Best Startup
At Best Startup US we track over 1,000,000 US startups and over 3 million people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top San Francisco, California based Founder operating in the Financial Services space. If you think a Founder is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.us.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
David Sacks
Co-Founder of Craft Ventures
David O. Sacks Is The Co-Founder At Craft Ventures.
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About Callin, Craft Ventures, Harbor: Craft Ventures is an early-stage venture fund specializing in the craft of building great companies.
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Bill Lee
Co-Founder and General Partner of Craft Ventures
Bill Lee was CEO and co-founder of Remarq, a Benchmark Capital-backed collaboration company. At Remarq, Bill guided the company in its development of a complete end-to-end Internet messaging and collaboration platform. Before its acquisition by Critical Path in March 2000, the company developed high-volume messaging platforms for sites such as eBay, Sun, Novell, and Amazon. The company raised over $43 million in venture and debt financing. Bill has been appointed by the Mayor of San Jose to the Redevelopment Committee of San Jose. Bill also graduated Beta Gamma Sigma from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in accounting/finance and received a JD/MBA from UCLA.
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About Craft Ventures, West Coast Holdings: Craft Ventures is an early-stage venture fund specializing in the craft of building great companies.
Jeff Fluhr
Co-Founder and General Partner of Craft Ventures
Jeff is co-founder and general partner at Craft. He has been a successful tech entrepreneur and investor for two decades. While at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Fluhr entered the annual business plan competition with the idea of creating a trusted and transparent marketplace where fans could buy and sell tickets for sporting events and concerts. Fluhr dropped out of school and co-founded StubHub in March 2000. By 2007, StubHub had over 400 employees, more than $600 million of gross merchandise volume and partnerships with many professional and college sports teams. Fluhr served as CEO of StubHub until it was acquired by eBay for $310 million in 2007.
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About Craft Ventures: Craft Ventures is an early-stage venture fund specializing in the craft of building great companies.
Alexis Ohanian
Founder & General Partner of Seven Seven Six
Alexis Ohanian, born April 24, 1983, is an entrepreneur and investor in Brooklyn, NY, best known as the co-founder and executive chair of reddit, a platform for online communities to share links and have discussions. While he learned his earliest lessons in leadership and web design from his high school Quake 2 clan and Everquest guild, Alexis continued his official studies at the University of Virginia, where he met his future co-founder Steve Huffman during freshman year move-in day. This would lead to the founding of reddit, which he recounted along with many lessons for entrepreneurs, in his national bestseller, Without Their Permission. At UVA, Alexis majored in business and history with a minor in German. Though he had originally planned to become an immigration lawyer, he experienced an epiphany in his junior year (while sitting in a Waffle House) that led him to the realization that he didn’t want to practice law. Instead he convinced his best friend Steve to start a company with him. The pair traveled to Cambridge, MA during their senior year spring break to hear Paul Graham give a talk titled “How to Start a Startup.” After the lecture, Alexis invited Graham out for a drink so he and Steve could pitch Graham on their business idea. Graham agreed, loved the idea, and suggested they apply to a new seed stage venture firm he’d launched called Y Combinator. Alexis and Steve’s original plan was to build an infrastructure that would allow people to order food from their cell phones. Though the idea was rejected, Alexis and Steve were invited to join the first class of Y Combinator, on the condition that they’d come up with a new concept. The next idea they pitched to Graham would become reddit.com.
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About breadpig, Seven Seven Six: Seven Seven Six is a venture capital firm that primarily seeks to invest in seed rounds.
Justin Kan
General Partner & Co-Founder of Goat Capital
Justin Kan is the CEO and co-founder of Atrium, a technology company and corporate law firm providing fast, transparent, and price-predictable business and legal services to startups. As a founder of multiple companies and an investor in hundreds more, Justin involuntarily became a power user of corporate legal services. Justin’s mixed experiences with traditional law firms and billing practices inspired him to reimagine the delivery of legal services with a better client experience as his guide. At Atrium, Justin is chief visionary and leads a team of talented executives in developing a technology platform for legal professionals to meet client needs responsively, and rethinking and refining how services are packaged and priced so that legal spend is clear, transparent, and predictable for client legal budgets. The Atrium corporate law firm employs experienced startup lawyers who are attuned to the needs of Atrium’s client base of emerging companies. Prior to Atrium, Justin was a partner at Y Combinator, the preeminent startup accelerator. Justin was a co-founder of Justin.tv, which became Twitch, the popular video game streaming platform (acquired by Amazon in 2014); Exec, an on-demand errand service (acquired by Handybook in 2014); Socialcam, a mobile app for sharing video (acquired by Autodesk in 2012); and Kiko, the first Ajax web calendar. Justin is a prolific angel investor and mentor to startup founders. He is a graduate of Yale University.
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About Goat Capital, Zero-F: Goat Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies.
Robin Chan
Co-Founder & General Partner of Goat Capital
Robin Chan joined Goat Capital Founder and General Partner in 2020.
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About Bird, Expa, Goat Capital, Operation Masks, Operator, Square: Goat Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies.
Tim Draper
Founder and Managing Partner of Draper Associates
Timothy Draper is founding partner of leading venture capital firms Draper Associates and DFJ. Tim’s original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and other web-based email providers and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. Tim launched the DFJ Global Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in over 30 cities around the globe. Tim founded or co-founded DFJ ePlanet (global), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), Zone Ventures (LA), Epic Ventures (Salt Lake City), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), DFJ Vina Capital (Vietnam), Draper Nexus (Tokyo), and DFJ DragonFund (Shanghai). Tim recently launched “Six Californias,” a statewide initiative to create six new states and dissolve a failed one in California. Previously, Tim served on the California State Board of Education. In November of 2000, Tim launched a statewide cyber-initiative on school choice for the California General Election. Tim was a Member of Singapore’s International Economic Council and Ukraine’s Orange Circle. Tim was on the Board of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Tim was ranked 52 on the list of the 100 most influential Harvard Alumni, and seven on the Forbes Midas List. Tim was named Always-On #1 top venture capital deal maker. Tim was awarded the Commonwealth Club’s Distinguished Citizen Award for achievements in green and sustainable energy. To further encourage entrepreneurship, Tim started BizWorld.org, a non-profit for children to learn entrepreneurship, Draper University of Heroes, a school for entrepreneurs 18-28 and he leads SixCalifornias, an initiative to improve the governance of California. Tim has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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About Bancor, DDF, DFJ DragonFund, DFJ VinaCapital, Draper Associates, Draper Athena, Draper Dragon, Draper University Ventures, ePlanet Capital, Gotham Ventures, SpeedUPAfrica, Threshold, VenturesLab, Zone Ventures: Draper Associates is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in industry-transforming companies.
Ronald Conway
Founder & Co-Managing Partner of SV Angel
Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ronald was previously with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions from 1973-1979, and Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO from 1979-1990. He eventually took Altos public in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) from 1991-1995. PTS went on to be acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft. Ronald has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Twitter, Digg, Brightmail, Ask Jeeves, Rupture (acquired by EA), Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo!), Facebook, RockYou, ScanScout, Zappos, Trulia, StumbleUpon, Plaxo (acquired by Comcast), Photobucket (acquired by Fox), and Anchor Intelligence (co-founder). Ronald was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top deal-makers in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ronald is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation. Ronald is also featured in Gary Rivlin’s book _The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ronald Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms, described as ‘the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone else in Silicon Valley.
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About Applied Intuition, FWD.us, Personal Training Systems, Smart Tech Foundation, SV Angel: SV Angel is an angel firm that helps startups with business development, financing, M&A, and other strategic advice.
Benjamin Forman
Founder and Chief Investment Officer of ParaFi Capital
Benjamin Forman (San Francisco) joined KKR in 2015 as a Principal. Mr. Forman is responsible for covering the industrials and automotive sectors for KKR Credit across various strategies, including liquid credit, direct lending, special situations and long-short credit. Previously, Mr. Forman was a vice president at TPG on its Special Situations platform. Mr. Forman graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania.
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About ParaFi Capital: ParaFi Capital is an alternative investment firm focused on blockchain and decentralized finance markets.
Siqi Chen
Co-Founder of Runway Financial
Siqi Chen is the Co-Founder of Runway and a Member Board Of Directors at Sandbox VR. Siqi holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.
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About Newco, Runway Financial: Runway is a ground up rethink of the role of financial data inside modern businesses.
Immad Akhund
CEO & Founder of Mercury Technologies
Immad Akhund is the CEO and Founder of Mercury.
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About Mercury Technologies: Mercury is the banking stack for startups.* FDIC-insured accounts, debit cards, currency exchange, APIs, 3rd party integrations & more.
Fred Ehrsam
Co-Founder of Paradigm
Fred Ehrsam is co-founder of Coinbase. He’s been named to both Forbes 30 Under 30 and TIME Magazine’s 30 Under 30 Who Are Changing the World. Previously, he was a foreign exchange trader at Goldman Sachs in New York where he traded and managed Goldman’s electronic market making platform. Fred has also analyzed portfolios at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world and worked in nanostructures research. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Economics with honors and distinction from Duke University.
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About Paradigm: Paradigm primarily invests in crypto-assets and businesses from the earliest stages of idea formation through to maturity.
