Programs
Meyer Malka is the Founder and visionary force behind Ribbit Capital. Founded in 2012, Ribbit has partnered and invested in leaders who influence over 700M people with financial services and products across 20 countries. He has spent over two decades shaping and investing in technology and financial services companies across four continents. His impact is global, reflected in his board memberships with industry titans such as MercadoLibre, Nubank, CRED, Robinhood, Revolut, and ONE.
Vanessa Larco joined NEA as a Partner in 2016 and focuses on opportunities in enterprise and consumer applications. She is passionate about well-designed products and services that enable people to be more productive and fulfilled in their daily lives. Vanessa has led investments in Assembled, Kindred, Rewind AI, Cleo, Evernow, Rocket.Chat, Mejuri, EvidentID, Greenlight Card, and Lily AI. She is also a board observer at Forethought AI, Safebase, Orby AI, and Granica AI. She was a board observer at Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) until its IPO in 2021. Prior to Venture, she led Product Teams at Box, Twilio, Disney and Xbox.
Renata is a venture capitalist, futurist and co-founder of Renegade Partners. Over the past 15 years, she has invested in founding teams transforming the trajectory of humanity through technology. Before launching Renegade, Renata specialized in early-stage deep technology investments and partnered with startups unlocking new markets and business models such as Dollar Shave Club ($1B acquisition, Unilever), Warby Parker (NYSE: WRBY), Planet (NYSE: PL) and Cruise Automation ($1B acquisition, GM).
Naomi is a Partner at Menlo Ventures leading the firm’s investments in early-stage data and AI-enabled SaaS companies. She has partnered with Eppo, Orb, Matik, and Lindy AI, to name a few, and previously served on Fleetsmith’s board until its acquisition by Apple. Prior to VC, Naomi was one of the first product-led growth (PLG) leaders in B2B, starting at Evernote over a decade ago where she built the product growth and monetization team on the company's path to 100m users, and then as VP of Growth at Invoice2go, the top grossing Business app later acquired by Bill.com. Naomi is a sought-after advisor as one of the original mentors to Reforge and as an active speaker across communities such as SaaStr, Lenny’s Podcast, The Information, First Round Angel Track, South Park Commons and more. Follow her on X @npilosof
Alejandro Guerrero is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Act One Ventures, a Los Angeles seed fund investing in business software, currently managing $147 million in AUM. The firm has invested in over 50 companies, 70% of which were founded by women or minorities. Previously, Alejandro was the Co-Founder and CEO of Uniq Apps, a SaaS platform for encrypted work messaging, and Co-Founder of Live Entertainment Network, an interactive video player platform that helped artists monetize live shows.
Kristin Baker Spohn brings to BAM Elevate ~20 years of experience building and investing in companies at the intersection of technology and healthcare. Prior to BAM, Kristin was a General Partner at CRV where she led private investments across sectors and stages and was a Partner at Social Capital. As a builder, Kristin was the Chief Commercial Officer at Collective Health and led various functions at Castlight Health from seed through IPO. Kristin began her career at Goldman Sachs in Investment Banking. She holds a Masters of Business Administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College. Kristin is a Lecturer in Management at Stanford and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Renata has spent over a decade bridging the finance and social impact sectors, having held roles in microfinance, investment banking, social enterprises, and venture capital. Renata is currently an investor at Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company, where she backs women-led venture capital funds and makes mission-aligned early-stage investments. Previously, she was part of the New Capitalism Project and worked as a Senior Associate at Nairobi-based KawiSafi Ventures, where she invested in the clean energy space. A proud SEO and Toigo alumna of Ecuadorian descent, Renata is passionate about increasing access to capital for diverse GPs and founders and building a bench of future capital allocators who reflect the changing demographics of the US. She holds a BA in International Relations and French from Tufts University and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lisa Cawley is the Managing Director of Screendoor, an investment platform that invests in new managers driving the next wave of innovation, alpha, and new perspectives in VC. Screendoor uniquely combines our robust LP frameworks with the strategic expertise of accomplished GPs, enabling us to underwrite the non-obvious throughout our manager selection and support. Screendoor is a strategic partner that offers not only returns-driven portfolio exposure, but also direct relationships for LPs' own portfolios so that through our community, allocators have early visibility into the next generation of leading VC firms as they scale. Prior to Screendoor, Lisa worked with a private multi-billion-dollar global investment firm where she was involved in all aspects of managing the firm’s private market portfolio, including sourcing and manager due diligence, asset allocation and forecasting, and creating and implementing the firm’s investment data tools and analytics. Lisa started her career at Ernst & Young, where she served on private equity, venture capital, and public CPG clients. Lisa earned an MBA and an MSF from Loyola University Maryland, and she obtained a BBA in Accounting with a double minor in Information Systems and Spanish from Loyola University Maryland. She is a CFA Charterholder and holds a CPA.
Jasmine Richards is the Head of Diverse Manager Research and a Managing Director at Cambridge Associates, with over 15 years of investment experience. She leads efforts to identify institutional-quality managers across public and private asset classes with a focus on diverse leadership. Previously, Jasmine was an International Equity Manager and Research Analyst at FIS Group, where she specialized in identifying and managing investment strategies, particularly with diverse-owned asset managers. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Aileen Lee is founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-focused venture fund based in Palo Alto, CA. Notable Cowboy investments include Dollar Shave Club, Drata Security, Guild and Ironclad Software. She started Cowboy VC after more than a decade learning the ropes across enterprise and consumer investing at Kleiner Perkins. She was also a venture-backed CEO during the great recession, and marketer during the dot com boom. Aileen is also known for coining the term "unicorn" in a 2013 analysis of VC-backed startups valued at $1 billion or more. She has been recognized as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and has appeared on Forbes' Midas List of investors several times as well as Forbes’ list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women.
Kirsten Green is the Founder and Managing Partner of Forerunner, a consumer-driven venture capital firm partnering with seed- through growth-stage companies. Forerunner partners with the ambitious teams redefining categories, and that are reshaping human behavior and modern culture. Founded in 2012, Forerunner has over $2B in assets under management and is an early investor in Chime, Faire, Glossier, OURA, Hims&Hers, Ritual, The Farmer’s Dog and more.
Daniel Levine first joined Accel in 2010. He focuses on product-first startups aimed at consumers, developers, and bottoms-up business users.Dan led Accel's investments in, and serves on the boards of, EdgeDB, Gem, Mux, ReadMe, Scale, Sentry, Sprig, Val Town, Vercel, and Whimsical.He led Accel’s investments in Altinity, Atrato, Beek, Flipturn, Minoan, Monarch Money, Numeracy (acquired by Snowflake), Searchlight (acquired by Multiverse), and vlt.Dan re-joined Accel after spending time at Dropbox, where he worked on the platform team. He helped open the platform to third-party developers and launched and managed many of the company’s developer-facing initiatives. Earlier, Dan co-founded Chartio, a Y Combinator-backed (S10) startup in the data visualization space, and prior to Chartio, worked on CrunchBase at TechCrunch.Dan is from Washington, DC and graduated from Yale.
