Venture with Grace

David Booth is an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) & investor at Blackbird. That means he gets to both sit on the investments team in NZ — on the lookout for ambitious Kiwis doing their life's work, wherever in the world they may live today; and also build cool stuff... in his case communities, products you'll be seeing more of soon. He's a community builder at heart, and gets a kick out of making connections. For nearly 7 years he did this at extreme scale as CEO of On Deck — where they've helped 1000+ companies get started, find their first customers, hires, and investors, and raise over $2bn. He stepped back to Chairman in Jan '24 to make way for a new chapter - for him, and for the company. Previously, he's carved out a career and professional expertise at the intersection of product, investment, and law/legal ops. He led investment operations at AngelList in ~2014/15, international growth & product at Carta in 2017, worked with some of the world's most innovative investors and incubators in between. He's made over 300 investments as a GP of On Deck's venture funds, scout for VC firms, angel investor and fund LP.

Raghu Ravinutala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Yellow.ai, a global leader in generative AI-powered customer service automation. The entrepreneurial bug had been conceded deep inside him for long before he co-founded Yellow.ai in 2016, with a vision to make customer and enterprise interactions more effective and effortless. Since its inception, Raghu and his team have successfully expanded Yellow.ai’s presence across North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America with 1000+ customers in 85+ countries.

Farooq Abbasi is the founder and sole general partner of Preface Ventures. Prior to founding Preface, Farooq was with Costanoa Ventures where he led investments in companies such as Alpha Health, Lively, Auterion, and Leap. Prior to Costanoa, he spent time with DN Capital and Mosaic Ventures on both sides of the Atlantic investing in enduring businesses such as Remitly (RELY) and Auto1 (A1G). He began investing as a sole VC in companies including but not limited to Redlock (PANW), Truebill (RKT), Armory.io, and Ambient.ai.

Cody Ng is an investor at 01 Advisors, a growth stage (Series A-C) vc firm founded by operators for operators, focusing on AI, devOps/infrastructure, and vertical SaaS companies. 01A is founded and led by Dick Costolo (ex-Twitter CEO), Adam Bain (ex-Twitter COO), and David Fischer (ex-Meta CRO). As a team, they’ve scaled high-growth companies like Twitter, Meta, Airtable, Yahoo, Benchling, etc. from $0 to $120B+ of combined yearly revenue and over $1T of market cap. Prior to 01A, Cody was at Point72 Ventures, where he was a founding member of the growth venture capital team and helped lead investments into B2B software companies like Boulevard, EliseAI, Natural Cycles, etc. Before becoming an investor, Cody earned his operating chops at Benchling (cloud based platform for scientists to collaborate and share data), where he helped lead GTM finance and strategy.

David Cheng is a Partner at DCM. He focuses on opportunities in Vertical SaaS, Marketplaces, Consumer Applications, Fintech and Digital Health. David's investments include Brigit, EvenUp, LARQ, Lighthouse, Metafy.gg, Musely, OpenArt, Plenty, and Tempo. Previous portfolio companies include AVA (acq. by DSM), Bill.com (NYSE: BILL), Musical.ly (acq. by Bytedance), SoFi (NASDAQ: SOFI), Weekend Health/Sequence (acq. by Weight Watchers) and X.ai (acq. by Bizzabo). David was named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital.

Demi Obayomi is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures where he invests in application layer software. He is a Board observer at Yellow.ai, Simpplr, Qualified and Rewst and has also worked on additional investments in GTM Software, Finance/CFO Software, HR Software, and Vertical SaaS. Demi has been recognized for his work in the industry, most recently by the Emerging Venture Capitalists Association (EVCA) in its inaugural list of top investors.

Brett Perlmutter is the founder of Bulletpitch. Bulletpitch is on a mission to redefine venture through media. Their flagship product is a publication that highlights and performs high-level diligence on top-tier startups each week. The publication has become a staple for thousands of founders and investors, with hundreds of companies that apply per month, and many of these featured companies going on to raise millions of dollars through the publicity. Bulletpitch is also known for hosting some of the best events in tech ranging from intimate dinners to large gatherings of 1000+. Brett is also the GP and syndicate lead for Bulletpitch+, an investment syndicate, which offers deal-by-deal investment opportunities to his hundreds of LPs.

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Phil Boyer is a Partner at Crosslink Capital. Phil brings over a decade of venture capital experience with a primary focus on themes within AI, data, developer tools, and deep tech in enterprise and vertical markets. He is passionate about serving as a partner with early-stage founding teams, with an eye towards helping strong technical teams build category-defining companies. At Crosslink, Phil’s investments include BetterUp, Forma.ai, Inscribe, Overjet, Syncari, Verodin (FEYE), and Weave (IPO NYSE: WEAV), among other companies.

Bob Muglia was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake Computing SNOW (NYSE), a data warehousing company. Bob is known for managing divisions at Microsoft that supported the Microsoft Office Suite, Windows Server and MSN Network product families. He was one of four presidents that reported directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.