Venture with Grace

Venky Veeraraghavan is the Chief Product Officer at DataRobot. Prior to that, he was the VP of Product Management at Microsoft. As Chief Product Officer at DataRobot, Venky Veeraraghavan drives the definition and delivery of the DataRobot Enterprise AI Suite. Venky has twenty-five years of experience focusing on big data and AI as a product leader and technical consultant at top technology companies (Microsoft) and early-stage startups (Trilogy). Topics: Product Leadership in AI Companies Enterprise AI Adoption Evolution of AI/ML Platforms #EnterpriseAI #AITrends #ProductLeadership

Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more. Topics: The Hidden Patterns Behind Winning AI Startups The Secret Sauce Behind Successful Angel Communities Building a Modern VC Platform: Lessons from Hustle Fund #VCInsights #StartupFunding #HustleFund #AIStartups #VentureCapital

Simon is a Partner at Cathay Innovation. He leads the US investment efforts at Cathay Innovation, a global venture capital firm managing over $2.5B AUM. He focuses on software, fintech, digital healthcare, and consumer investments based in the US. Prior to joining Cathay Innovation, Simon spent four years at VMware as a Manager in the Strategy & Corporate Development team, focusing on investments, M&A, and strategy. Before joining VMware, he was at UBS in the Investment Banking division as part of the Technology group, advising on M&A and equity + debt capital raises. Simon was a UC Regent and Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and holds both a B.S. in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business and a B.A. in Operations Research and Management Science. In 2020, Simon was named 40 Under 40 Rising VC Stars by Venture Capital Journal. Topics: AI Investment Landscape IPO Market & Future of Exits Evolution from AI tools to integration #VentureCapital #GlobalVC #CathayInnovation #AI

Apoorva Pandhi is a Managing Director of Zetta Venture Partners. Apoorva loves the complexity and thrill of the 0 to 1 startup phase and feels fortunate to work with deeply technical and product-centric founders. He finds them tackling the hardest challenges in AI/ML, data infrastructure and cloud-native infra. As a Managing Director at Zetta, he is excited to partner with founders who are ready to push through and beyond the complex chaos of this early stage to unleash greater potential and market impact. Apoorva's fascination for complex problems is rooted in his love for math and statistics as his mother, a mathematician, always challenged him, pushing him beyond his comfort zone. This led him to explore technology as the next frontier, starting with an engineering degree from IIT Delhi. Over the years, Apoorva has experienced this frenzied energy, firsthand. He has been in the trenches with early stage engineering-first startups in different modalities. He first met with several engineering-first companies as an investor at Lightspeed Ventures and then Foundation Capital. He has invested in data and ML infra companies like Outerbounds (OSS metaflow), Electric Sheep, Motherduck (OSS DuckDB), Tabular (OSS Iceberg), and Fennel, amongst others. He was also a co-founder of his own company, Funnl Labs, in the NLP/ML space and a GTM/sales leader at Quid. In addition to his undergrad from IIT, Apoorva holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Topics: The "0 to 1" phase in technical startups The evolution of data infrastructure Unbundling the data stack #AIInvesting #DataInfrastructure #AIEngineering #VentureCapital #MLOps

Mike Mangini is a partner at SignalFire. Mike joined SignalFire in 2016 to lead the Executive and Technical Talent teams, focused on developing relationships inside and outside the portfolio, and improving SignalFire’s proprietary Talent Tools. Prior to SignalFire, Mike led special projects executive recruiting initiatives for Facebook (2015–16), partnering directly with the senior leadership team to execute key strategic talent assignments and acquisitions. Mike joined Facebook from True Search where he was a Partner (2013–15), leading client engagements for venture-backed technology companies across multiple stages. Operating in the same capacity, Mike was a Principal at Ignition Talent Group (2010–13) which merged practices with True. As a retained recruiter, Mike completed over 50 assignments at the VP, CxO, EIR, XIR and Board levels. Mike began his entrepreneurial career in 2002, where he was Founder & CEO of National Sports Exchange – an award winning Fantasy Sports company – acquired by ProTrade (Citizen Sports), which went on to later be acquired by Yahoo! Mike is a Bentley University graduate, earning a degree in Finance, and was a 4-year varsity soccer letterman. He lives with his wife and two kids in San Francisco, where their favorite past times are discovering new places to eat treats and pretending the Mission is one giant playground. Topics: The impact of AI and data-driven approaches on recruiting The evolution of VC talent platforms Common traits among successful startup executives #VCPodcast #SignalFire #TalentInTech #StartupRecruiting #ExecSearch

Somesh Dash is a General Partner at IVP. He has been an investor at IVP for 19 years, where he focuses primarily on growth investments in enterprise software, consumer and digital health companies. He led or actively participated in IVP's investments in Accompany Health, Aledade, Amplitude, Brex, Business Insider, Datadog, Discord, Expanse, H1, Hello Heart, Humu, Lime, Klout, Lyra Health, Perplexity, Pindrop Security, Pure Storage, Qubole, Rubrik, Snap, SoundCloud, Tanium, Thrive Global, Uber, Uproxx, Walker and Company, and Whisper. Outside of his work with IVP, he also serves as a board member of the Advisory Council at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business (GSB) and the US India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF). He is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and on the Advisory Board of Malaria No More. Topics: Decision-making process for growth-stage investments Evaluates opportunities across different sectors (enterprise, consumer, digital health) Evolution of enterprise software and SaaS business models #VentureCapital #IVP #SomeshDash #StartupInvestor #GrowthEquity