Matt Huang
Co-Founder of Paradigm
The former founding CEO of Hotspots, a Y Combinator company acquired by Twitter in 2012, Huang spent time in Twitter’s ad analytics team before joining Sequoia Capital. The MIT grad works on investments like Reddit and Yik Yak for the firm. He’s an angel investor in companies including Instacart and Teespring. He is fascinated by new platforms: the internet, mobile devices, and whatever’s next. Matt holds a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT.
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About Paradigm: Paradigm primarily invests in crypto-assets and businesses from the earliest stages of idea formation through to maturity.
Brook Byers
Co-Founder of Kleiner Perkins
Brook Byers is the Board Director of Foundation Medicine Inc. He has been a venture capital investor since 1972. He has been closely involved with more than fifty new technology based ventures, over half of which have already become public companies. He formed the first Life Sciences practice group in the venture capital profession in 1984 and led KPCB to become a premier venture capital firm in the medical, healthcare, and biotechnology sectors. KPCB has invested in and helped build over 110 Life Sciences companies which have already developed hundreds of products to treat major underserved medical needs for millions of patients. Brook was the founding President and then Chairman, of four biotechnology companies which were incubated in KPCB’s offices and went on to become public companies with an aggregate market value over $8 Billion. He is currently on the Board of Directors of nine companies, most recently joining CardioDX, Genomic Health Incorporated, Five Prime Therapeutics, OptiMedica, Pacific Biosciences, Inc., Tethys, XDx, Inc He was formerly a Director of Idec Pharmaceuticals (Chairman), Athena Neurosciences (Chairman), Signal Pharmaceuticals, Arris Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacopeia, Hybritech (Chairman), Genprobe and others. These companies have pioneered the medical use of molecular biology, monoclonal antibodies, molecular diagnostics and genomics. Brook was President and a Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists. He is a currently a Board member of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Foundation, the New Schools Foundation, Stanford Bio-X Advisory Council and the Stanford Eye Council. He was Co – Chair of the five year, $1.4 billion, UCSF Capital Campaign. In 2007, he was awarded the UCSF Medal as their honorary degree equivalent. He was formerly a Director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation, the California Healthcare Institute, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council, That Many May See (UCSF) Vision Research Foundation (Chairman) and the Georgia Tech Advisory Board. Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Brook graduated in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech. He received an MBA from Stanford.
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About Aces Four Construction, Kleiner Perkins, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, Mission Bay Capital: Kleiner Perkins is a venture capital firm that specializes in investing in early-stage, incubation, and growth companies.
Max Levchin
Founder & CEO of Affirm
Max Levchin is an investor and advisor to emerging technology companies. He was previously the chairman and chief executive officer of HVF, a startup lab focused on extracting insights from recordable information. Levchin co-founded Confinity Inc. in December 1998, and served as the Chief Technology Officer and a director. He also founded NetMeridian Software, a developer of early Internet applications Levchin also serves as chairman of the boards of directors of Yelp Inc. and Kaggle Inc., and as a director of Evernote Corporation.
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About Affirm, Glow, HVF Labs, SciFi VC: Affirm is a financial technology services company that offers installment loans to consumers at the point of sale.
Arjun Sethi
Co-Founder & Partner of Tribe Capital
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About Applied Intuition, Instabase, Social Capital, Tribe Capital: Tribe Capital is an early stage venture capital firm focused on recognizing and amplifying early stage product-market fit.
Eric Ries
Founder & CEO of Long-Term Stock Exchange
Eric is the author of New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Startup Way, and The Leaders Guide (funded by one of the top Kickstarter book campaigns of all time). He’s also the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, practiced by individuals and companies around the world and the inspiration behind the LTSE. He has founded a number of startups, including IMVU, where he served as CTO, and has advised on business and product strategy for startups, venture capital firms, and large companies across many industries.
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About IDEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange, Pivotal: The Long-Term Stock Exchange designs an SEC-regulated national securities exchange that aligns great companies and long-term investors.
Adam Bain
Co-Founder & Managing Partner of 01 Advisors
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About 01 Advisors, Goat Group: 01A is a venture firm founded by a team of operators to help entrepreneurs build great companies.
Dick Costolo
Managing Partner & Co-Founder of 01 Advisors
Since October 2010, Dick has been the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, where he was responsible for the growth and management of the overall business. Previously, as Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer, he oversaw monetization and day to day operations. Before joining Twitter, Dick was co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in 2007. While at Google, Dick was Group Product Manager on the Ads team responsible for social media ads. Previously, Dick lived and worked in Chicago, where he founded and ran two digital media companies: SpyOnIt, a web page monitoring service, and Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company. Dick was also an improv performer with the acclaimed Annoyance Theater. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Computer Science.
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About 01 Advisors: 01A is a venture firm founded by a team of operators to help entrepreneurs build great companies.
Yahya Mokhtarzada
Co-Founder & CRO of Truebill
Prior to cofounding Truebill Yahya served as VP of Business Development at Nanigans, an advertising technology platform focused on social and mobile channels. At Nanigans, Yahya executed platform licencing agreements with enterprise advertisers including Ebay, Zappos, EA, Zynga, Amazon and Wayfair. Prior to Nanigans, Yahya held business development roles at SGN and Webs.com. Yahya is also a mentor at 500 Startups and has instructed at the Startup Institute.
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About Truebill: Truebill is a personal finance app that utilizes AI to enable users to manage their personal finances and improve their financial health.
Idris Mokhtarzada
Founder, CTO of Truebill
He is the Founder & CTO at Truebill.
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About Truebill: Truebill is a personal finance app that utilizes AI to enable users to manage their personal finances and improve their financial health.
Neil Mehta
Founder, Managing Partner of Greenoaks
Neil Mehta is the founder and a managing partner of Greenoaks Capital. Greenoaks is a leading investment firm focused on internet and technology businesses. Greenoaks makes concentrated, long-term investments in enduring businesses globally.
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About Greenoaks: Greenoaks is a global investment firm specializing in technology companies.
Peter Nieh
Partner and Co-Founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners
Peter is a Partner and Co-Founder of Lightspeed, and covers software, mobile and cleantech. He has been working in the venture capital industry since 1995. Peter’s current investments include 99Bill, BloomReach, CoalTek, Five Stars, Leyden Energy, LS9, MyBuys, Nest, QuantumScape, Skyfire and Stion. He was also responsible for several investments which have had successful exits including Blue Nile (NILE), Celequest (acquired by Cognos), DoubleClick (acquired by Google, post IPO), Extensity (acquired by Infor, post IPO), Informatica (INFA), Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape), Phone.com (OPWV), PSS System (acquired by IBM) and TimesTen (acquired by Oracle). Prior to Lightspeed, Peter worked in business development and product marketing at General Magic, a startup that before the emergence of the Web, pioneered the development of e-commerce and electronic media services by partnering with the world’s largest telecommunications service providers and consumer electronics companies. He also managed Acer’s portable PC business in North America, where he launched the company’s first laptop PCs. Before Acer, Peter was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company and worked predominately with high-technology clients on product, sales and distribution strategies. While an undergraduate at Stanford University, he worked at Apple Computer, where he helped to develop the power management system for Apple’s first portable computer. Peter holds a BS in Electrical Engineering, an AB in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
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About Lightspeed Venture Partners: Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that engages in consumer, enterprise, technology, and cleantech markets.
Barry Eggers
Founder and Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners
Barry is a Founder and Partner of Lightspeed and focuses primarily on information technology infrastructure, with a specific interest in cloud computing, big data, storage, consumerization of IT, and networking. He has 15 years of venture capital experience, 10 years of operating experience and has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top 100 investors multiple times. Barry works closely with Avi Networks, MapR Technologies, Nimble Storage, Pertino, and youwho. His past investments include Pliant Technology (acquired by Sandisk), Calista Technologies (acquired by MSFT), Arbor Networks (acquired by DHR), Growth Networks (acquired by CSCO), Maker Communications (acquired post-IPO by CNXT), Metasolv Software (acquired post-IPO by ORCL), Sirocco Systems (acquired by SCMR), and Telogy Networks (acquired by TI). Prior to joining Lightspeed, Barry held executive roles in business development and general management at Cisco Systems from 1991-1997. While at Cisco, Barry established many of the company’s largest distribution channels across OEMs, Service Providers, Distributors, and VARs. He also developed Cisco’s initial M&A process and directed the first wave of acquisitions and integrations for the company.Barry holds a BA in Economics and Business from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Barry is a member of the UCLA Economics Board of Visitors.
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About Lightspeed India Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Origami Logic, Snap: Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that engages in consumer, enterprise, technology, and cleantech markets.
Ron Hose
Founder and CEO of Coins.ph
Ron Hose CEO of Coins.ph, a company that delivers financial services over mobile to people in Southeast Asia. Prior to coins.ph, Ron was the CTO of the video communication service [TokBox](/organization/tokbox). He co-founded the company with Serge Faguet in 2007. Most recently, Ron was a founding partner at Innovation Endeavors, an early stage venture capital fund backed by [Eric Schmidt](/person/eric-schmidt). Ron graduated from Cornell University with a Masters degree in Computer Science.
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About Coins.ph: Coins.ph delivers financial services over mobile to people who are currently unserved by traditional banks.
Matt Humphrey
Co-Founder & CEO of LendingHome
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About LendingHome, Quiet Capital: LendingHome offers fix-and-flip bridge loans and rental loans for real estate investors.
