Venture with Grace

Andrew Blum is the Co-Founder and COO at HumanX, the preeminent event dedicated to accelerating enterprise AI adoption - backed by Primary, Foundation Capital, and FPV. Previously, he served as Researcher-in-Residence at Primary Venture Partners, where he built out the incubation program and helped launch venture-scale businesses. Topics: Community building as a catalyst for AI innovation Insights...

Casber Wang is a Partner at Sapphire Ventures where he is focused on security, enterprise infrastructure, and data and analytics. Born in China to parents who were both small-business entrepreneurs, Casber is familiar with and excited by the founder’s journey. Casber is on the boards of Cyera, Huntress, JumpCloud, Rewst, StarTree, and Zesty. Prior to Okta’s acquisition, he was also a board observe...

Joseph Floyd is a General Partner at Emergence and a Kauffman Fellow. Joe’s expertise in building cloud startups has evolved from over fifteen years of advising and investing in rocketship startups like SalesLoft, project44, Mya, Total Expert, LogDNA and more. Before joining Emergence, Joe was a Senior Associate in American Capital’s technology group where he focused on investing in fast-growing i...

Brian Peterson is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Dialpad, a leader in AI-powered communication and collaboration. With a background as a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where he contributed to the development of Google Voice, Peterson has been instrumental in driving technological innovation at Dialpad. His leadership continues to shape the company's growth and product deve...

Iliana Oris Valiente is the Managing Director (Partner) of NA Innovation Hubs Lead at Accenture. She leads all NA innovation hubs at Accenture, working with senior exec clients and boards to support their transformation journeys. This includes a focus on our AI, metaverse/web3, and cross industry plays. In this role, she oversees teams that bring together specialists in design, data science, the v...

Anna Barber is a partner at M13, Anna was the managing director of Techstars LA and also a partner in The Fund LA. A certified executive coach, Anna has worked as a corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant, product exec, and entrepreneur. She serves on the Advisory Board of PledgeLA and is a member of AllRaise. Topics: The rise of solopreneurship and its impact on the business landscape How AI is tra...

Stefan Weitz is the co founder and CEO of HumanX. He is a veteran of Microsoft with 18 years of experience, has led billion-user technologies, including Bing.com, while also pioneering strategic initiatives in online platforms and cybersecurity, showcasing a profound understanding of technology trends and a talent for transforming concepts into thriving ventures. Topics: The role of conferences in...

Yousuf Khan is a Partner at Ridge Ventures. Having held many operational roles in his previous positions, he’s uniquely qualified to not only grow Ridge’s portfolio, but more importantly to support founders through the vantage point of deep start-up experience. He currently serves as board director for Ridge-backed Archera, Cerby, Chisel Labs, Lightyear, Rafay, and Rewind. Prior to joining Ridge,...

Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of Check, has built a career transforming industries through technology. After co-founding Oyster, the "Netflix for books" acquired by Google, Andrew turned his focus to solving payroll complexities for businesses. With Check, he created a payroll-as-a-service API that enables software platforms to integrate payroll seamlessly. Backed by investors like Strip...

Jae Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, a leading AI research and product company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a significant presence in APAC, based in Seoul, South Korea. Under Jae’s leadership, Twelve Labs has pioneered groundbreaking advancements in multimodal neural network architecture, establishing itself as the world’s leader in video understanding AI. The comp...

Reed McGinley-Stempel is the co-founder and CEO of Stytch, an all-in-one platform for modern authentication, authorization, and fraud prevention. Their mission is to eliminate friction on the internet -- without compromising security. They offer solutions that are purpose-built for the needs of both consumer and B2B apps, including features like Google One-Tap & Biometrics to optimize conversi...

Sam Toole is a Partner at Primary, where he spearheads new enterprise and healthcare investments. The Nantucket native and Hamilton alum was previously the GM of Physician Marketplace for Nomad Health, where he helped lead the company’s sales team from seed through a Series B. Sam’s entrepreneurial career started as the founder of ACK Surf, a surf school on the island of Nantucket, then continued...

