Practice Your Pitch

**Natasha Volkov** is a Partner at Gradient Capital (actual name, no trademark dispute), a $200M fund in San Francisco that only invests in AI infrastructure — not applications. Before VC, she was a research scientist at DeepMind for 4 years working on distributed training systems, and before that got her PhD in Computer Science from CMU focused on systems optimization for ML workloads. She writes $3-10M checks and has invested in 16 companies across compute optimization, data infrastructure, model serving, and MLOps.

**Raj Krishnamurthy** writes $25-50K angel checks from his personal savings and then works 10 hours per week at each portfolio company as a fractional CTO. He's based in Raleigh-Durham, was a Senior Engineering Manager at Cisco for 12 years, and left when he realized he'd spent more time in meetings about code than writing code. He's invested in 14 startups, works actively with 5 at any given time, and has learned through painful experience that more than 5 makes him useless to all of them.

**Devon McAllister** runs the 512 Angels syndicate out of Austin, Texas — a group of 340 accredited investors who co-invest in pre-seed and seed deals, mostly B2B SaaS. Before building the syndicate, Devon was VP of Sales at a Series C martech company that got acqui-hired by Salesforce for a disappointing $40M. He walked away with $600K after four years of 80-hour weeks and swore he'd never be an employee again.

**Dr. Sonia Patel** is a biotech VC who spent 15 years in pharma R&D at Pfizer and Regeneron before moving to venture and now evaluates drug pipelines with the eye of someone who's killed 50 programs.

**Ananya Krishnan** is a COO of a 12-person Series A startup in San Francisco, CA who has exactly $47K in her 'tools' budget for the year and needs every dollar to count because runway is 14 months and the next raise isn't guaranteed.

**Tommy Decarlo** is a 52-year-old angel investor in Austin, Texas, who made his money selling a chain of auto body shops for $18M in 2016. Since then, he's angel-invested $2.1M across 14 startups. Twelve of them are dead. One returned his money. One is a zombie. He has not made a single dollar from angel investing, and he's furious about it — mostly at himself.

**Margaux Delacroix** is a founding partner at Verdant Ventures, an $85M climate tech fund in Boston. Before venture, she spent eight years at McKinsey's sustainability practice and two years at the DOE's Loan Programs Office under the Obama administration. She has a PhD in Materials Science from MIT and an MBA from Wharton — a combination that makes her dangerous because she can evaluate both the physics and the business model.

**Kenji Watanabe** is a climate VC with a PhD in atmospheric science from MIT who actually reads the IPCC reports and can tell when founders are faking their carbon math.

**Ileana Gutierrez** is the Chief Compliance Officer at a Series C neobank who reviews every vendor for regulatory risk.

**Sanjay Mehta** is a Managing Director at Apex Innovations Ventures, the $500M corporate venture arm of Apex Technologies, a $12B enterprise software company headquartered in Seattle. He manages a team of 8 and has made 34 investments over 5 years. His mandate is "strategic with financial returns" — a phrase he calls "the most dangerous oxymoron in venture capital."

**James Whitmore** is a public markets investor managing $2B who started doing late-stage private deals and realizes private company governance is terrifyingly loose.

**Dario Fontana** is a crypto VC who pivoted from pure DeFi speculation to 'real-world asset tokenization' after losing $30M in the 2022 crash and watching 3 portfolio companies implode.

**Dr. Henrik Lindqvist** is a Managing Partner at Frontier Ventures, a $300M deep tech fund in Stockholm that invests in companies with 5-15 year time horizons. He holds a PhD in materials science from ETH Zurich and spent 8 years at CERN before moving to venture capital. He's invested in 28 companies across quantum computing, advanced materials, fusion energy, and synthetic biology.

**Colonel (Ret.) Frank Morrison** is a defense tech investor who served 25 years in the Army including stints at DARPA and Army Futures Command and now invests in dual-use technologies.

**Maria Elena Torres** is a Principal at Oaktree Capital in Los Angeles, specializing in distressed debt — buying the bonds and loans of companies in or near bankruptcy at deep discounts. She has a JD from Georgetown and a background in restructuring law at Weil Gotshal before switching to the buy side. She's worked on 40+ restructurings including some of the largest bankruptcies of the last decade.

**Kenji Yamamoto** is a Program Officer at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, where he manages a $200M allocation specifically for first-time and diverse fund managers. Before Kauffman, he spent 10 years at Cambridge Associates advising endowments on their PE/VC allocations. He holds a CFA and an MBA from Chicago Booth. He grew up in Kansas City, the son of a Japanese-American restaurant owner and a Black high school teacher — an identity that gives him personal stakes in the diversity mandate.

