Venture with Grace

Vanessa Larco joined NEA as a Partner in 2016 and focuses on enterprise and consumer investing. She has led investments in Assembled, Kindred, Rewind AI, Cleo, Evernow, Rocket.Chat, and Mejuri, among others. She is also a board observer at Forethought, SafeBase, Orby AI, Granica, Modyfi, and HEAVY.AI. She was a board observer at Robinhood until its IPO in 2021. Prior to Venture, she led product teams at Box, Twilio, Disney, and Xbox. Topics: - Current Trends in Enterprise and Consumer Investing - The Impact of AI and Automation - Strategies for Identifying Promising Startups Early #VentureCapital #StartupSuccess #EarlyStageInvesting #TechInnovation #FutureUnicorns

Tikue Anazodo is the co-founder and CEO of Kudos Technologies, a company launched in 2022 that developed an AI-powered smart wallet to help consumers maximize credit card rewards and cash back for online purchases. Under his leadership, Kudos has grown rapidly, securing a recent Series A round led by QED Investors. Tikue, who previously worked at Google and Affirm, has driven Kudos to expand its user base from 1,000 beta testers to 200,000 registered users, while introducing innovative features like MariaGPT and Kudos Boost to enhance the shopping experience. - Leveraging AI for Innovation in Financial Technology - Current Trends and Innovations in the Fintech Sector - Growing a Fintech Company #Fintech #StartupGrowth #AIinFintech #TechInnovation #FinancialTechnology

Kyle Lui is a General Partner at Bling Capital. He has backed 7 “unicorn” companies across SaaS, consumer internet, digital health, and fintech. Previously, Kyle was a Partner at DCM where led early stage US investments including DocSend (acq. by Dropbox), TravelBank (acq. by US Bank), Wrike (acq. by Citrix), Hims & Hers (NYSE: HIMS), Shift (Nasdaq: SFT) and Tapingo (acq. by GrubHub). He also served as a board member or observer of SoFi (Nasdaq: SOFI), Matterport (Nasdaq: MTTR), BitTorrent (acq. by Tron), Mendel.ai, Fountain, Eaze and Tempo. Given the global focus of DCM, Kyle has extensive experience partnering with startups in Asia. He is also an angel investor in Elemy, All Day Kitchens, Blank Street and Atom Computing. Kyle has also been founder of two startups. He was the co-founder and CEO of ChoicePass, a HR SaaS startup acquired by Salesforce and became part of Work.com (Salesforce’s HR Cloud). At Salesforce, Kyle served as Director of Product Management for Work.com, growing the business to over 1,000 B2B customers and $40M+ ARR. He was also on the founding team for XcelDx, the predecessor to Scanwell Health (acquired by BD). Kyle began his career as a private equity investor at Pantheon and Clearwater Capital, based in San Francisco and subsequently Hong Kong. - Building Successful SaaS Businesses - Investing in Unicorns - Navigating Acquisitions #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting #UnicornStartups #SaaS #Fintech #DigitalHealth

An entrepreneur at heart, Rami Rahal started Blue Cloud Ventures after having worked as a tech investment banker at Madison Park Group. Before that, he was an IT strategy consultant at Accenture. In 2016, he was named by Forbes to the Venture Capital "30Under30" list and by Inc. Magazine as one of "20 Young Entrepreneurs You Need to Know". In 2018, he was named by Crain New York Business Magazine to the "40 Under 40" list and received the "Distinguished Young Alumnus Award" from the American University of Beirut. Rami has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University. He is an avid skier and previously was a national martial arts champion. Topics: - Building and Leading a Successful Venture Firm - Key Traits of Successful SaaS Companies - Navigating Investment Decisions #VentureCapital #SaaS #StartupGrowth #Fundraising #Entrepreneurship

Nick Singh is the Founder and CEO of DataLemur. Thousands of data scientists, data analysts, and BI professionals use DataLemur daily to prepare for their technical interviews and land their dream jobs in data. Previously, he worked at Facebook and Google. These days, he's the creator of the SQL interview platform DataLemur.com, the best-selling author of "Ace the Data Science Interview," and avidly writes data science and career tips for his audience of 166k+ followers on LinkedIn. - Hiring the Best Data Scientist for Your Team - Building the Best Data Science Team - Innovation in the Data Science Space #DataScience #TechInnovation #DataTeam #Hiring #DataAnalytics #AI #MachineLearning

