Allen Wang is the cofounder and CEO of Ditto AI, a dating matchmaker built for college campuses that eliminates swiping and texting, using AI to get users to in-person dates without the usual app friction. After dropping out of UC Berkeley, Allen started Ditto AI with Eric Liu to help a roommate find a girlfriend before graduation—a story that quickly evolved into a VC-backed startup, raised from top investors including Gradient Ventures and various tech leaders and well known founders. Topics:
#DittoAI #AllenWang #AIStartup #DatingAppRevolution #GenZFounder
Mahi de Silva is the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Higgsfield AI. Higgsfield is the AI-powered Cultural Engine for creators and marketers to amplify engagement and monetization In the new Attention Economy. Prior to that he was the Co founder and CEO of Amplify.ai. Amplify.ai is a global leader in Conversational AI, having delivered more than 10 billion interactions with more than 500 million people around the world. Higgsfield AI was also featured on our Smart AI 100 List among the top early stage AI companies. Topics:
#GenerativeAI #CreatorEconomy #AIVideo #HiggsfieldAI #CreatorAI
Tony Conrad is a Partner at True Ventures. He worked with amazingly talented founders, operating teams from companies like Automattic (WordPress), ZERO Longevity Science, Modern Animal, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, MakerBot, Voiceflow, Giftshop, Cast, Bumo, Typekit, Pluralsight, Connectifier & Holey Grail Donuts. He also co-founded about.me & Sphere, both acquired by AOL. Tony is a personal investor in Slack, Automattic, Lowercase Capital, Cygni, Ghia, Empirical Spirits, International Smoke, Saltwater Oyster Depot, Elk Fence, flour+water pizzeria, flour+water, Trick Dog, Samovar and August. He is a board member of Flour + Water Hospitality Group, the Tony Hawk Foundation and formerly a T40 National Co-Chair of Technology for President Obama.Topics:
#StartupCommunity #NetworkEffects #AITrends #VentureCapital #FounderJourney
Vivek Krishnamurthy is a Partner at Commerce Ventures. At Commerce Ventures, Vivek focuses on tech-first opportunities in FinTech & InsurTech – as well as where these two categories intersect with other verticals. He works closely with a number of CV companies, including Bureau, Canary Technologies, Flueid, Mudflap, Zeal and Zentist. Vivek was previously a member of the investment banking team at Financial Technology Partners where he worked on ~$1B of private capital raises, M&A, and IPOs for FinTech & InsurTech companies like GreenSky (Acq’d by Goldman Sachs), Marqeta (MQ), Yapstone, Enservio (Acq’d by Solera) and others. Along the way, he’s also spent stints working on credit portfolio management at GE Capital and airplane economics at Boeing. Topics:
#FinTech #InsurTech #VentureCapital #AIinFinance #EmbeddedFinance
Adam D’Augelli is a Partner at True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2005. With a foundational mission to empower entrepreneurs at the initial stages of company creation, True has partnered with over 1,050 Founders across more than 500 companies. The firm’s 12 funds have been a part of seven IPOs and over 60 acquisitions.Adam joined True as an analyst in 2010, immediately after graduating magna cum laude from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in finance. Adam currently serves on the NVCA’s Board of Directors. Adam has led True’s investments in Splice, Pendulum Therapeutics, Deep Genomics, Kettle, Radiant Graph, Dinamo Bio, The Nuclear Company, SuppCo, Howie, and others currently in stealth. His notable past investments include HashiCorp (NASDAQ: HCP), TripleLift (acquired by Vista Equity), Ring (acquired by Amazon), Runscope (acquired by CA Technologies), and Moleculo (acquired by Illumina).Topics:
#VentureCapital #SeedStage #TrueVentures #FrontierTech #AIInnovation
Soham Mazumdar is a serial entrepreneur and technology leader, currently the Co-Founder and CEO of WisdomAI, an AI-powered data insights platform that helps enterprises query their data using natural language. Previously, he co-founded Rubrik, where he served as Chief Architect and helped scale the company to IPO. Soham also co-founded Tagtile (acquired by Facebook), led core search infrastructure at Google—earning the prestigious Founders’ Award—and held engineering roles at Facebook. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and UIUC, he was named an IITK Distinguished Alumnus and a Silicon Valley 40 Under 40 honoree. Throughout his career, Soham has been at the forefront of cloud, security, and AI innovation.Topics:
#VCPodcast #AIStartups #EnterpriseAI #TechFounders #Rubrik #WisdomAI
5Moritz Sudhof is the Co-founder and CEO of Bigspin. He additionally sits on the AI Task Force for the International Coaching Federation, specifically focused on the impact of artificial intelligence in coaching. Holding a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford, Moritz has authored influential research on emotion and politeness in language and collaborated on AI research with institutions such as Stanford University, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and the Federal Reserve.Passionate about using AI to foster empathy and understanding, Moritz led development of the first AI-enabled employee engagement solution as Chief Data Scientist at Kanjoya and then Principal Data Scientist at Ultimate Software (now UKG). Most recently, Moritz co-founded Motive Software, a company dedicated to helping organizations leverage language data to better understand and support their people. Moritz served as CEO until BetterUp acquired Motive in 2021. He's most excited to participate in building a future where AI responsibly helps every person become their best.Topics:
