Venture with Grace

Amy Nauiokas is a transformational CEO, founder, governor and advocate who has spent three decades running and building purpose-led organizations at the intersection of access, equity, and innovation. She has dedicated her career to seeing around corners and leading teams to uncover what could be rather than accepting the status quo. After a rapid rise to the top of the global financial services i...

When it comes to the business of women, Ali knows a golden opportunity when she sees it. As one of the very first employees at Refinery29 — a company that now has over 450 employees globally — Ali was tasked with building an ad and brand partnerships business from the ground up. She answered this challenge by assembling a world-class team that integrated custom collaboration with brands across eve...

Charlotte Ross is a Partner of Inspired Capital. Prior to Inspired Capital, Charlotte was an Associate at New Enterprise Associates (NEA). At NEA, she led investments in The Wing, Mejuri, CoEdition and Choosy. Charlotte served on the Boards of those companies in addition to the Boards of Duolingo, Framebridge and Landit. Charlotte also spent three months working at Tamara Mellon, an NEA portfolio...

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project. Topics: - Data-Driven Insights in the Private Capital Ecosystem - Current Trends in Private Capital - Future of Data in Ventu...

Prasad Kawthekar is the CEO & Co-founder of Dashworks. Dashworks is the personalized, all-in-one, and secure AI solution for organizations. Dashworks learns from existing knowledge scattered across siloed cloud applications to help employees find instant answers to all their questions at work. The company has raised funds from investors including Y Combinator, Point72 Ventures, and OVO Fund. P...

Evan J. Zimmerman is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer. He is the co-founder and CEO of Edge, a patent assistant startup backed by Y Combinator, for which he was recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 2023. He invests through Jovono, his personal venture capital firm, and was Chairman of the Clinton Health Access Initiative technology council, which advises the technology of global public health in...

Hyphen Capital was founded and led by Dave Lu. Dave is a Silicon Valley veteran and started his career in tech at Yahoo! in the late 90s. He sat around the corner from Jerry Yang, an entrepreneurial inspiration for many Asian Americans including himself. He went on to work at other iconic technology companies including Apple, eBay and Cisco before starting his first company Fanpop. After growing t...

Samit Kalra is a Partner at 1984 Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed fund that backs technical founders using software to solve pressing market needs. The fund is currently investing out of its $75M Fund II. Samit joined the team in 2021, following a two-and-a-half-year tenure at Bain Capital Ventures, a prominent multi-stage fund that has backed iconic companies such as Docusign and LinkedIn. Be...

Magnus Grimeland is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Antler, a global early-stage VC enabling and investing in the world's most exceptional people. He leads a global team across 6 continents, 30+ locations with the mission to fundamentally improve the world by supporting founders, who are building the defining companies of tomorrow. Antler has invested in, and helped build 1100+ port...

Alex Freberg is the Founder & CEO of Analyst Builder and Alex Analytics LLC. He is also the creator of a highly popular YouTube channel, "Alex The Analyst," which has amassed over 780,000 subscribers. Alex's channel provides comprehensive content on everything you need to know to become a data analyst, making him a prominent figure in the data analytics community. Through his edu...

Marshall Sandman is the Managing Partner of Animal Capital. Animal Capital is the first venture firm with access to 150M+ engaged consumers across the world. Animal Capital drives growth by leveraging proprietary marketing channels and increasing awareness around brands. Animal Capital provides all the services of a traditional venture fund combined with an unrivaled ability to influence a new gen...

Renee Shah is a Partner at Amplify Partners. Amplify Partners is an early-stage venture capital fund. She is focused on security, infrastructure and dev tools. Prior to Amplify Partners, Renee worked at BCG (The Boston Consulting Group) focused on strategy for healthcare and private equity clients; Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. where she invested in new technology to improve healthcare in...

Jesse Draper is a mother of 3 boys, founding partner of Halogen Ventures and focused on early stage investing in consumer technology companies led by female and co-ed teams. Draper is a Kauffman Fellow and 4th generation venture capitalist. She is a fierce advocate for investing in women and the opportunity for using technology and innovation to solve some of the biggest issues facing women and fa...

Stephanie Zufle Retcho has served as the Chief Marketing Officer for both KAYAK and Hungryroot. She has also held leadership positions at renowned agencies like McCann Erickson and TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, managing blue-chip accounts like Verizon Wireless and Sprint-Nextel. Throughout her career, Stephanie has driven growth through strategic marketing, resulting in increased revenue, profit, and market sha...

Vanessa Larco joined NEA as a Partner in 2016 and focuses on enterprise and consumer investing. She has led investments in Assembled, Kindred, Rewind AI, Cleo, Evernow, Rocket. Chat, and Mejuri, among others. She is also a board observer at Forethought, SafeBase, Orby AI, Granica, Modyfi, and HEAVY.AI. She was a board observer at Robinhood until its IPO in 2021. Prior to Venture, she led product t...

Tikue Anazodo is the co-founder and CEO of Kudos Technologies, a company launched in 2022 that developed an AI-powered smart wallet to help consumers maximize credit card rewards and cash back for online purchases. Under his leadership, Kudos has grown rapidly, securing a recent Series A round led by QED Investors. Tikue, who previously worked at Google and Affirm, has driven Kudos to expand its u...

Kyle Lui is a General Partner at Bling Capital. He has backed 7 “unicorn” companies across SaaS, consumer internet, digital health, and fintech. Previously, Kyle was a Partner at DCM where led early stage US investments including DocSend (acq. by Dropbox), TravelBank (acq. by US Bank), Wrike (acq. by Citrix), Hims & Hers (NYSE: HIMS), Shift (Nasdaq: SFT) and Tapingo (acq. by GrubHub). He also...

An entrepreneur at heart, Rami Rahal started Blue Cloud Ventures after having worked as a tech investment banker at Madison Park Group. Before that, he was an IT strategy consultant at Accenture. In 2016, he was named by Forbes to the Venture Capital "30Under30" list and by Inc. Magazine as one of "20 Young Entrepreneurs You Need to Know". In 2018, he was named by Crain New Yor...

Nick Singh is the Founder and CEO of DataLemur. Thousands of data scientists, data analysts, and BI professionals use DataLemur daily to prepare for their technical interviews and land their dream jobs in data. Previously, he worked at Facebook and Google. These days, he's the creator of the SQL interview platform DataLemur.com, the best-selling author of "Ace the Data Science Interview,&...

Kanyi Maqubela serves as Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. He focuses his investment and formation work in theme areas including frontier technology, digital health, e-commerce, financial technology, supply-chain/logistics. He currently serves a number of startups as a lead investor, including Adyton, Basis Theory, Faircraft, Cloudtrucks, Goldfinch, and Tala. He previously led or participated...

David leads pre-seed investments at Roble Ventures, a future-of-work-focused fund that invests in technologies enabling people, teams, and organizations to achieve their most ambitious work. He looks for early-stage software companies that positively impact organizations and workers and can scale to be potential $1B+ unicorn companies. David served on a Fulbright Scholarship at the leading global...

Brian Harwitt is a Partner at CoVenture where he focused on finding alternative lending platforms to partner with for both debt and equity financings. Prior to joining the CoVenture team, Brian was an investment banking analyst at Guggenheim Securities focusing on healthcare. Brian received a BS Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University. - Key trends and innovations in alternative lending - How star...

Natasha is a partner at Silicon Legal Strategy. Her practice focuses on advising emerging growth and development stage companies on a variety of matters: pre-incorporation planning and entity formation, debt or equity financing and day-to-day business issues, and through the exit process. She also represents emerging technology investors. Prior to joining SLS, Natasha was a corporate associate at...

Nir Eyal is an author, speaker, and expert in behavioral design, which combines psychology, technology, and business. He wrote the bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir has taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design School and has sold two tech companies since...

Tushar Roy is a Partner at Square Peg Capital, focusing on investing in venture and growth stage online and technology companies across Southeast Asia, Australia, and Israel. With almost a decade of experience in the region, he specializes in identifying and supporting tech founders to help them achieve their goals. Tushar’s current portfolio includes Chope, Cialfo, Doctor Anywhere, FinAccel, Kaod...