James Herbert
Co-Founder, Board Member of LendingHome
Current: Co-Founder, Board Member of LendingHome; SVP at First Republic Bank. Previous: Founder of Two Bridges Real Estate; Co-Founder and EVP of Colony American Homes; VP at Colony Capital; VP in Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley. BA and MBA from Stanford. Investor in / advisor to seed to Series C companies
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About First Republic Bank, First Republic Bank, LendingHome: LendingHome offers fix-and-flip bridge loans and rental loans for real estate investors.
Ullas Naik
Founder & General Partner of Streamlined Ventures
Ullas Naik is the Founder & General Partner at Streamlined Ventures.
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About Streamlined Ventures: Streamlined Ventures is a seed-stage investment firm focusing on Data Science, APIs, Blockchain/Web3, AI, and Software Automation.
Nicholas Brathwaite
Founder & Managing Partner of Celesta Capital
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About Celesta Capital, Walden Riverwood Ventures: Celesta Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs and disruptive technology companies.
Steve Jang
Founder & Managing Partner of Kindred Ventures
Steve Jang is a venture capital investor and technology entrepreneur. Based in San Francisco, Steve serves as founder and a managing partner of Kindred Ventures. As a generalist early stage venture fund, Kindred’s mission is to invest in brilliant and dedicated founders at the earliest stages of building their startup and, ultimately, our collective future. Over the past 12 years, Steve has backed over 100 companies across different theme areas, including Uber, Coinbase, Postmates, Tonal, Color Health, Zymergen, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Since 2009 and up until IPO, Steve has also served as an Advisor to Uber since the founding of the company, up through initial product launch, global expansion, and then IPO. Steve also serves as an Advisor at Expa, a startup studio based in SF and NY, mentoring startup teams on product development, team building, and company growth. Most recently as an entrepreneur, Steve served as co-founder of Bitski, a digital wallet and storefront service for NFTs. Previously, he was co-founder/CEO of SoundTracking, a popular mobile music service that was Apple’s Best iPhone Music App of 2011 and was acquired by Rhapsody in 2014. Prior to these startups, in 2005, he was the co-creator and founding team member of the world’s first and largest on-demand music streaming service which reached over 100 million monthly unique users before its eventual acquisition by MySpace. //Investment Theme Areas of Interest// * Online Marketplaces * Decentralized Systems and Crypto * ClimateTech & Sustainable Systems * Digital Health and Wellness * FinTech * Social Consumer Media * Developer/Creator Tools * Future of Work * Software-enabled Hardware //Representative Portfolio Companies Include// Marketplaces/Market Networks: Uber (IPO), Postmates (acq. by Uber), Poshmark (IPO), StyleSeat, Italic, Reserve (acq. by Resy), Drip (acq. Kickstarter), GrandSt (acq. by Etsy), RangeMe (acq. by ECRM) Decentralized Systems & Crypto: Coinbase, dYdX, Zora, CoinTracker, Mina Protocol, Bitski, Computable, Nervos Network, Origin Protocol, Harbor, Radar Relay, Set Protocol, Messari, Rarebits Health & Wellness: Tonal, Color Health, Heartbeat Health, Forward, Enso, Breathometer Sustainable Systems/Climate Tech: Zymergen, Linear Labs, Replenysh, Mootral, Connora Systems FinTech & LegalTech: Atrium, Bloom Credit, Coinbase, Catch Benefits Developer/Creator Tools: Red Planet Labs, Northflank, Optic, Anjuna Future of Work: Bravado, Torch, Braintrust, Fountain, Catch Food Innovation & CPG: Taika, Blue Bottle Coffee, Fort Point Beer Consumer/Social Media: Clubhouse Frontier Tech: Humane
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About Bitski, Kindred Ventures: Kindred Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital fund that supports startup companies.
Tim Chen
Founder and CEO of NerdWallet
Tim Chen is the founder and CEO of NerdWallet. A former hedge fund equity analyst specializing in payment processing companies, credit card networks, and technology companies, Tim also worked as an equity research analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. He is a graduate of Stanford University with a degree in economics. In addition to writing for NerdWallet, Tim regularly contributes to several major personal finance publications.
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About NerdWallet: NerdWallet develops a financial platform to help people find the right credit cards and mortgage rates.
Eyal Shinar
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Fundbox
Founder and Executive Chairman of Fundbox, Eyal is an expert in financial technology, AI and technology management. Prior to Fundbox, Eyal served as VP at Battery Ventures, leading projects and investments in finance, machine learning and SaaS. Notable examples are IDI Direct Insurance, Istra Research, Cortera, cVidya, Leadspace, Champions Oncology, Relay Foods, and Sportority. Prior to his work in Battery Ventures, Eyal was one of the first employees of Old Lane, a $5.5B NYC-based global hedge fund (later acquired by Citigroup) and also worked for Castle Harlan, a leading $6B NYC-based buyout firm. Eyal graduated from the special program for outstanding students at the Hebrew University with an LLB in Law and advanced degree in Finance. He earned his MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Eyal was recently recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2016 at its Builders + Innovators Summit.
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About Fundbox: Fundbox is an AI-powered financial platform for small businesses.
Thaddeus Dryja
Founder and Developer of Lightning Network
Thaddeus Dryja is the founder and developer of Lightning Netwok.
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About Lightning Network: Bitcoin Lightning Network is built upon bitcoin’s blockchain technology, making peer to peer micropayment transactions through off-chain.
Phil Black
Co-Founder of True Ventures
Phil is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He learned the venture trade and met his future True Ventures co-founder during his time at Summit Partners. He held general partner positions for eight years prior to raising and investing a small angel fund called Blacksmith Capital, which became a seminal moment in his career of managing venture fund investments. Phil believes in risk-taking at the earliest stage and that startup founders benefit most when they are supported fully, both professionally and personally. Phil is a product of Oklahoma and Stanford alumni. He loves art, wine, and travel. His favorite place outside of the San Francisco Bay Area is London.
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About True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Phil Black
Co-Founder of True Ventures
Phil is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He learned the venture trade and met his future True Ventures co-founder during his time at Summit Partners. He held general partner positions for eight years prior to raising and investing a small angel fund called Blacksmith Capital, which became a seminal moment in his career of managing venture fund investments. Phil believes in risk-taking at the earliest stage and that startup founders benefit most when they are supported fully, both professionally and personally. Phil is a product of Oklahoma and Stanford alumni. He loves art, wine, and travel. His favorite place outside of the San Francisco Bay Area is London.
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About True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Jon Callaghan
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of True Ventures
Jon is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He has been in the venture capital business since 1991 and built three companies of his own. His first was Mountain Bike Outfitters, Inc., which he created at age 18. Jon started his venture career as an associate at Summit Partners and then joined Greenhouse, AOL’s venture capital investment group and incubator. He entered the internet market early by joining CMGI’s @Ventures group in 1996. Before founding True, Jon was a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners. First as a founder and now as an investor in early-stage technology companies, Jon’s direct startup experience has allowed him to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes. Jon’s career has been driven by a deep belief in the power of human creativity to improve our world. Jon received a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School. He was recently the Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. When he is not empowering the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, you can find him talking about airplanes or hanging out with his wife and four boys.
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About NexPrise Corporation, True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Jon Callaghan
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of True Ventures
Jon is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He has been in the venture capital business since 1991 and built three companies of his own. His first was Mountain Bike Outfitters, Inc., which he created at age 18. Jon started his venture career as an associate at Summit Partners and then joined Greenhouse, AOL’s venture capital investment group and incubator. He entered the internet market early by joining CMGI’s @Ventures group in 1996. Before founding True, Jon was a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners. First as a founder and now as an investor in early-stage technology companies, Jon’s direct startup experience has allowed him to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes. Jon’s career has been driven by a deep belief in the power of human creativity to improve our world. Jon received a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School. He was recently the Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. When he is not empowering the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, you can find him talking about airplanes or hanging out with his wife and four boys.
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About NexPrise Corporation, True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Owen Van Natta
Founder and Managing Partner of Prefix Capital
Owen Van Natta is currently Founder and Managing Partner of Prefix Capital, an early stage investment fund founded in 2019. Owen is also a Founder and Managing Partner at 415 Investments. Previously, Owen was the Executive Vice President of Business at Zynga. He was responsible for the company’s revenue strategy, corporate development, international expansion, and brand. Owen was also a member of Zynga’s Board of Directors. Before Zynga, Owen served as Chief Executive Officer of MySpace, where he was responsible for all aspects of the company’s strategic vision and the execution of its global business initiatives. Owen joined the MySpace team after serving as the Chief Executive Officer of Project Playlist, a music sharing website allowing users to search for music, create custom playlists, and share the content with friends. Prior to Project Playlist, Van Natta was the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, where he focused on revenue operations, business development, and strategic partnerships. Earlier in his career, Owen was Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon.com, where he managed global marketing programs and strategic partnerships. He was part of the founding team of A9.com, the Amazon.com search company, and was responsible for site operations and sponsored-link advertising. Owen holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
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About 415, Prefix Capital: Prefix Capital is an early-stage, deep-tech VC that invests in foundational technologies.
Byron Alsberg
Founder and General Partner of Prefix Capital
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About 415, Prefix Capital: Prefix Capital is an early-stage, deep-tech VC that invests in foundational technologies.
Calvin Ling
Founder and Principal of Prefix Capital
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About 415, Prefix Capital: Prefix Capital is an early-stage, deep-tech VC that invests in foundational technologies.
Daniel Friedland
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Goldcrest Capital
Daniel Friedland is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Goldcrest Capital.
