Peter Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Axial, a New York based online platform where owners of small and lower middle market private companies meet buyers, lenders and financial sponsors. He also hosts the Masters in Small Business M&A podcast. Before Axial, he was on the founding team of Gerson Lehrman Group and worked in private equity at SFW Capital Partners.
Sam Li is co-founder and CEO of Thoropass, the New York-based information security compliance and audit platform formerly known as Laika. He grew up in Shanghai, studied computer science and economics at the University of Virginia, worked at Goldman Sachs and Google, dropped out of Harvard Business School to run a YC-backed insurtech called Zinc Platform, watched it die, spent a year as an EIR at Bain Capital Ventures, then in 2019 co-founded a company to make SOC 2 audits less miserable. Thoropass has raised roughly $98 million across four rounds and now combines software with a licensed audit practice.