Venture with Grace

9Alex Bangash is the Co-founder/ Managing Director of Transpose Platform. Transpose Platform investing in the future of venture—backing founders, funds, and platforms that shape the next generation of market leader. Topics: The Evolution of Venture CapitalThe Future of Fund StructuresBuilding Successful Venture Funds#venturecapital #ventureinvesting #transposeplatform #futureofvc

David Blumberg is the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, which he established in 1991. Prior to Blumberg Capital, David managed international investments with the Bronfman Family Office (Claridge), Adler & Co. Venture Capital APAX Partners and at T. Rowe Price. He also launched business development for Check Point Software Technologies as one of its top four executives.David earned his A.B. in Government, cum laude, from Harvard College and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and INSEAD. David speaks French and is proficient in Hebrew and Spanish. David serves as a member or observer on the boards of DataHeroes, Jassby, Kloudfuse, Mytaverse, Trulioo and Wunder Mobility.Topics:Enterprise Software EvolutionThe Art of Spotting IPO-Worthy CompaniesBuilding a Durable VC Firm#VentureCapital #DurableInvesting #BlumbergCapital #FounderSuccess #ExitStrategy

Jon Turow joined Madrona in 2022. As part of the investment team, Jon partners with founders who build products that customers love. He is interested in applied AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open-source business models.Jon is an experienced product leader with over a decade of experience in cloud computing. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Vision AI services including Amazon Textract (AI for intelligent document processing) and before that Amazon Rekognition (highly accurate image and video analysis). He also wrote the original product and business plans for AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass, which extends AWS services to run locally on edge devices. Jon has launched more than 5 new services and countless features in the areas of AIML, edge computing, IoT, and messaging during his time at Amazon. Jon cofounded and led a cloud telephony startup prior to Amazon.Topics: The Evolution of Applied AIEdge AI & Computing's FutureOpen Source AI Business Models#AppliedAI #VentureCapital #ProductLeadership #CloudComputing #AIInfrastructure

Yujian Tang is the CEO of OSS4AI. OSS4AI is an organization aimed at providing all developers access to the resources to understand, use, and contribute to the direction and development of AI. He is also a Venture Partner at Banyan Ventures, a New York City-based pre-seed, first-money-in, venture capital firm born in the AI era.We will be in person going live at AWS in SF! Topics: Open source AI projects AI infrastructure and development AI-native applications and infrastructure#VCPodcast #AI #VentureCapital #AIStartups #OpenSourceAI

Jay Reno is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound. Pointhound is helping people find and book free flights, for free, to amazing destinations using credit card points and miles. 🛫🏝️ 💳 He also leads seed and series A investments with 645 Ventures where he's a Venture Partner. Investment areas include consumer, fintech, climate tech and AI. Previously founded Feather, raised $76m, built a world-class team of 150 people, and sold the company in 2022.Topics: The Role of AI in Fintech Consumer AI Trends Insights from Being a Second-Time Founder#SecondTimeFounder #FintechTrends #ConsumerTech #TravelTech

Lauren Kolodny is a Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. Lauren leads the fintech thesis area at Acrew. She has made investments in companies including Chime, Clara, Divvy, Gusto, Klar, Papaya, Pie, & Plaid. Prior to co-founding Acrew, Lauren was a partner at Aspect Ventures. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google, where she led a number of launches for Workspace, including Google Drive.Topics: How AI is Transforming the Future of Financial Services The Evolution of Payments Technology Cross-Border Financial Solutions in a Global Economy#FintechFuture #VCInsights #AIBanking #StartupGrowth #DigitalFinance

Nosu founder backgrounds: Audrey (CEO) won 20+ hackathons, engineering @ Intuit, Intel, NASA USRC, content creator with 68k following on instagram @jia.seed. Disclaimer: Grace is an investor in Nosu. Topics: How to Spot Successful Founders at Hackathons Content Creation and Community Building Authentically Building a Gen Z Engineering Community#hackathon#startups#womenintech#engineering#tech

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 is a Partner at NEA. He seeks to partner with founders building generational companies in AI, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and robotics. His current investments include Databricks, Second Front, Pulumi, Martian, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Deltastream, Rapid Robotics, Built Robotics, Outrider, Tigera, and ForAllSecure. Previous investments include Box (NYSE:BOX), NGINX (acq. by F5), Streamsets (acq. by Software AG), and Illusive Networks (acq. by Proofpoint). In 2016 he was named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” in Venture Capital and the Silicon Valley Business Journal's "40 Under 40".Aaron graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Electrical Engineering, and carried a minor in Math.Topics: Enterprise AI Infrastructure Evolution Next wave of industrial robotics Enterprise Security Architecture#CloudInfra#DevTools#AIstack#RoboticsTrends#EnterpriseTech