Kanyi Maqubela serves as Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. He focuses his investment and formation work in theme areas including frontier technology, digital health, e-commerce, financial technology, supply-chain/logistics. He currently serves a number of startups as a lead investor, including Adyton, Basis Theory, Faircraft, Cloudtrucks, Goldfinch, and Tala. He previously led or participated in the earliest stages of investments including Outschool, Just, Impossible Foods, Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), Reddit (NYSE: RDDT), Mural, Hellosign (acquired by Dropbox), and Earnest (acquired by Navient). As an entrepreneur and operator, Kanyi is a co-founder at Heartbeat Health, the largest virtual heart health platform in the United States. He previously served as a Partner at Collaborative Fund. Early in his career before venture, Kanyi ran growth at One Block Off the Grid (acquired by NYSE: NRG for $120 million) and was an early employee at Doostang (acquired by Universum Global). Kanyi has also served as an Adjunct Professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, a curriculum adapted from his time as a student at Stanford University, where he studied Philosophy. Kanyi lives in San Francisco with his family, and serves as founding advisor for Screendoor Partners, and on the Board of Directors of the UCSF Foundation Investment Company. - Frontier Technology and Its Impact on Venture Capital - The Future of Digital Health - E-commerce Evolution and Investment Trends #VentureCapital #StartupSuccess #FrontierTech #DigitalHealth #Ecommerce

David leads pre-seed investments at Roble Ventures, a future-of-work-focused fund that invests in technologies enabling people, teams, and organizations to achieve their most ambitious work. He looks for early-stage software companies that positively impact organizations and workers and can scale to be potential $1B+ unicorn companies. David served on a Fulbright Scholarship at the leading global accelerator Endeavor in Mexico City. Later, as an operator in two venture-backed startups, he saw firsthand how difficult scaling can be. His mission now as an investor is to partner with founders to establish a strong foundation from the beginning for scaling their businesses, their own potential, and their potential impact and financial returns. Roble Ventures invests $200k-$2M in early-stage startups, reimagining the future of work through SaaS, marketplaces, and consumer tech products. - Building a System for Consistent Quality Deal Flow - Diligencing a Company, Key Questions and Process - Analyzing and Picking a Company, Criteria for Success #FutureOfWork #EdTech #VentureCapital #DealSourcing #StartupInvesting #DueDiligence

Brian Harwitt is a Partner at CoVenture where he focused on finding alternative lending platforms to partner with for both debt and equity financings. Prior to joining the CoVenture team, Brian was an investment banking analyst at Guggenheim Securities focusing on healthcare. Brian received a BS Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University. - Key trends and innovations in alternative lending - How startups can decide which financing route to take - Risk assessment and management in alternative lending #VentureCapital #Fintech #AlternativeLending #StartupFunding #DebtFinancing

Natasha is a partner at Silicon Legal Strategy. Her practice focuses on advising emerging growth and development stage companies on a variety of matters: pre-incorporation planning and entity formation, debt or equity financing and day-to-day business issues, and through the exit process. She also represents emerging technology investors. Prior to joining SLS, Natasha was a corporate associate at Kaye Scholer LLP and DLA Piper LLP (US) in Palo Alto and San Francisco, where she worked with emerging companies and investors in venture financings, M&A and corporate governance. She also practiced with DLA Piper Hong Kong and advised clients in various international transactions, including strategic investments and public offerings in the U.S., Hong Kong and India. - Essential Legal Steps for Startup Founders and Emerging VCs - Strategic Entity Formation and Structuring - Navigating Venture Financings #VentureCapital #StartupLaw #LegalTech #VCInsights #FounderTips

Nir Eyal is an author, speaker, and expert in behavioral design, which combines psychology, technology, and business. He wrote the bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir has taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design School and has sold two tech companies since 2003. With a background in video gaming and advertising, he helps companies create positive user behaviors and teaches people how to build healthy habits. As an investor, Nir supports habit-forming products that improve lives, with investments in companies like Eventbrite, Kahoot!, Anchor.fm, Canva, and Product Hunt. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. - Building a Focused and Productive Team - How to Create Habit-Forming Products - Mastering Focus and Managing Distractions #VentureCapital #Startups #TechInvesting #Entrepreneurship #Innovation