James Joaquin is the co-founder and managing director of Obvious Ventures, leading the team’s investments focused on plant-forward approaches to food (like Beyond Meat), “good for you” consumer goods (like Olly), and companies at the forefront of how people find and do their best work (like Incredible Health). Joaquin has been working in venture capital since 2007. Prior t...

Juliet Anammah is the chairwoman of Jumia Nigeria and the Chief Sustainability Officer of Jumia Group, the largest e-commerce platform in Africa and the first African tech startup to be listed on the NYSE. She previously served as the CEO of Jumia Nigeria for more than 4 years, overseeing the growth and transition of Jumia Nigeria from online retail to a full digital ecosy...

Daphne Koller is the CEO and founder of insitro, a machine learning-enabled drug discovery company. Previously, she was a professor of computer science at Stanford University for 18 years, co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space. She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004. In th...

It’s understandable that, amid a flurry of pitch meetings and rejections, founders might find themselves mystified about what venture capital investors want. However, according to Bessemer Venture Partners operating partner Jeff Epstein, it’s actually very simple: They want to see a business that has the potential to grow exponentially, some evidence of traction, and a con...

Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms, and is the author of the forthcoming book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). She has spent more than a decade building movements to fight for women and girls’ economic empowerment, working to close the gender gap in the tech sector, and most recently a...

James Reinhart is the co-founder and CEO of thredUP, one of the world's largest online resale platforms. thredUP designed a digital resale experience that aims to take the work and risk out of thrift in an effort to make used clothes the new normal and create a more sustainable future for fashion. Prior to thredUP, he helped develop one of the nation’s premier public schoo...

As the Chief Marketing Officer for companies that have included Twilio, Jive, Genpact, Nuance, and Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Lynda Kate Smith has owned go-to-market strategy and full marketing responsibilities across a diverse set of industries, particularly in the area of tech products and services. She is currently a consultant/fractional CMO for mParticle...

Justin Kan is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch. In 2006, Kan launched the live video service Justin.tv, a company that started when he strapped a camera to his head and streamed his life to the internet 24/7. Over the next 8 years, he and his co-founders turned the business into Twitch, which ultimately sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 mil...

In a recent paper, Stanford professor Chuck Eesley and Notre Dame professor Yong Suk Lee observed that formal entrepreneurship education helped Stanford alumni founders raise more funding and scale more quickly than peers who received no formal entrepreneurship training. But entrepreneurship education didn’t lead to a higher rate of startup creation itself. What should tha...

Ashley Flucas is the founder and general partner of Flucas Ventures. Based in West Palm Beach, Florida, the syndicate of around 2,000 angel investors has invested in more than 200 startups. Flucas, a graduate of Duke University and Harvard Law School, also serves as a partner at Jupiter, a Florida-based real estate finance fund with $3 billion in assets under management. I...