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About Goldcrest Capital: Goldcrest is a venture capital fund that invests in private technology companies.
Anthony Schiller
Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of Green Bay Ventures
Led venture investments in Dropbox, Lyft, Spotify, DocuSign, MuleSoft and Xiaomi. Early investor with Kramlich in the world’s largest private nuclear fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy.
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About Green Bay Ventures: Green Bay Ventures (GBV) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most prominent families.
Richard Kramlich
Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of Green Bay Ventures
Dick Kramlich began his venture career in 1969 as a General Partner with Arthur Rock and Co. after nine years in general management as Manager of Financial Planning at the Kroger Co. and Investment Management as Executive Vice President at Gardner & Preston Moss Company in Boston. Since co-founding NEA in 1978, he has been involved in eight companies that have grown from start-up or near start-up stage to companies with market value in excess of $1 billion, including Juniper Networks, Ascend Communications (acquired by Lucent), ImmuneX (acquired by Amgen), Macromedia (acquired by Adobe), and Dallas Semiconductor (acquired by Maxim Integrated products). Dick was the first investor to invest in the Ethernet at 3Com with Bob Metcalfe and an early investor with John Simpson in balloon angioplasty at Advanced Cardiovascular Systems (acquired by Eli Lilly) as well as Forethought (acquired by Microsoft), the company that originated PowerPoint. Dick continues to work with start-ups such as Financial Engines, Force10 Networks, MaxiScale, Tabula, Visual Edge, Xoom, and Zhone. He recently joined the board of CITIC Pharmaceuticals in China and is also a director of Silicon Valley Bank. Dick has received four Lifetime Achievement Awards including awards from the National Venture Capital Association (he served as Chairman and President from 1992-93), the University of California- Haas School of Business, the Silicon Valley Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Program, and the Red Herring Magazine Award. He received an MBA from Harvard University and a BS in History from Northwestern University. Dick and his wife, Pamela, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. They are noted collectors of Media Art and founded the New Art Trust to foster best practices in the field in 1997. They have four adult offspring and five grandchildren; they enjoy hiking, traveling, tennis and swimming and are currently residing in Shanghai, China where Dick is assisting NEA’s China practice.
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About Green Bay Ventures: Green Bay Ventures (GBV) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most prominent families.
Ramtin Naimi
Founder & General Partner of Abstract Ventures
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About Abstract Ventures: Abstract Ventures is a sector agnostic venture investor in pre-seed, seed, and series A startup companies.
Philipp Stauffer
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Fyrfly Venture Partners
Philipp Stauffer is a co-founder and managing director at Fyrfly Venture Partners.
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About Containn, Fyrfly Venture Partners, Gmelius, rready: Fyrfly Venture Partners is a venture capital firm with a focus on data and intelligence.
Mitchell Kapor
Founder & Partner of Kapor Capital
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of [Lotus Development Corporation](/organization/lotus-development-corporation) and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is known as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist. Kapor has been the Chair of the [Mozilla](/organization/mozilla) Foundation since its inception in 2003. He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health. He also co-founded, and is on the board of, the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to fairness in education and workplaces. Kapor is also Chair of the Board of Directors of [Linden Lab](/organization/secondlife), a [San Francisco-based](/maps/city/San%2520Francisco) company which created the popular virtual world [Second Life](/product/second-life), and a member of the Advisory Board for the [Wikimedia Foundation](/organization/wikimedia-foundation). In 1990 Kapor’s new company On Technology introduced their new product On Location, an application designed for the Macintosh that contained an indexing system that permit quick retrieval and display of text on the Mac’s hard disk. “We think we’re being cagey by bringing it out on the Mac first,” Kapor said. “It’s a richer medium than MS-DOS, and if we have a hot product in the Mac market, it will be easier to get into the PC market.” In 2001, Kapor founded the Open Source Applications Foundation, where he is now working on Chandler, a modern personal information manager built using open source tools and methods. In 2006, Kapor founded his latest startup, [Foxmarks](/organization/foxmarks), based in San Francisco.
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About Kapor Capital, Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Center for Social Impact, Linden Lab, Lotus, Mitchell Kapor Foundation, Mitchell Kapor Foundation, SMASH | Level Playing Field Institute: Kapor Capital is an investment firm that invests in early-stage tech-enabled startups.
Freada Kapor Klein
Founder & Partner of Kapor Capital
As a Founding Partner at Kapor Capital, Freada invests in seed stage tech startups that create positive social impact by closing gaps of access, opportunity or outcome for low income communities and communities of color.
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About Kapor Capital, Project Include, SMASH | Level Playing Field Institute: Kapor Capital is an investment firm that invests in early-stage tech-enabled startups.
Gordon Ritter
Founder & General Partner of Emergence
Gordon Ritter is a Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital Partners. Prior to founding Emergence, he spent over 15 years founding and building companies which pioneered new markets including embedded web-based interfaces, server appliances, “On Demand” services for the SMB market and web-native application development. In 2003, Gordon led Emergence Capital’s first investment, in Salesforce.com. In 2008, Gordon invested in Industry Cloud pioneer Veeva Systems when the company had 25 employees and less than $2 million in revenue. He has played a key role in the company’s development (now a public company NYSE:VEEV) and he is currently Veeva’s Chairman. Gordon was named to the Forbes’ Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2007, 2012, 2014 and 2015. Prior to founding Emergence, Gordon was co-Founder and CEO of Software As Service, a web services platform company he created with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. Software As Service is the origin of Salesforce.com’s Salesforce1 platform. Prior to founding Software As Service, he ran the $3 billion IBM Global Small Business division, created as a result of IBM’s acquisition of his company, Whistle Communications in 1999. He was responsible for IBM’s launch partnership with Salesforce.com. Prior to IBM, Gordon was co-Founder and President of Whistle, a pioneering Internet appliance and web services platform. Gordon also co-founded Tribe Communications, a networking infrastructure company, and he was a VP of Capital Markets at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York. Gordon has a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University, where he rowed on the heavyweight crew team. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and four children. He enjoys a range of endurance sports and recently summited both Denali and Aconcagua, and completed a 250-mile trail run across Switzerland.
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About Emergence, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy: Emergence is a venture capital firm, investing in early and growth-stage cloud and SaaS visionaries that change the way the world works.
Connie Loizos
Founder & Editor of StrictlyVC
Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. She is currently the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series.
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About StrictlyVC, TechCrunch: StrictlyVC publishes a daily email that provides readers information related to venture capital firms, finance, and business investment.
Eric Bahn
General Partner & Co-Founder of Hustle Fund
Eric Bahn is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in software startups at the pre-seed and seed stages, backing founders who exhibit great execution and high velocity (aka, hustle). Previous to Hustle Fund, Eric was an angel investor and partner at 500 Startups. And prior to becoming a professional investor, he spent over a decade as an operator (Facebook, Instagram) and entrepreneur (Beat The GMAT, The Hustle). Eric draws from his product and growth experience to advise his founders in scaling their own enterprises. Eric is a native of Detroit, Michigan and first arrived to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University (BA, MA), which launched his career into software and startups. Eric is happily married with two kids.
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About Hustle Con, Hustle Fund: Hustle Fund is a seed fund that seeks to invest in early-stage startups.
Elizabeth Yin
Co-Founder & General Partner of Hustle Fund
Elizabeth Yin is co-founder and CEO of LaunchBit. She frequently speaks at conferences and events and has previously spoken at Women 2.0 partner events, Web 2.0, Lean Startup events, TechStars, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Babson among others. Prior to LaunchBit, she built profitable niche websites and previously worked as a product marketing manager at Google. She holds a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
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About Hustle Fund: Hustle Fund is a seed fund that seeks to invest in early-stage startups.
Cathy Han
Founder and CEO of Levro
Cathy Han is Founder & CEO of 42 Technologies. She also the founder and CEO at Levro.
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About Levro: Levro is a financial technology company.
Jessica McKellar
Founder and CTO of Pilot
Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle. Jessica is also a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America’s Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2013.
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About Pilot: Pilot is a platform that offers bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing businesses.
Waseem Daher
Founder & CEO of Pilot
Waseem Daher is a Founder and CEO at Pilot.
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About Pilot: Pilot is a platform that offers bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing businesses.
Tammy Camp
Founder & CEO of Stronghold
Tammy is the CEO of Stronghold, an API platform that creates virtual payment networks that enable instant settlement and interoperability between legacy and new payment networks. Tammy served as the first Head of Growth at Stellar, helping the network grow to 4 million users in its first two months. A former partner at accelerator 500 Startups, she invested in portfolio companies and ran the growth and marketing curriculum for its flagship Silicon Valley location. She is a graduate of Singularity University’s GSP11 in Exponential Technologies at NASA Ames where she first learned about Bitcoin from legendary cryptographer Ralph Merkle.
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About Action Factory, Stronghold: Stronghold creates virtual payment networks that give developers access legacy and next-generation payment networks through a simple API.
Deepak Rao
Co-Founder and CEO of X1 Card
Deepak Rao is a Co-Founder and CEO at X1 Card. He was the Group Product Manager at Twitter before that.
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About ThriveCash, X1 Card: The smartest credit card ever made.
Vincent Diallo
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Interlace Ventures
Vincent Diallo serves as the Managing Partner at Interlace Ventures and Bleu Capital. Diallo served as the Chief Financial Officer at Sinodis (Shanghai) from 2011 to 2015. He worked for 7 years at Deloitte. Diallo has cross industry exposure from manufacturing to distribution.
