Venture with Grace

Jim Tananbaum is the founder and CEO of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm he launched in 2011 that manages approximately $3.5 billion in assets. With a career spanning three decades, Jim has partnered with some of the fastest-growing and most influential healthcare companies of their generation, including 10x Genomics, Amerigroup, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. A lifelong student of both data science and medicine, his vision for Foresite Capital is to sit at the intersection of biology, technology, and data to support entrepreneurs building transformative healthcare solutions. Earlier in his career, he co-founded GelTex Pharmaceuticals and Theravance, companies that together delivered blockbuster drugs and multibillion-dollar market capitalizations. Jim holds a BS and BSEE from Yale, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was also part of the Harvard/MIT HST Program.Topics: Recent $900M fundraise and bets on Alumis, Latigo Biotherapeutics, Xaira Therapeutics50+ IPOs, 47 public listings, 58 FDA approvals across portfolioForesite Labs incubating ML-powered healthcare startups#BiotechInvesting #AIBiotech #ForesiteCapital #JimTananbaum #HealthcareInnovation

Ashley Smith, General Partner and founder of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, shares her journey from leading marketing at GitHub to investing in AI and developer tools. She emphasizes the mantra 'done is better than perfect' and discusses the importance of building communities for technical credibility. Ashley highlights trends in AI infrastructure, advocating for a practical approach focused on reliability and security. Additionally, she shares insights on sourcing deals through her vast network and designing events that resonate with builders.

Philip Rathle is the Chief Technology Officer of Neo4j, where he has spent more than a decade helping transform the company from a niche on‑premise database into a leading global graph database and analytics platform used in modern AI and data-intensive applications. With over 25 years in enterprise data, he previously led Neo4j’s product organization, growing ARR from under seven figures to well into nine figures and expanding the portfolio into multiple cloud product lines, while building and leading large global product and engineering teams. Earlier in his career, Philip co-founded a customer data integration startup and held product and consulting roles at Embarcadero, Accenture, and Tanning Technology, giving him deep experience in databases, data modeling, and large-scale information systems. A Northwestern-trained engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is also known for thought leadership around graph technology, GenAI, and GraphRAG, including authoring “The GraphRAG Manifesto” and championing industry standards such as ISO GQL.Topics: From On-Prem to Cloud: Scaling Neo4j’s Graph Database BusinessGraphRAG in Practice: How Graphs Supercharge GenAI and RAG Systems25 Years in Data: What Actually Changed (and What Hasn’t)#GraphRAG #Neo4j #GraphDB #GenAI #AIDatabases #VentureAI

Igor Taber is the founder and General Partner of Cortical Ventures, an early-stage AI-focused venture fund launched in 2021 to invent, incubate, and invest in companies driving the AI revolution. Previously, he served as SVP of Corporate Development at DataRobot, where he shaped growth strategy, raised over $500 million in capital, and managed M&A and partnerships; before that, as Managing Director at Intel Capital, he led the AI and data investment practice, funding over 20 organizations and earning recognition as a top AI investor. A Wharton MBA graduate based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Taber remains an active angel investor, advisor, and board member for AI startups like Weaviate, Immerok, and OthersideAI.Topics: Inventing AI Leaders: From Idea to Series A"$500M Raised: Scaling AI via M&A MasteryCorporate VC Edge: AI Strategy Wins#AICapital #VentureAI #CorticalVentures #AIInvesting #StartupFunding #DataRobot #IntelCapital

Dave Steer is Chief Marketing Officer at Webflow, where he leads global marketing to scale the company’s enterprise growth and AI-powered digital experience strategy. A veteran marketing leader, he brings two decades of experience across B2C, B2B, and developer marketing, with prior senior roles at GitLab, Cloudflare, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, eBay, TRUSTe, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Known for unifying story, strategy, and go-to-market execution, he has led platform positioning, major AI product launches, and customer advocacy and community programs while managing large cross-functional teams. Steer is also a recognized mentor and marketing thought leader who frequently speaks on topics such as AI and the future of product marketing and building trust in marketing. Topics: How AI is reshaping product marketing and go-to-market strategyBuilding a unified brand story across B2B, B2C, and developer audiencesLessons from leading marketing at hyper-growth companies (Facebook, Twitter, Cloudflare, GitLab, Webflow)#Webflow #CMO #ProductMarketing #AIMarketing #GoToMarket #MarketingLeadership #B2BGrowth #DeveloperMarketing #BrandStrategy #Hypergrowth

