women

Akshay Krishnaiah, Founder/CEO Line

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Akshay Krishnaiah Founder & CEO of fast growing subscription-based Cash Now Pay Later startup Line (useline.com) Akshay is a millennial, immigrant, uber driver (36,000 miles SF Bay Area) turned Techstars fintech startup founder & CEO at Line (useline.com) that came out of stealth this July and has taken the world by storm by delivering over $500,000 in Lines at $30 a line in just the last 90 days, to people who earn as low as $600 a month helping them make ends meet while proving to the world that you can do social good and run a profitable business by posting an impressive 11X  jump in monthly recurring revenue. He was previously Global Product Head at PayPal’s research labs where he earned over 75 patent publications covering hardware, payments, embedded fintech and consumer fintech and prior to that he headed the highly coveted PayPal-eBay Retail Labs where he and his team invented Wallet Tokenization the foundational technology behind most of PayPal and Venmo’s recent breakthroughs along with Handsfree shopping using bluetooth a predecessor to the computer vision based Amazon Go. His tour of academic duties include Stanford, MIT and University of Texas and was also once offered Adjunct Professor role at Cornell which he had to decline to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. But, he is most proud of his role as a dad, husband, brother and son of parents who came from extreme poverty, worked hard to give great education, tolerant values and culture.

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Lauren Kolodny, Founding Partner Acrew Capital

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Lauren is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Acrew Capital where she invests in fintech. Among her investments, Lauren led the 2016 Series A round in Chime. Other investments include Divvy, Finix, Gusto, Kettle, La Haus, Papaya Payments, and Pie Insurance. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google leading a number of launches for GSuite, including Google Drive. Lauren began her career building tech partnerships for the Clinton Foundation in India. Lauren is a Trustee Emerita at Brown University where she served as the university’s youngest board member. Lauren was featured on the 2021 Forbes Midas Brink List.

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Minnie Ingersoll, Partner TenOneTen

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Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast.  TenOneTen is a venture fund based in LA investing in early stage software and data companies.   Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of recently public Shift Technologies (Nasdaq : SFT), an online marketplace for used cars. In her spare time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.

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Shuo Chen, General Partner IOVC

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Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, where she focuses on early stage venture investments in Silicon Valley with a focus on future of work and enterprise/SaaS. She is also Faculty at UC Berkeley and Singularity University. Shuo is appointed by California Governor Gavin Newson to serve as 1 of 13 voting members on California’s Mental Health Commission (as the first Asian American Commissioner), which includes overseeing ~$2.6 billion annually in state budget and advising the Governor or the Legislature on mental health policy.In her venture role, Shuo has invested in companies now acquired by Goldman Sachs, Ford, Caterpillar, Binance and Dialpad, as well as now unicorns including Boom, Checkr, Grubmarket, Instacart and Rescale. She has helped portfolio companies close deals with Amazon, Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz and NASA among others, as well as scaled portfolio companies into Europe and Asia.Prior, Shuo worked at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, where she worked with clients including Alibaba and Tencent, as well as represented the firm on the Board of Women in Finance. Before that, Shuo was at PwC, where she worked on Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola and LinkedIn’s $119 million acquisition of SlideShare. Shuo has also co-authored one of the leading books on financial regulations published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and sits on the Advisory Board of Forbes China, where she advises on content and awards for Asian Americans in North America.

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