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About Bleu Capital, Interlace Ventures: Interlace Ventures is an early-stage and seed-stage fund investing in the Future of Commerce.
Kenneth Lin
Founder and CEO of Credit Karma
Kenneth started Credit Karma in 2007 to offer free credit scores and bring transparency and simplicity to the credit industry – an industry that was built around and had long prioritized banks above consumers. He has guided the company from a small team of three to a team of several hundred employees who are disrupting consumer finance, serving millions of people. Kenneth spent his early career working with mission-driven businesses like Upromise and Eloan, and he was inspired to build Credit Karma – a platform where consumers can manage their full financial lives with more certainty, supported by a unique business model that creates genuine, organic value by reducing marketing inefficiency for banks and empowering consumers with information. Like LinkedIn has done for professional identity and Facebook for social lives, Kenneth’s vision is that one day Credit Karma can create a simple way for Americans to manage their financial identities. Kenneth also founded Multilytics Marketing in 2006 and has a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Boston University.
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About Credit Karma: Credit Karma offers a range of tools and personalized recommendations designed to help customers make the most of their money.
Asya Bradley
Founder & COO of First Boulevard
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About First Boulevard: First Boulevard is a fintech startup that aims to address the generational wealth gap for Black Americans.
Philip O’Connor
Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Blackhorn Ventures
Phil is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Blackhorn Ventures, an early stage venture fund investing in technology that increases the resource efficiency of essential industries. Prior to Blackhorn, Phil was co-founder and CEO of PAX Pure, an industrial water treatment company. For the past five years Philip has been an investor and advisor focusing on improving natural resource use.
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About Blackhorn Ventures, Conservation International: Blackhorn Ventures is an early stage venture firm that invests in companies using cutting edge engineering to improve resource productivity.
Jon Lerner
Co-Founder and CEO of CoinTracker
Co-Founder and CEO of CoinTracker.
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About CoinTracker: CoinTracker is a portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency that enables seamless cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance.
Chandan Lodha
Co-Founder of CoinTracker
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About CoinTracker: CoinTracker is a portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency that enables seamless cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance.
Roger Lee
Co-Founder of Human Interest
Roger Lee is the co-founder/CEO of Human Interest, a modern, paperless 401(k) provider with automated investment advice built in. Businesses of any size can set up a 401(k) plan entirely online in a matter of minutes, and ongoing administration is completely automated. Previously, Roger was the co-founder/president of Thunder, a startup that automates and scales online advertising across devices, formats, and volume. Thunder works with over 100 media companies and agencies and has been used to design over 100,000 ads to date. The company was named one of the Forbes’ 100 Most Promising Companies in America and was described as “An Ad Engine to Put Mad Men Out of Business” by the New York Times.
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About Human Interest: Human Interest helps employees of small and medium-sized businesses save for retirement.
David Vivero
Co-Founder & CEO of Amino
David Vivero is co-founder and CEO at Amino, guiding the vision and direction of the company and its personalized, consumer-centric, and data-driven approach to health care. Previously, David was VP of Rentals at Zillow, responsible for the world’s largest online rental marketplace. He arrived at Zillow after the company acquired RentJuice, which he cofounded in 2008. David is also a General Partner at Red Swan Ventures, a seed investment fund that has supported Warby Parker, Birchbox, AltSchool, and dozens of other high growth companies. A Forbes “30 under 30” entrepreneur, David has a BA and MBA from Harvard University.
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About Amino, Red Swan Ventures: Amino is an all-in-one healthcare financial wellness platform for employees.
Bill Elmore
General Partner and Founder of Foundation Capital
With a combinationof venture and operating experience that cultivated a deep understanding about the challenges an organization faces on a daily basis, Bill founded Foundation Capital in 1995 with the purpose of helping entrepreneurs build strong organizations from the ground up. He has always operated on the belief that substantial, sustainable companies are the result of matching insight—whether about technology or market opportunity—with the right entrepreneurand management team. Prior to Foundation, Bill spent eight years as a General Partner at Inman & Bowman. Previous roles include president of Visual Engineering, as well as a variety of marketing management positions, at Hewlett-Packard. As former director and past presidentof the Western Association for Venture Capitalists, and past director of the National Venture Capital Association, Bill continues to be actively involved in defining, serving, and representing the interests of the venture capital and private equity industries. Equally passionate about his philanthropy work, Bill serves on the Advisory Council at Stanford Business School and is a board member of the Eastside College Preparatory School. Bill currently sits on the board ofdirectors of Biz360, CloudShield, Helpstream, Quartics, SpringCM, TeaLeaf Technology, Venafi, and XMOS Semiconductor, and was previously on the boards of Atheros Communications and WindRiver Systems. Bill holds a BSEEand MSEE from Purdue University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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About Foundation Capital: Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm made up of former entrepreneurs and helps companies and businesses grow.
David J. La Placa
Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Intellectus Partners, LLC
David J. La Placa is the Chief Executive Officer | Founder at Intellectus Partners, LLC.
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About Forbes San Francisco Business Council, HintBox.ai, Intellectus Partners, LLC, Orbital Insight: Intellectus is an exclusive, private MFO for Entrepreneurs offering Wealth Creation&Preservation,Investment Mgmt, Venture & startup Advisory
Jay Casey
President & Co-Founder of Intellectus Partners, LLC
Experienced investor and financial professional working in various roles; including Venture & Private Equity investing, Portfolio Management, Trading, and Client Relationship Management. Experienced investor in Fixed Income, Equities, Commodities, Hedge Funds, Private Equity, and Private companies. Previous experience with First Union, Manulife Financial, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, and currently Intellectus Partners.
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About Intellectus Partners, LLC: Intellectus is an exclusive, private MFO for Entrepreneurs offering Wealth Creation&Preservation,Investment Mgmt, Venture & startup Advisory
June Ou
COO, Co-Founder of Figure
Founder and CEO of CCO Solutions, a firm that provided outsourced middle and back office solutions to the hedge fund industry. Co-founder, VP of Product Management and Engineering at Finaplex, a leader in wealth management solutions (sold to Broadridge NYSE: BR), responsible for both enterprise and cloud solutions. MS from UC Santa Cruz; MS from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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About Figure, Provenance Blockchain: Figure is a financial services company leveraging blockchain technology.
Michael Cagney
Co-Founder & CEO of Figure
As the CEO, Chairman and co-founder of SoFi, Mike Cagney leads corporate strategy and development at SoFi—bringing decades of experience in the financial industry to his leadership of the company. He’s held a Senior Vice President role at Wells Fargo, where he was head trader for the proprietary trading and financial products group. Mike is also co-founder and a managing member of Cabezon Investment Group, a global macro hedge fund, in addition to serving as a non-executive Chairman of ReFlow. Before Cabezon, Mike founded, was CEO and then Vice Chairman and Chief Architect, of Finaplex, a leader in wealth management software that was sold to Broadridge (NYSE: BR). While overseeing SoFi’s overall direction, Mike makes a daily point to interact with SoFi’s member base, now more than 260,000 members. In addition to reading and responding to member feedback, he hosts SoFi member dinners at his San Francisco home to better know our customers and understand their financial goals. Mike holds an M.S., Management degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Sloan Fellow. He also holds a MS in applied economics from UC Santa Cruz.
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About Figure, Provenance Blockchain: Figure is a financial services company leveraging blockchain technology.
Parul Gujral
Founder and CEO of Snowball Money
Parul Gujral is the founder and CEO of Snowball Money.
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About Snowball Money: Snowball Money operates as a crypto investment automation platform that provides access to professionally curated portfolios.
Soul Htite
Founder & Executive Chairman of Dianrong
Soul Htite is the founder and CEO of Dianrong. Prior to co-founding Dianrong in 2012, Soul co-founded Lending Club, the world’s largest and benchmarking financial technology company. He served as the Head of Technology until 2011. Soul led all the design and development efforts of Lending Club’s award winning online lending platform. Soul spent the earlier part of his career building enterprise software at Oracle Corporation. His focus was in real-time online services and system design for high availability and fault tolerance. Soul holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Université de Montréal. Specialties: entrepreneurship, internet, software, product design, innovation, creativity, product development, startups, investment
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About Dianrong, Upgrade: Dianrong is an online marketplace lending company that uses technology to transform the way China is financed to help enrich people’s lives.
Armaan Ali
Co-Founder & CEO of Human Capital
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About Human Capital: Human Capital is a venture firm for engineers.
