Venture with Grace

Mike Droesch is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners primarily focusing on AI applications, cybersecurity, supply chain software, and B2B marketplaces. He currently serves on the board of directors for Tackle, Curri, Raft, Cypress, Netography, Optimal Dynamics, and VendorPM.

Amber Atherton is a Partner at Patron, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in a future shaped by games. She is a former founder, whose Y Combinator backed start-up was acquired by Discord. She is the author of the best selling book ‘The Rise of Virtual Communities’ published by Apress. Born in Hong Kong, Atherton began coding as a kid. Building websites, mini-games and Neopets communities. At 16, she started a popular blog, which evolved into one of Europe’s largest online jewelry marketplaces. After the merger of her first startup, she toyed around with computer vision, creating an app that generated captions for your instagram posts that immediately went viral. Amber then found fame in the UK, co-creating and briefly starring in a hit TV show. At 24, she was named by the Evening Standard as one of London’s Most Influential Londoners, by Vogue as 1 of the top 5 people in Digital Fashion, and joined Forbes’ 30 under 30 list.

As the inaugural Executive Director of VC Platform Global Community, Joshua Goodfield leads the largest dedicated collective of platform professionals in the venture capital industry, with over 2,000 members across 1,000 funds in 45 countries representing $2.6T+ in AUM. His mission is to create value for the VC ecosystem through community building and accelerating outstanding leaders.

Medha Agarwal is a General Partner at Defy. Prior to Defy, she was a Partner at Redpoint Ventures for seven years focused on early stage investments across fintech, vertical saas, marketplaces, and healthcare. Medha started her career at Bain & Company and also started and built 2 companies, skedge.me & Roomidex, before starting her investing career at Bessemer Venture Partners.

TX Zhuo is a General Partner at Fika Ventures. An entrepreneur at heart, TX has been involved with startups since his college days where he started then successfully sold an online college textbook marketplace. After a stint at McKinsey where he was a core member of their financial services and consumer goods practices, he came back to his roots and served as the CFO for an electric vehicle startup, Lit Motors. Thereafter, he worked for Innovation Endeavors, a seed stage venture fund backed by Eric Schmidt. In 2012, he co-founded Karlin Ventures, based in Los Angeles, where he served as the managing partner for 4 years before co-founding Fika Ventures. He is a strong proponent of transparency and efficiency and is constantly on the lookout for new platforms that seek to disrupt old, antiquated industries.

Chon Tang is the Founding & General Partner of Berkeley SkyDeck Fund. Chon is an experienced Silicon Valley engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He was formerly founding partner and Managing Director of Junzi Capital Engineering, a leading quantitative hedge fund investing in the commodity space. He has been actively investing in Silicon Valley startups for 12 years, and has personal investments in over 25 deals with multiple IPOs and exits. Chon is a proud Cal Bear (BS EECS), and also has a SM EECS from MIT.

Rob Biederman is the Managing Partner of Asymmetric. Prior to founding Asymmetric, Rob co-founded and served as co-CEO for eight years of Catalant Technologies, the market leader enabling companies to frictionlessly access and deploy talent, ranging from employees to over 70,000 elite independent consultants and 1,000 boutique firms. He is currently Chairman of Catalant. Rob is also co-author of a book titled, Reimagining Work: Strategies to Disrupt Talent, Lead Change, and Win with a Flexible Workforce, which lays out a vision and path for a new relationship between global companies and talent.

Jett Fein is a General Partner at Headline, where he invests in technology businesses globally. Jett joined Headline in 2014 and has led or co-led the firm’s early investments in Gopuff, Fancy (acquired by Gopuff), Honeycomb.io, gettacar, Playbook, Sprout Therapy, Air, Swell, Avoma, Candid Co., NomNomNow (acquired by Mars), Rocket.Chat, Tonebase, Copa90, and is involved in several other investments in the US and Europe, including Shopmonkey and GRIN.

Ed Sim is the Founder of boldstart, partnering from Inception with developer first, infrastructure and SaaS founders. He loves working with engineering-driven founders with bold ideas and laser-sharp focus on product well before writing their first lines of code.

Deon Nicholas is the Co-Founder & CEO of Forethought, the first AI platform for customer support automation. Previously, Deon built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage. Deon is a sought-after futurist and expert on generative AI, with appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. He has authored several machine learning publications and holds numerous infrastructure patents. Deon was a World Finalist at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest and was named to Forbes 30 under 30.