yale
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Paul Gu and the price of a future
He left Yale with a question about how to finance human potential. Fourteen years after co-founding Upstart, Paul Gu is now its CEO, still working out what a lender should see when it looks at a person.
Kevin Czinger and the factory that refuses to stand still
He grew up building hot rods in Cleveland, took a detour through Yale and Wall Street, and returned to the factory floor. With his son Lukas, Kevin Czinger is trying to give manufacturing the freedom to change its mind.
Justin Borgman and the trouble with putting everything in one place
A Yale research paper gave Justin Borgman his first company. A stubborn question about where data belongs kept him building, through an acquisition, a second startup, and the arrival of enterprise AI.
Jake Schwartz and the education that starts after graduation
A Yale degree and a Wharton MBA gave Jake Schwartz an education. Building General Assembly meant figuring out what people needed once school was over.
Kenny Gunderman and the art of coming back together
He took charge of a company built by separating a network from its operator. A decade later, Kenny Gunderman brought the pieces back together - and put small-town America at the center of his next bet.
Tiffany Pang-Cadengo and the problem between the agencies
She left an engineering job at Instacart to help cities respond to homelessness. Outreach Grid began with a deceptively practical question: how could the people helping the same person share what they knew?
Zack Parisa and the price of a tree left standing
At 13, Zack Parisa chose forestry to escape a life behind a desk. His work has since taken him from outdated forest records in Armenia to satellite maps, carbon markets, and a stubborn question: what should a landowner be paid to keep a forest growing?
Jensen Harris and the trouble with good enough
He helped rearrange Microsoft Office, then co-founded Textio to change what writing software could do. Jensen Harris keeps returning to the same question: why should people have to struggle with tools built to help them?
Nicholas D'Andre and the second life of a traffic camera
Before co-founding GridMatrix, Nicholas D'Andre managed sensor supply chains at Apple. Now he works with transportation agencies to turn equipment they already own into information they can use.
Jim Tananbaum and the art of assembling people
Before he built Foresite Capital, Jim Tananbaum built companies, collected disciplines, and learned how much a partnership can matter. His career is a study in putting the right people around a difficult idea.
Miles Lasater and the art of starting again
He helped take a college startup public. At Purpose Built, Miles Lasater is working on an earlier question: how do you give a promising founder a fair chance to begin?
Vikrant Raina and the business of staying
At BV Investment Partners, Vikrant Raina has spent more than a quarter-century backing businesses that make technology useful. His career turns on a deceptively difficult question: when is it time to leave, and when is there more to build?
Ben Silbermann and the things we keep
Before Pinterest became a public company, it was a place to save things that mattered. Ben Silbermann built it by following a collector’s instinct - and listening to people far from the usual startup crowd.
Steve Axelrod and the art of measuring what moves
Before startup leadership, Steve Axelrod spent years making instruments behave in particle laboratories and on factory floors. His career follows a practical question: how do you make a measurement worth trusting?
Santiago Suarez and the long way back to the checkout
He left Colombia, learned the machinery of American finance, and returned to build Addi. Then came a harder lesson: how much a company can grow when its founder changes his mind.
Yale and August U.S.: The smart lock that let you keep the key
August put a motor on the inside of the door and left the familiar key outside. Paired with Yale, that small concession became a business in deciding who gets in, when, and how.
Lorenss Martinsons Is Teaching AI to Know When It Has Failed
A linguistics medal, a physics medal, a cognitive-science lab and a film soundtrack all led to the same practical question: how can we tell whether an intelligent system actually understands what it is doing?
Sara Griffin
Sara Griffin is a retail marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Belk, the Charlotte-based Southern department store chain. She built her career over a decade at Saks OFF 5TH, where she rose from marketing leadership to Chief Marketing and Analytics Officer, launched the SaksOFF5TH.com site in 2013, helped build the retailer's Canadian store fleet, and created the tender-neutral OFF 5TH Rewards loyalty program that surpassed 2.5 million enrollments. A Yale graduate with a Wharton MBA and a former Monitor Deloitte consultant, she later served as CMO of The Shade Store before joining Belk. She is known for tying data, analytics and marketing together to deliver personalized shopping experiences.
Renee Halvorsen
Renee Halvorsen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Marine Layer, the San Francisco apparel brand known for absurdly soft t-shirts and a laid-back California outlook. A Yale-trained economist who began her career in finance and investment banking, she has spent the better part of a decade at Marine Layer, helping grow the business more than tenfold by treating marketing as a blend of art and science and treating customer lifetime value as the metric that matters most. Before Marine Layer she sharpened her craft in strategy and analytics roles at Gap Inc. and Athleta.
Jonathan Winer
Jonathan Winer is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a New York-based firm that applies technology to physical infrastructure like power grids, roads, water and digital systems. Backed by Alphabet, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and StepStone, SIP has raised close to $1 billion and incubates operating companies such as virtual power plant Renew Home and grid-flexible data center developer Verrus. Before SIP, Winer ran investments for Alphabet's urban innovation platform Sidewalk Labs, founded the Asian clean-energy fund Nereus, and helped build the private equity business at the D. E. Shaw group. He is known for thematic, first-principles investing in what he calls the 'missing middle' between venture capital and traditional infrastructure.
