Venture with Grace

Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Sauce Labs, a leader in continuous testing and error reporting solutions that enable the development, delivery, and updating of high-quality code at speed. The Sauce Labs unified testing platform has conducted over four billion tests, making it the most comprehensive and trusted continuous testing solution in the world. It provides a 360-degree view of a customer's application experience, helping businesses improve their user experience by ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device. Prior to Sauce Labs, Dave worked at Unity Technologies as a Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Twins. * The Role of Continuous Testing in Software Development * The Future of Continuous Testing and DevOps * Building and Leading High-Performing Teams #Leadership #TechLeadership #Innovation #ContinuousTesting #SoftwareDevelopment

Jenny Fielding is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures (The Fund). She was the Managing Director at Techstars for 7.5 years where she led investments into companies that now have a market cap of over $10B, prior to co-founding the global venture capital firm, Everywhere Ventures. Across these entities, Jenny has been the first-money into 300+ tech-enabled companies including: Chainalysis, Alloy, Latch, Tempo Automation, Headway, Contra, Particle Health, Pair Eyewear, Solo Funds, Halp, Rupa Health, Morty, Wagmo, Smarthop, PathSpot, Remesh, Cube, OnePipe, Season, Parsley Health and many more. - Key Trends in Pre-Seed Investing - Impact of Diverse Backers on Investment Decisions - Founder-Operator Insights #VentureCapital #PreSeedInvesting #StartupEcosystem #TechStartups #VCInsights

Darian Shirazi is a General Partner at Gradient Ventures. Prior to Gradient, Darian founded Radius, a leading B2B Customer Data Platform, serving as the company’s CEO for 7+ years. He grew the company to over one hundred employees, raised more than $100MM in venture capital from top tier firms, and served dozens of Fortune 500 customers. He is an early investor in many companies including Lyft, Udemy, Carbon Health, Palantir, and serves on the Board of Directors at Gigs, Range, Spline, and Chili Piper, among others. He studied briefly at UC Berkeley, after working at Facebook as a Software Engineer reporting to Mark Zuckerberg, but dropped out after two years to work full-time on startups. - Lessons from Building and Growing Startups - Strategies and Insights for Investing in Top AI Companies - Raising Capital and Acquiring Clients #VentureCapital #StartupGrowth #AIInvestment #Entrepreneurship #TechInnovation

Qin En Looi is a Partner at Saison Capital. Saison Capital is an early stage fund with a focus on emerging markets. We back ambitious founders solving big problems, with deep fondness for web3, fintech and embedded finance - non-fintech companies expanding into fintech. Their team comes from an operating background, and we are unafraid to roll up our sleeves to support our founders. We are backed by Credit Saison, a Tokyo-listed 30b AUM consumer finance company with extensive financial services across Asia. - Investment Focus and Strategy - Operational Expertise and Founder Support - Partnership with Credit Saison and Market Impact #VC #VentureCapital #Fintech #EmergingMarkets #Web3

Ian Sigalow is the co-founder and managing partner of Greycroft, a multi-stage venture fund based in New York. Since co-founding the fund in 2006, Ian has helped grow AUM to more than $3B, having invested in companies like Venmo, Bumble, Shipt, and Scopely. Before founding Greycroft, Ian spent three years at a venture fund in Boston, before starting his own company called StrongData, which developed smart card technology to prevent card-not-present fraud. * The State of VC in 2024 * Market predictions * Generative AI  #vc #tech #startup

Inspired by Knight Rider and Star Trek, Shahin grew up with a passion to endow superpowers to humanity through feats of engineering. He learned BASIC on an IBM PC XT clone he built at his aunt’s computer store and used to dial into Bulletin Board Systems when he was in the 4th grade. He learned about engines by taking apart an Alfa Romeo at his Uncle’s repair shop a few years later. He aspired to design microchips, software, and systems that could someday amount to the fictional K.I.T.T., and build warp drives that could propel humanity to far corners of the galaxy. Shahin has had the privilege of partnering with amazing founding teams for over two decades. After working for several software startups, he built his first startup in 2004 building upon his PhD research designing chips, systems, and software to capture and interpret brain signals. He later had the pleasure of meeting Lux’s founding team, who invited him to partner with them in 2006, where he has cofounded and led Lux’s investments into companies that have gone on to become publicly traded (e.g., NYSE:AEVA and NYSE:PL), and acquired by the likes of Intel (Nervana), Amazon (Zoox), Silicon Laboratories (Silicon Clocks), and Lattice Semiconductor (SiBeam). Topics: - Building and Scaling Deep Tech Startups: Challenges and Opportunities - Collaborating with Founders to Drive Innovation in Complex Technologies - Exploring the Influence of AI and Robotics #VentureCapital #AI #Robotics #DeepTech #Innovation

