Bill Reichert is Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, a leading seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund, based in Silicon Valley. Garage makes seed investments in promising early stage technology companies and works intensively with them to help them to the next step. Some of Garage’s most successful startups include Pandora, Tripwire, LeftHand Networks, Coremetrics, Hoku Scientific, Kaboodle, WhiteHat Security and Simply Hired.

Bill has spent most of his career as an entrepreneur and operating executive. Prior to joining Garage in 1998, Bill was a co-founder and senior executive at several early-stage, venture-backed technology companies, including Trademark Software, The Learning Company, Infa Technologies, and Academic Systems. Earlier in his career, Bill worked at McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles, the World Bank in Washington, DC, and Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. Bill earned his BA from Harvard University and his MBA from Stanford University.

Email: reichert@garage.com
Desk: 650.383.5659
Twitter: @billreichert

Website: http://www.garage.com

Ching-Yu Hu just joined next47 as a Principal in our Palo Alto office. Prior to that, she was an Entrepreneur In Residence in Google’s internal startup incubator Area 120. In 2009, she co-founded Skybox Imaging, a data and aerospace startup that designed, built, and launched the world’s largest constellation of high resolution imaging satellites. As the Director of Business Operations and Customer Relations, she was responsible for growing a stealth company into an industry-defining brand, driving new global business opportunities with strategic partnerships, and playing a critical role in securing Skybox’s venture capital financing from leading investors and eventual acquisition by Google in 2014 for $500M. Ching-Yu holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Operations Research Management Science and Statistics from UC Berkeley, and a Master’s degree in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University. In 2014, Ching-Yu was named as one of Inc Magazine’s 35 Under 35.

Eric S. Yuan founded Zoom in 2011. Prior to starting Zoom, Eric was Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco’s collaboration software development. As one of the founding engineers and Vice President of Engineering at WebEx, Eric was the heart and soul of the WebEx product from 1997 to 2011. Eric proudly grew the WebEx team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real time collaboration. In 2017, Eric was added to the Business Insider list of the 52 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech. Eric is a graduate of the Stanford University Executive Program.

Erik Murphy-Chutorian is the founder and CEO of 8th Wall, building cross-platform solution for developers to build augmented reality applications on all mobile devices. Erik has deep expertise in computer vision, imaging infrastructure, data analysis and full-stack/mobile product development. Prior to founding 8th Wall, he worked at both Facebook and Google as an engineering manager and senior staff software engineer respectively, leading the initiatives behind a number of key projects on Google Images and Google Photos. Erik holds a PhD in computer vision from the University of California, San Diego and a BA in Engineering Physics from Dartmouth College.

Jack Altman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lattice, a modern performance management platform for growing companies. Since graduating the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class, Lattice serves 250+ customers such as Birchbox, Coinbase and Glossier. Lattice closed its Series A with investments from Thrive Capital, Slack Fund, Khosla Ventures, Marc Benioff (Salesforce), and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit). Prior to starting Lattice, Jack was the VP of Business and Corporate Development at Teespring, and an angel investor in companies such as Opendoor, Instacart, Pinterest, Gusto, LendUp, Soylent, and Patreon.

John Mannes is an investor at Basis Set Ventures, a $136 million early stage venture capital fund focused on supporting startups using machine learning to address big problems across industries. Prior to Basis Set Ventures, John was a TechCrunch writer covering machine intelligence startups, machine learning research and major AI initiatives from big tech. His work has also been featured in The Washington Post and Education Week.
Previously, John consulted startups and VC associations on development and growth. In 2012, John was elected to a seat on the Montgomery County Board of Education (MD), the nation’s 17th largest school district, where he advocated technology modernization across over 200 schools. For his public service work, John was honored by members of the U.S. Congress.

Karl Alomar is the COO at DigitalOcean, one of the fastest growing cloud infrastructure companies that is becoming a strong challenger brand to the Amazons and Googles of the world. Karl is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in developing high growth businesses. He is responsible for driving the day-to-day business and people operations, and manages DigitalOcean’s international footprint as the company continues to build out its hardware and datacenter infrastructure globally. Prior to DigitalOcean, he was the co-founder and senior partner of China Export Finance, Ltd, where he helped the business to grow from inception to more than $125M of annual revenue within four years. He received his MBA from Columbia Business School in New York and a Bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Imperial College London.

