Ari is a venture partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on enterprise, infrastructure, cloud computing, data management, security and programming frameworks and languages. 

Prior to joining Khosla Ventures, Ari was the chief technology officer at Hortonworks, the premier commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the de facto open source platform for storing, managing and processing big data. While there, he helped build the product management, sales and services teams and led the company to ship it’s initial product. Ari also brokered several initial partner integrations and designs. More recently, he worked closely with customers building multi-thousand node clusters and designing business solutions on the platform and with the founding architects driving new features into the open source core itself. Ari also helped shepherd the company’s successful initial public offering.

Mar Hershenson is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Pejman Mar Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm in Palo Alto. At Pejman Mar Ventures, Mar works closely with founders to take companies from an idea to defining business. Mar has been recognized in the Midas Brink List of Top Tech Investors in 2015. Mar received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2000 for her breakthrough work in circuit design automation, and taught the Analog Circuit Design course at Stanford for over a decade. Mar made her mark as an entrepreneur by co-founding three companies: Barcelona Design, Sabio Labs, and Revel Touch. She ran each company from day one, being deeply involved in all aspects of the business, including product definition and development, business strategy, sales, recruiting, and financing. Post the acquisition of Sabio labs, Mar served as VP of Product Development for Magma Design Automation's Mixed Signal division. Mar has received many awards throughout her career. Among them, the renown T35 Young Innovator Award by MIT (for her technical work), and the prestigious Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award in 2010 (for her work in entrepreneurship). Mar currently serves on the board of Palo Alto Community Child Care and is a technical advisor to the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Jeremy Fiance is the Berkeley startup investor, dedicated to strengthening Berkeley’s startup community and equipping Berkeley founders with the tools needed to build great businesses. Jeremy was previously an investor at Keiretsu Forum, CrunchFund, and Dorm Room Fund SF. As an entrepreneur, Jeremy co-founded a health data science startup called Dropsense backed by Skydeck Berkeley and the Foundry @ CITRIS and actively advises several Berkeley startups, including Lily. While a student at UC Berkeley, Jeremy proved the campus’ startup potential co-launching several initiatives, including Kairos Society Berkeley and Free Ventures, that have sparked over 50 startups. Outside of the technology and startup world, Jeremy is a black belt in Tang Soo Do, table tennis gold medalist, self-proclaimed cartoonist, live music enthusiast, and die hard Cal Bears fan.

Jim is a co-founder of Silicon Valley Data Science. He is currently a Venture Partner at Crosslink Capital and has Board seats at Ayla, Coraid (observer), 365 Main. Prior to joining Crosslink, Jim was the head of US investing for 3i Ventures, a global venture capital fund. Jim’s track record in the venture industry spans nearly two decades with experience at several of the industry’s leading firms. Before 3i, he was a Partner at ComVentures. Previously, he was a founder of Bedrock Capital Partners where he led the Information Technology practice. Prior to Bedrock, he served as a Partner at Highland Capital Partners and as an Associate at Accel Partners. Over his career, Jim has led a number of successful investments including UUNet (sold to Worldcom), Polycom (PLCM), Alantec (sold to Fore Systems), Centillion (sold to Nortel), Boston Communications Group (BCGI), NewCity (sold to Clear Channel), New Oak (sold to Nortel), Sonus (SONS), Arbinet (ARBX), Site Smith (sold to Metromedia) and V-Bits (sold to Cisco).

Craig Walker is CEO and co-founder of Dialpad (formerly Switch Communications). Dialpad is communications for the modern worker, delivering voice, video, text, messaging, screen sharing and audio conferencing with Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365 integrations. Prior to Dialpad, Craig was the first EIR at Google Ventures and ran Real-Time Communications at Google. With more than 15 years of communications industry experience, Craig built the companies and led the teams that brought Google Voice and Yahoo! Voice to tens of millions of users. Craig is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BA), Georgetown University (MBA), and Berkeley Law (JD). He is a recipient of the 2014 Georgetown Entrepreneurial Excellence Award, and a member of the Telecommunications and E-Commerce Committee for the US Chamber of Commerce.