Top 50 Energy Angel Investors in United States in December 2024

Kiran Bhatraju is the Founder and CEO of Arcadia. Kiran has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mark Cuban is the founder of Fireside, Chairman and Founding Partner of AXS TV, and the Owner of Dallas Mavericks. He previously worked at Broadcast.com as a Co-Founder. Mark Cuban attended the Indiana University Bloomington.

Jackson Moses currently serves as the Founder and Managing Partner of Silent Ventures, an early-stage venture firm that invests in exceptional founders building unrivaled aerospace, defense, and national security startups. He also founded and manages Silent Capital, a private syndicate that provides its members exclusive access to leadingmulti-stage defense and frontier tech deals. Additionally, Jackson serves as a Senior Advisor to the founding teams of Castelion and Privateer Space.Before founding Silent Ventures, Jackson founded and served as VP of Partnerships at MainStreet: the first tech company to make R&D tax credits accessible to startups and SMBs via industry-leading workflows and integrations. As a founding executive, he was responsible for developing go-to-market strategies, building a world-class sales organization, managing business development initiatives, and scaling annual revenue to over $30M. To date, MainStreet has employed hundreds of people and helped 2,000+ startups claim over $150M in tax savings, collectively extending their runway by centuries.Before founding MainStreet, Jackson founded and served as Chairman & CEO of Spectrum Labs (enterprise AIaaS), which was acquired by ActiveFence after last being valued at $137M. Spectrum Labs pioneered multimodal LLMs, specifically a series of proprietary GPT foundation models, designed to make digital communities more profitable for Fortune 500 owners, marketers, influencers, and their users. Its customer base spanned gaming, dating, and social media, and included Tencent (TCEHY), Pinterest (NYSE: PINS), Grindr (NYSE: GRND), Yik Yak, Wildlife Studios, and The Meet Group, among others.Before founding Spectrum Labs, Jackson worked in sales (Lynda.com), customer operations, and executive recruiting at LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft). Before this, he worked as a Market Research Analyst at Cisco where he evaluated industry trends, new investment opportunities, and emerging threats to Cisco’s core business lines. Having raised $120M+ across his two companies, Jackson actively advises startups, venture firms, and family offices on private-sector aerospace and defense tech trends, investment opportunities, and capital allocation strategies. He serves as a Venture Partner to several large firms and has sourced deals for 8VC, a16z, Airbus Ventures, Tribe Capital, Quiet Capital, Susa Ventures, Lavrock Ventures, First In, Cubit Capital, and defense primes.Jackson holds two B.A. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Economics, with a concentration in monetary policy, and Political Science, with a concentration in game theory.

Bill Gates is the Co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He attended Harvard University.

Bill Gates is the Co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He attended Harvard University.

Jordan Mendell is the chief product officer and head of mobile products at Mendell studied organic chemistry at the University of Colorado atDenver.

Mark Cuban is the founder of Fireside, Chairman and Founding Partner of AXS TV, and the Owner of Dallas Mavericks. He previously worked at Broadcast.com as a Co-Founder. Mark Cuban attended the Indiana University Bloomington.