Paul Hsiao
Co-Founder & General Partner of Canvas Ventures
Paul joined forces with Rebecca Lynn and Gary Little as a founding member of Canvas Ventures in 2014, with the purpose of creating the type of boutique firm he would have liked to work with as an entrepreneur himself, one where every investment is meaningful and where he can spend his time working with his founders to scale their business. At Canvas, Paul’s investments include eporta, Fluxx Labs, Kidbox, MasonHub, Flowspace, Roofstock, Shoreline Software, Skyflow, Thrive Global, Transfix, and Zola. He has also pioneered the firm’s work in co-creation— helping start new companies by match-making domain experts with market opportunity in areas ripe for disruption. A former partner at NEA, Paul spent ten years helping companies scale from garage-scale startups to IPO and acquisition. Paul found that he loved the venture business, and he had an innate curiosity to learn about how others built meaningful companies. While at NEA, he worked alongside companies including Salesforce (CRM), Tableau Software, Coursera, Spreadtrum Communications, Workday (WDAY), Upwork, Gaikai (SNE), Boingo Wireless (WIFI), SMIC, and many others. Paul is an entrepreneur at heart. He immigrated with his parents from Taipei in junior high. Contrary to his parent’s wishes for him to become a doctor, he leveraged his mechanical and biomedical engineering degrees from MIT, where he launched startup in the medical device space tackling open-heart surgery, and his MBA from HBS, where he launched a startup in the network security space called Mazu Networks. Paul financed the early days of Mazu on credit cards, camped outside of customer prospects and venture firms in minivan rentals, and got his break when he attracted financing support from Greylock, Matrix and Benchmark Capital. Mazu was a pioneer in network security built from technology developed at MIT. Early adopters of Mazu’s proprietary DDoS-security platform, which was eventually acquired by Riverbed Technology, included Yahoo, eBay and CNN, and Paul is proud to say that the engineering team and underlying software paved the foundation later for Meraki
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About Canvas Ventures, Roofstock, Zola: Canvas Ventures is an early-stage investment firm that specializes on fintech, healthtech, marketplaces, and data infrastructure.
Doug Higgins
Co-Founder & Partner of Sapphire
Doug is a co-founder of Sapphire Ventures and a lead investor for Sapphire Sport. He currently manages the firm’s investments in Convercent, Jibe, Localytics, Phoenix Labs, Return Path, Tonal, and Spring Mobile Solutions. Previously, he worked on investments including LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft), Paytm, DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU) Fitbit (NYSE: FIT), Square (NYSE: SQ), and Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora). He is focused on investing in early-stage technology companies at the intersection of sports, media and disruptive technologies. Doug has worked for a venture-backed startup as well as for one of his entrepreneurial heroes, George Lucas. He launched the business development group for Lucasfilm, creating strategic partnerships for Star Wars prequels. Doug started his career in investment banking, with a focus on technology, at Robertson Stephens. More recently, he managed the Intel 64 fund at Intel Capital. Doug has lived in Madrid, Spain; Santiago, Chile; and Walker, Minnesota. He graduated with a bachelor’s from Duke University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, both with high honors.
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About Sapphire: Sapphire is a venture capital firm that partners with visionary teams and venture funds to build companies.
David Hartwig
Co-Founder & Partner of Sapphire
Dave is a co-founder and managing director of Sapphire Ventures. He has been working in venture capital since 1997 where he started in inside sales. Dave’s excitement for venture investing springs from getting to work with people that are smarter than him and getting a preview on new technologies and businesses changing the shape of just about everything. His interests are wide ranging and his experiences include: analytics, digital health and wellness, enterprise SaaS, FinTech/FinServices, infrastructure, IoT and security. Dave is currently a member of the board (director or observer) at Kaltura, LeanData, Livongo, Phoenix Labs and Reonomy. Dave’s previous investments at Sapphire include: 23andMe, Alfresco (acquired by THL Partners), Datria (acquired by Intelligrated), FitBit (NYSE: FIT), Lithium Technologies (acquired by Vista Equity Partners), PayScale (acquired by Warburg Pincus), Ping Identity (acquired by Vista Equity Partners), Qumu (NASDAQ: QUMU), Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora), Tradewind Markets, Tremor Video (NYSE: TLRA). Prior to joining Sapphire Ventures in 2006, Dave helped start the tech venture capital team within American Capital and was a member of the communications investing team at Battery Ventures from 1997-2004. He began his career at Deloitte Consulting where he worked on large-scale software rollouts and the supporting network and process redesigns within technology and healthcare focused clients. Dave has a BSE in operations research from Princeton and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He’s interested in hearing about the best book you’ve read recently.
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About Sapphire: Sapphire is a venture capital firm that partners with visionary teams and venture funds to build companies.
Scott Stanford
Co-Founder and Partner of ACME Capital
Scott Stanford is a Co-Founder and Partner at ACME Capital. He has been focused on the internet/technology sector for over 25 years as an advisor, operator, and investor. Prior to founding ACME in 2018, he was a co-founder of Sherpa Capital. Scott co-headed Goldman Sachs’s Global Internet Investment Banking business in San Francisco for 12 years where he advised clients on $80 billion of equity and debt financings and strategic transactions and was deeply involved in investments in technology-enabled companies such as Facebook, Uber, DST/Mail.ru, Demand Media, LinkedIn, Palantir, iCrossing, and Square. His client coverage responsibility included Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Groupon, Zillow, Airbnb, Uber, and many other established and emerging technology-enabled companies. Prior to rejoining Goldman in 2004, Scott was an early employee of LookSmart, helping build the company from a start-up in 1999 to a publicly-traded NASDAQ company. From 1996 to 1998, while earning his MBA, Scott coded prototype applications for two startup ideas, one focusing on community service and the other focusing on automating and prototyping core financial analyses. He spent a summer during business school as an Associate at General Atlantic Partners focused on technology venture capital. Prior to business school, Scott was a Financial Analyst with Goldman Sachs’s Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Investment Banking Group. He began his Goldman career in the Fixed Income Group from 1993 to 1995 in New York. During this time, he developed software applications as well as structured and marketed Interest Rate Swaps and Options for the firm’s municipal clients. Scott grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. As an early adopter of technology, he taught himself to code at age 13, built and ran a dial-up BBS, taught computer courses, started a personal computer consulting business, and developed a robotics exhibit for the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Scott also earned his Pilot’s License at the age of 17. Scott received his A.B. with Honors from Harvard College (Social Studies) and M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
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About ACME Capital: ACME Capital invests in breakthrough technologies that fuel platform shifts and disruptive business models that capitalize on new platforms.
Hany Nada
Co-Founder and Partner of ACME Capital
Hany Nada is a Co-Founder and Partner at ACME Capital. He is a trusted resource to the public and private company CEOs and management teams and has served as a long-term partner to more than 150 companies over the past two decades, advising them on the global market and business development, customer introductions, and M&A/IPO guidance across US, European, and Asian markets. Prior to founding ACME in 2018, Hany was a Co-Founder and Partner at GGV Capital in 2000 where he pioneered a one-team approach to create a cohesive culture across the firm’s US and China offices. Hany made GGV’s first investment in China and served as a Managing Director at the firm from 2000 to October 2016. He remained a Venture Partner from November 2016 to 2018. Over the course of his career, Hany has made a significant number of successful investments, including Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), Endeca (acquired by Oracle), Kintana (acquired by Mercury Interactive), and Xfire (acquired by Viacom), Tudou (NASDAQ- TUDO later acquired by Youku/Alibaba), Vocera Communications (NASDAQ- VCRA), and Heptagon (acquired by AMS). Hany currently serves on the board of directors of DraftKings, Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), Phoenix Labs, and Houzz. Before founding GGV Capital, Hany spent ten years on Wall Street as a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co., specializing in internet software and infrastructure. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota where he earned a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in political science. Board Member: DraftKings, Glu, Houzz, Phoenix Labs, Wild Tangent Former Board Member: Account, BandPage, Endeca, Heptagon, Kintana, OneWave, Tudou, Turbine, Vocera, Xfire
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About ACME Capital: ACME Capital invests in breakthrough technologies that fuel platform shifts and disruptive business models that capitalize on new platforms.
Asha Jadeja
Founder of Motwani Jadeja Foundation
Asha founded Dot Edu Ventures in March 2000 to fund innovative technologies emerging from top US universities. Among her many investments are Bytemobile, Kaltix (now Google), Jareva (now Veritas), and Mimosa Systems. Alongside her career in venture capital Asha founded and ran as CEO iScale Inc, a peered networking company for distributing large file content across the internet using proprietary technology. Before iScale Asha was an angel investor and advisor in various silicon valley startups. Asha studied civil engineering for undergrad in India and transitioned into urban planning and policy studies for graduate studies at USC, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. She held several research and analyst positions at multinational agencies such as the United Nations’ Transnationals Corporation and the World Bank while pursuing graduate studies. Her civil engineering and urban planning work included projects such as the Los Angeles Metro Rail.
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About Dot Edu Ventures, Motwani Jadeja Foundation, Various: Motwani Jadeja Foundation is a not-for-profit global venture fund that supports and empowers entrepreneurs to enable exponential change.
Paul Madera
Co-Founder & MD of Meritech Capital Partners
Paul Madera is a graduate of the USAF Academy and is currently Managing Director at Meritech Capital Partners, a $3.1 billion venture capital fund he co-founded in 1999. He currently invests in private technology companies in the SaaS, storage, e-commerce, financial, and medical device sectors. Over the past 12 years, he has led Meritech’s investments into several of the most successful tech companies of the era including 2Wire, BlueArc, Dealer Socket, Facebook, Force10 Networks, Glaukos, IntraLase, Riverbed Technology, and Salesforce.com. He is consistently listed in the top tier of the annual Forbes “Midas List” of venture capital investors. Prior to Meritech, Paul was Managing Director of Private Equity at Montgomery Securities/Banc of America where he and his group advised technology and consumer-based startups in raising capital. He began his career in finance as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York. Before entering the private sector, he served in the United States Air Force as an F-16 Instructor Pilot based in South Korea, Spain, and Utah. He also spent a tour at the Pentagon as a member of the Air Force Liaison Office where he interfaced with Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Paul holds an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and B.S. in Political Science from United States Air Force Academy.
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About Meritech Capital Partners: Meritech Capital provides late-stage venture capital to technology companies.