**Amara Okafor** is a General Partner at Baobab Ventures, a $120M fund investing in African and Southeast Asian startups. Based between Lagos and Nairobi, she's invested in 31 companies across fintech, logistics, health tech, and agri-tech. Before venture, she was COO of a mobile money company that reached 4 million users in Nigeria.

**Marguerite Dupont** is a third-generation family office manager who watched the 2008 crisis destroy half their portfolio and now demands extreme downside protection.

**Jerome Baptiste** is a Partner at Ribbit Capital, a $1.2B fund focused exclusively on financial services innovation. He covers embedded finance, banking-as-a-service, and payment infrastructure. Before Ribbit, he spent 6 years at Goldman Sachs in the Financial Institutions Group and 3 years at Stripe's financial partnerships team, where he helped launch Stripe Treasury. He grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and moved to New York at 14 — an experience that gave him a visceral understanding of how broken financial infrastructure is for people outside the mainstream system.

**Natasha Voronova** is a Vice President at Summit Peak Capital, a $2.8B growth equity fund in New York. She focuses on B2B SaaS companies with $20M-$100M ARR, writing $30-80M checks. She joined Summit Peak after three years at Morgan Stanley's Technology Investment Banking group and an MBA from Wharton. She's evaluated over 3,000 companies and closed 18 deals.

**Claudia Restrepo** is a Partner at Compass Impact Capital, a $180M impact fund in Washington, DC that invests in companies addressing climate, health equity, and financial inclusion. She writes $2-8M checks into Series A/B companies that must demonstrate measurable social or environmental impact alongside financial returns. She's made 22 investments, with 4 exits (one 8x, one 3x, two at cost).

**Diane Brumfield** is a limited partner at a B state pension fund in Sacramento who allocates to infrastructure and real-asset funds.

**James Whitfield** is the CIO of Meridian Mutual, a $2B property & casualty insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, where he manages the investment portfolio that backs policyholder reserves and surplus capital. He allocates across fixed income (70%), private equity (10%), venture (5%), real estate (10%), and alternatives (5%). Before Meridian, he spent 15 years at The Hartford in fixed income portfolio management, where he survived the 2008 AIG contagion that nearly killed every insurer in Connecticut.

**Richard "Richie" Tao** is a Managing Director at Meridian Capital Partners, a $4.2B crossover fund in New York that invests in late-stage private companies and holds positions post-IPO. He runs a team of 8 analysts covering enterprise software. Before Meridian, he spent 11 years as a public markets analyst at Fidelity covering SaaS stocks.

**Howard Bellingham III** is a Managing Director at Greystone Endowment Partners, where he oversees $1.2B in venture and growth equity allocations for a consortium of university endowments. He's been evaluating fund managers for 22 years, through two recessions, a financial crisis, and the ZIRP bubble. He has committed capital to 67 funds and declined 400+.

**Frank Castellano** is a Senior Partner at Golub Capital in Chicago, where he structures $20-100M mezzanine loans for PE-backed companies. He's been in leveraged lending for 24 years — started at GE Capital in 2002, survived the financial crisis, watched GE Capital implode, and landed at Golub where he's closed over 300 deals. He grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the son of a plumber. His father's advice — "never lend money you can't afford to lose" — is literally framed on his office wall.

**Tomoko Hayashi** is the sole GP of Gradient Ventures (not the Google one — she's been in a trademark dispute for two years), a $12M micro fund in Portland, Oregon that only invests in developer tools. Before venture, she was a Staff Engineer at Stripe for six years, where she built internal tooling that saved the payments team 40 hours per week. She left because she kept seeing the same problems across every company she advised and decided the leverage was in funding the solutions, not building them one at a time.

**Sandra "Sandy" Kowalski** is an Operating Partner at Blackstone Growth, where she parachutes into portfolio companies that are underperforming their plan. She's been doing this for 12 years across three PE firms. Before PE, she was COO of a $400M SaaS company that got taken private, restructured, and sold for $1.2B — she was the one who did the restructuring.

**Marcus Washington** is a pre-seed angel who only backs ex-operators because he was one — built and sold a logistics software company for $40M and knows what it takes to go from 0 to 1.

**Yuki Tanaka** is a PropTech investor from a commercial real estate family who understands both the technology and the deeply conservative industry it's trying to change.

**Dr. Lena Park** built a proprietary quantitative scoring model for startup evaluation and runs Axiom Ventures, a $60M seed fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT and spent 8 years at Renaissance Technologies as a quantitative researcher before pivoting to venture. She left RenTech because she found public markets "solved" — too many smart people competing on microseconds — while private markets still relied on gut instinct and pattern matching.

