tech-investing
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Yan-David Erlich
Yan-David 'Yanda' Erlich is a General Partner and Head of Tech Investment Practice at B Capital Group, a multistage global venture firm. A four-time venture-backed founder and CEO, he brings an unusual combination of operator depth and investor acuity: he scaled Weights & Biases from $3M to $50M ARR as COO/CRO before joining B Capital in January 2025, and previously built the enterprise venture practice at Coatue Management. His personal angel investment in Weights & Biases achieved 55x DPI. He focuses on AI co-workers, ML infrastructure, and B2B AI applications, with checks ranging from $5M to $50M.
Jen Kha
Jen Kha is the Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations and Fundraising at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. She leads global partnerships, managing the firm's relationships with limited partners and orchestrating capital raises across all of a16z's investment strategies. Over her career she has been involved in raising over $55 billion in LP capital - an extraordinary track record that spans healthcare investment banking, corporate strategy at HSN, investor relations at TCV, and now the front lines of tech VC. In 2023 she registered as a lobbyist in California to help a16z tap major pension funds like CalPERS for the first time in the firm's history.
Reid Dennis
Reid Weaver Dennis (1926-2024) was the founding father of institutional venture capital in Silicon Valley. As founder of Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), he pioneered the model of raising venture funds from institutional investors - insurance companies and endowments - at a time when VC was barely a cottage industry. His 1974 fund raised nearly half of all private venture capital in the U.S. that year. Over seven decades, he backed companies like Seagate, Netflix, TiVo, and Juniper Networks, served 37 years on the San Francisco Opera board, and built IVP into a firm managing $7 billion with a 40-year IRR of 43.1%.
Freada Kapor Klein
Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, a social-impact venture firm that has invested in 200+ startups founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs while outperforming 75% of peer VC firms by financial returns. Long before #MeToo, she co-founded the first U.S. organization dedicated to combating workplace sexual harassment (1976), earned a Ph.D. studying harassment in federal employment, and built diversity programs at Lotus Development Corporation. She co-founded SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), the Level Playing Field Institute, Project Include, and the DAIR Institute, and co-authored 'Closing the Equity Gap' (HarperCollins, 2023). Former NAACP National Board member and Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council member, she has spent five decades dismantling the belief that fairness and financial return are mutually exclusive.
Michael Kao
Michael Kao is a veteran macro investor, former hedge fund manager, and founder of Akanthos Capital Management, now running his family office. A UC Berkeley EE/CS and Wharton MBA graduate who traded commodities at Goldman Sachs and co-founded Canyon Capital Arbitrage Fund, he built his career on a proprietary framework called 'Alpha With Asymmetry.' Known online as @UrbanKaoboy, he publishes the Kaoboy Musings newsletter on Substack - covering finance, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and thrash metal - and co-hosts the KAOS THEORY podcast with Grant Williams.