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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Alex Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO at Truewind, a venture-backed technology startup building AI for Accountants. Trusted by 200+ businesses and accounting firms, including EisnerAmper and Frank Rimerman, Truewind raised $17 million from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Rho Capital, Pathlight Ventures, and Y Combinator. Previously, Alex was a venture capital investor at Alliance Ventures and Schematic Ventures, where he invested in early stage startups and provided finance support to the portfolio compa...
Harry Qi is the co-founder and CEO of Motion, an AI-native productivity company building an “agentic work suite” that uses autonomous agents to manage calendars, tasks, and workflows for knowledge workers and SMBs. A former hedge fund analyst, he left a seven‑figure finance career in his early 20s to found Motion in 2019 with friends Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu, taking the company through Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch and scaling it to over 100,000 customers worldwide. Under his leadership, ...
Robert LoCascio Founded a new company in 2023 called Eternos.life which became Uare.ai and is providing a platform for prosumers and consumers to create their own individual AIs for both work and personal use. Previously, Rob was the Founder of LivePerson, Inc. (LPSN: NASDAQ ), and was its Chief Executive Officer from 1995 to 2023. He was the guiding force behind the company’s vision of creating meaningful connections between brands and consumers and was the original inventor of web chat. Rob’s ...
Gabriel Jarrosson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lobster Capital, an early-stage fund that invests exclusively in the top-performing Y Combinator startups. After bootstrapping a prior company to $1M ARR with no employees and investing tens of millions of dollars across 100+ YC companies, he built Lobster Capital around a traction- and data-driven thesis, backing the top 2% of YC teams and coaching them through the messy realities of product-market fit, founder psychology, and scaling. To...
Benjamin Orthlieb is the Co-Founder & GP at Blue Moon, a seed fund backing B2B founders across North America. Ben is building a modern venture model — human focused, powered by data and AI. Founders consistently tell him they love the approach because it feels like working with a tech startup as much as a VC. Before Blue Moon, Benjamin spent nearly two decades leading strategy, M&A, and venture investing teams. At LinkedIn, he led the Corporate Development & Strategy team, partnering...
Gil Rosen is the President of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, and co-teacher of CEE246A Web3 Entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering. Gil aims to nurture the future of Blockchain and Web3 as a sustainable force for good - building infrastructure, organizational models, and technology, that serve humanity and our ecosystem rather than extract. Gil is the founder of HeadandHeart.capital, an angel fund aligning social impact with venture returns investing in blockchain, fintech,...
Ville Tuulos is the Co-founder & CEO of Outerbounds. Outerbounds is a company developing modern human-centric ML. Ville has been developing infrastructure for machine learning for over two decades. He has worked as an ML researcher in academia and as a leader at a number of companies, including Netflix where he led the ML infrastructure team that created Metaflow, a popular open-source framework for ML infrastructure.He is also the author of an upcoming book, Effective Data Science Infrastru...
Jason Saltzman, Head of Insights at CB Insights. Jason leads the insights function at CB Insights, delivering predictive intelligence on the companies and technologies defining the future. Prior to CB Insights, Jason led marketing and insights at Live Data Technologies and built GTM functions for 25+ startups at Verbatim. He is also a former professional cyclist.Topics: The future of AI, enterprise software, and emerging tech The industries primed for hyper-growth in 2026 How CB Insights predict...
Vivek Ladsariya is a Managing Director at PSL and general partner of PSL's venture capital firm, PSL Ventures. Vivek will play a pivotal role in leading external pre-seed and seed investments out of PSL Ventures’ $100 million Fund II, actively investing in new Pacific Northwest technology companies. The majority of the fund’s portfolio consists of companies where PSL Ventures led an initial round within weeks of company formation, and roughly half of all PSL investments are AI-enabled software c...
Aditya Naganath joined Kleiner Perkins’ investment team in 2022 with a focus on artificial intelligence, enterprise software applications, infrastructure and security. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Aditya was a product manager at Google focusing on growth initiatives for the next billion users team. He previously was a technical lead at Palantir Technologies and formerly held software engineering roles at Twitter and Nextdoor, where he was a Kleiner Perkins fellow. Aditya earned a patent dur...
Rachel Holt is Co-founder and General Partner of Construct Capital, an early stage focused venture firm that invests in extraordinary founders who are transforming the most foundational industries of our economy. Sectors such as manufacturing and supply chain to logistics and transportation drive half our economy’s GDP yet lack advanced technology and are failing to meet customer expectations. Before Construct, Rachel spent nearly 8.5 years at Uber and was a long time member of the company’s Exe...
