Mentors

Pratik Agarwal is a Principal at Accel. Prior to joining Accel, Pratik helped to set up the SaaS investing practice at SAIF Partners. Pratik was part of the deal team at Playment (one-stop data labeling platform), Fareye (global logistics software), Haber (Industrial IoT for water treatment), Goodera (software for doing good space), Sensehawk (vertical SaaS for solar), Detect (Industrial IoT for the Oil & Gas industry), and Toppr (K-12 learning platform). Pratik grew up in Rajasthan, India and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Miles Anthony is the project lead of Decentral Games, the first DAO-governed metaverse gaming and NFT ecosystem. Miles Anthony is the first to launch this gaming ecosystem concept with a play-to-earn model. His work is supported by his belief that true digital ownership lies in blockchain technology. Prior to his interest in crypto and starting Decentral Games, Miles founded an e-commerce company while still studying in UCLA.

Rob Behnke is a multi-disciplined entrepreneur, growth hacker, and decade-long bitcoin fanatic. His career has seen him as CEO and cofounder of companies in several industries including CPG, Consumer App, AdTech, Web3 and Cybersecurity. His startups have been featured in dozens of publications like Bloomberg, Forbes, Techcrunch and The New York Times. In his multi-industry career of founding and scaling startups, he grew distribution of his CPG company from 0 to 10,000 store shelves, founded and product managed a niche iphone app for musicians from 0 to 1M lifetime downloads, bootstrapped a blockchain marketing agency to 7 figures in revenue in less than a year, and is now leading the globally recognized market leader in blockchain cybersecurity, Halborn. In his spare time, he’s a loving father, electronic musician and drummer.

Dmitriy is a Partner at Archetype, where he drives research, investments, portfolio support, and fund strategy. He was previously a Research Partner at 1k(x), where he focused on research, investments, and working with founders on fundraising, business development, and token model design. Prior to this, he was a Research Partner at Bollinger Investment Group, a crypto-focused family office, where he led research & investments, and worked with CoinFund, a crypto-focused investment firm. Before becoming an investor, Dmitriy spent six years at Deutsche Bank across a number of strategy and innovation roles. Dmitriy holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and is a proud Blockchain@Berkeley alumni.

Dispersion Capital was founded by Patrick Chang, a seasoned VC with more than two decades of experience in web3 and web2. Patrick is an early investor in web3’s most pioneering innovators and protocols (since 2014), including Alchemy, Dapper Labs, Flow, Forte, Theta, Blockstack (STX), Helium, and others. He was also an early investor in Volterra (sold to F5) and Branch Metrics. Before founding Dispersion Capital, he launched the blockchain portfolio and strategy at Samsung Next Ventures and led investments in cutting-edge infrastructure technology at Cota Capital, Investor Growth Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Foundation Capital. He began his career in tech investment banking and M&A at Lehman Brothers and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Neil is a Director at SoftBank's Vision Fund with a focus on investments in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has more than a decade of experience structuring a variety of deals across the world with Deutsche Bank and Coller Capital. At SoftBank, Neil focuses on the company’s EMEA portfolio and has a particular interest in fintech, e-commerce, and crypto.

Prior to launching Anagram, Joe was the president of Polychain Capital, one of the first and largest crypto focused investment groups globally. Before getting into crypto in 2017, Joe spent 17 years in traditional finance - most recently as the COO of a long/short equity fund, Tiger Legatus.  From 2008 to 2014, Joe was a Principal at Investcorp focusing on the Firm’s Hedge Fund seeding business. Prior to joining Investcorp, Joe managed risk arbitrage and special situations portfolios at several hedge funds.  Joe began his career at Bank of America in the media and telecom investment banking division. Joe holds a BA in political science from Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Edgy is the pseudonymous founder of The DeFi Edge, a leading web3 research and media company. He’s a master of web3 growth: he grew his @thedefiedge account from 0 → 225,000 followers in under a year on Crypto Twitter through quality educational content. Prior to Crypto, he founded several successful eCommerce companies and loves applying business frameworks to web3. Edgy studied at one of the top engineering universities in the world.

Itai has spent more than a decade helping enterprises and startups develop and execute marketing and growth strategies in the digital space. Itai is a managing partner at MarketAcross, one of the leading marketing agencies in Web3 and has managed marketing and PR campaigns for ventures like Polygon, Binance, eToro, Polkadot, Crypto.com and many more. Itai has also invested in a wide range of early start-ups and advises projects on early stage growth and marketing.

