Murat Bicer is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied early-stage venture firms. Born in Turkey and educated at Middle East Technical University and Babson College, he has spent two decades hunting for the next breakout enterprise software company. His signal achievement: backing Datadog at the seed stage in 2011 - before cloud monitoring was a recognized category - and riding it to a $30B+ public company that burned under $25M to get there. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked #24 in 2024), Bicer is known for investing in developer-first companies, his contrarian willingness to back pre-product teams, and a portfolio that spans Datadog, Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly for $775M), Iterable, Voyage AI (acquired by MongoDB), LanceDB, and Gorgias.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.