StrictlyVC – San Francisco
January 24, 2024 — San Francisco
Speakers
Alex Blania
CEO & Co-Founder Tools for Humanity
Viviana Faga
General Partner Felicis
Ilya Fushman
Partner Kleiner Perkins
Elad Gil
CEO Gil & Co
Sarah Guo
Founder and Managing Partner Conviction
Mamoon Hamid
Partner Kleiner Perkins
Aydin Senkut
Founder & Managing Partner Felicis
Alex is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tools for Humanity, the technology company building tools for the Worldcoin project. He is a Co-Founder of the Worldcoin protocol with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. Alex is responsible for leading strategy, development, and execution of the technology and tools enabling Worldcoin to ensure everyone benefitsfairly from the opportunities AI presents. Worldcoin is building the world’s largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone. The protocol is proving humanness and uniqueness in the age of AI and is creating a future where everyone, regardless of their race, geography, or economic status can fully participate in the global economy. Alex led the development of Worldcoin’s custom, privacy-protecting biometric imaging device, the Orb, which has verified humanness and uniqueness of 2 million individuals worldwide; World ID, which is a first-of-its-kind decentralized, privacy-preserving identity protocol; and World App, which is one of the fastest-growing and most accessible self-custodial wallets in the world. Alex holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Physics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and studied physics at Caltech before dedicating his full time and attention to supporting Worldcoin. You can follow and interact with him on Twitter @alexblania.
Alex's Sessions
Fireside with Alex Blania
Viviana is a General Partner at Felicis, bringing over 20 years of experience designing and building brand categories for successful cloud/SaaS and enterprise social companies. Her expertise includes scaling go-to-market SaaS teams, messaging and positioning, category creation, freemium product strategy, and sales enablement. An experienced angel investor, Viviana previously served as an operating partner and advisor at Emergence Capital. She held leadership positions in marketing at Yammer, Salesforce, Platfora, and Zenefits. After Yammer’s $1.2B acquisition by Microsoft, she became its head of marketing for enterprise social, which included Office 365, Skype, and Lync. She has a BS in Operations Management & Information Systems from Santa Clara University and enjoys spending time with her family and traveling internationally.
Viviana's Sessions
Fireside with Felicis
IIlya Fushman is a Partner and managing member at Kleiner Perkins. Ilya has been an early investor in and served on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies of recent times including Slack, Intercom, Optimizely, Cameo, KeepTruckin, CultureAmp, Loom, UiPath and Nova Credit. Prior to Kleiner Perkins, Ilya was a general partner at Index Ventures. Prior to Index, Fushman spent four years at Dropbox where he was one of the company’s first 75 employees. At Dropbox, he helped to build and run the company’s business and corporate development functions before taking on a product leadership role and building out the core Dropbox product, Dropbox for Business, and the developer platform. Previously, Fushman was a principal at Khosla Ventures and the Director of Technology at Solar Junction. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Physics from Caltech.
Ilya's Sessions
Fireside with Mamoon Hamid & Ilya Fushman
Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor/ advisor to private companies such as AirBnB, Airtable, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Gitlab, Gusto, Instacart, Notion, Pinterest, Retool, Samsara, Square, Stripe, TripActions and others. He has invested in over 40 “unicorn” companies worth $1B or more, 30+ of them at seed or series A. He’s the author of the bestselling book “High Growth Handbook”, about organizational and financial scaling of breakout technology companies. Elad is Co-Founder and Chairman of Color, a digital health company focused on virtualized population care delivery. He is also involved with longevity biotech including BioAge and Spring Discovery. Elad’s an advisor to Electric Capital, a crypto hedge fund, and is involved with various crypto protocols and companies (Coinbase, Opensea, Anchorage, Bitwise, Filecoin, dYdX, IronFish…). Previously, Elad was VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, he also ran various product teams (Geo, Search). Elad joined Twitter via acquisition of MixerLabs, where he was co-founder and CEO. MixerLabs ran GeoAPI, an early developer-centric infrastructure product. Elad spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team. He was involved with 3 acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and Mobile Gmail. Prior to Google, Elad had product management and market seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies. Elad worked at McKinsey & Co. and received a Ph.D. from MIT and BS and BA in Math from UCSD.
Elad's Sessions
Fireside with Elad Gil & Sarah Guo
Sarah Guo is the Founder and Managing Partner at Conviction, a venture capital firm founded in 2022 to invest in intelligent software, or “Software 3.0.” Prior, she spent a decade as a General Partner at Greylock Partners. She has been an early investor or advisor to 40+ companies in software, fintech, security, infrastructure, fundamental research, and AI-native applications. Sarah is from Wisconsin, has four degrees from University of Pennsylvania, and lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. She co-hosts the AI podcast “No Priors” with Elad Gil
Sarah's Sessions
Fireside with Elad Gil & Sarah Guo
Mamoon's Sessions
Fireside with Mamoon Hamid & Ilya Fushman
An original super angel turned multi-stage investor, Aydin has been named on the Forbes Midas List for the past ten years (2014-2023) as well as the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists list for four consecutive years (2016-2019). Before starting Felicis, he was the first product manager at Google and helped launch their first ten international sites. He received a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with Honors from Boston University, an MBA in Marketing from the Wharton School, and a master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Aydin currently sits on the Graduate Board of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Aydin's Sessions
Fireside with Felicis