Nathan Beckord is the CEO of Foundersuite.com a venture-backed company that makes the leading Investor CRM and Investor Updater tools for startups raising capital. Since launching in March of 2016, customers have raised over $650M in seed and venture capital.
Prior to starting Foundersuite, Beckord spent ten years working with over 150 startups as interim CFO, Business Developer, and Advisor. Beckord has an MBA in Entrepreneurship, a BSC in Finance, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). In his free time, he enjoys sailing and riding motorcycles.

Dr. Shubhra Jain is an investor at Cota Capital where she is responsible for sourcing, executing and analyzing healthcare investments. Cota Capital is a stage agnostic fund in San Francisco investing in Healthcare, Tech and Fintech. Prior to Cota, Shubhra was Associate Director of Commercial Strategy and Corporate Development at Natera where she focused on biopharma partnerships, acquisitions, market research and competitive positioning. Prior to Natera, she led Product management for Acute care suite of products at Pieces Technologies where she led product development and launch of SaaS risk surveillance and prediction solutions for clinical outcomes and published peer-reviewed research on the subject. Dr. Jain has served as a consultant and an advisor to several health tech startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Jain is a Primary Care Physician by background, has her Masters in Engineering from Stanford with a major in Biodesign and her MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Soma is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group.  Pior to joining Madrona, Soma had a successful twenty-seven-year career at Microsoft Corporation. His last role at Microsoft was Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division. Soma has long been an angel investor, with more than 50 such investments across a wide range of technology areas. At Madrona, he is focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Applications and Developer centric platforms and tools.  Soma serves on the boards of MightyAI, SmartAssist.io, Pixvana, Shyft, Icebrg, and CloudCoreo.  Madrona Venture Group has deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  Apple acquired two of Madrona’s AI portfolio companies: Turi and Lattice. Additionally, Kitt.ai was acquired by Baidu.

Steffen Bartschat is a member of Sand Hill Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world.  During his day job as CEO of Hill88, Steffen helps large corporates engage with the Silicon Valley ecosystem.   He has held senior management positions ranging from early stage startups (Lumo BodyTech) to Fortune 50 corporations (IBM) in the consumer, automotive, and enterprise software sectors. Steffen holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and an M.S. in Business Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Sumeet Jain is a Co-Founder and General Partner with LUMA Capital partners and invests in innovative commerce and marketing technology companies.  He is focused on software and products that are accelerating the digital marketing transformation.  He is based in San Francisco and previous was with Intel Capital in its Digital Media group.  Prior to that he was a partner at CMEA Capital and a technology investment banker at Goldman Sachs.  He also was with two startup companies, Personify and iManage.

In 1999, Tom Villante founded YapStone with the simple goal of converting bills commonly paid by paper check into online electronic payments. Today, YapStone processes over $18 billion in online and mobile payments and has raised over $110 million in capital. As Chairman and CEO, Tom leads the strategic vision, operational execution and global expansion of the company. With his experience and expertise in the FinTech industry, Tom is focused on positioning YapStone’s innovative and proprietary payments platform to meet the needs of global marketplaces and large vertical markets.

Prior to YapStone, Tom was a Partner at The Seidler Company, a private equity firm, and an investment banker with S.G. Warburg (now UBS) and William E. Simon & Sons. In addition to his role at YapStone, Tom is a member of Young Presidents’ Organization (Santa Monica Bay) and has served on the Boards of local schools and charitable organizations. With 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, he is an active angel and real estate investor, frequent speaker at FinTech and Leadership conferences as well as a contributing writer to notable business publications. Tom earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton University.

Tony dropped out of Stanford in 1992 to join Apple as PM of the mobile Newton OS and Tools.  After Apple, in the early days of the Web, ​he ​co-founded
a successful development firm, ​which  designed early online services for Bank of America, Microsoft, Netscape, Intel, Sony and Magic the Gathering.
​Tony ​has ​co-found​ed​  a number of ​ venture-funded​ consumer internet startups including When.com (acquired by AOL in 1999) and Social Express (acquired by MTV Networks in 2010).  In each case, post-acquisition Tony lead business units as GM/VP and scaled  team and revenue​  to $50MM.  In addition to funding his own companies over the years, Benchmark Capital recruited Tony as a VP Product (Kollective), CEO (Couchsurfing), and Limited Partner.  Personal angel Investments include Postini (acquired by Google) and Ofoto (acquired by Kodak).

In addition to ​building ​social and mobile apps​, games​ and web services, Tony is also a successful music producer and sound engineer with credits recording Alanis Morissette, New Order, REM, David Gray, Ice Cube, DJ Shadow and Radiohead.

These days, Tony enjoys working with​early stage ​​entrepreneurs as a coach helping to guide and support the process from formation through financing​ and​
product/market fit through scaling​.