#AI #ResponsibleAI #FutureOfWork #HumanCenteredAI #LeadershipDevelopment
Jamie Davidson is the Co-founder at Omni. Omni is a business intelligence and embedded analytics platform that empowers everyone—regardless of technical ability—to easily analyze data using SQL, spreadsheets, AI, or point-and-click interfaces. Prior to that he was the VP of product at Looker. He was also a Partner at Repoint Ventures. Before that he was the founder of PrimaTable which was acquired by HotelTonight. Topics:
#OmniAnalytics #BusinessIntelligence #DataDemocratization #AIinBI
Connor Heggie is the co-founder and CTO of Unify, a San Francisco-based startup building an AI-driven “system of action” for go-to-market teams aimed at enabling companies to reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right message at scale. Prior to Unify, Connor worked at Scale AI as a Machine Learning Research Engineer and earlier at Helm.ai, developing unsupervised perception systems for autonomous vehicles. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. With a strong background in machine learning and a vision for transforming sales and growth through AI, Connor leads Unify’s engineering and product roadmap as the company continues to scale rapidly.Topics:
#AI #GoToMarket #SalesTech #StartupFounders #MachineLearning #B2BSoftware
Yash Sheth is the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Galileo, an AI observability and evaluation platform that helps organizations build reliable, high-performing large language model (LLM) applications at scale. Before founding Galileo in 2021 with Vikram Chatterji and Atindriyo Sanyal, he spent nearly nine years at Google, where he led the Speech Recognition Platform team powering over 20 products and advanced the state of AI speech-to-text systems globally. A machine learning expert driven by the goal of improving model quality and usability, Sheth holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai.Topics:
#AI #MachineLearning #LLM #AIObservability #AIEvaluation #AIInfrastructure
Marc Boroditsky is the Chief Revenue Officer at Nebius and a seasoned tech executive with over 30 years of experience leading high-growth software companies. Previously, he served as CRO at Twilio, President of Revenue at Cloudflare, and VP at Oracle following the acquisition of Passlogix, one of several startups he founded and successfully exited to major acquirers including Cisco, Oracle, and Twilio. Marc has deep expertise across SaaS, cloud, and security, and is known for scaling organizations from early concept to billions in revenue while building world-class go-to-market and product strategies.Topics: -Scaling SaaS and Cloud Businesses from Zero to Billions in Revenue
#SaaS #CloudComputing #Leadership #GoToMarket #StartupGrowth
Aarti Borkar is the Corporate Vice President of Customer Success for Microsoft’s $20B+ Security business, where she oversees strategy, customer experience, and a global team of 1,000+. With over two decades in cybersecurity and AI, she has built and scaled billion-dollar businesses, led over a dozen acquisitions, and is a Limited Partner at Operator Collective supporting women-led innovation.Dipti Borkar is Vice President and General Manager at Microsoft and the Founder of Ahana (acquired by IBM), a cloud-native data analytics company that democratized access to big data. A deep technologist with expertise across databases, distributed systems, and data infrastructure, she previously held senior roles at Couchbase, IBM, and Hortonworks. Dipti is a frequent keynote speaker and advocate for diversity in data and AI leadership.Together, Aarti and Dipti bring decades of leadership across security, data, and AI—building and scaling products that power the modern enterprise.Topics:
Suhani Mohan is an impact investor and healthcare entrepreneur committed to advancing social and planetary well-being. She is the Director of Impact Investing at Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2), where she leads early-stage investments in climate, health, education, and economic empowerment. Before SV2, she co-founded Saral Designs, an award-winning social enterprise that revolutionized menstrual health access through decentralized manufacturing—reaching over one million women across 13 countries. A two-time TEDx speaker and Forbes India Top 25 Trailblazing Woman in Business, Suhani has also led climate-focused investments at ACT Capital Foundation and Energy Innovation Capital. A Stanford GSB MBA and IIT Bombay alum, she bridges deep technical insight with a purpose-driven approach to building a more equitable and sustainable world.Topics:
#ImpactInvesting #SocialInnovation #ClimateTech #WomenInLeadership #PurposeDrivenCapitalTranscriptSuhani Mohan is an impact investor and healthcare entrepreneur committed to advancing social and planetary well-being. She is the Director of Impact Investing at Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2), where she leads early-stage investments in climate, health, education, and economic empowerment. Before SV2, she co-founded Saral Designs, an award-winning social enterprise that revolutionized menstrual health access through decentralized manufacturing—reaching over one million women across 13 countries. A two-time TEDx speaker and Forbes India Top 25 Trailblazing Woman in Business, Suhani has also led climate-focused investments at ACT Capital Foundation and Energy Innovation Capital. A Stanford GSB MBA and IIT Bombay alum, she bridges deep technical insight with a purpose-driven approach to building a more equitable and sustainable world.Topics:
