Venture with Grace

Ryan Gavin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Slack and a seasoned business leader with over 25 years of experience driving growth, innovation, and go-to-market excellence across the tech industry. Before joining Slack, Ryan was the Chief Growth Officer at Convoy, where he led a $650M+ digital freight marketplace, improving margins by over 2000 basis points while scaling customer engagement with top global shippers. Earlier, Ryan held senior leadership roles at AWS and Microsoft—building the AI/ML business at AWS from the ground up and leading Microsoft’s Surface commercial business and Bing, where he helped bring the search engine to profitability and scale to 5 billion monthly searches. Across every role, Ryan has been known for his ability to unite product, engineering, and marketing teams to create new categories, transform markets, and build world-class organizations.Topics: Scaling Slack — what it takes to grow an already iconic brand in a changing SaaS landscape.AI, Product, and MarketingThe Go-To-Market Playbook for Builders#Leadership #GrowthStrategy #GoToMarket #AI #Slack #StartupLessons #MarketingLeadership

Kathleen Estreich is an investing partner at Pear. Prior to Pear, she was the co-founder at MKT1 & MKT1 Capital where she invested in and advised early-stage B2B startups. MKT1 Capital invested in pre-seed thru Series A startups and helped them build their marketing team and strategy. Prior to founding MKT1, she built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook, and Scalyr (acq by SentinelOne). Kathleen holds a BA in Political Science & History from Brown University.Topics: Go-to-Market at the Seed StageB2B Storytelling That SellsThe Evolving Role of Marketing in AI Startups#VentureCapital #GoToMarket #B2BStartups #MarketingStrategy #SeedStage

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad is the President & CTO of Engineering at Salesforce, overseeing next-generation platforms for Agentforce, Data, MuleSoft, and Tableau. With over 25 years of industry experience, including over six years at Salesforce, Muralidhar has driven the rapid growth of Agentforce and Data Cloud. He plays a crucial role in shaping Salesforce's AI-driven future and previously held pivotal engineering roles at Oracle and Microsoft, building foundational services for Azure, Dynamics, and Synapse. His expertise spans databases, cloud services, and applications.Topics: Building Salesforce’s AI-first engineering cultureIntegrating Agentforce, MuleSoft, and Data Cloud for the enterprise AI eraLessons from leading engineering at Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce#AIEngineering #EnterpriseAI #CloudComputing #LeadershipInTech #Salesforce

Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO of Superhuman and Rapportive, with a successful track record of investing in over 100 startups including Placer, Mercury, and ClassDojo. He has a strong background in early stage investments and product development, with expertise in software as a service (SaaS) and user experience design. Highlights of Rahul Vohra's career include founding successful companies like Superhuman and Rapportive, as well as making significant investments in a wide range of startups across various sectors and stages of development.Topics: How to build a business customers become obsessed with (and pay 30x more)The contrarian playbook that turned email into an $825M businessHow AI meets human psychology in next-generation product design#SuperhumanCEO #ProductMarketFit #StartupSuccess

Xan Wood joined Canvas in May 2024 as an Investor, focusing on artificial intelligence applications across healthcare and fintech. He brings unique insight into emerging AI technologies through his strong connections to UC Berkeley's AI ecosystem. As the writer of the weekly Built By Berkeley Newsletter, Xan has his finger on the pulse of what’s coming next. While getting his MBA at Berkeley Haas, Xan demonstrated his ability to identify and support promising technical founders by raising Courtyard Ventures, a $1M fund that has invested in 30 Berkeley-founded businesses. Prior to Canvas, Xan built an impressive track record in complex deal execution across multiple markets. He spent 7 years in Asia working in Private Equity at Development Finance Asia and Private Credit at TransAsia Private Capital, where he led nearly $1B of transactions across 19 countries. Notable deals included serving as interim CFO at a Mongolian logistics business after leading its acquisition, and incubating Myanmar's largest motorcycle leasing platform. At TransAsia Private Capital, he led the multijurisdictional restructuring of a $225M loan facility to a Hong Kong-listed company, involving taking control of a power plant in India and a mine in Indonesia.Topics: The Next Wave of AI-Native StartupsThe Future of Vertical AIBuilt by Berkeley#VentureCapital #AIStartups #HealthcareInnovation #Fintech #BerkeleyFounders

Jonathan is Co-Founder and CEO of Impart Security. Prior to founding Impart, Jonathan was the VP of Product at Signal Sciences, an application security startup that sold to Fastly for $825M. Prior to Signal Sciences, Jonathan was product lead at Edgecast Networks, a global content delivery network that sold to Verizon for over $400M. After the sale of Edgecast Networks, Jonathan served as VP of Product at Verizon shaping the digital product portfolio, leading to the acquisition of Uplynk, Volicon, AOL, and Yahoo. Jonathan started his career building secure applications as a developer at the Wall Street Journal, 21 Century Fox, and Resource (acquired by IBM).Topics: From Signal Sciences to Impart: lessons in scaling and selling category-defining security startupsThe evolution of web and API security — why runtime protection is the next frontierBuilding technical products for modern cloud environments and high-stakes security demand#Cybersecurity #APISecurity #StartupLeadership #AIProtection #VentureCapital