Brian Zhan is an investor at CRV, where he focuses on investing in early-stage infrastructure software companies. Prior to that, he worked on product development at Facebook and Starburst. Brian joined the original Presto creators (who co-founded Starburst to offer fully managed Presto) to build Starburst's batch analytics product from scratch. He interviewed users to build the business proposal and roadmap, hired an engineering team, and led the go-to-market strategy. Building an active open-source community of over 200 companies using Starburst's open-source product Trino (renamed from Presto) for batch analytics was a key achievement. His work's popularity is evidenced by many companies like Salesforce, Lyft, Zillow, and TreasureData giving talks, writing blogs, and publishing research papers about Starburst/Trino for batch analytics. Brian was also featured in many influential data forums like dbt Coalesce, DataIQ Talks, and Data Fabric Summit, showcasing his significant contributions to the field. - Early-Stage Infrastructure Software Investing - Open-Source Community Building - Transition from Product Development to VC #VentureCapital #InfrastructureSoftware #OpenSource #DataAnalytics #StartupInvesting

Gabby Slome is the Co-founder and CEO of Cooper, a parenting mecca offering parents (and parents to be) with the tools and resources to build their parenting muscle and become the parents they want to be. Cooper offers on demand access to leading experts in child development and likeminded parents, 24/7. Group sessions, live events/workshops and “always on” one-on-one support are spearheaded by top tier experts including PhD’s, educators and licensed clinical social workers with decades of experience. Cooper’s mission is to equip parents with more effective ways of seeing and solving parenting challenges at home. - Building an Inclusive Community - Entrepreneurship in Parenthood - Navigating Parenthood with Expertise #VentureWithGrace #ParentingInnovation #ModernMotherhood #ExpertGuidance #InclusiveParenting

Chris is a partner at Wing, where he works with founders building data infrastructure and AI-first infrastructure. His passion is improving the odds for founders at the earliest stages, particularly in finding product-market fit through introductions to potential customers and strategic partners. He strives to support founders in de-risking the beginning stages of building an enduring company. Before joining Wing as a partner, he was a venture investor at Base10 Partners and a growth-stage investor at Insight Partners. Chris’s prior investments include infrastructure software companies like Plaid, Sysdig, OneSignal, as well as application software companies like Carta, Figma, and Mercury. Chris co-founded Soled Out, an e-commerce marketplace and set of SMB software tools focused on collectible sneakers and streetwear that reached more than $10 million in sales where data infrastructure was a heavy product component. As a former marketplace founder, Chris has also invested in many e-commerce software tools like Attentive, Klaviyo, and Tapcart. He writes on all things data infrastructure and infrastructure software at Data Gravity. As a former founder, he brings a deeply empathetic communication style that strives for high engagement with founders. He studied statistics and finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating magna cum laude and dean’s list while operating as a founder. - Navigating the Data Infrastructure Landscape - Building AI-First Infrastructure - Future of AI in Business #VentureCapital #StartupSuccess #DataInfrastructure #AIInnovation #FoundersJourney

Galia Beer-Gabel is a Partner at Team8 where she helps to build innovative fintech startups. Galia works closely with founders and supports them with the ideation, building, and scaling of their businesses. Prior to joining and building Team8’s fintech foundry, Galia spent 6 years at PayPal where she held multiple business development and sales leadership roles across sub-Saharan Africa, Israel, and Eastern Europe. In addition to possessing deep fintech and eCommerce expertise, Galia has vast experience with B2B sales methodologies and intrapreneurship. During her tenure at PayPal, she has led product innovation, business development activities, strategic partnerships, and enterprise sales, as well as geo-expansion efforts. With a passion for innovation and emerging markets, Galia introduced and led product driven partnerships with banks, alternative payment methods, and credit card providers that delivered true impact in the day-to-day lives of consumers and businesses. Most notably, Galia was the driving force behind PayPal’s strategic partnership with M-PESA, one of the world’s first and leading mobile wallets to democratize access to financial services and global eCommerce for Kenyan businesses and consumers. - Fintech Trends and Innovations - Building Successful Fintech Startups - Building Globally Scalable Companies #Fintech #Innovation #Startup #Entrepreneurship #Leadership