Meghan Verena Joyce is the co-founder and CEO of Duckbill, a Boston startup that pairs AI with human experts to act as an executive assistant for your personal life - booking appointments, filing claims, and clearing the to-do list. Before founding Duckbill in 2022, she ran Uber's biggest East Coast markets, served as COO and EVP of Platform at Oscar Health, and advised the U.S. Treasury during the recession. She has raised $33 million for Duckbill, led by Forerunner Ventures, and sits on the boards of The Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health.
Srikanth Narayan is the founder and CEO of Cache, a San Francisco brokerage built for people who are dangerously over-invested in a single stock. A former engineer at Uber and Alphabet's Waymo, he discovered exchange funds while trying to untangle his own concentrated Uber equity, then spent a year in stealth turning a tool reserved for $10M-plus private bank clients into a product with a $100,000 minimum. Since launching in March 2024, Cache has crossed $600M+ in assets and raised a $12.5M Series A led by First Round Capital.
Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber, the global ride-hailing and delivery platform he has led since September 2017. An Iranian-American who fled Tehran as a child during the Revolution, he spent 12 years building Expedia into a travel giant before inheriting Uber at its most turbulent moment. Under his leadership, Uber went public in 2019, achieved sustained profitability, and expanded into a multi-service platform operating across 70+ countries with $193+ billion in annual gross bookings. A self-described gamer, sci-fi geek, and cycling enthusiast who once wore a Slayer T-shirt to his wedding, Khosrowshahi has rebuilt Uber's culture around a simple principle: 'We do the right thing. Period.'
Anish Dhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Cortex, a San Francisco-based internal developer portal company he co-founded in 2019 after spending nearly five years as an engineer at Uber. Watching Uber's microservices sprawl into chaos—thousands of undocumented services named after video games, ownership lost every time someone quit—he rented an Airbnb for a weekend hackathon with two friends and built the first version of what would become a $470M company backed by Sequoia, Scale Venture Partners, IVP, and the Collison brothers. Cortex raised $60M in Series C funding in September 2024 and is used by engineering teams at Adobe, Grammarly, Xero, TripAdvisor, and Canva to catalog, score, and continuously improve their software services.
Bernardo Garcia is the Co-Founder and COO of Félix Pago, a Miami-based fintech startup that lets Latino immigrants in the US send money home via WhatsApp in roughly 40 seconds. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Garcia built his career across consulting and Uber before earning his MBA at Wharton, where he met co-founder Manuel Godoy. Together they launched Félix in 2020, growing it to process over $1 billion in remittances in 2024 and raising a $75 million Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Zahid Shaikh is the Co-Founder and Head of Risk Products at Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has raised $145.6M in total funding. Previously a top inventor at PayPal where his device intelligence product saved the company $40M+ annually in fraud losses, Zahid then led risk and security product teams at Uber and Revolut before co-founding Sardine in April 2020 alongside Soups Ranjan and Aditya Goel. Sardine now profiles 2.2+ billion devices and achieved 130% YoY ARR growth in 2024.
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.
Mini Suri is the Co-Founder and CEO of VELMENI, a Silicon Valley-based FDA-cleared dental AI company that analyzes 2D and 3D dental X-rays to detect pathologies that even experienced dentists miss. Drawing on 20+ years at Citi, a stint building intelligent automation at Uber, and an MBA from MIT Sloan, she pivoted to healthtech after a personal brush with the cost of missed diagnoses. Under her leadership, VELMENI has grown to serve 500+ dental offices across 50+ countries with AI-powered tools for panoramic, bitewing, periapical, and CBCT imaging - aiming to bring affordable, high-quality dental diagnostics to one billion patients worldwide.
Annie Case is a Partner (and current Advisor) at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where she backs early-stage founders building in consumer tech, digital health, and enterprise AI. A Stanford-educated defender who won the 2011 NCAA soccer championship, she traded cleats for cap tables after stints at Bain & Company and Uber — where she helped scale UberEats internationally — and has since built a portfolio spanning mental health (Modern Health), AI healthcare infrastructure (Ambience), fitness coaching (Future), and next-generation shopping (Phia). Known for investing at the intersection of human behavior and technology, Case brings rare operator empathy to the boardroom.
Rob Hayes is a Board Partner at First Round Capital, the seed-stage venture firm famous for backing companies before anyone else dares. Over 12 years as a full partner beginning in 2006, Hayes made some of the most consequential bets in tech history - writing the first institutional check into Uber when it was worth $4 million, backing Square before payments were cool, and leading investments in Mint.com, eero, Planet Labs, and Gnip. A former Palm product manager turned Omidyar Network pioneer turned VC legend, Hayes built First Round's San Francisco office from scratch and helped define what 'founder support' actually means in venture capital.
Samson Wu is a Recruiting Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With roots in economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and formative stints at AIESEC, Uber, and CloudKitchens, he has become a key architect of how a16z and its portfolio companies find and hire world-class talent. He supports the firm's New Media team as an HR Business Partner and brings operational rigor to recruiting functions that span early-stage startups to growth-stage companies across the a16z portfolio.