Mike Gordon
Co-Founder & MD of Meritech Capital Partners
Mike Gordon was a founder of Meritech in 1999. He currently focuses on the communications infrastructure and applications, mobile, datacenter and clean technology sectors. Mike has been directly involved with BigBand Networks (ARRS), Broadsoft (BSFT), Calix Networks (CALX), Corvis (CORV), Cyan (CYNI), FiberTower (FTWR), Good Technology, NextG Networks (CCI acquisition-pending), Presidio Solutions (acquired by American Securities), Omneon Networks (HLIT), Sourcefire (FIRE), Tele Atlas (acquired by TomTom), Tremor Video (TRMR) and Vonage (VG). Mike joined Meritech Capital Partners from Deutsche Banc Alex Brown where he was a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst focusing on communications infrastructure. Mike was the research analyst during the equity financings of Ciena, Broadcom, and JDS Uniphase, among others, and was recognized as a two-time Wall Street Journal All Star Analyst. Prior to joining Deutsche Banc Alex Brown, Mike worked at Montgomery Securities in research and Salomon Brothers in investment banking.
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About Meritech Capital Partners: Meritech Capital provides late-stage venture capital to technology companies.
Rob Ward
Co-Founder & Managing Director of Meritech Capital Partners
Rob co-founded Meritech in 1999. His current areas of investment interest include Big Data, cloud computing, Saas, security and online consumer services. Rob led Meritech’s successful investments in Acclarent (JNJ), BigFix (IBM), Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD), Counterpane (BT), Fortinet (FTNT), Greenplum (EMC), Imperva (IMPV), Netezza (IBM), NetSuite (N), PopCap Games (ERTS), Quigo (AOL), Reliant (SLTM) and Zipcar (ZIP). Prior to Meritech, Rob was a principal in the Private Equity Group at Montgomery Securities, and worked in the New York and San Francisco Corporate Finance Departments at Smith Barney.
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About Eastside College Preparatory School, Meritech Capital Partners: Meritech Capital provides late-stage venture capital to technology companies.
Masha Drokova
Founder and General Partner of Day One Ventures
Masha is the Founder and General Partner at Day One Ventures. Before launching Day One, she was an angel investor and founder of a PR studio that worked with companies like Houzz, HotelTonight, Gett, and Toptal. She was named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 List, and as a Top 50 PR Pro in Tech by Business Insider. Masha has a deep love for our earth and serves as an advisor to Oceanic, a non-profit using VR to bring attention to issues impacting our oceans
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About Day One Ventures: Day One Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that backs customer-obsessed companies and spearheads their communications.
David Fisher
Co-Founder & Managing Partner of 9Yards Capital
David focuses on investments in the enterprise and consumer segments. Previously, David worked at the private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners and the investment bank JP Morgan & Chase. He is an alum of Stanford GSB, and graduated summa cum laude from The University of Pennsylvania.
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About 9Yards Capital: 9YC is a global investment firm that invests in tech enabled consumer and enterprise fintech and logistics companies at the growth stage.
Theo Osborne
Co-Founder & Managing Partner of 9Yards Capital
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About 9Yards Capital: 9YC is a global investment firm that invests in tech enabled consumer and enterprise fintech and logistics companies at the growth stage.
Vishal Vasishth
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Obvious Ventures
Vishal is the Managing Director of Obvious Ventures. Board Observer at Tomorrow Health, Galileo & Corvus Insurance.
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About Devoted Health, Good Eggs, Myro, Obvious Ventures, The Aspen Institute: Obvious Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in the early and growth stages.
James Joaquin
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Obvious Ventures
James has over twenty-five years of experience building and leading technology companies from early stage company ideation to global market leadership. He helped create entirely new categories such as online photography, web-based calendaring and the Personal Digital Assistant. James is the former CEO of Ofoto, Xoom, and Xmarks. James is the co-founder of Obvious Ventures, investing in #worldpositive startups that combine profit and purpose.
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About Breezeworks, Obvious Ventures: Obvious Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in the early and growth stages.
John Cadeddu
Co-Founder, General Partner of Corner Ventures
Prior to joining DAG in 1999, John was a Managing Director at Amsterdam Pacific, an investment bank specializing in media and telecommunications. While at Amsterdam Pacific Corporation, John worked with BBU Mezzanine Fund I and BBU Mezzanine Fund II, where he sourced, supported and exited mezzanine investments across a number of industries. Previously, John worked at Octel Communications (now Lucent Technologies) and Tandem Computers (now H-P) in marketing and strategic planning roles He also worked at JP Morgan in both capital markets and corporate finance. John received a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. John led DAG II’s investments into Raza Microelectronics, Agami, Tropos Networks, Qlusters, Centrata, Kovio, Pedestal Networks, Trapeze Networks, Topspin Communications and Entrisphere. He also serves on the board at Trapeze Networks, Qlusters, Pedestal Networks and Entrisphere.
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About Corner Ventures, DAG Ventures, Duff, Ackerman and Goodrich: Corner Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in the B and C rounds of promising startups.
Samir Vasavada
Co-Founder & CEO of Vise
Samir Vasavada is the Co-Founder & CEO of Vise. Vise is a venture-backed startup using Artificial Intelligence to revolutionize Portfolio Construction and Management for RIAs and Family Offices. Vise allows investment advisors the ability to provide tailored financial advice to each of their clients powered by proprietary Portfolio Intelligence making them smarter and more efficient. Vise AI is backed by Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Bling Capital, Great Oaks Ventures, and the Wharton School of Business amongst other investors. In his respective position, Samir is responsible for Operations, Business Development and managing a team of Engineers and Ph.D. AI and Quantitative Finance Researchers. Prior to Vise AI, Samir founded NYX Group, a technologies firm specializing in Marketing and Software Development. He oversaw an international team of developers and projects. Samir sits on advisory boards for several SaaS startups as well as a fellow at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He is also a consultant with GLG and Coleman Research amongst his own personal portfolio. He has consulted with firms such as UBS, BCG, Mass Mutual, Deutsche Bank and others on Artificial Intelligence in Portfolio Management and Infrastructure in the AI space. Alongside consulting, Samir actively speaks on AI & Fintech at conferences around the globe such as Money20/20, InVest, Raymond James Institutional Investors, AI World and more.
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About Vise: Vise is an AI-driven portfolio management platform for financial advisors.
Benjamin Black
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Akkadian Ventures
Benjamin Black is the Co-founder & Chief Investment Officer of Akkadian Ventures, LLC. An eleven-year veteran of the private equity space, Ben co-founded Akkadian with Peter Smith, to specialize in offering early liquidity to entrepreneurs, early employees, and investors in successful private companies. In 2011, Ben co-founded, with Chris Tarr, the Momentum Index (www.momentumindex.com) which tracks the top performing private venture-backed companies. With the understanding that it often takes more than ten years for entrepreneurs to achieve liquidity, Akkadian Ventures created unique deal structures for entrepreneurs and employees to generate liquidity and diversify their risk by selling or leveraging private stock. Focusing exclusively on purchasing small stakes in successful growing companies, Akkadian helps innovators manage risk and reap financial reward during that hard climb to the top. Among many, Ben has managed notable investments in RocketFuel, Splunk, DocuSign, Lithium Technologies, Cloudmark, Ooyala, Citizenhawk, The Villa, Automattic and Telephia. Ben co-founded New Cycle Capital with Josh Becker to bring socially responsible investing to sectors like clean energy and social finance with angel investments in Renewable Funding and Opower. He spent nearly four years at Seattle venture capital firm Maveron, focusing on consumer businesses such as Allconnect (Inc. 500 winner). Prior to Maveron, he spent 3 years at private equity firm Rosewood Capital where he focused on branded consumer products and services, including Under Armour. As an entrepreneur, Ben was part of the founding team at Harris Interactive, which was a pioneer in Internet-based market research. During Ben’s tenure, the company completed a successful IPO and generated $200M in revenue. Ben received his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and his JD at the Cornell School of Law. He is the author of a book on American Politics titled ‘The Politics of American Discontent’ which can be bought on Amazon for $0.12.
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About Akkadian Ventures: Akkadian Ventures is a direct secondary investment firm that offers liquidity to early employees and investors of venture-backed businesses.
Jim Kim
Founder & General Partner of Builders VC
Jim Kim began his career with GE Structured Finance and subsequently moved to GE’s Energy Financial Services Division where he worked on project financing for renewable energy projects. As a founding partner of the Energy Technology Ventures group, Jim invested in A123Systems, China High Speed Transmission, Ocean Power Delivery, and several later-stage companies across diverse cleantech sectors. Jim then joined CMEA Capital as a senior partner in the Energy & Materials practice. There he collaborated with entrepreneurs from A123Systems, Foro Energy, and a number of university spinouts. Most recently, Jim Kim was a partner at Khosla Ventures, where he led seed investments in companies like Varentec, Arcanum, and Avogy, and later-stage investments in companies like Ciris Energy. Jim received undergraduate degrees in computer science, electrical engineering and political science from MIT, where he also founded an Internet infrastructure start-up at the height of the technology bubble. He holds an MBA and a master’s in quantitative methods from Columbia University. When he’s not spending his free time making wine or practicing hung gar kung fu, Jim teaches green energy and entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, and conducts research with a professor at the Columbia Earth Institute. Jim hopes to see the U.S. National Soccer team win the World Cup in his lifetime.
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About Builders VC, Formation 8: Builders VC is an early-stage VC focused on investing where technology meets new business models to modernize antiquated industries.
