Cal Hacks 5.0

Lee Fan has over 13 years of finance and venture capital investing experience on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. She invests in disruptive technology startups and is an investor in Beautylish, Joy, Meritize, and Republic. Lee was a VC investor with ZZ Ventures and had a successful career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, Evercore Partners, and BofA Merrill Lynch. Lee holds a B.S. degree in Economics from Duke University and an MBA from Wharton. Lee lives in San Francisco with her puppy Panda @iamnotapanda.

UC Berkeley alumni, Entrepreneur since age 16. Formerly Investment Banker, Hedge Fund. Currently active venture capitalist and mentor at techstars, alchemist accelerator, 500 startups, plug-n-play.

Faraz joined Bain Capital Ventures in 2018 as an investor focused on early stage consumer and enterprise software.

Previously, Faraz held roles at TPG Growth and Bain & Company, advising clients across the technology and private equity practice areas.

Faraz graduated from Haas in 2016. At Cal, he held leadership roles within Berkeley Consulting, UFA, and Sigma Chi.

As an associate, John connects with entrepreneurs, researches potential investments, supports portfolio companies and develops investment roadmaps. Previously, John was an engineer for Google Cloud and a product development engineer at Verizon Terremark. Earlier, John was the technical co-founder for a mobile payments startup. John holds bachelor’s degrees in computer science, economics and electrical and computer engineering, from Duke University.

Simon is a Director with Cathay Innovation, an early growth venture capital firm based in San Francisco, Paris, and Shanghai. Cathay Innovation is affiliated with Cathay Capital Private Equity, a global investment firm with over $3 billion in AUM and six offices globally.

Prior to joining Cathay Innovation, Simon spent over three years at VMware as a Manager in the Strategy & Corporate Development team which was responsible for leading acquisitions, investments, and strategy. Before joining VMware, he was at UBS in the investment banking division as part of the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications group.

Simon holds both a B.S. in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in Operations Research and Management Science from University of California, Berkeley.

Michael is a software engineer at Brex, a fintech startup in San Francisco, and a long-time hackathon participant, winning TechCrunch Disrupt's hackathon in high school and placing Top 10 at MHacks the same year. He's worked in software engineering roles at a variety of companies, including Facebook, Sidewalk Labs, and Tempo Automation.

I am Product Designer based in the Bay Area. I've been designing impactful digital products for the last 12 years at places like Facebook, Adobe and Yahoo! I'm currently helping build Facebook Stories and I've helped in building the AR Camera, Live, Video Ads and parts of Portal at Facebook in the past. I started designing for mobile phones in the pre-iPhone era. Design for me is bringing common sense to it's simplest form.

Renzo is an entrepreneur and startup enthusiast. He’s been involved in several early-stage startups mostly in consumer software, including payment processing company Due and productivity application Calendar.com. Currently he consults for several companies in Silicon Valley and is the founder of an augmented-reality startup called Radar. You can reach him at renzo@checkradar.io!

Nicolas is a 4th year EECS major at Berkeley originally from Venezuela. He was a director for Cal Hacks 2.0 who enjoyed driving golf cars too much! He has interned at Visa to work on their developer API, worked at an exoskeleton startup to help push human capabilities, and before that did Computer Vision research at a lab in Berkeley!

Danielle is a partner at Cherubic Ventures and oversees Cherubic’s US operations and investment strategy. Prior to Cherubic, Danielle spent 8 years at Google building and leading international sales and operations teams. While at Google, Danielle was also a startup advisor with Blackbox Connect and global program manager supporting female entrepreneurs in emerging markets. She is a San Francisco native and holds her MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

An Associate at the Hardware-focused VC fund Q Venture Partners, Atin works across the board on deal sourcing, qualification, due diligence, all the way through to deal structuring and documentation. Most recently, he led Hong Kong's leading corporate accelerator. An ex-entrepreneur, he is passionate about speaking at events, occasionally penning thought pieces and mentoring early-stage startups and young aspiring entrepreneurs. He spends time outside of work training for ultra-trail marathons.

I have worked as a web developer for the last 3 years at RaisMe, a scholarship platform startup. I work mainly in JS (React), RoR, Postgres, and MongoDB and love learning new technology. I'm starting a new job at a small startup called Impira soon, which is a data analytics company. I like guitar, jiu jitsu, biking, StarCraft2, and life.