Aseem Datar is a Vice President at Microsoft building the next generation computing business. Most recently he was a Partner at Madrona Venture Group investing in Enterprise companies. Aseem scales businesses and is a seasoned operator. Prior to Madrona, Aseem spent over 17 years at Microsoft, working in a wide variety of roles from a developer writing deep installer level code to building and creating business models for Office 365. Aseem also has global sales experience, led growth for SaaS and hardware businesses, and was most recently the GM/COO for Microsoft Cloud where he grew the business from its early days to over $20B ARR. Aseem brings deep experience creating cutting edge services and platforms and bringing them to market. His background in Cloud, AI/ML, SaaS, Commerce & Payments, Devices & OS means he is interested in a broad set of startup businesses. Aseem holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He was also a Research fellow at the Applied Physics Lab before earning an MBA from the University of Washington. While at Microsoft, he also pursued his executive education from the Harvard Business School. He is a Seattle 40 under 40 honoree and has published a thesis on e-commerce for IEEE. Aseem is also the recipient of the coveted Microsoft CMO Award for leading growth in emerging markets for both devices and SaaS and has worked to pass legislation in Washington State dealing with student aid programs. Topics: Future of Enterprise Computing Building Global SaaS Businesses Technical Leadership Journey #TechLeadership #MicrosoftCloud #VentureCapital #Enterprisetech #CloudComputing

Adeyemi (“Ade”) is co-founder & Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. Before Base10, Ade had a successful career as an entrepreneur and investor. Ade was the co-founder and CEO of Tuenti (The “Spanish Facebook” which was acquired by Telefonica in 2010 for $100M), co-founder and CEO of Identified (“AI for HR” acquired by Workday in 2014) and a founding investor of Cabify (the largest ridesharing company in Latin America currently valued at over $1B). While at Workday, Ade led the launch of Workday Ventures, the first fund focused on Applied AI for Enterprise Software and was VP of Technology Strategy. Ade is originally from Spain and half Nigerian. He holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He also holds a J.D. in Law and a M.S in Economics from Icade University in Spain and studied a certificate on Machine Learning at Stanford. Ade was named to the Forbes Midas List in 2023 and 2024. Topics: Key lessons from founding multiple successful companies Views on Applied AI and Enterprise Software Perspective on overlooked markets and opportunities #VentureCapital #Base10Partners #TechEntrepreneur #SpanishTech #AI

HEMANT MOHAPATRA is a partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners India. He focuses on global SaaS, Enterprise Infrastructure, and frontier / deep tech areas such as crypto, space/satellite, AR/VR and more. Lightspeed has offices in Silicon Valley, India, China, Israel, Europe and South East Asia, with companies such as SnapChat, Byju's, OYO Rooms, Affirm, Docker, Nutanix, AppDynamics, Mulesoft and many more in our portfolio. Prior to that, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm based in the silicon valley and investor in Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, Zynga, Foursquare, Coinbase, Medium and more. He joined a16z after almost 5 years at Google doing strategic partnerships deals (e.g. NetApp, EMC, Verizon, TATA) and investments (e.g. Avere series E, acqd by Microsoft) for the Google Cloud platform team. Before a16z and Google, he was an Engineer & Product Manager at AMD, a micro-processor firm. Topics: Investing Trends in SaaS, Enterprise Infrastructure, Crypto, and Spacetech Insights on differences between startup ecosystems in India, Silicon Valley, and other markets The future of enterprise infrastructure #VentureCapital #DeepTech #StartupInvestor #TechVC #LightspeedVP

Gary is a partner investing in technology and healthcare companies out of our San Francisco office. He represents Polaris on the boards of Quantcast, SimplyInsured, FloQast, Faro Health, Qstream, Foresight, and Livara, and he also works with Wellthy, Naked Poppy, Falkonry, and Novi. He previously served on the board of CliQr (Cisco) as well. Previously, Gary was the CEO of oDesk (now UpWork, NASDAQ; UPWK), the world’s largest online workplace. He guided the company to industry leadership through a merger with Elance while serving as a leading voice for the future of work and the emerging online work industry. Before oDesk, Gary was the Chief Revenue Officer for Intellibank, responsible for all channels and go-to-market operations. Before Intellibank, he was a business unit executive for IBM’s Rational Software Product Group. Gary joined IBM after the acquisition of Rational Software, where he held several senior management positions. Before Rational, Gary held several sales, management, and leadership positions with Pure Software. Gary is a thought leader on marketplaces, sales leadership, the future of work, how best to lead effective teams, and the rise of the “freelance economy.” His commentary has appeared in various publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, and The Washington Post. And he’s appeared on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, BBC, Bloomberg TV, National Public Radio (NPR), and the Fox Business Network. In addition, Gary is a mentor and coach at several accelerators, including Alchemist and StartX. Topics: Building the First Global Remote Work Platform Investing in Healthcare Tech's Digital Future Tech Sales Leadership to Venture Investing #TechSales #VentureCapital #B2B #SiliconValley