Venture with Grace

Sandy Kory founded Horizon in 2022 and has over 15 years of venture capital experience. He was an early investor in Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, Sendbird, and several other unicorns. Horizon is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in disruptive software.Topics: Evolution of Software Investing Bootstrapped vs. Billion-Dollar Rounds Inside Palantir & Canva's Early Days#SeedStage#StartupGrowth#VentureCapital#BootstrappedVsVC

Eugene Lee is a Partner at OMERS Ventures. He is currently a board member at Postal (offline marketing automation), WorkRamp (learning engine), Klue (competitive enablement), Mosaic (strategic finance), Fonoa (tax automation), Quorso (co-pilot for retail operations), and an investor in Crunchbase (prospecting for private companies).Eugene is an experienced professional with a demonstrated ability in business, financial and sales operations, general management (GM), business development, growth, online marketing, sales, M&A, and strategy for both Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups. He has significant exposure to and interactions with business unit leaders, executive management, and board members. He also has direct experience with consumer, commerce, and SaaS platforms.Topics: The Evolution of SaaS Business ModelsBuilding Sales Operations at ScaleInvesting Trends in Vertical SaaS #SaaS#VerticalSaaS#VentureCapital#OMERSVentures

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners. Amplify Partners investments include Intervenn Biosciences, RunwayML, Maze Design, Bayes (acquired by Airtable), OctoML, Einblick AI (acquired by Databricks), Hyperparam, Hex, Meroxa, Metaphor Data, Datafold, Modal, Eppo, Gantry, Datology, WarpStream among others. Prior to that she worked as an associate at Canvas Ventures and the head of data at Mattermark. Topics: The evolution of AI infrastructure investingData tooling and the modern data stack The intersection of AI and life sciences#AIinfrastructure#DeepTech#VentureCapital#DataScience#AI

Hansae Catlett is a Partner at HOF Capital where he invests across sectors and stages, with a particular focus on leading the firm's early stage investment strategy in applied AI, B2B application software (horizontal and vertical), dev tools & infra, and deep tech.Prior to joining HOF Capital, Hansae was a Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, helping to lead the firm's investments in cloud and AI. His investments and/or board positions included Guild, Jasper, Luxury Presence, MaintainX, Nala, Productboard, Rilla, ServiceTitan, Sila, Shopmonkey, Spot AI, TRM Labs, and VendorPM. He also supported Bessemer's investments in Canva, EvenUp and Syndio.Before Bessemer, Hansae helped lead the investment strategy of Scott Cook's family office with a focus on enterprise SaaS, biomedical informatics, and edtech. He has worked with the investment teams at Slow Ventures and Omidyar Network, and has held product and business strategy roles at various startups.Hansae is a co-founder and general partner of The MBA Fund, a seed-stage fund that partners with promising alumni and student entrepreneurs from top universities, with notable investments in Create Inc, FlutterFlow, Hightouch, Jeeves, Seso, and Vooma AI, among others.Hansae earned his MBA and MPP from Stanford and graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in biomedical engineering and philosophy.Topics: Early Stage Investment Strategies in Applied AIB2B SaaS and Dev Tools Trends and OpportunitiesDeep Tech Investments Challenges and Rewards#VentureCapital#AIInvestments#B2BSaaS#DeepTech#CloudComputing

Emilio Escobar is the Chief Information Security Officer of Datadog. With two decades of experience in Information Security and Compliance, Emilio Escobar has worked at large enterprises, medium-sized companies, and governmental organizations. Previously, Emilio served as the VP of Information Security for Hulu, where he played a pivotal role in setting up key security functions. Prior to that, Emilio worked for PlayStation, where he built and ran the software security teams. Emilio’s unique approach to security and compliance has always prioritized partnerships and people—hiring the right talent to build the processes, procedures, and technologies that unite Security, Engineering, and Operations teams. Emilio holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Puerto Rico.Topics: Evolution of Security in Cloud EnvironmentsFuture Trends in CybersecurityData Security in a Cloud-First World#Cybersecurity#CloudSecurity#Datadog#CISO#DevSecOps

Itamar Novick is the Founder & General Partner at Recursive Ventures where he invest in early stage technology companies. Supporting entrepreneurs since 2010 (100+ investment). Business insider Top 100 Global seed investor in 2021-2024.Previously Entrepreneur & Startup executive at Life360 and Gigya. Some of his portfolio companies including: Deel, Honeybook, Peerspace, Akash Network, SafeGraph among others. Topics: Journey from a Successful Investor to Fund ManagerFirst-Time Fund Manager's Guide to LPsBreaking Into Competitive Rounds#VentureCapital#StartupLife#SeedInvesting#SoloGP

Andrew Bihl is the co-founder & CTO at Numeric. Numeric is an AI accounting automation platform, built to take manual work off accountants' plates so they can focus on what’s impactful. Numeric is currently used by hundreds of private and public companies to organize their close, automate reconciliations, and leverage AI for auto-drafted flux explanations and technical accounting research. Topics: The AI Revolution in Financial Software Building for Scale: The Enterprise Financial Stack Revolutionizing Accounting Through Real-Time Data #FinTech #AccountingTech #StartupLife #TechnicalFounder

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: Lessons from early-stage investing in consumer and enterprise businesses The biggest challenges in building a company vs. investing in one The future of consumer experiences and hospitality #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting #Entrepreneurship #TrueVentures

Gary Pinkus is chairman of North America. He was previously the managing partner for the firm in North America, and before that led McKinsey’s office for the Western United States. Gary is also the former global leader of McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice, which he helped cofound more than two decades ago. He has been a long-time member of McKinsey's Shareholders Council (our global governance board), including historically chairing the Finance and Infrastructure Committee and the Risk, Audit, and Governance Committee. His client work spans multiple industries with a particular focus on private equity and principal investors. Gary joined McKinsey in Los Angeles in 1987 as a business analyst and came to the firm’s San Francisco office in 1992. Over the course of his career, he has worked for Dole Food Company in Honduras, Bear Stearns’ M&A group in New York, and in McKinsey's Houston, Mexico City, Sydney, and Zurich offices. Gary currently serves on the boards of Wake Forest University and US Ski and Snowboard Association. He is a prior member of the boards of San Francisco Opera, California Academy of Sciences, Menlo School, California Business Roundtable, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, ReSurge International (formerly Interplast), and the investment committee for Woodside School Foundation. He earned a Bachelor's degree in English and quantitative economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, both with distinction. Topics: Essential skills for the next generation of global business leaders A chairman's perspective on what truly sets great companies apart The evolving role of AI in reshaping business strategy and operations #McKinsey #LeadershipJourney #BusinessStrategy #PrivateEquity #ConsultingLife

Joe Reis is an Instructor of DeepLearning.AI DeepLearning.AI is making a world-class AI education accessible to people around the globe. DeepLearning.AI was founded by Andrew Ng, a global leader in AI. Joe is also the former CEO of Ternary Data. He also co-authored the wildly successful O’Reilly book, Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Topics: The Data Engineering Skills Gap The Future of Data Engineering Modern Data Architecture #DataEngineering #DataArchitecture #TechInvestor #VC