Dylan Taylor is a global business leader, commercial astronaut, thought leader and philanthropist. Currently, Dylan serves as Chairman & CEO of Voyager Space, a multi-national space exploration firm focused on building the next generation of space infrastructure for NASA and other global space agencies.Dylan has been recognized by HarvardUniversity, SpaceNews, the BBC, the Financial Times, Pitchbook, CNBC, CNN and others as having played a seminal role in the growth of the private space industry. As an early-stage investor in more than 50 emerging space ventures, including Axiom, Kepler, York, Astrobotic, LeoLabs, Relativity, and Planet, Dylan is widely considered the most active private space investor in the world.Dylan’s technical background, global business experience and unbridled passion for space make him a unique figure within his industry. As a thought leader and futurist, he has written many popular pieces on the future of the space industry for Forbes, FastCompany, Newsweek, SpaceNews, The Space Review, and Space.com. As a speaker, Dylan has keynoted many of the major space conferences around the world and has appeared regularly on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC.Dylan has extensive global business experience as both a board director and CEO in several industries, including advanced electronics, finance and real estate. He previously served as a Director for UMB Bank, a Fortune 500 company based in Kansas City and as a mutual fund director for the Jackson Funds where he oversaw assets of $8B across 130 distinct funds. He has also served in the roles of CEO, President and Board Director for multinational companies like Prudential PLC, Honeywell, Colliers and Jones Lang LaSalle. Dylan was recognized as a Fortune 1000 CEO with P&L responsibility in excess of $3B and operations encompassing 15,000 employees in over 60 countries. In addition, Dylan has participated in 4 IPOs over the course of his career. Dylan is a leading advocate of space manufacturing and the utilization of in-space resources to further space exploration and settlement. In 2017, he became the first private citizen to manufacture an item in space when the gravity meter he co-designed and commissioned was 3D printed on the International Space Station. The historic item is now housed in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.Dylan is an explorer of note. On December 11th, 2021 Dylan became just the 606th human to go to space as part of the crew of Blue Origin’s NewShepard Mission 19. Accordingly, Dylan earned his commercial astronaut wings with the FAA and his universal astronaut wings from the Association of Space Explorers.He is also one of only a handful of humans to have descended to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench as part of the Limiting Factor Expedition in July of 2022. In that mission, Dylan descended with pilot Victor Vescovo to a depth in excess of 10,800 meters (35,500 feet) into an area of the Mariana Trench that had never been visited by humans. Dylan is the youngest human to have been to the deepest part of the world’s oceans and crossed the Karman line into Space. Dylan has been a member of the Explorers Club since 2014.Dylan maintains an extensive philanthropic impact on the space industry. In 2017, Dylan founded the nonprofit and social movement, Space for Humanity, which seeks to democratize space exploration and develop solutions to global issues through the scope of human awareness to help solve the world’s most intractable problems. Space for Humanity has successfully sent two citizen astronauts to space via Blue Origin including both the first Mexican-born woman (Katya Echazareta), and first African-born woman (Sara Sabry). Building upon his passion and support for the space industry, Dylan serves as a strategic advisor for both the Archmission and the Human Spaceflight Program and is a co-founding patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which promotes the growth of commercial space activity. Additionally, he is also a leading benefactor to the Brooke Owens Fellowship, Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and Mission: Astro Access.Dylan is the founder and Chairman of Multiverse Media, an integrated global media company focused on science and technology, with an emphasis on space. Multiverse is the parent company of the popular space philosophy website 2211.world as well as the Ad Astra Dinners, a Jeffersonian-style dinner series featuring some of the world’s leading influencers discussing the future of humanity in space. Another subsidiary of Multiverse Media, Multiverse Publishing, publishes books by leading authors including Frank White, Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill. Multiverse is also the executive producer of the documentary film, The High Frontier and the forthcoming film, Fortitude. For his influence as a global leader and his commitment to creating a positive impact on the world, Dylan has been honored with numerous personal and professional accolades in recent years. The World Economic Forum recognized Dylan as a Young Global Leader in 2011 and a full member of the World Economic Forum in 2014. That same year he was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. In 2020, Dylan was recognized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation with their top honor for business and finance, following in the footsteps of 2019’s inaugural winner, the late Paul Allen and subsequent winners Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.Dylan Taylor earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago and holds a BS in Engineering from the honors college at the University of Arizona, where he graduated Tau Beta Pi and in 2018 was named Alumnus of the year. He is also a graduate of the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century program at Harvard University.Dylan and his family reside in Denver, Colorado where he is active locally with Colorado Concern and the Colorado Spaceport. In his spare time, Dylan enjoys hiking, competing in triathlons and spending time outdoors. As a weekend warrior athlete, Dylan has more than 25 top ten finishes and 25 age group wins to his credit, and he regularly interviews world class athletes whom have shown extraordinary resilience as the host of the Legendary Podcast. He is married to legal expert, consultant and author Gabrielle V. Taylor with whom he has two teenage daughters.

Tom McInerney is a notable angel investor. He was a seed investor in Segment, Notion, GetAround, Tala, MemSQL, Mode Analytics, OpenTrons, Arcadia Power, and more.

Venture Capitalist, Managing Partner, Chief Technology Officer

Managing Partner @ Jolly VC, LLCFounder and Patent holder - GROTU mobile app @ 101 Islands LLC. Angel investor in 44 pre-IPO technology startups. Frequently invited by accelerators and angel forums to Judge startup competitions and discuss technology innovation. Former IT Consulting industry executive who sold hundreds of millions of dollars inconsulting services to Fortune 500 companies working for Cap Gemini, HCL, L&T, NTT data.

