Venture with Grace

Amber Illig, General Partner at The Council Fund, launched a $5 million debut fund targeting early-stage startups disrupting legacy industries. With a background in angel investing, Illig aims to leverage her experience in tech and venture to support companies in Vertical SaaS, Fintech, and Healthcare. Her career has spanned roles at influential tech companies and her fund emphasizes investment in...

Elaine is the Co-Founder of Tofu, a generative AI platform for creating hyper-personalized, omnichannel campaigns at scale that converts leads for B2B marketing teams. She also serves as a Venture Partner at SignalFire where she first joined in 2018 to invest in seed stage enterprise SaaS companies. In her work as Venture Partner, she primarily focuses on GTM SaaS and generative AI applications. ‍...

Vijay Karunamurthy is the field Chief Technology Officer at Scale AI, where he works to democratize the capabilities of Generative AI and Large Language Models, partnering with large model providers, governments, and Fortune 500 companies. Prior to Scale, Vijay was a Director of Engineering at Apple and Google, where he worked on applications of AI for personalizing human interfaces. Vijay was an...

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 500Startups. And prior to becoming a professional investor,...

Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist, and writer. He is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Tusk Ventures, the world’s first venture capital fund that invests solely in early stage startups in highly regulated industries, and the founder of political consulting firm Tusk Strategies. Bradley’s family foundation is funding and leading the national campaign to...

Jon Levy is a behavioral scientist and New York Times bestselling author known for his work in trust, human connection, belonging, and influence. Jon specializes in applying the latest research to transform the ways companies approach marketing, sales, consumer engagement, and culture. His clients range from Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Google, AB-InBev, and Samsung, to startups. More than...

A graduate of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Ross Pomerantz is a multifaceted individual known for his role as Corporate Bro. He is not just a content creator but also an entrepreneur, angel investor, and a "chill dude." His work mainly revolves around satirical portrayals of corporate life, especially focusing on the life of a Silicon Valley software salesman. His content has g...

Samir Kaji is the CEO and co-founder of Allocate, a platform that democratizes access to the best technology and life sciences private alternatives. Allocate removes the barriers of discovery, diligence, and access that prevent qualified investors from participating in this lucrative asset class. He also host Venture Unlocked, a podcast and blog that dives into the inner workings of venture capita...

Chris Douvos founded Ahoy Capital in 2018 to build an intentionally right-sized firm that could pursue investment excellence while prizing a spirit of partnership with all of its constituencies. A pioneering investor in the micro-VC movement, Chris has been a fixture in venture capital for nearly two decades. In addition to successfully identifying and catalyzing nascent funds, he bridges a gap be...

Crystal McKellar is a Harvard-trained lawyer. She learned to invest from Peter Thiel and began her venture career in 2012 at a growth-stage venture capital fund backed by Thiel. There, she held board positions at Neurable, Siren Care, DoubleDutch (acq. Cvent), and Fractyl Labs, and was instrumental in the fund's 2012 investment in Palantir Technologies. While working for Thiel, Crystal support...

Joey Primiani is the founder and designer at Superfuture. Superfuture is a creative venture studio and collective of artists, engineers and dreamers out to create magical consumer product experiences at the intersection of technology, arts and culture. Passionate and creative, his designs have been called “ingenious” by Fast Company, “charming ... incredibly unique” by Mashable, and “simple and br...

Mike Duda is the Managing Partner at Bullish. Bullish is a Marketing Operating Partner focused on being in the growth business. One-part Creative Agency, one-part consumer investment Firm, they deploy capabilities from both worlds to help brands speed the transformation of opportunities into outcomes. Brand Agency campaigns for the likes of: Anheuser Busch, Walmart, GoDaddy, Pepsi, Nike, The Light...

Rohit Dave is the Head of Corporate Development at Block. Prior to that he was the Head of Portfolio Capital Markets at Juxtapose and former VP and head of Corporate Development at WeWork and Corporate Development at Twilio and Samsung. Topic: * M&A strategy insights: deal evaluation frame work * Post-acquisition integration * Understanding your acquire’s perspective 🍎 Apple: http://apple.co/...