Brendan is currently the co-lead of Polygon Zero. Prior to that, he was the co-founder of Mir, which was acquired by Polygon. Brendan built tech tools used on national political campaigns before studying pure math and philosophy as an AB Duke Scholar. He became interested in cryptography after the Snowden leaks.

Evan is a Partner and Director of Research at CoinFund. He started his traditional finance career at Barclays’ Investment Banking division before moving over to buy side roles as an investor at hedge funds Citadel, and later Point72, where he covered stocks in the Tech, Media, and Telecom sector prior to diving into digital assets investing full time. When not keeping up-to-date on the 24/7 world of blockchain, Evan enjoys all kinds of PC gaming, catching up on the latest streaming shows, and reading both historical nonfiction and space-based science fiction. Evan grew up around Boston, Massachusetts before heading off to New York University where he earned a B.Sc. in Finance and Accounting.

Geoff is an Investment Research Partner at Variant, where he focuses primarily on DeFi. Prior to joining Variant, Geoff spent 15 years investing in private and public companies. During that time, helped start and grow five investment firms, including Askesis Capital, Dayah Capital, Sachem Head Capital Management, and Conatus Capital. Before that, Geoff worked at Bain Capital and Bain & Company and studied Economics at Harvard.

Samuel is the Managing Partner at Faction, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage blockchain opportunities, and a Senior Advisor to Lightspeed on Crypto. He led Blockchain.com Ventures as co-founding General Partner from 2018 to 2022. Prior to Blockchain.com, Sam spent four years at Naspers Ventures, where he invested ~$200 million in technology companies globally. He's led investments in companies such as Wintermute, Amber, Blockdaemon, NEAR, Aave, Udemy, Codecademy and Republic. Sam has been investing in cryptocurrency since 2013.

James Hu is an NFT expert, currently advising several stealth startups in the NFT space and previously leading product and international strategy at OpenSea. Prior to web3, James was a general manager at an E-commerce startup, and began his career in VC and management consulting. James is a global nomad, having lived and worked across the US, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Japan.

Anand is a Venture Partner at Lightspeed where is focused on advising and growing Lightspeed’s crypto portfolio. He’s also Founder and Managing Partner of Canonical Crypto, an early stage crypto infrastructure fund, and previously, was a Visiting Partner at Pear, where he led their blockchain and crypto investments. In addition to being an investor, Anand is a true builder and operator. Previously, he founded Trusted, a child care marketplace, which was acquired by Care.com in 2018, and subsequently acquired by IAC in 2020. He also cut his teeth building products at companies like Microsoft and Cisco. Anand loves working with entrepreneurs at the earliest stages and helping founders think through product, go-to-market and hiring.

Brad is a seasoned entrepreneur with several leadership roles under his belt. His entrepreneurial journey began in 2006 when he founded Holdem Properties, a real estate investment company. Later, he served as CEO of Talkable, an industry-leading referral marketing platform. Now, leveraging his extensive web2 expertise, Brad aims to decentralize the web at Unstoppable Domains by utilizing proven web2 strategies to make web3 more accessible.

Unstoppable Domains is making crypto user-friendly by tackling the hassle of long public keys. Think of it as DNS for blockchain addresses. However, they differentiate themselves by issuing user-owned NFT domains that swap out crypto addresses for simple URLs. To Brad and team, it’s all about owning your digital identity and making crypto as simple as possible.

Andrew Kang is a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor. He is the Co-Founder of Mechanism Capital which invests in cryptocurrency through prop trading, mining, ventures, and secondary markets. Kang previously worked in portfolio management and venture capital at Digital Capital Management. In 2020, Kang was deeply involved in various DeFi related ventures, he is also very active in providing analysis on DeFi projects through Twitter.

Sreeram Kannan is the Founder of EigenLayer and the Director of the University of Washington's Blockchain Lab. EigenLayer introduces a validation marketplace that allows participants to freely re-stake/re-use their tokens in different networks rather than having their assets locked up in a singular location. Before founding EigenLayer, Sreeram worked on many different technological domains such as peer-to-peer wireless systems, computational genomics, and AI. His current research at UW spans a wide range of disciplines, including distributed computing, information theory, networking, and game theory of blockchain systems.

