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 Marketing
• The 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 Stage
• B2B Storytelling That Sells
• The 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 culture
• Integrating Agentforce, MuleSoft, and Data Cloud for the enterprise AI era
• Lessons 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 business
• How 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 Startups
• The Future of Vertical AI
• Built 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 startups

• The evolution of web and API security — why runtime protection is the next frontier

• Building 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 automation
• Technical 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 Acquisitions
• The Evolution of Digital Advertising: From Banner Ads to AI
• The 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 startups
• Scaling 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 investor
• How AI-native tools are reshaping enterprise workflows and productivity

#VentureCapital #EnterpriseAI #AIInfrastructure #WomenInTech #StartupInvesting