#ImpactInvesting #SocialInnovation #ClimateTech #WomenInLeadership #PurposeDrivenCapital
Patti Degnan is a seasoned cybersecurity executive, venture investor, and operator. She recently joined Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a Partner (Operating Partner, CISO/CIO Advisor), where she oversees security-portfolio initiatives, engages with the CISO community, and forges strategic relationships across the industry. Prior to a16z, Patti served as the first Security hire and Chief Information Security Officer at Notion, where she built the security organization end-to-end—scaling it to 60+ individuals and supporting 100 million+ user sign-ups across security operations, product security, infrastructure security, governance, risk and compliance (GRC), privacy, and trust engineering. With her unique transition from operator to investor, Patti brings deep hands-on experience and strategic insight to help founders and CISOs build secure, scalable, and resilient organizations.Topics:
#AISecurity #CybersecurityLeadership #a16z #ResponsibleAI #TechInnovation
Frederik Ebert is the Founder and CEO of Emancro Robotics, a company developing intelligent robots to automate critical logistics tasks in hospitals. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he was advised by renowned AI researchers Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn. During his time at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, Frederik focused on advancing robotic manipulation through deep learning, reinforcement learning, and classical robotics. His mission at Emancro is to bring cutting-edge AI and robotics from the lab into the real world—improving efficiency, safety, and care delivery in healthcare environments.Disclosure: Grace is an investor in Emancro Robotics.Topics:
#AI #HealthcareInnovation #Robotics #DeepLearning #VentureCapital
Denise Persson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Snowflake. Denise has 20 years of technology marketing experience at high-growth companies. Prior to joining Snowflake, she served as CMO for Apigee, an API platform company that went public in 2015 and Google acquired in 2016. She began her career at collaboration software company Genesys, where she built and led a global marketing organization. Denise also helped lead Genesys through its expansion to become a successful IPO and acquired company. Denise holds a BA in Business Administration and Economics from Stockholm University, and holds an MBA from Georgetown University.Topics:
#Snowflake #DenisePersson #MakeItSnow #GoToMarket #AI #DataCloud #B2BMarketing
Alexander Danilowicz is the Co-founder of Magic Patterns, a Y Combinator–backed AI design platform that enables teams to instantly turn text prompts, screenshots, and user stories into interactive, production-ready interfaces. A Dartmouth College graduate in Computer Science and Economics, Alexander previously worked as a software engineer at LiveRamp and Canopy before launching Magic Patterns in early 2023 to automate front-end design and coding workflows. The platform, which he co-founded with longtime collaborator Teddy Ni, has become a go-to tool for product and design teams at scale, integrating AI with popular component libraries to generate high-quality UI elements. Based in San Francisco, Alexander continues to build at the intersection of AI, design systems, and developer productivity.Topics:
#LeanStartups #AIStartups #VentureCapital #StartupGrowth #DesignTech #AITools
Ryan Gavin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Slack and a seasoned business leader with over 25 years of experience driving growth, innovation, and go-to-market excellence across the tech industry. Before joining Slack, Ryan was the Chief Growth Officer at Convoy, where he led a $650M+ digital freight marketplace, improving margins by over 2000 basis points while scaling customer engagement with top global shippers. Earlier, Ryan held senior leadership roles at AWS and Microsoft—building the AI/ML business at AWS from the ground up and leading Microsoft’s Surface commercial business and Bing, where he helped bring the search engine to profitability and scale to 5 billion monthly searches. Across every role, Ryan has been known for his ability to unite product, engineering, and marketing teams to create new categories, transform markets, and build world-class organizations.Topics:
#Leadership #GrowthStrategy #GoToMarket #AI #Slack #StartupLessons #MarketingLeadership
Kathleen Estreich is an investing partner at Pear. Prior to Pear, she was the co-founder at MKT1 & MKT1 Capital where she invested in and advised early-stage B2B startups. MKT1 Capital invested in pre-seed thru Series A startups and helped them build their marketing team and strategy. Prior to founding MKT1, she built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook, and Scalyr (acq by SentinelOne). Kathleen holds a BA in Political Science & History from Brown University.Topics:
#VentureCapital #GoToMarket #B2BStartups #MarketingStrategy #SeedStage
Muralidhar Krishnaprasad is the President & CTO of Engineering at Salesforce, overseeing next-generation platforms for Agentforce, Data, MuleSoft, and Tableau. With over 25 years of industry experience, including over six years at Salesforce, Muralidhar has driven the rapid growth of Agentforce and Data Cloud. He plays a crucial role in shaping Salesforce's AI-driven future and previously held pivotal engineering roles at Oracle and Microsoft, building foundational services for Azure, Dynamics, and Synapse. His expertise spans databases, cloud services, and applications.Topics:
#AIEngineering #EnterpriseAI #CloudComputing #LeadershipInTech #Salesforce