Ryan Sungho Kim is a Partner at Hashed. He assesses deals from Asia and focuses on applications, corporate finance and enterprise. Previously, Ryan successfully exited his company LOOKET, a mobile solution for SME to Recobell (a Big Data company). Ryan was in charge of the development and planning of recommendation systems in his previous company, and he realized that the data space has many vulnerabilities. This led him to blockchain and ultimately made him co-found Hashed. Ryan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology).

Dan Kim is VP Business Development at Coinbase, the world’s most trusted cryptocurrency exchange where he leads strategic partnerships with developers, creators, and users of the global web3 ecosystem. Dan also serves as Coinbase’s Head of Listings, and works with crypto project teams from all around the world so that their tokens can be bought, sold, and held in the safest way by more than 100 million Coinbase customers. Prior to joining Coinbase, Dan worked at Tesla as Global Head of Sales & Delivery, where he led a team of over 3,000 people to drive the zero-to-scale growth of Model 3. Dan also worked at Airbnb as Head of Supply for Airbnb Plus, a collection of premium homes with superior hospitality, comfort and design. While Dan’s first jobs were in investment banking and structured finance, he spent the majority of his career working for founder-led, mission-oriented technology companies. Dan also founded Red Mango, a health-focused frozen yogurt and smoothie franchise that he scaled to over 300 retail stores before selling the company to a private equity firm. Dan graduated from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and lives in Oakland, CA with his fiancée. His interests span from web3 gaming and interactive art to empowering creators and discovering new ways to converge the physical world with the digital universe.

Beryl is a cofounder at Yield Guild Games (YGG). She previously founded asset token platform, CapchainX, and was in the founding team at Coins.ph, a crypto exchange and payments startup in the PH acquired by GoJEk. Her experiences include backtesting fx trading algorithms at BlackRock Asset Management in London as part of a consulting project, and product owning an investment platform at Unionbank PH. She authored the Philippine Roadmap for Digital Startups in 2014 and started her career in early stage Venture Capital in Shanghai in 2012. Beryl obtained her postgraduate degree in finance at Cambridge University.

Matthew is the co-founder of Origin Protocol and is a serial entrepreneur. He was previously co-founder of PriceSlash (acquired by BillShark) and CEO of Unicycle Labs. Earlier in his career, Matthew was one of the earliest Product Managers at YouTube (acquired by Google). Later, he was VP of Product at Qwiki (acquired by Yahoo) and VP of Product at Bonobos (acquired by Walmart). He has a MS and a BS from Stanford University.

Jack is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magic Eden. He got into crypto in 2013, when he started hacking on bitcoin wallet apps. Before co-founding Magic Eden, Jack worked at FTX where he saw the huge potential in Solana and was inspired to build something with his co-founders. Before FTX, Jack worked at Google as a Product Manager and as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group.

Richard Ma is a former software engineer at Tower Research where he developed software that handled millions of dollars using extreme testing methods. He was inspired to found Quantstamp to improve security auditing after investing in the DAO and experiencing the aftermath firsthand. Richard aims to secure the future of blockchain technology through the Quantstamp protocol and better methods for secure enterprise blockchain deployments.

Antoni Martin is the Co-Founder at iden3 and Business Development Lead at Polygon Hermez. Previously an economist that worked at a bank for 20 years, he shifted to new technologies brought about by blockchain. He’s passionate about empowering Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) and scalability, and developing edge-tech financial solutions through Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP).

Jack led marketing and business development at Polkadot for 2.5 years and launched Hypersphere Ventures in 2020.

Illia Polosukhin is the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a decentralized developer platform powered by a sharded smart contract blockchain. NEAR’s vision of a scalable, robust, and highly usable blockchain began in 2018 when they couldn't find a protocol that met the needs of builders. NEAR Protocol launched in 2020 and is focused on scaling to global mainstream adoption with the Blockchain Operating System. Before NEAR, Illia worked in AI research at Google and co-authored the landmark paper, "Attention Is All You Need." Illia has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, TIME, Wired, New York Magazine, Forbes, and TechCrunch.