Erik Peterson is the Founder at DormTrader.

Ramez Naam is Chief Futurist and Partner at Prime Movers Lab.

Sierra is a Founding Partner at Voyager Ventures.

Yun-Fang Juan

Technical leader and architect in enterprise software including S&P 500 customers for Microsoft. Built web portals for IBM with Team International, created medical FDA-approved devices with Medtronic over Global Logic. , and certified phone station in telecom business over the globe with Alcatel over Altron. Excellent background in distributedsystems, artificial intelligence, and Big Data. Passionate about tuning robust, high-performance systems that scale well. Two Master's degrees in Technical Management from Foster School of Business - The University of Washington in the USA and also computer science masters from Kharkiv Aerospace University in Ukraine. Slava received customer obsessions awards in Microsoft and always acting as a bridge from business to technology with a pioneering spirit. Viacheslav is passionate about leadership roles on strategic and impact projects with metrics-driven, high-performance, and scalable development. Expert in lean software development - it means rapid, agile prototyping with development cycles that fail fast to learn quickly and to apply innovative solutions in iterations. Clients hire me to develop new software products for innovative markets that are rapidly growing. They know that the best products come from great empathy and customer insights, but also require courage, hard work, and perseverance.

Jon Oringer is the founder and chairman of Shutterstock.

Gary R. Hirshberg, Ph.D., Co-Founded Spiffly, Inc. in 2014. Gary Hirshberg serves as a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. He serves as an Advisor at Renewable2 Management Company and Renewal2 Investment Fund. Gary Hirshberg co-founded Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (Stonyfield Farm Yogurt) in September 1983 and served as its Chief Executive Officer,since September 1983 until January 2012, President, since 1989. He oversaw Stonyfield's phenomenal growth, from its infancy as a seven-cow organic farming school to its $330 million in annual sales. In 2001, Stonyfield Farm entered into a partnership with Groupe Danone and in 2005, he was named Managing Director of Stonyfield Europe. He served as Director of the Rural Education Center at Stonyfield. Gary Hirshberg was a Managing Director at Stonyfield Europe. Previously, he served as an Executive Director at The New Alchemy Institute. He has extensive experience as an environmental activist, including terms as the Founding President of the Cape and Island Self Reliance Corporation and as the Founding President of the Cape Cod Environmental Alliance. Prior positions include serving as a Water-Pumping Windmill Specialist and an Environmental Education Director at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Gary Hirshberg served as an Advisor at Renewal Partners LLC, Solera Capital, the Heinz Center Leadership Summit and the Corporate Ecoforum. Gary Hirshberg is Co-Founder and Chairman of O'Naturals. He served as the Chairman of Stonyfield Farm, Inc. He served as the Chairman of The Social Venture Network. Gary Hirshberg serves on several corporate and non-profit Boards including Applegate Farms, the Dannon Company, Honest Tea, Peak Organic Brewing Company, The Full Yield, Climate Counts, Stonyfield Europe, Ltd, Glenisk, Ltd, Solera Capital and Sambazon. He serves as Member of Advisory Board at Spiffly, Inc. He has been a Director at Blue Apron, Inc. and since February 27, 2017 Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. since October 2016. Gary Hirshberg serves as Director of Sweetgreen, Inc., Danone Communities and Quantum Designs, LLC. He serves as a Director of Ramp Sports LLC and The Full Yield, Inc. He served as a Director of Stonyfield Farm, Inc. Gary Hirshberg served as a Director of Monogram Energy, Inc. since June 1995. He served as a Trustee of Leadership New Hampshire, Inc. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board of Simon Equity, LLC. He serves as Member of Social Advisory Board at Commons Capital Management LLC. Gary Hirshberg served as a Director of the New Hampshire Audobon Society and the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod. Gary Hirshberg is the Author of the book Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World. He is a frequent speaker on topics including sustainability, climate change, the profitability of green and socially responsible business, organic agriculture and sustainable economic development. Gary Hirshberg has won numerous awards for corporate and environmental leadership, including Global Green USA's "1999 Green Cross Millennium Award for Corporate Environmental Leadership." He was named "Business Leader of the Year" by Business NH Magazine and "New Hampshire's 1998 Small Business Person of the Year" by the U.S. Small Business Administration. More recently, 2009 was a year of big wins as Gary Hirshberg was named one of "America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs" by Business Week magazine, Stonyfield was chosen "Business of the Year - Manufacturing" by Business NH magazine and Stonyfield won an EPA Clean Air Excellence award. He also is featured in 2009's most successful documentary, "Food, Inc." Gary Hirshberg served on the Advisory Panel for Newsweek magazine's Global Environmental Leadership Conference. He has received eight honorary doctorates and was named a Gordon Grand Fellow at Yale University. Gary Hirshberg holds an honorary Doctor of Science from New Hampshire College, an Honorary Doctor of Law from Notre Dame College in Manchester, New Hampshire and a B.A. from Hampshire College.

