations with Tyler podcast, and the founder of Emergent Ventures, a grant program that has funded more than 1,000 ambitious people worldwide. Across books like The Great Stagnation, Stubborn Attachments, and Talent, he argues that sustained economic growth is a moral imperative and that the rarest resource of all is context.
Glen Evans is Partner of Core Talent at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. A veteran recruiter who built Facebook's engineering recruiting team from scratch and served as Slack's first Head of Global Recruiting, Evans now helps Greylock's portfolio companies build world-class teams. He advises founders on hiring strategy, recruiting operations, compensation benchmarks, and talent pipelines - translating the hard-won lessons of hyper-growth into practical playbooks for startups.
Kelly Kinnard is Operating Partner and Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. She leads the talent function across 500+ portfolio companies, advising founders and CEOs on how to recruit and retain exceptional leaders. With a career that spans elite retained search firms, Oracle's cloud transformation, and Battery Ventures before landing at Khosla, Kelly has helped shape the executive teams driving some of tech's most ambitious bets. She is known for treating recruiting like relationship-building - equal parts strategy, empathy, and persistence.
Ryan Batra is the VP, Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential deep-tech venture firms. A career talent architect with over a decade in hypergrowth tech, he spent six years building DoorDash's technical and executive recruiting machine through multiple phases of explosive expansion, then led recruiting at Lime and OpenStore before landing at Khosla. Now he helps founders across KV's portfolio - spanning AI, biotech, space, and climate - hire the engineers, researchers, and leaders who make bold ideas real. He's placed 500+ engineers and leaders. His philosophy: talent is one of the most powerful forms of leverage a founder has.
Sarah Altabet is the Early Career Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential VC firms. She builds the firm's university recruiting program and connects students and early-career candidates with opportunities across the KV portfolio. With a career spanning Western Digital, Rivian, and Sierra, she has become a go-to voice on how top-tier startups and venture-backed companies hire - and how students can break into the industry.
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Zabie Elmgren is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism investing team, where she backs founders building companies at the intersection of AI and the physical world - from industrial infrastructure to defense technology. Before a16z, she was a Partner at Index Ventures leading early-stage B2B and B2C software investments. Her career started unconventionally: as part of the founding team at Human Capital, she helped grow a recruiting firm into a $600M+ venture fund while studying computer science at Harvard, personally placing early engineers at Brex, Robinhood, Snowflake, and Nuro.
Maren Kate Donovan is a serial entrepreneur and operator best known for founding Zirtual, a US-based virtual assistant marketplace that grew to 400+ employees and $11M ARR before its dramatic overnight collapse in 2015. She turned that spectacular failure into a career studying how people work, building Avra Talent (later Carrara), co-founding Inde.co for remote workers, serving as interim COO at Calm, and writing candidly about the realities of building companies. Currently exploring SMB acquisition and building Zozy, an AI-powered home inventory app, she writes at marenkate.com under the banner 'Build Real Things.'
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.