Alexey Kalinichenko
Co-Founder and CTO of Step
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About Step: Step is a financial services company that builds mobile-based banking for teenagers.
CJ MacDonald
Founder & CEO of Step
CJ is a serial entrepreneur and has over 15 years experience launching early stage startups across multiple industries. He has demonstrated an exceptional ability throughout his career to bring innovative products to market, attract large clients and deliver rapid sales expansion in emerging technology verticals. Currently CJ is the Founder and CEO Step, a next generation banking platform. Prior to Step, CJ was the co-founder of Gyft (Acquired by First Data), led Sales and Business Development initiatives at Luminate (Acquired by Yahoo) and was an early executive at Liveops. CJ is a graduate from Wesleyan University and lives in the Bay Area.
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About Step: Step is a financial services company that builds mobile-based banking for teenagers.
Brion B. Applegate
Founder of Spectrum Equity
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About Spectrum Equity: Spectrum Equity, a private equity firm, provides capital and strategic support to internet, software, and information services companies.
Brian Koo
Founder and GP of Formation 8
Brian Koo is the Founder & GP at Formation 8.
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About Formation 8, Formation Group: Formation 8, a California-based technology investment firm, focuses on seed, early, and later stage venture investments.
Bon Woong Koo
Founder & GP of Formation 8
Brian Koo is a founding member of Formation 8. He currently serves on the boards of AKAStudy, Illumio (observer), Kidaptive, and Learnsprout. He was previously a board observer for Oculus. Prior to Formation 8, Brian established InnovationHub, which helped LS Group – his family business – manage relationships and find investment opportunities in energy and technology sectors, specifically in the areas of smart grids, electric vehicles and next generation wireless technologies. Prior to InnovationHub, Brian co-founded and served as a managing partner of Harbor Pacific Capital, and advised a number of companies in the online education and media space before that. Brian began his entrepreneurial career with a start-up venture that involved a wireless technology and social networking service. Brian received a B.A. with honors in Economics from Stanford University, and received an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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About Formation 8: Formation 8, a California-based technology investment firm, focuses on seed, early, and later stage venture investments.
Colin Walsh
CEO and Co-Founder of Varo Money
Colin Walsh is the brainchild behind Varo and its mission to revolutionize banking. Colin and his team founded Varo to create a better way of banking that empowers consumers to be more in control of their financial lives. He believes too many people are not well served by the big banks, which have created a significant opportunity for innovators. Varo is building a seamless retail banking solution that addresses big pain points for the ~20 million millennial Americans (ages 22-36) who are creditworthy yet still manage their money on a month-to-month basis. These Americans are often one unexpected event away from running into financial trouble, which can prevent them from building savings and investing their money around longer-term goals. Varo has designed a product that allows its customers to see their full financial picture, understand how they’re spending, and access lending and savings products to smooth cash flow and build wealth over time. Varo’s frictionless, mobile-first banking solution does not charge overdraft fees or punitive interest rates, thereby eliminating the harmful fees traditional banks rely on to make money from this large segment of consumers. As proven in other industries, innovators who introduce products people love at lower cost often create massive disruption. We believe the time for such a change in retail banking has arrived. Understanding banking and how people manage their money is a vital part of developing such a new mobile banking platform. Walsh is perfectly positioned to do this with more than 25 years of retail financial services industry experience. His knowledge and expertise is guiding the Varo team to deliver a platform that allows users to effortlessly cover their expenses and build their wealth, so they can get on with their lives.
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About Varo Money: Varo is a digital bank that offers innovative, premium banking services wrapped in inclusive design.
Geoff Yang
Co-Founder & Partner of Redpoint
Geoff Yang is a Founding Partner of Redpoint Ventures. Prior to founding Redpoint, Geoff was a general partner with IVP, a firm he joined in 1987.Geoff emphasizes investments in consumer media and infrastructure. His media and advertising investments include Ask Jeeves, Clicker, Efficient Frontier, Excite, Machinima, MySpace and TiVo. His networking investments include Calix, Foundry Networks, Juniper Networks, MMC Networks and Wellfleet. He currently serves on the Board of Bluefin, BranchOut, Formspring, Gaia Online, Gravity, Machinima, Oodle, Pinwheel and Scribd.In addition, Geoff was founding director or previously led investments in Agile Networks, Applied Digital Access, Centillion, Collabra, Crescendo, Golfweb, JotSpot, Netcore Systems, Netlink, Promatory, Rapid City, Shasta Networks and Whitetree. Geoff is currently on the Advisory Council for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and previously served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) as well as a Director of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and President of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists (WAVC). Prior to joining IVP, Geoff was an Associate with First Century Partners and a Marketing Representative at IBM Corp.Geoff holds a B.S.E. in Engineering from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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About Franklin Templeton Investments, Performance Health Sciences, Redpoint, Rock The Bells, Tastemade, United States Olympic Committee: Redpoint Ventures partners with visionary founders to create new markets or redefine existing ones at the seed, early, and growth stages.
Travis Bryant
Partner and Head of Founder Experience of Redpoint
Travis is an EiR focused on Enterprise companies. Prior to joining Redpoint, Travis was head of Customer Growth at Front, after spending 5 years building the global Sales organization at Optimizely, the world’s most popular experimentation platform. During his time at Optimizely, the company grew from from $7 to >$90M in ARR, 40 to 400 colleagues, and from 1 to 6 offices. Travis spent his formative years at Salesforce from 2006-2012 in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. His path to sales leadership was not an obvious one, having started as an Oracle DBA at Chevron before recognizing he was a mediocre developer and moving to more customer-facing roles. Travis also runs Saleshuman Consulting Group, an organization focused on helping technology companies build the principles and frameworks that generate scalable growth and high-performance culture. He has invested personally in YipYap, Starcity, Kettle & Fire, and Cloz.io. Travis lives in San Francisco with his wife, eagerly awaiting the hurricane of their first child arriving in the new year. He is super excited, and kinda panicked.
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About Redpoint: Redpoint Ventures partners with visionary founders to create new markets or redefine existing ones at the seed, early, and growth stages.
Peter Svennilson
Managing Partner and Founder of The Column Group
Peter Svennilson is the Managing Partner and Founder of The Column Group, a biotech VC fund based in San Francisco. He has 23 years of experience in corporate finance, investment banking, and venture capital. He was the founder and a partner of Three Crowns Capital, a leading backer of a new generation of US biotechnology companies. He helped found companies such as Rosetta, PTC, Tercica, and Somalogic. Over the past 12 years he has helped finance and develop biotech companies, including Tularik, Sunesis, Chemocentryx, Infinity, AVEO, Rinat, and FivePrime. He is currently a Board Director of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, Aragon Pharmaceuticals and PTC Therapeutics and has served on the Boards of Directors of several other biotechnology companies, including Rosetta, Somalogic, and ChemoCentryx. Before founding Three Crowns Capital, he was the Associate Managing Director of European Investment Banking Origination at Nomura Securities in London. He is currently a trustee for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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About Nomura Holdings, The Column Group, Three Crowns Capital: The Column Group is a venture capital firm dedicated to developing biotechnology companies.
Tory Patterson
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Owl Ventures
Tory is the co-founder and Managing Director of Owl Ventures where he is actively involved with all facets of the firm and serves on the board of directors for Accelerate Learning (acquired by Carlyle Group), BetterLesson, Degreed, DreamBox Learning (acquired by TPG), Gather, Hazel Health, Kiddom, Labster, Newsela, Noodle Partners, Quizlet, Remind and uLesson. As one of the early pioneers in the next generation of leading EdTech companies, Tory has led investments in some of the most successful companies in the sector. As a lead investor and board member he has played a hands-on role helping leading edtech companies across all facets of development including core definition and measurement of value proposition, sales & distribution, hiring, funding and eventual paths to successful exit. Prior to Owl Ventures, Tory was a Partner at Catamount Ventures where he founded and ran one of the venture industry’s first education investment practices. There he led investments in education companies TenMarks (acquired by Amazon), MasteryConnect (acquired by Instructure), PresenceLearning and EdSurge (acquired by ISTE). Tory is a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow and holds a B.A. in Economics from Williams College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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About Catamount Ventures, Owl Ventures: Owl Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in education technology companies.
Jed Smith
Co-Founder of Owl Ventures
Jed is a Partner of Catamount Ventures. He has dedicated his business career to the art of entrepreneurship and to making a difference. Prior to launching Catamount, Jed founded drugstore.com (NASDAQ: DSCM) in 1997, serving on its board of directors with John Doerr, Brook Byers, Peter Neupert, Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos. Before that, he co-founded and spent four years at Cybersmith, a retail store chain that showcased the latest advances in information technology and multimedia software. Jed was also Vice President of Sales at Tribe Computer Works, a networking hardware and software company that was successfully sold. Jed began his career in technology working for Tom Siebel and, later, Marc Benioff at Oracle Corporation, ultimately serving as District Manager for the Eastern Region. Jed has no doubt that world-class mentors have been important to his career. Jed has advised many private companies and currently serves on the boards of Linden Lab, Numi Organic Tea, Banyan Water, Plum Organics, and Revolution Foods. He has also served on the boards of several education and non-profit institutions, including the Board of Trustees of Middlebury College, the Monterey Institute for International Studies, Shackleton Schools and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Jed earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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About Catamount Ventures, drugstore.com, Owl Ventures: Owl Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in education technology companies.
