Topher Conway: Born to Be a Venture Capitalist

Even in his early teens, it was already obvious that Topher Conway was going to follow in his father, Ron’s footsteps. Ron Conway co-founded SV Angel, an angel investment firm that helps startups with funding, business development, M&A, and other forms of strategic advice. Being exposed to this kind of industry at a very young age, Topher made his first angel investment in Napster when he was only 13. Today, he is a partner at SV Angel and focuses more on companies in the Niche, Bluebox, Zenefits, and URX categories.

Like many venture capitalists, Topher Conway gathered work experience outside the VC industry before jumping into investing. Prior to joining his father’s firm, Topher earned his stripes by working at EQAL, Inc., a media and technology company which created the viral web video series “lonelygirl15”. At EQAL, he worked closely with both the business development and sales teams. He was responsible for leading the creation of new business opportunities, as well as developing and maintaining close professional relationships with brands and ad agencies. Prior to EQAL, Topher was also able to accumulate work experience by working at eCost and accepting a summer internship at Google’s Direct Sales Organization in 2004.

Investing isn’t Topher’s only responsibility at SV Angel. He is able to put his sales and business development background to good use as he is also in charge of leading platform partnerships. He works closely with corporate partners and establishes strong ties with them. He also helps out portfolio companies with whatever they need when it comes to business and corporate development.

Topher received his bachelor’s degree in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at the university, he became a member of the UCLA VC fund which aims to foster and encourage entrepreneurship within the UCLA campus.

Catharine Ahearn: Sculpting Her Way to the Top

Catharine Ahearn is a sculptor known for her eclectic works. Some of her more famous sculptures are the Pretzel Bike (2013) and the piece aptly named Smash (2015) which is basically green foam fists coming out of a wooden base.

Ahearn was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1985. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 2007 from New York University and she is a candidate for a master’s degree in the same field at the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Since 2007, Ahearn has joined several group exhibitions held all over the globe including Laugh Now Cry Later (2007 – Shanghai, China), The Bunker Gallery (2010 – London, UK), Beer Show (2013 – Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA). Ahearn has also staged several solo exhibitions including Bite into That Soft Ass (2013 - Ramiken Crucible, New York, USA), and No Soap Radio (2015 – Peep-Hole, Milan, Italy). She is currently getting ready for another solo exhibit slated for 2016. The exhibit is called Office Baroque and will be held in Brussels, Belgium.

Michelle Phan: From YouTube Sensation to Entrepreneur

The video streaming site YouTube is filled with videos that teach people how to do a myriad of activities. Among all of these tutorial videos, the makeup tutorial videos posted by Michelle Phan are just some of those that stood out. Since she began posting these videos on her YouTube channel in 2005, Phan has received over a billion views from all over the world.

The popularity of her tutorial videos grew even more after popular websites such as Buzz Feed featured some of her videos on their site. The success of her YouTube channel prompted the site to offer her an advertising partnership and helped her create a multi-channel network on the site called FAWN.

In 2010, after featuring the prominent makeup brand Lancôme in her videos several times, the cosmetics company chose Phan to be their official makeup artists in a series of videos that they made. Phan’s relationships with famous makeup brands didn’t end there. In 2013, L'Oreal came up with a cosmetics line called “EM” by Michelle Phan. By 2014, it seems like there was no stopping Phan as she partnered up with reality-show producer of Endemol Beyond USA. Together, they will create content for millennials and build a talent network featuring YouTube stars.

In spite of all her success as a YouTube sensation and popular media personality, Phan still ventured into unchartered territory when she co-founded Ipsy, an online subscription service where members can receive samples of beauty products carefully selected by Phan and her team.

Phan was born in Massachusetts, but she grew up in Tampa, Florida where she completed high school. She went on to study at the Ringling College of Art and Design. She was not able to earn a degree; however, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the college in March 2014 for her achievements.

Eric & Susan Gregg Koger: The Husband & Wife Tandem behind ModCloth

Some people are meant to be partners – both in life and in business. The husband and wife tandem of Eric Koger and Susan Gregg Koger is one prime example of this.

The story of their business and life partnership began when they entered college. Then just boyfriend and girlfriend, Eric and Susan studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Coming from Florida, they were both in dire need of winter clothes to survive the cold weather in their new location. Susan, a lover of vintage clothing and thrift-store shopping, took Eric to thrift stores to buy what they needed and Susan ended up buying more than the necessities. With her closet space running out, Eric convinced his girlfriend to sell the clothes she didn’t want nor need and created a website for her to do so. After graduation, what was once a hobby became serious business and ModCloth was launched. As the company grew larger, their relationship grew deeper. Eric and Susan were married in late 2006 and continuously work together to ensure the success of their company and their marriage.

