Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.
Danielle McMeekin is Vice President and Head of Global Media Sales (also titled Head of Global Performance Sales) at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's worldwide media and performance sales strategy. Based in Orlando, Florida, she brings over two decades of experience in digital advertising, having risen through sales leadership roles at Yahoo! before joining Microsoft. A recognized voice on the future of search and AI-powered advertising, she co-authors thought leadership on conversational search, multimodal discovery, and generative AI's transformation of performance marketing. She received Microsoft Advertising's Client Obsession FY25 Award for her work building powerful partnerships with clients and partners.
Jacqueline 'Jackie' Reses is the Chair and CEO of Lead Bank, a Kansas City-based chartered bank she acquired in 2022 and transformed into a banking-as-a-service powerhouse serving fintech builders. Previously, she built Square Capital from zero into a multi-billion dollar lending business at Square (now Block), served as a board member at Alibaba through its historic 2014 IPO, led 41 transactions as Yahoo's Chief Development Officer, and spent seven years at Goldman Sachs in M&A. A Wharton-trained economist from Atlantic City, she co-authored 'Self-Made Boss' and holds patents in payments, credit, and cryptocurrency. Lead Bank closed a $70M Series B in September 2025 at a $1.47B valuation backed by a16z, Ribbit Capital, Coatue, and Khosla Ventures.
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
Naveen Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based AI-powered customer experience platform that serves over 100,000 businesses globally. Inspired by a personal struggle to find a quality surgeon for his mother at Stanford, Naveen and his brother Neeraj built Birdeye in 2012 to help businesses manage their online reputation and grow through customer feedback. Under his leadership, Birdeye crossed $100M ARR in 2023, raised over $93M in total funding, and pioneered what Naveen calls 'Experience Marketing' - the discipline of turning customer satisfaction into organic growth. A veteran of Yahoo and RingCentral, he brings deep product and operational expertise to one of SaaS's quietest success stories.
Ashish Aggarwal is a General Partner at Chamaeleon, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm. He invests in seed and Series A consumer, vertical SaaS, AI, and crypto startups, drawing on 18+ years as an operator, two-time founder, and investor. A Kauffman Fellow (Class 24), he previously led investments at Grishin Robotics in companies like Ziva Dynamics (acquired by Unity), Taskade, ClubFeast, and Spin (acquired by Ford). Before VC, he ran M&A and corporate strategy at Opera Software, marketing analytics at Dell, and built ad infrastructure at Yahoo!.
Eric Ye is a General Partner at Eastlink Capital, a Menlo Park-based early-stage VC firm backing AI and data infrastructure founders. A seasoned technologist turned investor, Eric spent over a decade at eBay as Director of Tech Platform and Principal Architect before serving as CTO, SVP of Technology, and Chief Scientist at Ctrip (NASDAQ: TCOM), the world's second-largest online travel agency, where he led 4,000+ engineers and architected the company's transformation into a cloud-native, mobile-first marketplace. Holder of 31 U.S. and China patents, winner of China's Best CTO Award, and a founding partner of Eminence Ventures, Eric now backs mission-driven founders at the seed-to-Series-B stage across AI/ML, distributed databases, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and enterprise software.
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.
John Kremer is the CEO of Rizzle, a San Francisco-based AI video platform that turns written content into broadcast-quality video for publishers and media companies. A 30-year Silicon Valley veteran, Kremer brings operational depth from senior leadership roles at Yahoo!, Adobe, and JP Morgan Chase - having helped Adobe's Digital Media business scale from under $3B to over $12B in revenue. At Rizzle, he leads a platform reaching over 1 billion viewers across MSN, Yahoo, NewsBreak, and social media, cutting video production time by up to 98% and costs by 80% for media clients.
Marcus Shen is the CEO and Board Member of B-Stock, the world's largest B2B marketplace for excess merchandise, helping retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco efficiently recover value from returned and surplus inventory. A former Yahoo! VP of Corporate Development and KKR advisor, Shen joined B-Stock as CFO in 2019, rose to COO, and took the CEO role in March 2022. Under his leadership, B-Stock has become a defining force in the recommerce economy, selling 160 million units annually and keeping nearly 300,000 tons of inventory out of landfills.
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the cloud-based music creation platform powering millions of producers worldwide with sample libraries, plugins, and AI-powered tools. A mechanical engineer turned product visionary, she grew Flickr from 37,000 to 60 million users, led product at GitHub and Adobe's Creative Cloud, and co-founded the enterprise app studio Tomfoolery. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 and Billboard's Women in Music Executives list three years running, she champions a philosophy that technology should empower artists — not replace them.