Sid Powell is Co-Founder and CEO of Maple Finance, an institutional crypto capital network powered by blockchain technology. Sid comes from a background in debt capital markets and institutional banking. By leveraging his experience in traditional finance, he has become equipped with the tools that allow him to solve some of the leading problems in the emerging crypto space. Prior to co-founding Maple, Sid was a Treasurer at Angle Finance, a non-bank asset finance company.

Maria is a partner on the investment team at Electric Capital. Prior to Electric, Maria was CTO and co-founder of a startup that helped SMBs easily create their supply chains with manufacturers around the world. Prior to that, she worked on search technology at Microsoft, with her features shipped to more than 1 billion devices.Maria received her A.B. in Government from Harvard and M.Eng. in Computer Science from Cornell. Maria is interested in talking to women, minority, and immigrant founders.

Jing Sun is the Co-Founder of IoTeX and MachineFi labs. Before co-founding IoTeX in 2017, Jing was the Managing Partner of Sparkland Capital, an early-stage venture fund.

Mirza Uddin is the Head of Business Development at Injective Labs and General Partner at Vessel Capital. At Injective, Mirza leads business development and is a major contributor. Injective today is one of the fastest growing L1 blockchain networks with backing from leading investors such as Binance, Pantera, and Mark Cuban.

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In addition to his work at Injective, Mirza has recently founded his own web3 fund. As the Co-Founder and General Partner at Vessel Capital, he’s focused on supporting early web3 founders reaching new heights with a strong hands-on approach. Previously, he worked at renowned hedge fund Two Sigma. He received his B.A. from Harvard University.

Mahesh Vellanki is Managing Partner at SuperLayer, bringing extensive experience in both technology and finance. Before SuperLayer, he co-founded Forte and Rally.io. Previously, Mahesh was a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures from 2012 through 2018 where he led Redpoint’s growth investments in the consumer internet, mobile, e-commerce, and fintech sectors. His notable investments include DraftKings, Nextdoor, Nubank, and Gigster. During Mahesh's time at Redpoint, he was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” VC list in addition to LinkedIn's Top Voices list for his technology industry thought leadership. Prior to Redpoint, Mahesh was an investment banker at Citi where he worked on IPO and M&A transactions in the consumer internet space with clients such as Zillow, Facebook, Groupon, and Yelp. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor of Science in finance.

Paul has been a partner at Pantera Capital since 2014, where he focuses on the firm’s venture capital and early-stage token fund investments. He has helped launch Pantera Venture Funds and the firm’s token funds, executing over 100 investments. Paul also sits on the board of Alchemy, Blockfolio, and Staked, is a mentor at The House Fund, Boost VC, and Creative Destruction Labs, and is an advisor to Audius, Ampleforth, and Set Labs. Paul’s prior experience includes working as an associate at Strive Capital, where he focused on investments in the mobile space, including an early stage investment in App Annie. He also performed partnerships and growth for Urban Spoils, a daily-deal aggregation startup, and worked with LECG and Hatch Consulting. Paul graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sota is the Founder and CEO of Astar Network. Prior to creating the Smart Contract HUB for WASM + EVM and one of the top Parachains on Polkadot, he was the Director at the Japan Blockchain Association. He is selected Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2022. He was also a task force member of the Trusted Web Council led by the Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. Prior to that, he worked at Chronicled in San Francisco and was a blockchain researcher at the University of Tokyo.

Andrew has experience investing in and supporting a wide variety of interactive media and technology companies, including publishers, mobile/PC/console developers, and technology platforms. He has deep experience with strategy, M&A, go-to-market, and organization topics. Andrew loves story and art-driven console games and casual free-to-play mobile games. Andrew also loves outdoor adventures, especially in the snow.

Wiz is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Spacecadet, the Marketing VC. Launched in 2020, Spacecadet invests generally across all emerging technologies, and boasts Marc Andreesen, Alexis Ohanian, and Chris Dixon amongst its LPs.

Prior to founding Spacecadet, Wiz was a 2x startup founder. He co-founded Rise People in 2011, which was one of the first People and Culture technology platforms. Later in 2016, he co-founded Hazel, which was a feedback and culture app built on top of Slack that was acquired in 2019.

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An influential figure in the web3 gaming industry, Jiho is the Co-Founder and Growth Lead of Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity. Axie is a pioneering game in web3 that is largely credited with being the largest NFT gaming ecosystem, and one of the first games to implement NFTs into its platform.