Karen Ng is the executive vice president of product at HubSpot, where she leads product strategy and execution across product management, design, and partnerships with a mission to help millions of organizations grow better.Prior to HubSpot, Karen held head of product roles at Common Room, Google, and Microsoft. At Common Room, a customer intelligence platform, she founded and scaled the product and data science teams, taking the product from 0–1 and driving its first revenue milestones. At Goog...
Kourosh Zamani is a co-founder of Laurel, the first company to apply AI to time in professional services. Kourosh has experience in various roles in business development, investment, and entrepreneurship. Zamani also founded and served as the Executive Director of Young Professionals of San Francisco, a networking organization with over 8,000 members. Kourosh holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, along with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administrati...
Anish Srivastava is a seasoned venture capitalist and innovation leader, currently a Venture Partner at Swisscom Ventures, where he focuses on Series A and later-stage investments in enterprise SaaS, AI, cybersecurity, next-gen IT, cloud technologies, and telecom. Anish also leads Telosity Ventures, investing in early-stage startups focused on digital wellness and mental health. In addition, he is the Founder and CEO of Vinaj Ventures, an innovation firm that helps Fortune 500 companies develop ...
Ernie is a Managing Director at Forgepoint and focuses on early stage investments. Ernie serves on the Boards of Huntress, DataBahn.ai, 1Kosmos, Synadia, RAD Security, Bishop Fox, and NowSecure. Prior to Forgepoint, Ernie served as the Chief Operating Officer of the Defense Innovation Unit. In that capacity, he was responsible for executing the organization’s strategy to identify and adopt emerging commercial technologies to solve national security challenges. Ernie helped grow the organization ...
Laura Burkhauser is the CEO of Descript, leading the company in developing innovative AI-powered tools for audio and video creators. She is recognized for her expertise in product leadership, with previous senior roles at Twitter, Rent the Runway, and Le Tote. Laura holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago. As CEO, she is focused on making creative tools radically more accessible through AI-driven content creation.Topics: Lead...
Jon Callaghan is a founder, an investor, and a Managing Partner of True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm he co-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. Under Jon’s leadership, True was among the first institutional investors in now-iconic companies, inclu...
Ross Fubini is the Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, which he founded in 2016 after a successful career as a founder and operator. A 2025 Midas List honoree (#88) and #8 on the Midas Seed List, Ross is recognized for early investments in Anduril, the defense technology company founded by Palmer Luckey, and cloud security leader Verkada. Under his leadership, XYZ has grown to over $1.2B AUM across four funds, backing bold founders in frontier technology, AI, and enterprise innovation. Befo...
Natalie Dillon is a Partner at Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco. She joined Maveron in 2018 after working at Susa Ventures, where she helped source and diligence early-stage consumer investments. Prior to that, she was a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs and a research associate at Silicon Valley Bank, where her passion for consumer businesses and identifying market patterns flourished. A San Francisco native and Stanford graduate, Natalie is known for her...
Manmeet Singh Bhasin is a technology entrepreneur and VC. He is currently the founder of a stealth-mode startup and was the founder and managing partner of PGV Fund 1 from January 2022 to March 2025, a venture capital fund investing in AI/ML and blockchain early-stage companies. Before that, he was the founder and CEO of Dataguise, a company focused on data privacy and security, which was acquired by PKWARE for over $100 million. Earlier in his career, he worked in engineering and technology man...
Conor Brennan-Burke is the founder of Hyperspell (YC F25), which builds memory and context infrastructure for AI agents. Before starting Hyperspell, he helped scale software products to over $50M in ARR and advised on more than $1B in private equity and M&A deals. He’s a repeat founder with experience across five countries and a focus on making AI systems more capable and useful in the real world. Hyperspell is also featured on Smart AI 100 list as one of the most promising early stage ai co...
Lari Hamalainen is a Senior Partner at McKinsey. In the past he has led McKinsey Digital in Northern Europe and Northeast Asia and served as managing partner for McKinsey’s Finland office.Lari’s passion is to help companies build new businesses while renewing their existing business models. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and has from a young age been involved in building technology businesses and helping organizations better adapt technology to their needs. Over the last 15 years at McK...
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: ...
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 amo...
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...
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 IP...
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 sc...
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...
