Details
Kiersten Hollars is the SVP, Corporate Marketing & Communications at Ripple. Prior to joining Ripple, Kiersten was a partner at The Hatch Agency, where she spent three years working with Ripple to help build and grow the communications program. She also led agency teams for companies like Ancestry, Dropbox and Stitch Fix. In 2012, Kiersten served as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, counseling the firm’s portfolio companies on their marketing programs. Before this, Kiersten led award-winning media campaigns, events, and employee and crisis communications for Silicon Valley tech companies like Hightail, AOL, Yahoo!, Oracle and Salesforce.
Work Experience
Relevance Person
Ronny Conway
Ronny Conway is the Founder & General Partner at A.Capital. Prior to starting A.Capital, Ronny was one of the first Partners at Andreessen Horowitz, where he was the head of seed and early-stage investing and was involved in such high profile investments as Airbnb, Instagram, Optimizely, Pinterest, Dollar Shave Club and Twitter. Before a16z, Ronny spent six years at Google, and was one of the first employees at Google Ventures. Ronny has spent most of his life around venture capital, and received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA.
Ramu Arunachalam
Ramu Arunachalam is the General Partner at A.Capital. Ramu was most recently a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. A computer scientist by training, Ramu has over a decade of operating experience in product management and engineering at both startups and public companies. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Ramu led new product initiatives in Big Data for Aster Data (acquired by Teradata). Earlier in his career, Ramu was an engineer at VMware and part of the team that developed the industry’s first virtual switch for VMware’s flagship ESX server product line. Ramu holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with University Honors) from Carnegie Mellon University.
Li Jin
Li Jin is the co-founder of Variant Fund and the founder of Atelier Ventures. Prior to that, Li Jin was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Stefan Thomas
Open-source developer and distributed systems advocate. Co-creator of Interledger Protocol. Currently working to improve interoperability and competitiveness in the financial system.
Nina Suthers
Nina is the chief marketing officer at Variant where she is responsible for the brand, marketing, communications, and events. She also advises projects in our portfolio on their marketing strategy. Nina was previously a marketing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she helped build the crypto fund’s brand through media, events and special programs like the Crypto Startup School. Prior to her work at a16z, she was an account director at the OutCast Agency, a marketing agency specializing in comms, creative, and digital.
Niraj Pant
Niraj Pant is the Co-Founder at Ritual. Presively he was a General Partner at Polychain Capital, where he invests in early-stage cryptocurrency projects. Prior to this role, he researched privacy in the Decentralized Systems Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Niraj has also served as a Member of the Board of Directors for CoinDCX, an Ambassador for Sequoia Capital, and Co-Founder and CTO of Source Networks. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jed McCaleb
Jed McCaleb is the founder of Stellar, Mt. Gox and Ripple, and he has been involved in and witnessed many of the major events in the history of Bitcoin. He also founded Vast, an aerospace startup. In addition, he is also the founder of the world's first P2P sharing software eDonkey.
Jonathan Lai
Jonathan Lai is Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the consumer team, investing in games, crypto, and social. Today, Jon serves on the board of Elodie, Mainframe Industries, Mountaintop, Singularity 6, and StarStock, and helped lead the firm's investments in RTFKT, Roblox, Parsec, Lowkey, and Z League, among others. Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Jon led the North America games investments team at Tencent. Prior, Jon was a product manager at Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, where he shipped the Riot API and Merch Store before the company was acquired by Tencent. He started his career in investment banking for Morgan Stanley. Jon graduated from Harvard University with an MBA and BA in Economics, and lives in the Bay Area with his family.
Denis Nazarov
Denis Nazarov is the founder of Mirror. Previously, he was a consultant at Uniswap Labs and an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He graduated from New York University.
Jane Lippencott
Jane Lippencott is a partner at a16z Crypto, she was previously a partner at Winklevoss Capital and also worked at Distributed Global.