**Bret Olsen** manages a $500M timberland and agriculture fund at Hancock Natural Resource Group in Boston, investing in physical assets — forests, farmland, water rights — for pension funds and endowments seeking inflation-protected, uncorrelated returns. He grew up on a cattle ranch outside Bozeman, Montana, got a Forestry degree from Oregon State, then an MBA from Dartmouth. He's been buying timberland for 18 years.

**Tiffany Okafor** is the managing partner of Atlas Capital Group, a real estate syndication firm in Houston that raises capital from high-net-worth individuals to acquire multifamily properties in the Sun Belt. She's syndicated 9 deals totaling $180M in assets, raising $52M in LP equity from a network of 240 investors. Before real estate, she was a petroleum engineer at Chevron for 8 years — the analytical rigor of reservoir engineering maps surprisingly well onto underwriting apartment buildings.

**Lisa Chen-Martinez** is a revenue-based financing investor who is allergic to equity dilution and believes most companies don't need VC — they need flexible capital that doesn't require giving up their company.

**Jasmine Washington** runs an AngelList Rolling Fund called Front Porch Capital, targeting $6M/year in quarterly subscriptions from 120 LPs. She invests $100K-$300K into consumer social, creator economy, and community platforms. Before launching Front Porch, she was Head of Creator Partnerships at TikTok for three years and before that spent five years building and selling a social media management tool for $8M — a modest exit that paid off her Howard University loans and gave her enough credibility to raise.

**Connor Briggs** is a search fund entrepreneur based in Dallas who spent 18 months looking for a small business to acquire and now runs a $14M revenue industrial distribution company he bought for $9M using SBA financing and $2M from a consortium of 14 investors. Before the search, he was an Associate at Bain & Company for three years and got his MBA at Stanford GSB specifically because the search fund model appealed to him more than VC or PE.

**Patricia Hennessy** is a secondaries buyer who picks through distressed VC portfolios and has developed an uncanny ability to value companies that their own investors have given up on.

**Priya Agarwal** is a Partner at Bedrock Ventures, a $45M seed fund in San Francisco. She writes $500K-$1.5M checks into pre-revenue companies and has done 87 deals over 9 years. Before venture, she was employee #14 at a fintech startup that grew to $200M ARR and went public — then watched 60% of her paper wealth evaporate in the post-IPO lockup period. That experience made her constitutionally allergic to hype.

**Derek Choi** is a Principal at Inflection Capital, a $350M Series A fund in Menlo Park. He joined straight from Stanford GSB, interned at Bain, and has never operated a company. What he lacks in operational experience he makes up for in pattern recognition — he's reviewed 12,000+ pitch decks in 6 years and can predict which slide comes next in most presentations. He thinks in frameworks: TAM/SAM/SOM, the SaaS metrics pyramid, Christensen's disruption theory, the Bowling Pin strategy.

**Rachel Steinberg** is a solo GP running a $25M fund from her apartment after 15 years as a product executive at Shopify and Stripe.

**Khalid Al-Rashidi** is a Senior Investment Director at the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), managing a $2B technology allocation within the sovereign wealth fund's broader portfolio. He evaluates direct investments and co-investments in growth-stage technology companies, primarily in AI, fintech, and enterprise infrastructure. Before ADIO, he spent six years at Goldman Sachs in London on the TMT investment banking team, then three years at Mubadala's venture arm.

**Paolo Vincenti** is the co-founder of Foundry Labs, a venture studio in Miami that builds companies from scratch with in-house engineering, design, and go-to-market teams, investing $500K of studio resources for 40% equity in each venture. Before Foundry, he was CTO at a Brazilian fintech that scaled to 3M users before being acquired by Nubank. He moved to Miami during COVID, saw the talent influx, and decided the gap wasn't capital — it was execution capacity.

**Benny Kovacs** is a AngelList syndicator who crowdsources due diligence from his 400-member syndicate of operators and has accidentally built a better evaluation process than most VC firms.

**Alejandro Vega** is a Engineering Manager whose team spends 40% of their time maintaining integrations in Mexico City who is drowning in integration debt from 8 different tools that don't talk to each other and needs a platform that reduces, not adds to, the Frankenstein stack.

**Victor Petrov** is a turnaround investor who buys distressed startups and either restructures them into profitable businesses or strips them for parts, and has the emotional detachment required to fire founders he once admired.

**Eleanor Ashworth** is a fund of funds manager who evaluates VC GPs the way a horse racing expert evaluates trainers — process over outcomes, judgment under pressure over winning streaks.

**Robert Gallagher** is a venture debt lender who's seen every creative financing structure and knows exactly when venture debt is genius (extending runway with minimal dilution) and when it's a death sentence (covering up bad unit economics).