Daryna is a Co-Founder and COO at OpenPhone (YC S18). Prior to that, she was a Product Manager at Vidyard. She founded Product Hunt Toronto, the first and largest Product Hunt community in the world. She started her career at Deloitte - first in Consulting and later in Innovation.

Mahyar is a Co-Founder and CEO at OpenPhone (YC S18). Prior to founding OpenPhone, Mahyar was an Engineer and Product Manager at Joist. He started his career building products at Zynga, Tagged among others. He graduated from the University of Waterloo Bachelor of Software Engineering program in 2014.

Jeremy is a US Navy Veteran. He served for 6 years as a radar technician and rescue swimmer. Wanting to transition from electrical engineering and into entrepreneurship, he came to Berkeley Haas to learn more about business and to find inspiration. BearX is what he spends his time on these days, connecting the innovation community at Berkeley and soon with BruinX at UCLA and beyond.

Malhar is a senior studying EECS at Berkeley. He does research in the RISELab, and is a liaison for Canvas Ventures. He's also working on building the smallest maneuverable satellite, SpinorSat, and an on-campus autonomous vehicle, AMAC.

Nick Triantos is a software engineer, entrepreneur, executive, and VC. He's worked at 7 startups, started 3 (2 great exits so far and just started his 3rd), been a CEO (2x), first Chief Software Architect @ NVIDIA, and was most recently a VC at Ignition Partners, focused on AI. His new company will change the worlds of medicine and neuroscience. Haas class of 2006

John is a Principal with NexStar Partners where he is focused on early stage VC investments in IoT and Connected / Autonomous Vehicles. Most recently, he was a Director, Strategy at GE Digital’s Predix platform where he helped to drive M&A, technology partnerships, and the launch of Predix globally.

Prior to GE, he was a Director, Strategy at SoftBank’s Innovation Center where he was focused on creating new and disruptive mobile products and services, and spearheaded the development and launch of the Space IoT platform, an open IoT ecosystem for consumer-related solutions.

Previously, John was a Principal at Exigen Capital, a $560 million transformational private equity fund, and was an Associate at GE Antares Capital, GE Energy Financial Services, and Fog City Capital. He started his career in consulting where he was an Engagement Manager at Deloitte.

John has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BA in International Relations / Russian Studies from Tufts University.

Sukrit Arora, 3rd year EECS major at UC Berkeley, Cal Hacks alumnus.

Arjo Mozumder is an Associate at Point72 Ventures in Palo Alto. He is responsible for sourcing, diligence, and execution on artificial intelligence investments. Arjo’s focus areas include industrial AI/robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other field-specific themes such as oil & gas and agriculture.

Vincent is currently GP at Bleu Capital, an early stage fund dedicated to commerce technology in US. Prior that he was the CFO of the largest western-food importer in China (Revenue from 50 to 200 MUSD / Headcount from 300 to 600 / Acquired by Savencia Group - Bongrain) from 2010 to 2015. He started his career in auditing (+ transactions services engagements) at Deloitte Paris and Shanghai. As an auditor, he has been exposed to multiple industries from manufacturing to professional services with a specialization on retail. He got involved in several acquisition deals in China. He is fluent in French, English and Mandarin.

By the time he turned 21, Wenz had worked at four scrappy startups (including one he started), four VC firms, and launched a student-run venture firm dedicated to bridging the gap between student entrepreneurs and early stage investors.

He was an Associate at Hyde Park Angels on the Digital Media & Technology team, and a student fellow at three other venture firms (including Chicago Ventures, Foundation Capital, and University of Chicago’s Innovation Fund) - wearing hats from sourcing to deep market due diligence. Wenz studied economics on a full-ride Questbridge scholarship at the University of Chicago. He was most recently on the Special Projects team at Cloudflare helping build a better Internet.

Brian Pietras is the Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Workday, a leading enterprise cloud company. Prior to Workday, Brian was the head of technology ventures at Hays PLC in London. Brian’s background includes over 15 years of experience working and investing in high-growth technology companies. He is a graduate of the London Business School and the University of Richmond.

Yan is currently pursuing his MBA at Berkeley Haas. Previously, he was an investment professional at The Baupost Group where he evaluated public and private investments in the United States, Europe, and South America. Before that, he worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s investment banking group. Yan is also a strategic advisor to the real estate startup Domio.

