Venture with Grace

Sri Batchu, most recently Chief Marketing Officer at The RealReal, the leading luxury luxury resale platform in the U.S, is a seasoned leader in growth and operations, with a proven track record of scaling hyper-growth tech companies through pivotal roles at Ramp, Instacart, and Opendoor. In addition to his growth and marketing expertise, Sri is an active investor and advisor to over 50 startups. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School, Sri is known for leveraging data-driven marketing strategies and operational excellence to drive transformative growth in fast-paced industries.Topics:

• Scaling operations from $50M to $5B+ revenue
• Building cross-functional growth teams across marketing, product, and operations
• Insights for founders on fundraising and overcoming early-stage growth challenges

Caroline Duffy is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures. She thrives partnering with ambitious builders reimagining existing categories or creating entirely new ones. She focuses on B2B software and AI, with a particular passion for teams modernizing overlooked, unglamorous industries burdened by outdated tech stacks. It’s never too early to reach out - she’s excited to collaborate with founders from idea inception onwards. Before Cowboy, Caroline was at Construct Capital, where she led investments in a range of technologies transforming real-world industries including supply chain and logistics, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure. Prior, she was building and investing in AI companies with AI pioneer Andrew Ng. Before becoming an investor, Caroline was a management consultant and started her career as an AI researcher at Harvard. Caroline holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from Dartmouth. She works closely with organizations advancing education opportunities for women and girls in AI and serves on the Board of Access Institute, which increases access to mental health services for under-resourced communities in SF. Topics:

• Why target the most 'boring' companies everyone else ignores
• Most common mistakes B2B AI startups making when targeting legacy industries
• Fintech, healthcare, logistics: Why these 3 verticals are ripe for AI disruption

Akankshu Dhawan is Senior Vice President of Product Management and Executive General Manager at Xero, where he leads product strategy and AI-driven innovation for small businesses. He previously held leadership roles at Uber, AppDynamics, and Microsoft, and co-founded ImaZing. With an MBA from Chicago Booth, an MS in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UMass Dartmouth, and a B.Tech. from DAIICT, Akankshu brings deep product and engineering expertise to driving digital transformation.Topics:

• How AI is transforming small business accounting and finance
• Building product teams that can execute on both innovation and reliability
• The biggest AI opportunities he sees for SMBs vs. enterprise

Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, a leading generative video company whose personalized storytelling app quickly reached #1 in graphics on the App Store and debuted a state-of-the-art video world model in 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Generative AI at Snap Inc., leading MyAI chatbot development and GenAI AR effects for hundreds of millions of users, after Snap acquired his startup AI Factory for $166M. Alex holds master’s degrees from MIPT and Innopolis, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and angel investor in AI startups like Scale AI, Anthropic, and Brex, with a reputation for building world-class teams and innovative consumer products at scale.Topics:

• Scaling generative video AI startups: challenges and strategies
• AI-powered content creation for media and marketing
• Leadership lessons from building breakthrough AI products at Snap and beyond

Kate Berardo is the Vice President of Executive Development at Meta, where she leads the company’s most strategic coaching, team, and leadership initiatives. Trusted by senior leaders to navigate their most pressing challenges, she has designed and delivered some of Meta’s most impactful leadership programs and learning products. With a proven track record of building and scaling teams, practice areas, and centers of excellence, Kate is recognized for driving transformative leadership development that enables executives and organizations to perform at their highest level.Topics:

• Managing executive teams through major strategic shifts
• The biggest leadership gaps in fast-growing startups
• How to identify and develop high-potential leaders before they're ready

#VCPodcast #LeadershipDevelopment #MetaLeadership #ExecutiveCoaching

Andrew Chau is the co-founder and CEO of Boba Guys Inc., the revolutionary bubble tea company that has fundamentally changed how people view boba and tea culture in America. Starting from a shared passion for quality milk tea and a mission to elevate the boba experience with fresh, premium ingredients, Andrew and co-founder Bin Chen launched Boba Guys in 2011. What began as a single San Francisco location has grown to 24+ locations, making Boba Guys one of the most recognizable premium bubble tea brands in the United States.Topics:

• How to build a premium brand in a commoditized market
• Maintaining brand authenticity while scaling
• Technology integration in traditional retail

#AndrewChau #BobaGuys #ConsumerBrands #FoodTech

James Flynn is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on post-Series A investments across the tech landscape. Prior to that he was a growth equity investor at General Atlantic. Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most valuable and enduring businesses. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hands-on help required at every stage of the company building journey. Our expertise comes from 50 years of working with legendary founders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Adi Tatarko, Brian Chesky, Jensen Huang, Anne Wojcicki, Eric Yuan, Patrick Collison, Julia Hartz, and Sebastian Siemiatkowski. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 25% of NASDAQ's total value. Since our inception, the vast majority of the money we invest has been on behalf of nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT, which means most of the returns we generate benefit these great causes.Topics:

• How Sequoia identifies "outliers" - what specific signals or patterns indicate a company could become truly legendary
• How AI is reshaping investment thesis across different verticals beyond just AI companies
• The evolution of founder needs from Series A to IPO - how support requirements change at each stage

#VCPodcast #SequoiaCapital #VentureCapital #StartupFunding

Vikram Chatterji is the co-founder and CEO of Galileo. Galileo is the leading platform for enterprise GenAI evaluation and observability. Our comprehensive suite of products support builders across the new AI development workflow—from fine-tuning LLMs to developing, testing, monitoring, and securing their AI applications. Each product is powered by our research-backed evaluation metrics. Today, Galileo is used by 100s of AI teams from startups to Fortune 50 enterprises, including Twilio, Comcast, and HP. Topics:

• Making generative AI reliable for enterprise adoption and trust
• Diagnosing and reducing hallucination in large language models
• Measuring and improving generative model performance at scale

#AI #GenerativeAI #MachineLearning #EnterpriseAI #AIEthics

Shaun VanWeelden is the Managing Director at Mercor, where he leads efforts to reshape how talent connects with work, using AI-led approaches to deeply assess candidate expertise. Prior to Mercor, Shaun held a key role at OpenAI leading their human data operations team within research, supporting critical initiatives around human feedback for AI training. Before OpenAI, he spent time at Scale AI, where he served as Director of Computer Vision Engagements and Field Engineering, managing global teams delivering high-quality annotated data for the automotive, robotics, and technology sectors. Shaun is passionate about bridging the gap between technical and interpersonal skills and has a track record of building strong teams.Topics:

• The Future of AI-Powered Recruiting
• Managing Global Remote Teams
• Enterprise AI Implementation Challenges

#AIRecruiting #TalentTech #HumanData #AITraining #ComputerVision

Dan O’Connell CEO of Front. Front is the AI-powered customer service platform that helps companies deliver smarter, safer automation without sacrificing quality. We put humans in control of AI to ensure every customer interaction is handled by the best resource, whether that’s AI, a human agent, or both. More than 9,000 companies, including Uber Freight, Navan, and Stripe, trust Front to scale exceptional service, streamline team collaboration, and gain insights that improve customer experience every day. Prior to that he was the CRO and board member of Dialpad. Topics:

• AI & Customer Service Evolution
• Scaling & Go-to-Market Strategy
• Product & Platform Strategy

#VCPodcast #AICustomerService #FrontApp #StartupCEO