Rayyan Islam is the Co-Founder and General Partner at 8090 Industries. As serial entrepreneur, investor and advisor focused on industrial technology and the low-carbon economy, the companies Rayyan's invested in, sourced and advised have grown to over $8B in market value and have gone to raise further financing from the likes of SequoiaCapital, Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Venrock, Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Rayyan previously spent time helping source technology investments for multiple family offices globally, particularly focused towards industrialists based in the Texas and American midwest region and began his VC career at leading East Coast seed stage venture firm, Romulus Capital, where he sourced the firm’s most valued investment, EquipmentShare.A product manager by trade, he worked stints at Spotify, was on the founding team of a subscription airline and began his career supporting M&A transactions for industrial clients at Deloitte as well as economic developments efforts for Deloitte Consulting’s Emerging Markets Practice. Rayyan is a Forbes 30U30 Fellow, served as a United Nations Youth Delegate and is a recipient of the Outstanding Youth Delegate Award.Influenced by his family upbringing in Bangladesh, he personally witnessed energy security issues and the ramifications of climate change at a young age and its impact on communities around the world. Determined to make a serious dent on the issue, Rayyan supports a cadre of climate solutions, drafted policy recommendations to President Joe Biden’s climate transition team and is the editor of Decarbon Weekly, a decarbonization focused newsletter which counts leading climate scientists, members of state and local governments, climate tech founders and ESG focused investors and foundations amongst its subscription base. Rayyan co-founded the industrial decarbonization fund at 8090 Partners, in partnership with prominent industrial and energy families from around the world to invest, support and accelerate breakthrough technology companies decarbonizing every industrial sector driven by radical economic advantages.Rayyan and his work has been featured on Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Huffington Post and Forbes.

Hadi Partovi is an entrepreneur and investor, and CEO of the education non-profit Code.org. In 2013 Hadi and his twin brother Ali launched the education nonprofit Code.org which Hadi continues to lead full-time as CEO. Code.org has established computer science classes in 15% of US classrooms, created the most popular curriculum platform for K-12computer science, and launched the global Hour of Code movement that has reached over 100 million students.A computer science graduate of Harvard University, Hadi began his career during the browser wars in the 1990s, when he was Microsoft’s Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer. In a second stint at Microsoft, he was General Manager of the MSN portal, delivering its first year of profit. As an entrepreneur, Hadi was on the founding teams of Tellme Networks and iLike, which were acquired by Microsoft and MySpace, respectively. Hadi has served as an early advisor to numerous startups including Facebook and Dropbox, and as a tech investor his portfolio also includes airbnb, Uber, Zappos, IndieGogo, Change.org, and others. Aside from his investments, Hadi also serves as a Director on the boards of TASER International and Convoy.

Bradley Horowitz is an Advisor and Vice President of Product Management at Google. Most recently he helped create Area 120, Google's incubator for internally-sourced innovation. He's led a large number of products, programs and initiatives at Google - including Google for Startups, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Voice, blogger, and GoogleNews.Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo's vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Additionally, he was responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which included overseeing the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN).Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences.Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Walter Robb is the co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market.

oheila is an entrepreneur with C-team leadership experience on project management and pre-master planning of large-scale smart, resilient green infrastructure projects.

Gokul Rajaram is the Product and Business Helper at Doordash and currently in Pinterest and Coinbase as board member.

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow in Google's Research Group, where he leads the Google Brain team, Google's deep learning research team in Mountain View, working on systems for speech recognition, computer vision, language understanding, and various predictive tasks. He has co-designed /implemented five generations of Google's crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed / implemented major pieces of Google's initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems. He is also a co­designer and co­implementor of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, LevelDB, and TensorFlow, a popular open­-source system for machine learning.​Jeff received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996. He is a Fellow of the ACM, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the Mark Weiser Award and the ACM­-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Daniel Curran is the Founder and CEO at CustEx.com.