Flaviu Radulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc are the co-founders of Runware, an AI infrastructure company focused on making high-performance generative media dramatically more affordable and accessible for developers and product teams worldwide. Drawing on over two decades of Flaviu’s experience building bare-metal data clusters and custom hardware, Runware designs its own GPU and networking systems plus the Sonic Inference Engine, enabling up to 10x cost savings and order‑of‑magnitude speedups for visual and media AI workloads. As business and product leader, Ioana has helped steer Runware from an early image-generation prototype through major funding rounds and into a scalable AI media platform, partnering with leading investors and powering billions of creations while keeping AI inference costs low enough for companies of all sizes.Topics: Why “affordable AI” is a defensible wedge in the crowded AI infra marketHow Runware achieved 5–10x cost and speed gains by designing its own hardware + inference stackThe future of generative media: real-time, multimodal, and as cheap as API calls today#AIInfra #GenerativeMedia #StartupFounders #DeepTech #AI2026

Josh Sirota is the founder and CEO of Eragon, an AI operating system for work that connects to a company’s business apps and uses custom agents to provide unified, on-demand insights across everything from sales forecasts to product analytics. Based in San Francisco, he founded Eragon to help teams run their companies “from idea to IPO,” after earlier roles in enterprise software sales and go-to-market at Oracle and Salesforce. Under his leadership, Eragon has quickly grown to serve fast-scaling startups and large enterprises, positioning itself at the center of the emerging AI-powered future of work.Topics: The AI OS Replacing Dashboards, Reports, and App-Hopping at WorkThe Agentic AI Layer Transforming How Companies OperateWhy the Future of Work Needs an AI Layer That Understands Everything#AI #FutureOfWork #AgenticAI #StartupLife #EnterpriseAI #Productivity #AIOS #EragonAI #SaaS #VentureCapital

Jack Raines is a Forward Deployed Personality Hire at Slow Ventures, where he scouts the bold, the obsessive, and the slightly unhinged founders building the next wave of breakout companies. Before VC, Jack built a 65,000-subscriber Substack that landed him a Penguin book deal, wrote 50,000 words in 14 days, and worked across Robinhood’s Sherwood News, Litquidity, and UPS. A creator turned investor, he blends storytelling with venture to back founders and influential creators who want to build real businesses—not just audiences. His first book, a guide to navigating your 20s, comes out in 2026.Topics: Creator → Investor: Why Audiences Became the New Due DiligenceHow Slow Ventures Finds “Moderately Unhinged Founders”Investing in the Creator-Led Startup#VC #Startups #Creators #FounderLife #SlowVentures #JackRaines

Denise Teng is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to joining Gradient, Denise spent six years as a product manager. Most recently, she was a PM on the Meta AI platform team where she built infrastructure tools for ML workflows. Denise previously spent time at Twitter as a senior PM where she launched products ranging from ad tech and social commerce to real-time data analytics. After grad school, she joined the Walmart e-commerce APM program where she scaled merchant-facing products for Walmart marketplace and supported the post-acquisition integration of Jet.com. Denise obtained an M.S. in software management from Carnegie Mellon University. Topics: Building AI infra and ML workflows from big tech to startupsHow a product manager’s mindset shapes AI and infra investingTactical fundraising and GTM advice for AI/infra founders#AIVC #GradientVentures #MLInfra #AIStartups #VCPodcast #ProductToVC

Rob Ferguson is the CTO and Head of AI at Microsoft for Startups, where he helps high‑growth founders access GPUs, frontier models, and strategic partnerships to scale AI products. A veteran engineering leader with more than two decades in AI and infrastructure, he previously served as Global Head of AI/ML for Startups and VC at AWS and has been a three‑time startup CTO/VPE with over $100M in exits, including Automatic Labs’ acquisition by SiriusXM. He has scaled engineering teams from early seed stages to hundreds of people at companies like Automatic Labs and Standard Cognition, and is known for making early, market‑shaping bets on platforms such as Databricks, Weights & Biases, and Ray. As a global AI keynote speaker, he focuses on turning cutting‑edge AI—LLM ops, RAG, and distributed training—into pragmatic playbooks for founders, enterprises, and investors navigating hyperscale cloud and modern AI infrastructure.Topics: How Hyperscalers Actually Evaluate AI StartupsLessons From Being a Three-Time Startup CTOThe 2026 AI Infrastructure Landscape#AIInfrastructure #StartupFounders #VentureCapital #CloudComputing #AIEngineering