Tomer Kagan: Living the American Dream

The American Dream can be defined as the ideal that every citizen of the United States can and should achieve prosperity and success through determination, initiative, and hard work. Tomer Kagan is one prime example of how hard work and ingenuity can result in success.

Kagan’s family moved from Israel to sunny California when he was just four years old. He grew up in an Israeli neighborhood and is fluent in Hebrew as well as in English. Even at a young age, it was evident that Kagan had a bright future as an entrepreneur. He paid his way through college by starting up a business called Static Printing which printed customized apparel for its customers. Kagan eventually graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Development Biology, but deciding against following that career path.

After college, Kagan ventured into business again – this time founding a branding solutions company called Your Logo Here. Some of the company’s biggest clients included Google and Slide. A born visionary, Kagan believes that the world will become more and more software-dependent and we will be seeing things like traveling hospitals and personalized food in the future. It is also this forward-looking attitude of Kagan that led him to co-found Quixey with Liron Shapira. Quixey is basically a search engine for apps where people can search for the applications they want and need by inputting a description of the task they would need the application for. Users don’t need to know the exact name of the application to use Quixey and it allows them to discover other apps that can perform the same tasks as more popular apps in the market.

Aside from being an entrepreneur, Kagan is also on the board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly, the Singularity Institute) and is an advisor to other companies like Upwest Labs, Mucker Lab Seed Fund, and Innovation Endeavors.

Eric Frenkiel: Providing Solutions for a Data-Driven World

The world is becoming more and more reliant on data. The faster we get the data, the better. Businesses also benefit more from real-time data processing and analysis. This is why in 2011, Erik Frenkiel co-founded MemSQL with the company’s CTO Nikita Shamgunov. The company is a tech start up that deals with databases and data processing in real-time. As CEO of MemSQL, Frenkiel has received recognition from big business media companies such as Forbes which listed him in their list of 30 Under 30 in Technology for two consecutive years (2011 and 2012)

Before co-founding MemSQL, Frenkiel worked for Facebook as a partner engineer. He isn’t a stranger to this line of work as he had taken on engineering and sales engineering roles for other consumer and enterprise startup companies in the past.

Frenkiel is a graduate of the Stanford University’s School of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Management Science and Engineering.

Anthony Goldbloom: Big Success with Big Data

The world is filled with so much data that most of the time people don’t know what to do with them anymore. Companies often find themselves in a bit of a pickle when their data analysts can no longer solve the problems brought about by the abundance of data. This is what motivated Anthony Goldbloom to start up his own company called Kaggle – a website where data scientists and analysts can compete to predict outcomes and solve data issues for a prize.

Goldbloom was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. Even as a youngster, he was already quite competitive as he represented his home country in the World Championship of Sailing when he was just in high school. He went on to study Economics and Econometrics at the University of Melbourne where he graduated with a first-class honours degree. After college, he began working at the Australian Department of Treasury where he was a data analyst at the Economic Modeling Unit. He took a break from his job at the Treasury in 2008 to pursue an internship at The Economist in London, which he got when he won an essay writing contest. It was during his stint at The Economist that he came up with the idea for Kaggle. Goldbloom was then working on a piece about predictive modeling and had spoken to key personnel in large companies and they had explained the difficulties they had with making sense out of big data.

Teaching himself how to code, Goldbloom began creating Kaggle back home in Melbourne. In 2010, he was able to launch the site and for starters, sponsored a contest himself. The media got wind of this and ran stories about the site. This caught the attention of major corporations and institutions including Allstate Insurance and NASA. As more and more companies sponsor competitions on the site, the number of data scientists – both professional and amateurs – have grown as well.

Jack Abraham: Born Leader

Jack Abraham was born in 1986 to an artist mother and a tech entrepreneur father. His father, Magid, is the CEO and co-founder of publicly traded internet analytics company comScore.

At a very young age, Abraham had already showed flashes of brilliance. At 13, he worked during summers at his father’s company which was where he learned how to code and worked with people who were much older than he was. He would also surprise his father by giving suggestions to make work easier and much more efficient.

Abraham studied technological entrepreneurship at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While he was there, he began creating Milo, an e-commerce website that allowed users to check out what products were in stock at local stores before they went out to buy them. After helping some of his friends pitch their startups to investors in California, Abraham decided to drop out of school – a semester short of graduating – to focus on Milo. By the end of 2010, Ebay bought Milo for $75 million.