Shari Doherty is the Marketing Partner for Crypto at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads brand and marketing for one of the most influential crypto investment firms on the planet. With two decades of marketing and communications experience spanning Danger Inc., Google Android, Uber, Atomico, Essential, and Amazon Smart Home, she has helped define how some of tech's most iconic products tell their stories. At a16z crypto, she's doing it again - this time for the next internet.
Bill Gurley is one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists - a 6'9" Texan who played college basketball, led the analyst team on Amazon's IPO, and then bet Benchmark's money on a then-tiny black-car startup called Uber. As a General Partner at Benchmark from 1999, he built a track record that includes Uber, GrubHub, OpenTable, Zillow, Stitch Fix, and Nextdoor. He writes the 'Above the Crowd' blog, has appeared consistently on the Forbes Midas List, and in 2026 published 'Runnin' Down a Dream,' a career guide ten years in the making. After stepping back from active investing, he relocated to Austin, Texas - where his wife Amy always wanted to end up.
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.
Travis Kalanick is the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, the ride-sharing giant that revolutionized urban transportation worldwide. After a controversial departure from Uber in 2017, he launched CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen infrastructure company, and in March 2026 announced Atoms, a robotics venture focused on food, mining, and transportation. Known for his relentless drive and combative approach to regulation, Kalanick has built multiple billion-dollar companies while stirring controversy over workplace culture and aggressive business tactics.
Ashton Kutcher is a venture capitalist, actor, and entrepreneur who transformed from sitcom star to one of Silicon Valley's most successful celebrity investors. As General Partner of Sound Ventures, he's built a $250M+ portfolio including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and Robinhood, with 35 exits and 7 unicorns. Beyond investing, he co-founded Thorn, a nonprofit using technology to combat child sexual exploitation, and has helped identify over 31,000 trafficking victims. From biochemical engineering student to Hollywood leading man to tech heavyweight, Kutcher represents a rare bridge between entertainment and venture capital.
Bill Trenchard is a Partner at First Round Capital, a top-tier seed-stage venture capital firm. A serial entrepreneur turned VC, he sold his first company (Jump Networks) to Microsoft at 23, scaled LiveOps to $100M in sales, and made early-stage bets on category-defining companies including Uber, Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Flexport, Notion, Verkada, and Superhuman. Known for creating First Round's Pitch Assist program, he's a fundraising savant who teaches founders his process-driven approach to raising capital. He was named to Forbes Midas List in 2017 (#41) and 2020 (#17), and BusinessWeek's Best Young Technology Entrepreneurs in 2006.
Guy Oseary is an Israeli-American music manager, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur who has guided Madonna's career since 1992 and co-founded Sound Ventures with Ashton Kutcher - a $1B+ VC firm with early bets on Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and now OpenAI and Anthropic. Once the teenage chairman of Madonna's Maverick Records who signed Alanis Morissette, Oseary has quietly become one of entertainment's most consequential dealmakers - turning a free internship offer into three decades of industry-defining moves at the intersection of music, tech, and culture.
Kevin Hartz is a Silicon Valley serial founder and venture investor who co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B), made seed-stage bets on PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack, and now runs A* Capital — a $300M early-stage fund that bets heavily on teenage founders. His career spans 30+ years of building and backing transformative tech companies from Berkeley to the world stage.
Eric Newcomer is the founder of Newcomer, an independent newsletter and media company covering venture capital and startups from his perch in Brooklyn. A Harvard-trained philosopher turned tech journalist, he broke some of the biggest stories of the Uber era at Bloomberg before quitting in 2020 to build his own media business. His newsletter now generates over $3M in annual revenue, runs an invite-only AI summit called Cerebral Valley, and gives readers what he calls 'Your Seat at the Cap Table.'
Gergely Orosz is the Hungarian-born, Amsterdam-based author behind The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack with over 1 million readers. A former engineering manager at Uber who helped build payments infrastructure processing $65B+ annually, he left Big Tech in 2021 to write independently. He covers software engineering careers, Big Tech culture, and the AI-driven transformation of the industry - earning $1.5M+ per year from subscriptions alone, with zero ads or sponsors.
Michael Houck is a serial entrepreneur and creator who went from driving for Uber to pay rent, to building a $15M venture-backed startup with a16z, to bootstrapping a $3M/year media and SaaS portfolio — all before 35. He runs Founding Journey, a 236,000-subscriber newsletter on startup building, and Megaphone, a viral content amplification platform, under his holding company Rye Valley LLC. After departing Launch House following a 2022 PR crisis, he rebuilt entirely on his own terms: no investors, no bosses, full ownership.
Sara Ittelson is a Partner at Accel, the global venture capital firm, where she invests in early-stage AI, consumer, enterprise, and SMB technology companies. Before joining Accel in 2022, she spent four years at Faire as Head of Strategic Partnerships, helping the wholesale marketplace grow from a $535M to a $12.4B valuation, and four years at Uber spanning ride-share and Uber Eats. A Stanford MBA and GSE alum originally from Chico, California, Sara brings a rare blend of operator grit and investor acuity to founders building category-defining companies.
Scott Banister is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor who co-founded IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco for $830M), was the first outside investor in PayPal, and is credited by insiders with conceiving the paid keyword search advertising model that spawned the entire Google AdWords ecosystem. With 100+ investments spanning Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Facebook, and Affirm - most at seed stage - he is one of the most consequential yet least-known members of the PayPal Mafia.
Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
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.