New Gold Rush: Prospects in GenAI & Tech Evolution
Amy Cheetham
Lizzie Matusov
Yousuf Khan
Priti Youssuf Choksi
In the constantly shifting realm of technology, Generative AI is emerging as a lynchpin, altering industries and setting new benchmarks. But GenAI isn't the only game-changer on the horizon.
Join us to hear from leading voices in venture about this new Gold Rush. In this talk, we will dissect not only the promising avenues in GenAI but also other pivotal tech trends poised to make waves in near future. Uncover the blossoming investment niches, anticipate future trajectories, and grasp the myriad opportunities and challenges that await. Of course, we will also be asking them to look into their csrytal ball and predict when technology sector will start to see growth. This conversation promises to equip investors, founders and tech aficionados with their foresight to steer through the next tech revolution.
About Priti Youssuf Choksi
Priti brings more than twenty years of corporate and business development experience to her role as a partner on Norwest’s consumer Internet team. Prior to Norwest, Priti spent nine years at Facebook in executive roles in corporate development and business development, where she led M&A efforts for the company, negotiated key partnerships, and served as a strategic advisor to product leadership teams across Facebook. Before her time at Facebook, Priti spent six years at Google in strategic partnership roles. As director of distribution partnerships, she led deals for Google applications such as Toolbar and Chrome and negotiated transformative search partnerships with companies such as Apple and Mozilla. Top-line revenue from these deals grew from $0 to $4 billion under her stewardship.
Earlier in her career, Priti earned her startup chops in strategy and management roles at two fast-growth companies, one of which was acquired by Inktomi in 2001 and the other went public in 1997. Priti holds an MBA with honors from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in architecture and communications.
About Yousuf Khan
Yousuf is a Partner at Ridge Ventures. Having held many operational roles in his previous positions, he’s uniquely qualified to not only grow Ridge’s portfolio, but more importantly to support founders through the vantage point of deep start-up experience. He currently serves as board director for Ridge-backed Archera, Lightyear, Rafay, and Rewind.
Prior to joining Ridge, Yousuf was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, the CIO and Vice President of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage and Qualys. He has been an advisor to early stage companies such as Zoom, Productiv and Material Security as well as an active member of the CIO community
About Amy Cheetham
Amy is a Partner at Costanoa Ventures where she has played an instrumental role in expanding Costanoa’s fintech practice. In addition to deepening the firm’s fintech portfolio in the US, Amy has driven the firm’s expansion into emerging markets, specifically into Latin America and Africa. Her primary focus is on seed and series A stage B2B fintech companies, which encompass everything from fintech infrastructure to payments to application-layer tools. In less than five years, she has led multiple investments, including Assis, Malga, Highline, and Highnote and sits on four boards. Amy was recently named as one of the top ten emerging VCs on the Midas Brink List by Forbes.
Amy is an advocate for both broader financial inclusion and for adding diverse perspectives to startups, on boards and in the venture community. She has played an active role at AllRaise.
Before joining Costanoa in 2019, Amy ran North American sales strategy and operations at Zuora, a public enterprise software company. Prior to that, she spent three years investing in growth stage technology companies at Summit Partners, where her investments included Podium, InfoArmor (acq. AllState), and onXmaps. Amy began her career on Wall Street, working at JP Morgan where she spent time as a technology investment banker and as an equities trader focused on financial services. Her experience at JP Morgan and Summit Partners has helped inform her ability to assess sectors, see opportunities and threats and then weave that all together into investment judgment.
About Lizzie Matusov
Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a toolkit that uses research to improve engineering teams’ most important processes. Prior to Quotient, Lizzie built software to improve access to medical-grade genetic testing at Invitae, and built web applications and deployment pipelines for numerous companies across industries at Red Hat. She holds a bachelor of science from UCLA, and an MBA and Masters of Engineering Sciences from Harvard.