Venture with Grace

Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures. Over decades of investing, he has identified seven meta themes and developed a screening process that successfully identified outlier companies and founders. Incisive Ventures is a Pre-Seed Fund in Seattle to invest in technology companies that reduce friction at scale, leveraging the partner's network built as an angel investor in 60+ companies in the sector, including 4 unicorns, that secured $2.5B+ in follow-on financing. He is a serial entrepreneur who has also invested in over 250 companies as an angel, half a dozen as a venture partner at a major VC firm, and he is a limited partner in over a dozen VC funds. He is also the Founder of a leading Angel network, Element8. As a 3x venture-backed CEO with experience from Microsoft and Accenture, he has raised over $500M (including two IPOs) for his own companies. Topics: Building deal flow when launching a first-time fund Due diligence framework for pre-revenue companies Real metrics that matter at pre-seed #VentureCapital#AngelInvesting#StartupLife#SaaS

Howard Wright is the VP of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Prior to that he was the VP of Global Head of Start Ups at Amazon Web Services. At NVIDIA, he leads their global Inception program, positioned at the epicenter of the generative AI revolution. His role focuses on democratizing access to NVIDIA's comprehensive AI platform while building strategic partnerships across the startup ecosystem. Working with over 19,000 innovative startups, leading VCs, and global technology partners, they're creating a flywheel of innovation that's transforming industries and solving humanity's greatest challenges.Topics: Current AI trends and their impact on different industries Building a successful startup in 2025 Creating and nurturing a thriving business ecosystem#NVIDIA#AI#GPU#DeepLearning#Innovation

Aaron Jacobson, a Partner at NEA recognized by Forbes for his venture capital insights, dives deep into the evolution of enterprise AI and the future of robotics. He highlights the critical role of identity protection in cybersecurity as technological advancements reshape defenses. The discussion also explores the importance of diverse advisory boards for founders and the balance required for successful startup funding. Jacobson draws on his experience to illustrate how strong product strategies can disrupt markets, especially in sectors like manufacturing and healthcare.

Abbas Haider Ali is the Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub where he lead all post-sales teams with an org size of 550+, supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including over 90% of the Fortune 100. Prior to GitHub, he was Vice President of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio, leading the Data & Growth business ($300M+ ARR) following Twilio's $3B+ acquisition of Segment. He's held executive leadership roles at industry-defining companies, including xMatters (acquired by Everbridge), Managed Objects (acquired by Novell), Opnet Technologies (acquired by Riverbed), and IBM.With a proven track record in leading both Product and Go-To-Market teams, he has cultivated a multi-disciplinary leadership style that spans solutions engineering, customer success, professional services, support, product management and strategy, product marketing, sales, and business development.In addition to being an operator, he is a General Partner at GTM Operators Network where he invests at seed through growth stage including companies such as Atlan, Metronome, Neon, Weights & Biases and 11x.ai. He also has a strong commitment to mentorship and is passionate about empowering women and underrepresented groups as they rise to leadership positions in the tech industry. Topics: AI's impact on software development and developer workflows Bridging the gap between product and go-to-market strategies Key differences in leading customer success at different company sizes#CustomerSuccess#DevTools#VentureCapital#GTM#GitHub

Mike Freedman is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, as well as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.Timescale is building the PostgreSQL database cloud for modern applications, supercharging real-time analytics, intelligence (AI), and transactional workloads. Thousands of global customers, $180M raised from leading VCs. Hiring globally @ timescale.com/careersMike's work broadly focuses on distributed systems, storage systems, networking, and security. He developed CoralCDN (a decentralized content distribution network serving millions of daily users) and Ethane (which formed the basis for the OpenFlow / software-defined networking architecture). He co-founded Illuminics Systems around IP geolocation and intelligence, which was acquired by Quova (now part of Neustar). Mike is also a technical advisor to Stacks/Hiro, building a more decentralized Internet leveraging the blockchain.Honors include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, ACM Fellow, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, given by President Obama). Prior to joining Princeton in 2007, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from NYU's Courant Institute and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees from MIT.Topics: Academic to entrepreneur journey Distributed systems evolution How AI is changing database requirements and architecture#TimescaleDB#PostgreSQL#DatabaseInnovation#RealTimeAnalytics

