Introducing Antler's US Visiting Partners for the Spring 2024 residency in the US
The Antler US team is thrilled to introduce our Visiting Partners who will be coaching and supporting founders participating in our US spring 2024 residencies this April across Austin, Boulder, and NYC.
We are excited to introduce these Visiting Partners to our founders who are just starting out on their path from zero to one. They will participate in residency events and office hours to provide mentorship, expertise, and insight, guiding founders through the critical early stages of their startup journey. Read more about our incredible Visiting Partners and the companies they’ve scaled below.
Andrew Hoag
Andrew Hoag is a serial entrepreneur and 0-to-1 product-oriented founder, who's started and sold two companies. He's raised nearly $100M in capital for his companies, and scaled businesses to 8-figure revenues. Early in his career Andrew secured banks & governments at VeriSign, and built high-performance computing at NASA.
Anthony Chen
Anthony Chen is an avid builder, investor, and advisor in the logistics & supply chain space.
He was the first employee at Flexport and helped to grow it to billions in sales, thousands of customers, and built the foundational operating model and software product. One of his favorite pieces of patented tech revolves around workflow automation. His superpowers revolve around storytelling, first principles product building, and go-to-market.
Paola Retes
Paola Retes is an investor with LiveOak Ventures. She joined LiveOak Ventures after graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a founding board member of Galvanizer, a nonprofit incubator for female founders. Before business school, Paola was an early employee at Ironspring Ventures. She assisted in all aspects of company formation and served as lead associate in the firm’s early investments. Her investment experience covers multiple stages and industries, focusing on enterprise software. Earlier in her career, Paola held various operating and investing roles at Holt Ventures, Becton Dickinson, Deloitte, and Matterhorn Capital Management. Paola also holds a CFA® charter.
Guhan Venguswamy
Guhan Venguswamy is passionate about building strong scalable software and teams. He's been working at Jasper AI for over 2 years and led them through the first portion of their hyper growth phase. Prior to Jasper, Guhan did Business development products for Accenture to land Department of Defense contracts. He is early on his VC journey, but is excited to bring his background as an operator to new and exciting companies.
Eric Engineer
Eric Engineer is currently a Partner at S3 Ventures. He was previously CEO at Invodo (S3 portfolio company acquired in 2018), Partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, Product Manager at Microsoft, and Sales Engineer at Trilogy Software. Eric has an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MCS in Distributed Systems from Rice University, and a BA in Computer Science and Managerial Studies from Rice University.
Tim Specht
Tim Specht is a founder and startup executive with deep roots in both zero to one and growth-stage environments across the US and Europe. Tim was the co-founder and CTO of video platform Dubsmash. Tim raised over $20 million from top-tier VCs (Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Balderton, Eniac, Lowercase Capital, and more) and grew Dubsmash to 250 million installs and 160 million users. Dubsmash was acquired by Reddit in December 2020. Post-acquisition, Tim served as Director of Engineering at Reddit. He's now excited to share his expertise and hands-on approach with early stage founders and startups.
Jonathan Simon
Jonathan Simon held the position of Chief Technology Officer for Brightline Health and AllTrails and built and led teams at Meta, JPMorganChase, Merrill Lynch and Qualcomm. Jonathan is a frequent advisor, author, mentor and speaker on startups and technology. When not working, Jonathan is likely hanging out with his wife and kids and their chickens, or maybe cycling, camping, or sailing... or playing music!
Neal Bloom
Neal Bloom is a serial founder in edtech and talent tech and Managing Partner at Interlock Capital. His startup, Portfolium, was acquired by Instructure. Prior to his career as a founder and investor, Neal studied mechanical engineering at UCSD and worked with NASA on the Space Shuttle Main engines and the upcoming Artemis program.
Emma Clark
Emma Clark has 10+ years of experience scaling startups from the seed stage to acquisition. She operates at the intersection of strategy, analytics, product, and operations. She is currently the co-founder and COO of Sweater, a fintech investment firm focused on making venture capital accessible to the entire retail investor public. She's most passionate about building great teams and bringing more women into leadership roles, especially in the financial services space.
Kevin Baum
Kevin Baum is the CEO and co-founder of AgriWebb, an Australian headquartered SaaS business that is the global market leader in its segment. Kevin has successfully grown the business through several rounds of fundraising, international expansion across five continents, and M&A. Kevin loves working as a mentor to early stage companies and speaking about entrepreneurship. He has mentored for Techstars, the CU Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and privately with early-stage businesses for over five years now.
Zeina Fayyaz Kim
Zeina Fayyaz Kim is a partner at Climate Capital, the most active investor in climate tech globally, and co-founder of Diamond List, an annual curation of underrated climate startups built on nominations from top-tier climate investors. She was previously Head of Strategy at The Plant, a $300M+ green real estate project in Yonkers, New York. Before diving headfirst into climate ~3 years ago, she was chief of staff at a Series A edtech company (sold to Roblox) and grantmaker/investor at Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and NewSchools Venture Fund.
Sameep Sheth
Sameep Sheth is the co-founder and CTO of Dripshop.live, a dynamic live and social commerce marketplace. Drip specializes in the exciting world of collectibles, focusing primarily on Trading Card Games and Sports Cards. Sameep has 15+ years of experience in hands-on coding & Technical Leadership. Before entering the startup world, Sameep spent the early years of his career in engineering at Microsoft and Goldman Sachs.
Alex Koren
Alex Koren is a former Thiel Fellow and serial founder. He’s built and sold 3 companies: Actiview, GYSR, and Wong Puzzles. He's worked extensively in small teams evaluating markets, designing and building products, and growing businesses. Alex holds a degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.
Spencer Coates
Spencer Coates has 15+ years of experience building and leading high-growth tech companies as startup operator and advisor. He currently leads the Western North America sales division for CloudKitchens, guiding aggressive expansion pre-IPO. Previously, he held senior sales and leadership roles at Square, Groupon, and Auto1 Group. Spencer lives in Denver and is passionate about empowering the next generation of innovators here in Colorado.
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