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Ali Yahya is a partner on the a16z crypto investment team. Previously, he was a software engineer and machine learning researcher at GoogleX and Google Brain, where he worked on learning algorithms for robotic manipulation, and developed Google's open source machine learning library, TensorFlow. Ali discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper as a computer science undergraduate at Stanford University. He became fascinated by the computer science implications and went down the rabbit hole, but somehow missed the economic implications until a few years later, and so sadly did not mine any from his dorm room. While at Stanford, Ali conducted research with Professors David Mazieres, Nick McKeown, and David Cheriton at the intersection of computer security, networking, and distributed systems. Fun fact: For three months in 2008, Ali followed a polyphasic sleep schedule, sleeping an average of 2.5 hours a night by taking a twenty-minute nap every four hours.
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James Rathmell
James Rathmell is general counsel at Haun Ventures and previously was a crypto consultant at Andreessen Horowitz. He graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Molly Mackinlay
Molly Mackinlay is the Engineering & Research Lead at Protocol Labs and was previously a product manager at Google. She graduated from Stanford University.
David Pekar
David Pekar, Co-Founder and CEO at Rare Bits. At Rare Bits (rarebits.io), we believe digital goods that live on the blockchain are fundamentally better for consumers. We’re building products that introduce these goods to mainstream audiences. Formerly, Product Manager, AdMob at Google; Co-Founder, Head of Product at Toro.
Will Robinson
Will Robinson is vice president of engineering at Coinbase and previously served as chief Technology officer at Chronicle. He graduated from Stanford University.
Alex Pruden
Alex Pruden is Chief Executive Officer at Aleo, ex-Deal Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz (Crypto Vertical).He is a former U.S. Army Infantry and Special Operations officer with a deep passion for applied cryptography and blockchain technology. I am currently pursuing my MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, after which I aspire to create a more secure, transparent, and equitable future for my children and their generation to experience.
Romil Verma
Romil Verma is the co-founder of Outdefine and previously worked as a software engineer at Google. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Purdue University.
Lukas Scheucher
Lukas Scheucher is the CTO of Compass Labs and previously worked as a software engineer at Google. He graduated from Stanford University and the Technical University of Munich
Jason Rosenthal
Jason Rosenthal is an operating partner at Andreessen Horowit and previously served as vice president of subscription services at Google. He is a graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Pomona College.
Jeff Boortz
Jeff Boortz is Blockstream's Chief Product Officer, responsible for managing the Blockstream product portfolio, and has more than 20 years of product management and IT experience. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. She was previously a Partner at 500 Startups, where she invested in seed-stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. Elizabeth also co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit, which was acquired in 2014. She holds a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Elizabeth has reviewed over 20,000 startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.