Sandy Kory founded Horizon in 2022 and has over 15 years of venture capital experience. He was an early investor in Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, Sendbird, and several other unicorns. Horizon is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in disruptive software.Topics: Evolution of Software Investing Bootstrapped vs. Billion-Dollar Rounds Inside Palantir & Canva's Early Days#SeedStage#StartupGrowth#VentureCapital#BootstrappedVsVC

Eugene Lee is a Partner at OMERS Ventures. He is currently a board member at Postal (offline marketing automation), WorkRamp (learning engine), Klue (competitive enablement), Mosaic (strategic finance), Fonoa (tax automation), Quorso (co-pilot for retail operations), and an investor in Crunchbase (prospecting for private companies).Eugene is an experienced professional with a demonstrated ability in business, financial and sales operations, general management (GM), business development, growth, online marketing, sales, M&A, and strategy for both Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups. He has significant exposure to and interactions with business unit leaders, executive management, and board members. He also has direct experience with consumer, commerce, and SaaS platforms.Topics: The Evolution of SaaS Business ModelsBuilding Sales Operations at ScaleInvesting Trends in Vertical SaaS #SaaS#VerticalSaaS#VentureCapital#OMERSVentures

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners. Amplify Partners investments include Intervenn Biosciences, RunwayML, Maze Design, Bayes (acquired by Airtable), OctoML, Einblick AI (acquired by Databricks), Hyperparam, Hex, Meroxa, Metaphor Data, Datafold, Modal, Eppo, Gantry, Datology, WarpStream among others. Prior to that she worked as an associate at Canvas Ventures and the head of data at Mattermark. Topics: The evolution of AI infrastructure investingData tooling and the modern data stack The intersection of AI and life sciences#AIinfrastructure#DeepTech#VentureCapital#DataScience#AI

Hansae Catlett is a Partner at HOF Capital where he invests across sectors and stages, with a particular focus on leading the firm's early stage investment strategy in applied AI, B2B application software (horizontal and vertical), dev tools & infra, and deep tech.Prior to joining HOF Capital, Hansae was a Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, helping to lead the firm's investments in cloud and AI. His investments and/or board positions included Guild, Jasper, Luxury Presence, MaintainX, Nala, Productboard, Rilla, ServiceTitan, Sila, Shopmonkey, Spot AI, TRM Labs, and VendorPM. He also supported Bessemer's investments in Canva, EvenUp and Syndio.Before Bessemer, Hansae helped lead the investment strategy of Scott Cook's family office with a focus on enterprise SaaS, biomedical informatics, and edtech. He has worked with the investment teams at Slow Ventures and Omidyar Network, and has held product and business strategy roles at various startups.Hansae is a co-founder and general partner of The MBA Fund, a seed-stage fund that partners with promising alumni and student entrepreneurs from top universities, with notable investments in Create Inc, FlutterFlow, Hightouch, Jeeves, Seso, and Vooma AI, among others.Hansae earned his MBA and MPP from Stanford and graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in biomedical engineering and philosophy.Topics: Early Stage Investment Strategies in Applied AIB2B SaaS and Dev Tools Trends and OpportunitiesDeep Tech Investments Challenges and Rewards#VentureCapital#AIInvestments#B2BSaaS#DeepTech#CloudComputing

Emilio Escobar is the Chief Information Security Officer of Datadog. With two decades of experience in Information Security and Compliance, Emilio Escobar has worked at large enterprises, medium-sized companies, and governmental organizations. Previously, Emilio served as the VP of Information Security for Hulu, where he played a pivotal role in setting up key security functions. Prior to that, Emilio worked for PlayStation, where he built and ran the software security teams. Emilio’s unique approach to security and compliance has always prioritized partnerships and people—hiring the right talent to build the processes, procedures, and technologies that unite Security, Engineering, and Operations teams. Emilio holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Puerto Rico.Topics: Evolution of Security in Cloud EnvironmentsFuture Trends in CybersecurityData Security in a Cloud-First World#Cybersecurity#CloudSecurity#Datadog#CISO#DevSecOps