Stefan Bauer
Stefan Bauer is the co-founder and CEO of Marker Learning, a New York City telehealth company that connects families and schools with licensed psychologists for learning disability evaluations, cutting the traditional cost and turnaround time of assessments. A Yale School of Management MBA and former McKinsey and Morgan Stanley professional, Bauer co-founded the company with Emily Yudofsky in 2021; it has since raised $19.7 million in total funding, including a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2023.
Fatima Husain
Fatima Husain is the Chief Business Officer at Numeral, a San Francisco-based AI-powered sales tax automation platform that raised $35M in Series B funding (led by Mayfield) at a $350M valuation in September 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $57M. By that round Numeral had processed $5B+ in transaction volume, filed 150,000 returns, tripled revenue year over year, and served 2,000+ ecommerce and SaaS brands across 11,000+ jurisdictions - and has since expanded into international VAT/GST compliance across 70+ countries. A Yale-educated operator-turned-investor originally from India, she spent six years leading growth and product at Airbnb - achieving 20x+ YoY growth on the supply side - before co-founding Mosaic General Partnership (formerly Mastry Ventures) with NBA champion Andre Iguodala. She was an early angel investor in Numeral and joined as CBO to build again, bringing two decades of operational instincts and venture capital pattern recognition to one of fintech's most unsexy yet massive problems.
Dan Cornwell
Dan Cornwell is the founder and CEO of PrescriberPoint, a Boston-based, AI-enabled medication access platform that helps clinicians cut through the paperwork between writing a prescription and a patient actually getting their medicine. Spun out of Eli Lilly in partnership with BCG Digital Ventures, the company raised seed backing from an unusual coalition of would-be rivals - Lilly, Pfizer, Adobe and Mastercard. Before PrescriberPoint, Cornwell ran the nurse-staffing marketplace IntelyCare and advised companies on building disruptive businesses at BCG Digital Ventures. A Yale historian turned Wharton-trained operator, he keeps returning to the same problem: the messy gap between a good intention and a completed transaction.
Perry Gershon
Perry Gershon is the CEO of FTN (For The Numbers) Network, the fantasy-sports, sports-betting and DVOA data company he bought into and now leads. A Yale-trained molecular biophysicist who spent 25 years as a heavyweight commercial real estate lender, he opened one of New York City's first sports bars in 1987, then walked away from finance to run twice for Congress in New York's 1st District. In late 2023 he took the helm of FTN and led a $3M seed round, betting that the numbers behind sports are a business as much as a pastime.
Steven Humphreys
Steven Humphreys is Deputy CEO of the Hirsch Group (formerly Vitaprotech), a French-headquartered high-security technology company that emerged from the 2024 merger of Vitaprotech and Identiv. Over three decades he has run a string of companies at the seam where the physical and digital worlds meet - SCM Microsystems, ActivCard, and Identiv - building the smart-card readers, secure credentials, and access-control platforms that guard U.S. embassies, federal agencies, and sensitive sites worldwide. A Yale and Stanford engineer who started his career at General Electric, he has spent his life turning identity into infrastructure.
Tiffany Pang
Tiffany Pang is the co-founder and CEO of Outreach Grid (Appledore, Inc.), a software platform that helps cities, outreach workers, law enforcement, and nonprofits coordinate the work of reducing homelessness. A San Francisco native and Yale-trained neuroscientist turned software engineer, she left a Silicon Valley job to build tools that connect the people working on the streets with the agencies that can house and help. Her work earned a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Social Entrepreneurs, and Outreach Grid has expanded to communities across multiple U.S. states.
Yunhao Jiao
Yunhao Jiao is the co-founder and CEO of TestSprite, a Seattle startup building an autonomous AI testing agent that aims to be the verification layer for AI-generated code. A competitive programmer turned AWS engineer, he left a five-year run at Amazon after a single production regression on an on-call shift convinced him that verification, not generation, had become software's weakest link. Since founding TestSprite in 2023 with Shawnie Shan and Rui Li, he has grown it to roughly 100,000 developers and raised about $8.1 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led most recently by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Scott Bowen
Scott Bowen is the CEO of Tenovos, a New York based digital asset management and content intelligence company he co-founded in 2018 with Sal Hakimi. Often described as one of the founding fathers of the DAM category, Bowen co-founded Artesia Technologies in the late 1990s, an early DAM pioneer acquired by OpenText in 2004, where he went on to launch the company's Customer Experience Management and Cloud Services divisions. A Yale-trained electrical engineer and economist, he has spent more than two decades building software at the intersection of digital media, marketing, data analytics and the cloud, including senior roles at Vistaprint and ICX Media. At Tenovos he is pushing the idea that modern marketing teams should treat content as measurable, data-rich infrastructure rather than files in a folder.
Andrew Dervan
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Andrew Kress
Andrew Kress is the co-founder and CEO of HealthVerity, the Philadelphia company that built one of the largest real-world healthcare data ecosystems and the technology to link, govern and exchange it without exposing patient identities. An English major from Yale who spent his career inside the plumbing of healthcare data - running SDI Health, then leading Healthcare Value Solutions at IMS Health - he started HealthVerity in 2014 to make fragmented, privacy-bound health data usable. The company raised $100M in Series D funding in 2021 led by Durable Capital Partners. Kress also serves on the boards of Philadelphia cultural institutions including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.