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Melissa Widner
CEO of Lighter CapitalMelissa Widner is the CEO of Lighter Capital, the pioneer and leader in revenue-based financing for tech startups and scales ups. Seattle based Lighter Capital is backed by National Australia Bank and Silicon Valley Bank. Previously Melissa was the Managing Director of NAB Ventures, the VC arm of the National Australia Bank, and a General Partner at Seattle-based SeaPoint Ventures. She was the founder and CEO of 7Software, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise software company acquired by Concur (Nasdaq: CNQR, acquired by SAP). She is the co-founder and Chairperson of Sydney based Heads Over Heels, an organization that supports women entrepreneurs running companies with high growth potential.
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Will Sacks
Founder and CEO at Fulcrum Venture AcceleratorAs the founder of Fulcrum and Kindara, while raising multiple rounds, Will developed a proven fundraising process that has been used by entrepreneurs to raise more than $20M in early-stage capital. Will has mentored at Techstars, MergeLane, and the RVC HyperAccelerator, and has been covered in Forbes, TechCrunch, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The Guardian and he once raced a solar-powered racecar from Chicago to Los Angeles.
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Cheryl Campos
Head of Venture Growth and Partnerships RepublicCheryl is passionate about the intersection of finance, technology, and social impact. She is the Head of Venture Growth and Partnerships at Republic, a one-stop-shop for founders to raise capital from both accredited and non-accredited investors. She is focused on introducing underrepresented founders to these alternative funding sources in order to help their startups thrive. In addition, she works on partnerships with other venture capital and ecosystem builders while supporting the growing Republic portfolio of 150+ companies.
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Andrew Oddo
Director of Early Stage Practice, Silicon Valley BankAndrew is the Director of SVB’s Early Stage Practice in NYC where he works with hundreds of founders to help them strategize around fundraising, go-to-market strategy, financing approaches, and more. Prior to his time at SVB, Andrew was the Director of Growth at Bowery Capital in NYC, and a Co-Chair of the Global VC Platform Community, a group of over a thousand operating partners at VCs across the world. Before entering the VC world, Andrew led sales teams at CrowdTangle (acquired by Facebook), and Chartbeat in NYC.
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Kelsey Gernert
Head of Partnerships, HubSpot for StartupsKelsey got her start working in the non-profit world with organizations such as Teach For America and City Year. She left this role to complete her MBA and pursue leadership training at Harvard. In 2016 she launched her own startup. She is passionate about helping startups grow and scale and now provides coaching and guidance to founders and provides scholarships to qualifying startups through her work with the HubSpot For Startups Program.