The a_capital team

Investing

Ronny Conway

Founder & General Partner

Prior to starting A.Capital, Ronny was one of the first Partners at Andreessen Horowitz, where he was the head of seed and early-stage investing and was involved in such high profile investments as Airbnb, Instagram, Optimizely, Pinterest, Dollar Shave Club and Twitter. Before a16z, Ronny spent six years at Google, and was one of the first employees at Google Ventures. Ronny has spent most of his life around venture capital, and received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA.

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Ramu Arunachalam

General Partner

Ramu was most recently a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he worked on over a dozen investments in the enterprise software space. In addition, he helped shape the firm’s investment thesis in Cloud infrastructure and Big Data. Past investments include Platfora (sold to Workday), Actifio, Apollo (fka Meteor), Illumio, Pindrop Security and Databricks. A computer scientist by training, Ramu has over a decade of operating experience in product management and engineering at both startups and public companies. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Ramu led new product initiatives in Big Data for Aster Data (acquired by Teradata). Earlier in his career, Ramu was an engineer at VMware and part of the team that developed the industry’s first virtual switch for VMware’s flagship ESX server product line.

Ramu holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with University Honors) from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Kartik Talwar

General Partner

Kartik was most recently at SV Angel where he led crypto and technical investments. He has promoted and originated investments in over 20 companies including MakerDAO, Radar Relay, Harbor, Handshake, Anchorage, DFINITY, CryptoKitties, Fortmatic, Near Protocol, DIRT Protocol, Computable, Tagomi, and Coinbase. A software developer by trade, he was also responsible for building tools that help manage the thousands of investments SV Angel considers each year. He is an active contributor to various open source projects, helped start ETHGlobal, and was also recently included in Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list. Kartik holds a degree in Astrophysics and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo.

Talent

Carrie Farrell

Talent Partner

Carrie Farrell specializes in helping entrepreneurs build a solid foundation for everything related to their recruiting and HR functions. Carrie, the second engineering recruiter hired at Google, spent twelve years at the company and was most recently Head of Talent Acquisition for Google Ventures. Her team worked with 200+ portfolio companies partnering with founders to create hiring strategies to acquire the best technical talent. Before Google Ventures, Carrie led Google’s Partnerships team for Google.org and the recruiting teams for Global People Operations groups. Carrie has led staffing and HR teams for Google in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Africa and Japan. She received her bachelor’s degree in political science and urban planning from Cal Poly.

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Brad Strader

Talent Partner

Brad moved to San Francisco in 1999, beginning his career in recruiting at startups and small technology companies. He joined Google in 2004, leading staffing and HR teams that were responsible for opening and scaling both domestic and global offices. He also spent three years as an HR Business Partner at Google, working with engineering leadership to retain the best talent with competitive equity and bonus structures. He has spent most of the past decade working closely with hundreds of founders to build highly scalable and flexible recruiting platforms capable of exponential growth, both as a consultant and at Google Ventures. Brad has a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Operations

Zachary Miller

Chief Operating Officer

Zach began his career as a corporate attorney at Latham & Watkins in San Francisco. He then served as outside-GC to numerous start-ups, including RentJuice (acquired by Zillow) and tenXer (acquired by Twitter). Zach was most recently the co-founder and COO of a legal staffing company based in San Francisco (acquired by Mainspring Legal). He has a BA in Communication Studies (Honors College) from UCLA and a JD from the University of Arizona, Rogers College of Law (Summa Cum Laude; Arizona Law Review; Order of the Coif).

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Heather Stickel

Executive Assistant

Heather supports A.Capital’s investing, talent and operation partners. Prior to joining A.Capital, Heather managed special projects and was executive assistant to former astronaut, Ed Lu, at the B612 Foundation—an organization dedicated to planetary defense against near-Earth object impacts. She has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Western Kentucky University (Magna Cum Laude).

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Advisors

Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz is a co-founder and Partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and Ben co-founded Loudcloud, a managed services provider, which became Opsware, a data center automation software provider.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator, a seed capital firm that has invested in hundreds of startups including Optimizely, Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe. Previously, in 1995, he started Viaweb with Robert Morris, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. Paul began publishing essays in 2001 on paulgraham.com, which reached 12 million page views in 2014.

Ron Conway

Ron Conway is a founder of SV Angel and has been an active angel investor since the mid 90’s. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998–2005). Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions (1973–1979), Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO (1979–1990) and took Altos public on Nasdaq in 1982. Ron is actively involved in numerous community and philanthropic endeavors.