Sharon Chang is an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she manages fund and deal operations across the Venture, Seed, and speedrun funds. A seasoned operator with over 15 years in product marketing and product management, she previously led marketing at Rockmelt (acquired by Yahoo), directed Yahoo's Digital Magazines initiative, and honed her craft at Opsware and NEC. At a16z she's published definitive playbooks on product marketing and co-hosted podcasts with Ben Horowitz. Beyond the portfolio, she chairs the board of trustees at Woodland School in Portola Valley, runs half marathons, and is deeply rooted in the Bay Area community.
Tim Brady was Yahoo's first non-founding employee, hired by his Stanford roommate Jerry Yang in 1994 when Yahoo was still a grad-school side project. He wrote the business plan that landed Yahoo's first VC money, helped invent the banner ad format, and served as Chief Product Officer through eight years of internet history. After Yahoo, he co-founded Imagine K12 (an edtech accelerator that funded 80+ education startups), served as CEO of QuestBridge, and then spent six years as a Partner at Y Combinator working with hundreds of early-stage companies. He is one of Silicon Valley's most respected operator-turned-investors, known for his integrity, self-effacing candor, and genuine commitment to education.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Carol Bartz is a trailblazing Silicon Valley executive who became the first woman to run a major technology company when she took the helm of Autodesk in 1992, growing revenue from $285M to $1.5B over 14 years. She later served as CEO of Yahoo from 2009 to 2011, famously emailing all 14,000 employees the night she was fired by phone, telling them she'd been let go. Known for her blunt candor, 'Fail Fast Forward' philosophy, and resilience - she delayed breast cancer surgery by a month to keep a professional commitment - Bartz transformed from a dairy farm girl in Wisconsin to one of the most powerful women in American business.
Marissa Mayer is a pioneering tech executive and entrepreneur who served as Google's first female engineer (employee #20) and later as Yahoo's CEO. After graduating from Stanford with degrees in symbolic systems and computer science, she spent 13 years at Google shaping products like Search, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome. As Yahoo CEO from 2012-2017, she led a transformation effort before the company's sale to Verizon. She now runs Dazzle AI, a venture building next-generation AI personal assistants that raised $8M in late 2025. Known for her meticulous attention to detail, product vision, and ability to scale consumer technology, Mayer has been a prominent voice for women in tech while building products used by billions.
Bart Swanson is an advisor to Horizons Ventures and serves on the boards of Zoom, Impossible Foods, and numerous transformative technology companies. With more than fifteen years in tech as an entrepreneur, mentor, and executive, he helped lead Amazon's international expansion (1998-2001), served as COO of Badoo, and chaired Summly before its acquisition by Yahoo. A Wharton MBA and Lauder Institute Fellow, Swanson champions impact investing - every founder he backs signs a legally binding Impact Pact. His 2024 portfolio generated over $400 million in wealth creation, with $342 million going to BIPOC and women founders, while creating 436 jobs at a 48% compound annual growth rate.
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Sir Michael Moritz is a Welsh-born billionaire venture capitalist who spent nearly four decades at Sequoia Capital turning early bets on Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube, Stripe, and Klarna into some of the greatest returns in VC history. A former Time journalist who wrote one of the first books on Apple, he arrived at Sequoia in 1986 and never looked back - topping the Forbes Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Knighted in 2013, he departed Sequoia in July 2023 and remains chairman of Klarna. His Crankstart Foundation has donated hundreds of millions to Oxford, the National Gallery, the ACLU, and the Booker Prize. In 2026, the son of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany applied for German citizenship - protesting the rise of antisemitism in Britain.
Jess Lee is a Partner at Sequoia Capital - the firm's first female investing partner in the US in its 44-year history. Before that, she was co-founder and CEO of Polyvore, the social fashion platform she helped grow to 20+ million monthly users before selling to Yahoo for ~$230 million in 2015. A Stanford CS grad who once paid tuition by selling manga art on eBay, Lee brings a rare blend of deep product instinct (forged at Google Maps), community-building obsession, and operator credibility to early-stage investing. She also co-founded All Raise, the nonprofit dedicated to getting more women into venture capital and founding roles.
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.
Jack Naglieri is the founder and CEO of Panther, a cloud-native SIEM platform that achieved unicorn status in 2021 with a $1.4B valuation. A former security engineer at Yahoo and Airbnb, he open-sourced StreamAlert in 2017 and parlayed that practitioner frustration into a $140M-funded company serving enterprises like Coinbase and Docker. He also writes Detection at Scale, a widely read Substack newsletter covering AI's transformation of security operations.