I host a top VC podcast called Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com). Past guests include C-level/VPs of Google, Meta, Amazon, Sephora, Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Pepsi, Instagram, Deloitte, Reddit, Lyft, etc. Managing Partners of top funds (many were featured on the Forbes Midas List) and unicorn founders (founders of Craigslist, Square, Loom, Cruise, etc.) Venture with Grace is my new spin-off series that features top LPs, GPs, solo GPs, Angel Investors, top AI founders, and other experts in tech and business to cover specific domain expertise.
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Soham Mazumdar shares insights from his serial entrepreneurship, including lessons from Rubrik's IPO success and the critical role of team and culture. He details WisdomAI's mission to revolutionize enterprise data analytics by providing AI-driven insights to business leaders, moving beyond traditional BI. The discussion covers how WisdomAI tackles data fragmentation, ensures trust and accuracy, and its go-to-market strategy for mid-to-large enterprises.
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 abo...
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: Reinventing Business Intelligence Building See-Through Analytics Platforms...
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 st...
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 dr...
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 organizatio...
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...
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 coun...
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+ i...
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 E...
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....
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...
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/M...
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 Scie...
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, Dynami...
Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO of Superhuman and Rapportive, with a successful track record of investing in over 100 startups including Placer, Mercury, and ClassDojo. He has a strong background in early stage investments and product development, with expertise in software as a service (SaaS) and user experience design. Highlights of Rahul Vohra's career include founding successful companies like Superhuman and Rapportive, as well as making significant investments in a wide range of startups...
Xan Wood joined Canvas in May 2024 as an Investor, focusing on artificial intelligence applications across healthcare and fintech. He brings unique insight into emerging AI technologies through his strong connections to UC Berkeley's AI ecosystem. As the writer of the weekly Built By Berkeley Newsletter, Xan has his finger on the pulse of what’s coming next. While getting his MBA at Berkeley Haas, Xan demonstrated his ability to identify and support promising technical founders by raising Courty...
Jonathan is Co-Founder and CEO of Impart Security. Prior to founding Impart, Jonathan was the VP of Product at Signal Sciences, an application security startup that sold to Fastly for $825M. Prior to Signal Sciences, Jonathan was product lead at Edgecast Networks, a global content delivery network that sold to Verizon for over $400M. After the sale of Edgecast Networks, Jonathan served as VP of Product at Verizon shaping the digital product portfolio, leading to the acquisition of Uplynk, Volico...
John Wang is the CTO at Assembled, where he leads efforts to transform customer support through a unified platform blending human expertise with AI-powered efficiency. Previously, he was Co-founder and Chief Engineer at Zinc and an early engineer at Stripe. A Computer Science graduate from MIT, John’s career spans open source contributions to Ruby on Rails, applied mathematics research in fluid dynamics and pathogen dispersal, and economics studies on housing quality and academic achievement und...
Krishna Subramanian is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and commentator on mobile advertising. He is best known for being the CEO and Co-Founder of Captiv8, which was acquired by Publicis Groupe, and a founding employee of BlueLithium, one of the largest online ad networks acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million, and Mobclix, a mobile ad exchange network acquired by Velti in 2010. Subramanian has also written for Forbes, The Huffington Post, Advertising Age, and Mashable.Topics: Le...
Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and reducing infrastructure overhead. Before founding Modal, he served as CTO of Better.com (2015-2020), scaling...
Çağla Kaymaz is a partner at Category where she invests in founders building transformative companies in enterprise software. Previously, she was at Citi Ventures, where she backed AI infrastructure and application startups including Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake), Galileo, Glean, Lexion (acquired by Docusign), and Norm Ai. Cagla began her career at Microsoft as a software engineer before moving into product management, where she led highly technical software teams shipping enterprise software...
Harris Stolzenberg is a Partner at Pear. Based in Boston, he is focused on making Pear the go-to early stage firm on the East Coast. He thrives when working alongside ambitious founders at the very earliest stages, rolling up his sleeves to help turn bold ideas into enduring companies. Harris returns to Pear as a partner after previously working at Pear as an associate. He touched many different parts of the Pear ecosystem before this full circle transition. After a quick stint in investment ban...
Will Lehmann is the Founder & GP at Step Function. He has spent his entire career investing in technical founders at the earliest stages. He started Step Function to give founders leverage: a fund purpose-built to help founders building infrastructure software succeed from the outset. He provides the support, domain experience & expertise that you expect from an institutional lead investor with the feel, velocity & accessibility of a super angel. He helps founders in all the conventi...
Clayton Petty is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, Clayton helped build the Cyber Security practice at McKinsey & Company, advising founders, operators, and investors across the cyber ecosystem. He also worked closely with vertical software, automation, and cloud infrastructure businesses to scale their go-to-market efforts. Before McKinsey, Clayton was a software engineer and studied computer science at Texas A&M University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.Topics: Shifts in C...
Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, where he leads product and business innovation in AI and software. He has held leadership roles at Salesforce, Cisco, Tonkean, TomoCredit, and Workplay Labs, and is also a General Partner at RNR Capital. Jeff co-founded RocketFuel Education, an education platform focused on cryptocurrencies, economics, AI, and venture capital, and is an active angel investor in multiple startups that have scaled to unicorn status. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from t...
Minjae Ormes is a Forbes World’s Most Influential CMO and Goldhouse A100 honoree, celebrated for building iconic brands and transformative teams at global companies including YouTube, Visible, and most recently as VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. Renowned for driving innovation in social media, the creator economy, and now AI, she leads with curiosity and courage, fostering inclusive, high-accountability cultures. In her free agent era, Minjae actively mentors, engages a global community, and relent...
Arif Damji is a Partner at Conductive Ventures with deep experience in software and tech-enabled services. He focuses on achieving an efficient Go-To-Market strategy, leveraging his background in both B2B and B2C marketing and sales. Arif believes that scrappy founders deserve hands-on investors who provide practical support rather than buzzwords or generic advice.Topics: How AI is reshaping B2B and B2C GTM playbooks How traditional software businesses should add AI capabilities When to build vs...
Joanne Chen is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, where she invests in AI-first B2B applications and data platforms that power the automated enterprise. A technologist at heart who built her first webpage business at age nine, she launched her career as an engineer at Cisco before co-founding a mobile gaming company and later advising tech companies on IPOs and M&A at Jefferies, as well as venture firms on fundraising at Probitas Partners. Prior to joining Foundation in 2014, she was a...
Wen Sang is the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai, a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for knowledge workers, which reached 2 million users and $36M in ARR within 45 days of launching in April 2025, securing $160M in funding and partnering with top AI labs to advance agentic work solutions. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Smarking Inc., a Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures-backed SaaS company for parking analytics, which was acquired by JustPark in 2022. Wen holds a PhD in Mecha...
