Venture with Grace

Kevin Novak is the founder of Rackhouse VC. Before that, he served as Uber’s first Head of Data Science, its first Head of Data Science Platform, and was one of the early members of a Uber Freight (Uber’s innovative freight marketplace). Kevin was the inventor of Uber’s dynamic pricing product, and holds several patents around GPS points processing, marketplace optimization products, and using data science to improve the mobile experience. He has also served as Chief Data Officer for Tala Financial, an alternative underwriting lender, helping the world recognize the creditworthiness of those without traditional financial identities. Kevin has invested in firms like Standard Cognition, Volley Automation, and several dozen others. He was one of the founders of the Greylock Data Science Community and regularly advises universities around the US on data science curricula.

Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Sauce Labs, a leader in continuous testing and error reporting solutions that enable the development, delivery, and updating of high-quality code at speed. The Sauce Labs unified testing platform has conducted over four billion tests, making it the most comprehensive and trusted continuous testing solution in the world. It provides a 360-degree view of a customer's application experience, helping businesses improve their user experience by ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device. Prior to Sauce Labs, Dave worked at Unity Technologies as a Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Twins.

Jenny Fielding is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures (The Fund). She was the Managing Director at Techstars for 7.5 years where she led investments into companies that now have a market cap of over $10B, prior to co-founding the global venture capital firm, Everywhere Ventures. Across these entities, Jenny has been the first-money into 300+ tech-enabled companies including: Chainalysis, Alloy, Latch, Tempo Automation, Headway, Contra, Particle Health, Pair Eyewear, Solo Funds, Halp, Rupa Health, Morty, Wagmo, Smarthop, PathSpot, Remesh, Cube, OnePipe, Season, Parsley Health and many more.

Darian Shirazi is a General Partner at Gradient Ventures. Prior to Gradient, Darian founded Radius, a leading B2B Customer Data Platform, serving as the company’s CEO for 7+ years. He grew the company to over one hundred employees, raised more than $100MM in venture capital from top tier firms, and served dozens of Fortune 500 customers. He is an early investor in many companies including Lyft, Udemy, Carbon Health, Palantir, and serves on the Board of Directors at Gigs, Range, Spline, and Chili Piper, among others. He studied briefly at UC Berkeley, after working at Facebook as a Software Engineer reporting to Mark Zuckerberg, but dropped out after two years to work full-time on startups.

Qin En Looi is a Partner at Saison Capital. Saison Capital is an early stage fund with a focus on emerging markets. We back ambitious founders solving big problems, with deep fondness for web3, fintech and embedded finance - non-fintech companies expanding into fintech. Their team comes from an operating background, and we are unafraid to roll up our sleeves to support our founders. We are backed by Credit Saison, a Tokyo-listed 30b AUM consumer finance company with extensive financial services across Asia.

Ian Sigalow is the co-founder and managing partner of Greycroft, a multi-stage venture fund based in New York. Since co-founding the fund in 2006, Ian has helped grow AUM to more than $3B, having invested in companies like Venmo, Bumble, Shipt, and Scopely. Before founding Greycroft, Ian spent three years at a venture fund in Boston, before starting his own company called StrongData, which developed smart card technology to prevent card-not-present fraud.

Inspired by Knight Rider and Star Trek, Shahin grew up with a passion to endow superpowers to humanity through feats of engineering. He learned BASIC on an IBM PC XT clone he built at his aunt’s computer store and used to dial into Bulletin Board Systems when he was in the 4th grade. He learned about engines by taking apart an Alfa Romeo at his Uncle’s repair shop a few years later. He aspired to design microchips, software, and systems that could someday amount to the fictional K.I.T.T., and build warp drives that could propel humanity to far corners of the galaxy.

Brian Zhan is an investor at CRV, where he focuses on investing in early-stage infrastructure software companies. Prior to that, he worked on product development at Facebook and Starburst. Brian joined the original Presto creators (who co-founded Starburst to offer fully managed Presto) to build Starburst's batch analytics product from scratch. He interviewed users to build the business proposal and roadmap, hired an engineering team, and led the go-to-market strategy. Building an active open-source community of over 200 companies using Starburst's open-source product Trino (renamed from Presto) for batch analytics was a key achievement. His work's popularity is evidenced by many companies like Salesforce, Lyft, Zillow, and TreasureData giving talks, writing blogs, and publishing research papers about Starburst/Trino for batch analytics. Brian was also featured in many influential data forums like dbt Coalesce, DataIQ Talks, and Data Fabric Summit, showcasing his significant contributions to the field.

Gabby Slome is the Co-founder and CEO of Cooper, a parenting mecca offering parents (and parents to be) with the tools and resources to build their parenting muscle and become the parents they want to be. Cooper offers on demand access to leading experts in child development and likeminded parents, 24/7. Group sessions, live events/workshops and “always on” one-on-one support are spearheaded by top tier experts including PhD’s, educators and licensed clinical social workers with decades of experience. Cooper’s mission is to equip parents with more effective ways of seeing and solving parenting challenges at home.

Chris is a partner at Wing, where he works with founders building data infrastructure and AI-first infrastructure. His passion is improving the odds for founders at the earliest stages, particularly in finding product-market fit through introductions to potential customers and strategic partners. He strives to support founders in de-risking the beginning stages of building an enduring company.