Ari Evans is the founder and CEO of Maestro, the Los Angeles-based white-label live streaming and interactive video platform he started in 2015. He built Maestro on a simple conviction: creators and rights holders should own their audiences and data instead of renting them from algorithm-driven giants. The platform powers interactive streams, monetization and analytics for clients ranging from Billie Eilish and Post Malone to Epic Games, PlayStation and ViacomCBS, and counts Sony Music among its investors. A former Zynga product manager who ran CityVille at its peak, Evans frames the creator economy as the biggest job-creation engine since the Industrial Revolution.
Jeremy Verba is the CEO of CoinCover, a Cardiff-based digital asset disaster recovery and wallet protection company that has safeguarded 600+ businesses and 22+ million wallets since 2018. A Silicon Valley veteran with 30+ years scaling fast-growth businesses from $10M to $250M, Verba previously led VUDU at Walmart, served as CEO of eHarmony across 18 countries, founded Zynga's Treasure Isle studio (the fastest-growing Facebook game at launch), and built Piczo into one of the world's largest teen social platforms. He holds a B.S. in Architecture from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and joined CoinCover in February 2026 to drive its transition from category creation to institutional-scale growth.
Jennifer Nuckles is the Chairperson and CEO of R-Zero, a San Francisco-based smart building technology company that deploys UV-C light, IoT sensors, and AI to make indoor environments safer, healthier, and more energy-efficient. With 25+ years spanning consumer goods giants (Clorox), social gaming (Zynga), digital health (Doctor on Demand), and fintech (SoFi), she is one of the rare executives who has led marketing and operations at scale across radically different industries. She took the helm at R-Zero in October 2022, raised a $105M Series C, and is on a mission to fix the fact that we spend 90% of our lives inside buildings that were never designed to keep us healthy.
Fareed Mosavat is a Visiting Partner at a16z Speedrun, a 12-week founder accelerator at the intersection of technology and entertainment. He came to venture capital after a career arc that started in physics simulation at Pixar and wound through product and growth leadership at Zynga, RunKeeper, Instacart, and Slack, before he ran product education for thousands of PMs as Chief Development Officer at Reforge. Today he backs AI-native B2B startups, co-hosts the Unsolicited Feedback podcast with Brian Balfour, and writes about what it actually takes to build products people love.
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Laurence 'Lo' Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, a San Francisco-based institutional VC firm he incubated at GV (Google Ventures) and spun out independently in 2018. Plexo's distinctive 'full stack' model invests across three layers - LP stakes in emerging diverse fund managers, direct investments in companies sourced through those networks, and equity stakes in the GP management entities themselves. After senior operating roles at Nike, eBay, and Zynga (where he ran Zynga Poker to $250M in annual bookings), Toney moved into VC via Comcast Ventures and GV before building Plexo Capital's $42.5M Fund I with backers including Alphabet, Intel Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Named to Forbes BLK 50: Money Masters 2026, he has championed diverse fund managers as alpha generators long before it became conventional wisdom.
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-born venture firm behind Discord, Coinbase, Affirm, and Warby Parker. A repeat founder-turned-investor, he opened Spark's San Francisco office in 2012 after selling his social gaming startup Conduit Labs to Zynga and riding Zynga's IPO. His portfolio reads like a cultural highlight reel: he backed Cruise before GM paid $1B+, Postmates before Uber, and Discord before it became the connective tissue of the internet. He deliberately makes only about two bets per year, applies a 'Japanese toilet' product lens to AI, co-hosts the Hallway Chat podcast, and recently co-founded a physical board game library in Berkeley with Groupon's Andrew Mason.