9Alex Bangash is the Co-founder/ Managing Director of Transpose Platform. Transpose Platform investing in the future of venture—backing founders, funds, and platforms that shape the next generation of market leader. Topics: The Evolution of Venture Capital The Future of Fund Structures Building Successful Venture Funds #venturecapital #ventureinvesting #transposeplatform #futureofvc

David Blumberg is the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, which he established in 1991. Prior to Blumberg Capital, David managed international investments with the Bronfman Family Office (Claridge), Adler & Co. Venture Capital APAX Partners and at T. Rowe Price. He also launched business development for Check Point Software Technologies as one of its top four executives. David ea...

Jon Turow joined Madrona in 2022. As part of the investment team, Jon partners with founders who build products that customers love. He is interested in applied AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open-source business models. Jon is an experienced product leader with over a decade of experience in cloud computing. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Visi...

Yujian Tang is the CEO of OSS4AI. OSS4AI is an organization aimed at providing all developers access to the resources to understand, use, and contribute to the direction and development of AI. He is also a Venture Partner at Banyan Ventures, a New York City-based pre-seed, first-money-in, venture capital firm born in the AI era. We will be in person going live at AWS in SF! Topics: Open source AI...

Jay Reno is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound. Pointhound is helping people find and book free flights, for free, to amazing destinations using credit card points and miles. 🛫🏝️ 💳 He also leads seed and series A investments with 645 Ventures where he's a Venture Partner. Investment areas include consumer, fintech, climate tech and AI. Previously founded Feather, raised $76m, built a world...

Lauren Kolodny is a Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. Lauren leads the fintech thesis area at Acrew. She has made investments in companies including Chime, Clara, Divvy, Gusto, Klar, Papaya, Pie, & Plaid. Prior to co-founding Acrew, Lauren was a partner at Aspect Ventures. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google, where she led a number of launches for Workspace, including Goo...

Nosu founder backgrounds: Audrey (CEO) won 20+ hackathons, engineering @ Intuit, Intel, NASA USRC, content creator with 68k following on instagram @jia.seed. Disclaimer: Grace is an investor in Nosu. Topics: How to Spot Successful Founders at Hackathons Content Creation and Community Building Authentically Building a Gen Z Engineering Community #hackathon #startups #womenintech #engineering #tech

Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures. Over decades of investing, he has identified seven meta themes and developed a screening process that successfully identified outlier companies and founders. Incisive Ventures is a Pre-Seed Fund in Seattle to invest in technology companies that reduce friction at scale, leveraging the partner's network built as an angel investor in 60+ compani...

Howard Wright is the VP of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Prior to that he was the VP of Global Head of Start Ups at Amazon Web Services. At NVIDIA, he leads their global Inception program, positioned at the epicenter of the generative AI revolution. His role focuses on democratizing access to NVIDIA's comprehensive AI platform while building strategic partnerships across the startup ecosystem....

Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at NEA. He seeks to partner with founders building generational companies in AI, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and robotics. His current investments include Databricks, Second Front, Pulumi, Martian, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Deltastream, Rapid Robotics, Built Robotics, Outrider, Tigera, and ForAllSecure. Previous investments include Box (NYSE:...

Abbas Haider Ali is the Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub where he lead all post-sales teams with an org size of 550+, supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including over 90% of the Fortune 100. Prior to GitHub, he was Vice President of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio, leading the Data & Growth business ($300M+ ARR) following Twilio's $3B+...

Mike Freedman is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, as well as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Timescale is building the PostgreSQL database cloud for modern applications, supercharging real-time analytics, intelligence (AI), and transactional workloads. Thousands of global customers, $180M raised from leading VCs. Hiring globally @ timescale.com/careers...

Sandy Kory founded Horizon in 2022 and has over 15 years of venture capital experience. He was an early investor in Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, Sendbird, and several other unicorns. Horizon is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in disruptive software. Topics: Evolution of Software Investing Bootstrapped vs. Billion-Dollar Rounds Inside Palantir & Canva's Early...