Ann Miura-Ko — Co-founder, Floodgate

**Ann Miura-Ko** is the co-founding partner of **Floodgate**, a seed-stage venture capital firm that has backed Lyft, Twitter, Twitch, Outreach, and dozens of other companies from their earliest stages. She holds a PhD in Mathematical Modeling of Computer Security from Stanford and teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford d.school. She was named on the Forbes Midas List multiple times and is known for her concept of 'thunder lizards' — startups with the potential for extraordinary, outsized outcomes.\n\nAnn's PhD in security gives her unusual technical depth for a seed-stage investor, and her teaching background means she thinks systematically about what makes founders and companies succeed.