Kelli Fontaine is a Partner at Cendana Capital, where she focuses on investing in early-stage venture capital funds worldwide. Cendana’s portfolio includes notable funds such as Forerunner, Uncork, and Mucker Capital among many others. Topics: * Effective strategies for identifying and engaging with top emerging fund managers. * Insights and takeaways from her extensive experience in fund investme...

Dmitry Petrov is the Co-Founder & CEO at Iterative.ai. He is a former researcher turned startup founder. With a background in data management algorithms, including a PhD thesis, and industrial data science experience he has transitioned into the realm of developer cutting-edge data infrastructure for AI. - Challenges and Solutions in ML Data Versioning - The Role of Open Source in ML Data Vers...

Anubhav Maheshwari is a Partner at Stage 2 Capital. Anu started his career as an Analyst in Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Investment Banking group advising both private and public technology companies on M&A, IPOs and other capital markets financings. While always at the intersection of technology and finance, Anu has moved to progressively earlier stages with time. After Morgan Stanl...

Winter Mead is the founder and CEO at Coolwater. Most recently, he has worked in financial services for a decade at two SEC-registered investment firms and has invested approximately $1-billion across 80 private equity and venture capital firms as a Limited Partner, specializing in venture capital. Before becoming an investor, Winter Mead worked in the technology world at three different angel and...

Bill Sun is the founder and CEO of Generative Alpha. He was a successful quant portfolio manager with a billion-dollar AUM trading global equity in the Millennium fund. Bill graduated from Stanford Math/AI PhD and also worked at Citadel, Point72 Cubist as a Quant/AI researcher and Google Brain, where he participated in the discovery of transformer architecture. Topic: * Quant Trading and AI-Enhanc...

David Zhou is the Head of Investor Relations at Alchemist Accelerator, a startup accelerator focused on investing the first check into rockstar B2B companies, where we were the first investors in companies like LaunchDarkly, rigetti, moengage, Retail Zipline and more. Prior to Alchemist, David ran operations and community for On Deck Angels, a community of the world's most ambitious angels and...

John Kraski is the Co-Founder of Future Proof which is focused on helping brands build the future communities of tomorrow. Future Proof is your trusted partner in navigating the digital frontier of the future and a trusted partner of the world's #1 Roblox builder. He is the author of Amazon #1 bestseller, The Future of Community which is focused on how brands and creators can leverage Web3, AI...

Gobi Dasu, co-founder of LD Talent, exemplifies the modern tech landscape's focus on rapid learning and adaptability. Completing his Stanford CS degree in two years, becoming a digital nomad, and then pursuing a master's in HCI+AI, Gobi now leads LD Talent while working towards a PhD at Northwestern. LD Talent, a network of diverse, vetted developers at ldtalentwork.com, encourages continu...

David Teten founded Versatile VC, which backs early-stage companies that help investors generate alpha and succeed. He is Chair of PEVCtech, a community of family office, private equity, and VC funds making better investments through technology and analytics. He is a Venture Partner with Coolwater Capital, the "Y Combinator for emerging VCs". Topics: 1. How are VCs differentiating using...

Romain Paulus, a founding engineer at MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016, has an extensive background in AI and technology. His expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) was developed through his role as a research assistant at Stanford University. Paulus also contributed significantly as a founding engineer of You.com, a private search engine known for summarizing web content. Curre...

Arad Malhotra, the founder and CEO of Report To Earn, leads a Web3-based rewards system for reporting and validating useful information in the real world. Additionally, he co-founded Skyless Game Studios, a video game studio dedicated to creating games with social, educational, or philanthropic impacts. He also features on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. 🌐 The Evolution and Future of Web3 Technologi...

Georgi Koreli is the founder of Hinkal. Hinkal is a multi-chain privacy layer for blockchain transactions backed Draper Associates and other leading VCs. It raised $5.3m in 2023. He also founded the SV Icons, community connecting Stanford entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley icons through curating dinners. Past speakers include Sam Altman, Evan Spiegel, Aneel Bhusri and other iconic founders and VCs....