Zixuan An is the managing director for RAVV Fund and Incubator. Zixuan has highly experienced in investing at the most innovative fields such as AR/VR, AI and robotic. Zixuan An is the advisor and investor for serval top university incubators and student organizations to incubate student and laboratory facilities startups.

Laura is a 2017 Thiel Fellow and co-founder of Acorn Biolabs, a young cell cryopreservation company. Passionate about future technologies, Laura spent their time over the last year in the effective altruism community contributing to biosecurity and AI safety initiatives. They are now engaging in the Ethereum space to try and fill in vital gaps in its ecosystem.

MK is a product manager turned investor at UpHonest Capital, the continuation of WeiFund, a US-China cross-boarder angel fund with strong connections in both countries. Prior to UpHonest Capital, MK held an investment role in New Horizon Fund, a China-based PE/VC fund for the past three years, overseeing all investment and related activities in Silicon Valley.

Zack Baker is a Philosophy major and entrepreneur in his third year at UC Berkeley. Zack is the founder of PassWhiz, the president of Kairos, and the president of the UC Berkeley Pod of Contrary Capital. Zack is also the host of Re:thinking, a podcast that explores ideas at the intersection of philosophy and technology.

After graduating from Cal in 2007, I've been working at various Bay Area startups, ranging from backend server work, mobile games, full stack web, VR, and infrastructure.

James' career spans multiple industries including automotive, real estate, and energy. He has started four companies, for which he has raised over $40 million of capital, and is currently working on a venture in the retail space. He holds a BA in economics and a Masters in Finance. He's currently an MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business and is an executive for the LAUNCH accelerator.

Casber is an investor at Sapphire Ventures and focuses on investments in enterprise software and consumer internet. Casber worked on Sapphire’s investments in Auth0, Outreach, Pendo and Thoughtspot. Before Sapphire, he spent time at Wish, a leading mobile commerce platform in North America and Europe. As a student at Berkeley, he co-founded Etch.ai, a personal relationship manager.

Danielle Élan Fujii | Mad Dog Software | Sunnyvale

I have enjoyed designing for the past 30 years. From IR presentations to GUI design, my focus is on relating to the end users and ensuring that their experience is a positive one.

Karthik is a General Partner at Evolution Equity Partners. He leads investments in cybersecurity, enterprise software, IoT, cloud and analytics primarily in the United States and Israel, and brings over 15 years of investment, entrepreneurial, operational, M&A and investment banking experience to this role

I'm currently a software engineer at Academia. I moved to San Francisco after graduating from Penn in 2017, where I helped organize PennApps and made a toast printer at HackNY.

I'm a recent Cal grad who was an executive director for Cal Hacks 2.0. Always happy to see another Cal Hacks :)

Divy Shrivastava is the CEO of Paladin Drones, and a Thiel Fellow. He’s creating autonomous drones to respond to 911 calls and provide first responders with as much information as possible before they arrive, helping reduce response time and increase efficiency. He also loves creating, singing, and listening to music whenever possible.

Suraj Ramure is a junior EECS major at Cal and a former Cal Hacks director, originally from Canada. Outside of hacking, he is heavily involved in the teaching community at Berkeley; he currently teaches an introductory discrete math course he developed himself and is also a head teaching assistant for Berkeley's intermediate data science course.

Currently working on a NewCo. Studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Formerly lead technical mentor and drive coach of World Champion FRC Team 5499, The Bay Orangutans, built StartupSift, organized Cal Hacks, and ran Hackers at Berkeley. Previously engineering with Zenreach, Google, NetApp, and Boeing.

Vincent Sun leads Growth at Wildfire, an app that instantly notifies you whenever a major event happens nearby. Previously, Vincent was a venture capitalist at The House Fund, where he focused on investing in top Berkeley startups. Vincent is from Vancouver, Canada and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Cognitive Science.

Cal grad who was one of the best TA's for a bunch of CS classes, and worked for Facebook, Dropbox, and Databricks. Currently Co-founder and CTO at Berkeley-founded startup Wildfire, where he went through Y Combinator last summer.

Rainier is a software engineer at Domino Data Lab. He has competed in 14 hackathons and won prizes at HackMIT and several corporate hackathons. He is also a 1517 Fund Grant recipient and founding Incubator Director of Convergent, the first interdisciplinary technology organization at the University of Texas.