Eric Schmidt is the founding partner of the Schmidt Family Foundation. He previously worked at Alphabet Inc. as an Executive Chairman and Technical Advisor. Eric Schmidt attended Princeton University.

Jeremy is a full time angel from Singapore who invests across USA/Canada, Europe, and Israel.

Joe Gebbia is a Co-Founder and Chairman of Airbnb. An entrepreneur from an early age, Airbnb's groundbreaking service began in his San Francisco apartment and spread to 2,000,000 listings in over 191 countries, creating a new economy for thousands of people around the world. He is involved in crafting the company culture, shaping the designaesthetic, and innovating future growth opportunities. Joe has spoken globally about both entrepreneurship and design, and received numerous distinctions such as the Inc 30 under 30 and Fortune 40 under 40.His lifelong appreciation for art and design led him to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he earned dual degrees in Graphic Design and Industrial Design. Gebbia now serves on the institution's Board of Trustees.

Brendan Wallace is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Fifth Wall. Brendan Wallace attended Princeton University.

Shamin Walsh has over 13+ years as an active angel investor who gained experience in the consumer space through her early investments in companies such as Sweetgreen, Flexport, and Sir Kensington’s.Prior to joining BAM Ventures as a managing director, she was a consumer-focused partner at an early-stage generalist firm with tangible assets in3PL/fulfillment, cold storage/co-packing, and manufacturing, giving her a holistic perspective through which to evaluate emerging consumer businesses. She managed the investment portfolio and served on several boards, such as Alchemy 43. She also leveraged her experience as a transactional attorney to assist in contract negotiations, fund formation, and fund construction.

Nat Friedman is an entrepreneur and developer. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nat Friedman has two degrees from MIT and has been writing software for 27 years. Nat Friedman is passionate about building products that delight customers with love and attention to detail.In 1999, he co-founded Ximian with Miguel de Icaza. Natwas a co-founder and chairman of the GNOME Foundation. At Novell, Nat ran engineering for a $110M product and served as CTO of the Linux business.

Early Stage Tech Investor; LP; Mortgage Backed Securities Trader, Columbia MBA, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

Sherman is an experienced advisor and investor who focuses on investing in early-stage companies. Sherman's investment areas include healthcare and frontier technology (including space technology). Prior to becoming a full-time investor, he worked as an M&A Investment Banker.Prior to his career in finance, Sherman was a Naval Officer. Heholds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy. Sherman resides in New York City.

Joanne Wilson has had many careers. She started out in retail, eventually moving to the wholesale arena. She then transitioned to the media side of the technology world, before once again reinventing herself as an investor. She is currently an active angel investor with a portfolio of over 90 companies such as Food52, Sweeten, Vengo, Nestio, Phinand Phebes, Makers Row, Clutter, and Union Station. She has been involved in numerous real estate transactions from beginning to end and continues to make investments in that world. She is also an investor in a few restaurants in the New York area. In addition to these endeavors, Joanne has been involved in various education projects and served as chairperson at Hot Bread Kitchen, non-profit committed to increasing access to the culinary industry for woman and minority entrepreneurs. She also sits on the board of The Highline. Joanne has maintained her very popular blog, www.gothamgal.com for over 11 years and has recently take her talents to the airwaves on her podcast, ""Positively Gotham Gal"". She loves to bake, cook, throw a good party, travel, read, collect art, do the crossword and stay on top of what's happening around the globe and in NYC.Her most successful venture is being married to her best friend, Fred and raising their three kids- Jessica, Emily and Josh

Sam Altman is the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI. He is a Partner of Apollo Projects. Altman was the president of Y Combinator from 2016 through 2019. Sam Altman attended Stanford University.

Patrick Soon-Shiong is the Executive Chairman of ImmunityBio. He previously worked at Wibbitz as a Board member. Patrick Soon-Shiong attended the University of the Witwatersrand.