John Wang is the CTO at Assembled, where he leads efforts to transform customer support through a unified platform blending human expertise with AI-powered efficiency. Previously, he was Co-founder and Chief Engineer at Zinc and an early engineer at Stripe. A Computer Science graduate from MIT, John’s career spans open source contributions to Ruby on Rails, applied mathematics research in fluid dynamics and pathogen dispersal, and economics studies on housing quality and academic achievement under renowned professors. Beyond technology, he is passionate about woodworking, applying the same commitment to craft, precision, and timeless design in both code and furniture.Topics: Building and scaling complex SaaS products integrating AI Innovation in customer experience through blending workforce intelligence and automationTechnical moats in an age of AI commoditization#AIandHumans #CustomerSupportTech #EngineeringLeadership #StartupJourney

Krishna Subramanian is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and commentator on mobile advertising. He is best known for being the CEO and Co-Founder of Captiv8, which was acquired by Publicis Groupe, and a founding employee of BlueLithium, one of the largest online ad networks acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million, and Mobclix, a mobile ad exchange network acquired by Velti in 2010. Subramanian has also written for Forbes, The Huffington Post, Advertising Age, and Mashable.Topics: Lessons from Serial Entrepreneurship with Three AcquisitionsThe Evolution of Digital Advertising: From Banner Ads to AIThe Influencer Economy: From Hype to Acquisition#KrishnaSubramanian #SerialEntrepreneur #AdTech #InfluencerMarketing

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and reducing infrastructure overhead. Before founding Modal, he served as CTO of Better.com (2015-2020), scaling the engineering team from 1 to 300 people, and spent seven years at Spotify where he built their music recommendation system. With a background in competitive programming—including an IOI gold medal—Erik combines deep technical expertise with leadership experience and shares insights on technology, data, and management through his blog at erikbern.com.Topics: How compute economics are changing with GPU demand and what that means for AI startupsScaling engineering teams from 1 to 300+ (lessons from Better.com)Fundraising and building in the crowded devtools/infrastructure space#AI #MachineLearning #Serverless #CloudComputing #DevTools #Infrastructure

Çağla Kaymaz is a partner at Category where she invests in founders building transformative companies in enterprise software. Previously, she was at Citi Ventures, where she backed AI infrastructure and application startups including Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake), Galileo, Glean, Lexion (acquired by Docusign), and Norm Ai. Cagla began her career at Microsoft as a software engineer before moving into product management, where she led highly technical software teams shipping enterprise software. She has also worked as an investor at Maverick Ventures, served as Chief of Staff at Season Health, and founded a vertical SaaS startup during business school. She holds a BS in Math and Computational Science and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School. Originally from Turkey (where everyone can pronounce her name—it's "Chala"), Cagla now calls the Bay Area home.Topics:Investing trends in AI infrastructure, Apps, and dev tools Lessons from both sides of the table: founder, operator, and investorHow AI-native tools are reshaping enterprise workflows and productivity#VentureCapital #EnterpriseAI #AIInfrastructure #WomenInTech #StartupInvesting

Harris Stolzenberg is a Partner at Pear. Based in Boston, he is focused on making Pear the go-to early stage firm on the East Coast. He thrives when working alongside ambitious founders at the very earliest stages, rolling up his sleeves to help turn bold ideas into enduring companies. Harris returns to Pear as a partner after previously working at Pear as an associate. He touched many different parts of the Pear ecosystem before this full circle transition. After a quick stint in investment banking, he joined Pando, a Pear portfolio company. He later caught the founder bug and left to start his own Pear-backed startup. Originally from South Florida, Harris headed north to attend MIT where he was a dual-sport athlete in lacrosse and football. After living in both San Francisco and New York, he chose to plant roots in Boston. Topics: Expanding Pear VC's East Coast presence in today's early-stage environmentThe firm's approach to identifying standout seed opportunitiesBacking the next generation of East Coast unicorns with early conviction

Will Lehmann is the Founder & GP at Step Function. He has spent his entire career investing in technical founders at the earliest stages. He started Step Function to give founders leverage: a fund purpose-built to help founders building infrastructure software succeed from the outset. He provides the support, domain experience & expertise that you expect from an institutional lead investor with the feel, velocity & accessibility of a super angel. He helps founders in all the conventional ways — domain expertise, customer intros, candidate intros, fundraising intros — and in the unconventional ways as well. Before starting Step Function, Will Lehmann was a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), where he spent a decade investing in early-stage enterprise software companies.Topics: Investing in the next wave of infrastructureUnconventional ways Step Function help foundersMajor trends, founding archetypes, or infrastructure bottlenecks will define the coming years

Clayton Petty is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, Clayton helped build the Cyber Security practice at McKinsey & Company, advising founders, operators, and investors across the cyber ecosystem. He also worked closely with vertical software, automation, and cloud infrastructure businesses to scale their go-to-market efforts. Before McKinsey, Clayton was a software engineer and studied computer science at Texas A&M University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.Topics: Shifts in Cybersecurity and Developer Tools InvestingThe Rise of Enterprise AI Agents and No-Code AutomationVertical SaaS and Applied AI

Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, where he leads product and business innovation in AI and software. He has held leadership roles at Salesforce, Cisco, Tonkean, TomoCredit, and Workplay Labs, and is also a General Partner at RNR Capital. Jeff co-founded RocketFuel Education, an education platform focused on cryptocurrencies, economics, AI, and venture capital, and is an active angel investor in multiple startups that have scaled to unicorn status. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.Topics: The evolution of AI-powered development toolsBuilding products in the AI eraAI investment landscape

Minjae Ormes is a Forbes World’s Most Influential CMO and Goldhouse A100 honoree, celebrated for building iconic brands and transformative teams at global companies including YouTube, Visible, and most recently as VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. Renowned for driving innovation in social media, the creator economy, and now AI, she leads with curiosity and courage, fostering inclusive, high-accountability cultures. In her free agent era, Minjae actively mentors, engages a global community, and relentlessly pursues what’s next in technology and positive societal impact.Topics: Building iconic brands at scale: Lessons from YouTube to LinkedInHow AI is transforming the CMO role and marketing organizationsBuilding transformative teams: Hiring, developing, and retaining top talent

Arif Damji is a Partner at Conductive Ventures with deep experience in software and tech-enabled services. He focuses on achieving an efficient Go-To-Market strategy, leveraging his background in both B2B and B2C marketing and sales. Arif believes that scrappy founders deserve hands-on investors who provide practical support rather than buzzwords or generic advice.Topics: How AI is reshaping B2B and B2C GTM playbooksHow traditional software businesses should add AI capabilitiesWhen to build vs buy AI solutions as a startup

Joanne Chen is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, where she invests in AI-first B2B applications and data platforms that power the automated enterprise. A technologist at heart who built her first webpage business at age nine, she launched her career as an engineer at Cisco before co-founding a mobile gaming company and later advising tech companies on IPOs and M&A at Jefferies, as well as venture firms on fundraising at Probitas Partners. Prior to joining Foundation in 2014, she was an active angel investor with Hyde Park Angels. Joanne has invested in and served on the boards of companies including Jasper.AI, SafelyYou, Tonkean, Tennr, Arcade, CaptivateIQ, and previously TubiTV (acquired by Fox), Mya (acquired by Stepstone), and EraDB (acquired by ServiceNow). A recognized thought leader on the societal and enterprise impact of AI, she has spoken at TED, CES, SXSW, and WebSummit. Joanne earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and her MBA from Chicago Booth. Topics: Building AI-First B2B Companies: Trends and ChallengesNo-Code Automation for Enterprises:Key Lessons from Successful AI Startup Exits

Wen Sang is the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai, a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for knowledge workers, which reached 2 million users and $36M in ARR within 45 days of launching in April 2025, securing $160M in funding and partnering with top AI labs to advance agentic work solutions. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Smarking Inc., a Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures-backed SaaS company for parking analytics, which was acquired by JustPark in 2022. Wen holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and has received industry recognition for both technical innovation and entrepreneurial leadership.Topics: From 0 to $36M ARR in 45 days: Hypergrowth playbook for AI startupsSecond-time founder lessons: From parking analytics acquisition to AI unicornRaising $160M in a tough funding market: What AI investors really want

Nick Evans is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avocado, a restaurant point-of-sale system integrated with an AI assistant designed to transform restaurant operations. He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Tile, a leading consumer technology company specializing in Bluetooth tracking devices, which was successfully acquired by Life360. Nick has deep technical expertise across hardware and software engineering, including embedded systems, real-time operating systems, machine vision, and web development. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and is an alumnus of Y Combinator. Nick is passionate about building impactful products that solve real-world problems and has over a decade of entrepreneurial experience leading hardware-software tech startups.Topics: How AI is revolutionizing restaurant operations beyond just orderingThe unique challenges of hardware vs. software startup scalingCompeting with established POS systems as a startup

Ganesh Bell joined Insight Partners as a Managing Director to invest in and help entrepreneurs build great software & data companies that will define modern enterprise and digital business. He is a profound student of the enterprise software market and industries reimagined by data. Ganesh has over 25+ years of rare experience as a builder and operating executive across startups, high-growth scaleups, global conglomerates, unicorns, successful exits, IPO, and M&A.Before joining Insight Partners, he ran Uptake, an AI/ML platform & applications company, was Corporate Officer at General Electric, and CEO of its largest IoT & Analytics software business. Previously he held senior leadership roles at market-defining enterprise software companies including SAP, PeopleSoft, and J.D.Edwards. He started as a developer and has led corporate strategy, engineering, product management, marketing, and sales teams over his career. He has keynoted large conferences, been featured in business books, leading media, and recognized for his work, including being named #11 in Fast Company’s list of 100 Most Creative People in Business World. Ganesh Bell holds a B.S in Mathematics from the University of Madras, India, and an M.S in Computer Science from North Dakota State University. Topics: Leveraging AI and data to transform traditional industriesIdentifying durable software and data companiesScaling enterprise software from startup to IPO