Venture with Grace

James Flynn is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on post-Series A investments across the tech landscape. Prior to that he was a growth equity investor at General Atlantic. Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most valuable and enduring businesses. We partner with a few outliers each year and go a...

Vikram Chatterji is the co-founder and CEO of Galileo. Galileo is the leading platform for enterprise GenAI evaluation and observability. Our comprehensive suite of products support builders across the new AI development workflow—from fine-tuning LLMs to developing, testing, monitoring, and securing their AI applications. Each product is powered by our research-backed evaluation metrics. Today, Ga...

Shaun VanWeelden is the Managing Director at Mercor, where he leads efforts to reshape how talent connects with work, using AI-led approaches to deeply assess candidate expertise. Prior to Mercor, Shaun held a key role at OpenAI leading their human data operations team within research, supporting critical initiatives around human feedback for AI training. Before OpenAI, he spent time at Scale AI,...

Dan O’Connell CEO of Front. Front is the AI-powered customer service platform that helps companies deliver smarter, safer automation without sacrificing quality. We put humans in control of AI to ensure every customer interaction is handled by the best resource, whether that’s AI, a human agent, or both. More than 9,000 companies, including Uber Freight, Navan, and Stripe, trust Front to scale exc...

Jiaona Zhang ("JZ") is the Chief Product Officer at Laurel. She has led product organizations at Linktree, Webflow, Airbnb, WeWork, Dropbox, and Pocket Gems. Prior to her career in product, she worked as a management and private equity consultant. In addition to her work, she advises and invests in start-ups. JZ received her BA from Yale University in Economics. Topics: How product leade...

Lauri Moore is a Partner at Bessemer’s Silicon Valley office, where she focuses on early-stage opportunities in data, AI, developer tools, and related infrastructure. With a unique background spanning research, data science, product management, and investing, Lauri is a passionate ally and coach for entrepreneurs, collaborating with them to tackle the inevitable challenges of company building. Bef...

sands of enterprise companies globally.  Sparked by his vision and focus to use AI technology to bridge the gap between humans and machines, today Umesh is recognized as an enterprise AI pioneer. Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud, launched in 2025, is among the first enterprise-grade AI platform purpose-built to unify data, knowledge, models, and agents in a way that’s truly usable, scalable, and secur...

Lars Leckie is a Managing Director at Aspenwood Ventures. Prior to his career in venture capital, Lars was a co-founder of AutoFarm (now Novariant), a company focused on GPS and robotics. Lars was in charge of strategy, product marketing, business development, and building the sales team across three continents. While Lars spends less time programming now, he started his technical career coding an...

Sara Choi is a Partner at Wing VC. Sara brings her experiences as a former founder and product leader to her collaborations, investing in and supporting founders early on their entrepreneurial journeys, often at inception. Sara partners with founders of transformative tech companies working to shape the future of medicine and healthcare. Prior to co-founding Airfox, acquired in 2017, Sara was head...

Meera is a Partner at Redpoint Ventures. She is passionate about empowering individuals in both their personal and professional lives. Having joined Redpoint in 2022, she supports the firm’s early-stage software and consumer investing efforts. Prior to joining Redpoint, Meera began her investing career at Obvious Ventures, and Obvious’ mission-driven approach is a theme that is evident in the many...

Maria Palma is a General Partner at Freestyle Capital. While she is a generalist investor, most of her recent time and investments have been in AI both at the app and infrastructure level. She loves being involved in start-ups and enjoys the challenge of creating real value and changing industries that are broken. She finds it constantly inspiring, humbling and mostly, a ton of fun. Prior to Frees...

Keshia Theobald-van Gent is a Partner at BDev Ventures. She previously served as the Sr. Director of the United States at German Accelerator where she led teams in NYC and Silicon Valley to help high-potential European startups enter the US. And, as the Director of Strategic Partnerships at GSVlabs, where she connected the world’s largest companies to the global startup community, accelerated new...

Shimrit Ben-Yair serves as the Vice President and General Manager of Google Photos and Google One. She has worked on various different products at Google, including on Google Docs sharing, Google Groups, YouTube Kids, and YouTube Community. Earlier in her career, Ben-Yair was the first product manager on Google+, contributing significantly to its early development. She holds a B.Sc. in Computer Sc...

Dr. Samir Menon is the Founder and CEO of Dexterity, Inc., a robotics company building autonomous systems with human-like dexterity to transform logistics, supply chain, and warehousing operations. He earned his Ph. D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where his research pioneered simulation models and control theory to study the human musculoskeletal system. With deep expertise in rob...

Nick Linck is the Founder of The Residency. The Residency is a program that is designed for entrepreneurs, builders, and creators who want to take control of their life and turn their ambitious dreams into reality. The program is unique in that it offers the social experience of college with a revamped version of the traditional educational experience. we provide housing in locations all around th...

Russ Heddleston is the CEO of Distill, having previously founded and sold DocSend for $165 million with $15 million raised, scaling it to over $40m in ARR. Previously, he started and sold an HR tech startup Pursuit to Meta. Russ holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard. His work on identity at Meta and his passion for intuitive product design drive his commitment...

Roman Chernin is the Chief Business Officer and co-founder of Nebius, an AI-focused cloud infrastructure company. He is responsible for driving the company’s business strategy and growth. Roman's career spans over 20 years in the tech industry, with 12 of those years spent at Yandex, one of Europe's largest technology companies. He began his journey at Yandex leading the Search platform an...

Snehal Antani is CEO & co-founder of Horizon3.ai, a cyber security company that pioneered the use of AI to autonomously conduct penetration testing. Prior to Horizon3, Snehal served as the first Chief Technology Officer for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). As a member of the Commander’s executive team, he led data analytics, cloud/edge computing, and cybersecurity initiatives. Prior to...

Sunil Rao is the Founder and CEO of Tribble, an AI-powered platform aimed at streamlining and automating go-to-market workflows for enterprise teams. With a technical foundation as a former software engineer at SAP, Rao rose to leadership roles at Salesforce—including VP and GM of Consumer Goods—before launching Tribble in April 2023. Drawing on experience in both engineering and enterprise sales,...

Emily Bennett is a Partner at Owl Ventures. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye...

Alex Konrad is the founder of Upstarts Media. He cut his teeth reporting at Fortune in 2010, writing about local New York startups such as ZocDoc and General Assembly. After joining Forbes in 2012, he kept covering the scene, writing some of the first in-depth stories about Blue Apron, Peloton and WeWork. For ten years, Alex managed the Midas List franchise of top venture capitalists, expanding th...

Hadley is a co-founder and General Partner at Eniac Ventures, where his investment areas include AI (application and tooling layers), data/dev tooling, SaaS, and healthcare. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in tra...

Ashish Kakran is a Partner at Sierra Ventures, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, str...

Molly Alter is a Partner at Northzone, based in New York. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets...

Marty Kausas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pylon, one of the fastest-growing platforms modernizing B2B customer support. With prior engineering experience at Airbnb, Marty blends deep technical chops with a market-first mindset to tackle one of the most overlooked segments in enterprise software: post-sales support. Since launching, Pylon has become the go-to support infrastructure for high-growth...