Clark Landry is the Managing Partner of Clover Leaf Ventures.Most recently, Clark was co-founder and COO at CESPPA, a cybersecurity company. Formerly, Clark was co-founder and COO at Maple Media (raised $30 million from private equity investors), co-founder and executive chairman at SHIFT (acquired by Brand Networks), co-founder and CEO at TopLevel Domain Holdings (now Minds + Machines - publicly-traded on the London Stock Exchange's AIM), co-founder and CMO at TagWorld (acquired by Viacom). Clark was a founding investor of Gradient X, a mobile DSP (acquired by SingTel), Traffic Marketplace, an advertising network (acquired by Vivendi), Adconion Media Group, a provider of digital media advertising solutions (acquired by Amobee), Conversion Logic, an advertising attribution company, and CREXi, a commercial real estate marketplace.Clark holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Yale University.

Marc Benioff is Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce. Marc Benioff attended the University of Southern California.

Josh loves studying companies or trends which have touch points with governance or with large industries or parts of society that are off the Silicon Valley radar. He previously founded Champion Hill Labs, which performed consulting services for venture firms and hedge funds, and through which he invested in SpaceX, Flexport, and RigettiComputing. Before that he cut his teeth in the venture industry during six years on the team at TrueBridge Capital Partners, committing about $1 billion to venture capital firms globally as an LP, and leading the team’s investments in several mid-stage companies. He began his career in finance at USAA Real Estate Company. Before becoming an investor, Josh spent about six years as an officer in the US Marine Corps, in infantry and combat engineering roles, and has led three different platoons ranging from 10-60 Marines. In his last role he led a reinforced rifle platoon and was responsible for the security and civil development of a city of 10,000 people along the Euphrates River. He graduated from Duke University. When not chasing his young kids he enjoys Alan Furst novels and any time spent in the great outdoors.

Josh Felser is the Co-Founder of Climactic. He previously worked at State of California as a Task Force Member. Josh Felser attended Duke University.

Jason Calacanis is the Founder and CEO of Inside.com and Launch. He previously worked at Weblogs as a Co-Founder and CEO. Jason Calacanis attended Fordham University.

Dr Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and investor in 50+ deeptech and web3 companies. He is the CEO at Zama, a homomorphic encryption startup. Rand started coding at the age of 10, created a social network at 14, and started his PhD at 21. He then created Snips, the first private-by-design voice assistant, which was acquired by Sonos. He was electedan MIT TR35, a Forbes “30 under 30”, and was a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris as well as a member of the French Digital Council.He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London (UCL).

Simon Newstead is CO-Founder and CEO of Frenzoo, creator of mobile 3D lifestyle games with it’s Me Girl™ series.

Tobias Harris is a professional basketball player for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Jacob Gibson is the Co-Founder and Partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures. He is a former co-founder and COO at NerdWallet. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

David E. Weekly is the Head of The Capital One Lab of Capital One. He previously worked at Medcorder as a Founder and CEO. David E. Weekly attended Stanford University.

Active individual investor in flying drones, also looking at payments and ecommerce.

John Legend is a nine-time Grammy Award winning recording artist, critically-acclaimed concert performer, philanthropist/social activist, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Legend’s debut album, Get Lifted (2004) sold more than three million copies worldwide and earned an astounding eight Grammy nominations withthree wins for Best New Artist, Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B album. Legend’s follow-up album, Once Again (2006) earned RIAA platinum certification and a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. High off the success of his third consecutive Top 10 album, Evolver (2008), Legend embarked on an extensive world tour with an 11 piece band - his largest traveling show to date. Inspired by the monumental 2008 Presidential election, Legend teamed up with The Roots to release the socially conscious album, Wake Up! (2010.) The album was nominated for five Grammy Awards and won Best R&B Album, Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B song (for “Shine”- an original composition also featured in Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim’s documentary film Waiting for Superman) along with two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Album and Outstanding Duo, Group or Collaboration. In 2007, Legend launched the Show Me Campaign, a nonprofit organization fighting poverty around the world. John also sits on the Boards of The Education Equality Project, Teach for America, and the Harlem Village Academies. Legend has been honored several times for his activism, including the 2010 BET Humanitarian of the Year award, the 2009 CARE Humanitarian Award for Global Change, and the 2009 Africare’s Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award. In early 2012, Legend released one of the hottest songs of his career, the RIAA gold-certified hit “Tonight (Best You’ve Ever Had),” which sat atop the Urban AC radio chart for six consecutive weeks. Legend recently released his fifth studio album Love in the Future, with executive producers Kanye West and Dave Tozer, and will embark on a North American tour this autumn.

Brad Flora is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator. He is a former Co-Founder and CEO of Perfect Audience. Mr. Flora received a BA from Princeton University in English and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern.