Elizabeth Yin | Hustle fund
Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed-stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an ad tech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Fernando spnola | base partners
Fernando Spnola is a GP of Base Partners, a venture capital firm based in Brazil investing across the stage spectrum in private technology companies globally.
Since its inception in 2017, Base has invested in category-defining companies including: Stripe, Nubank, Zoom, Klarna, Getir, Kavak, Figma, Netskope, TripActions, MPL and Bytedance.
Fernando has a special focus on growth-stage companies globally and co-manages Bird Dog, Base’s early-stage investing program in LatAm. Fernando has co-led the early financing rounds of Getir, Mottu and Praso.
Prior to forming Base, Fernando worked in recruiting and spent several years in the Brazilian public equities industry. Born and raised in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Fernando currently lives in Sao Paulo with his wife Paula and their two kids Lisa and Thomas.
Mac Conwell | rarebreed Ventures
McKeever “Mac” Conwell II is a software engineer by trade and was a former DOD contractor with a top-secret clearance. He was a two-time founder with an exit and a failure. Next, Mac moved on to the venture capital world via the Maryland Technology Development Corporation as part of their Seed Investment Team. During his four years there, Mac amassed experience leading an initiative to create the Minority Business Pre-seed Fund, the first and only, at the time, state-backed pre-seed fund for women and minorities in the country. The program institutionalized the friends and family round for black-, women-, and minority-led startups and was subsequently funded long-term by the state of Maryland. In September 2020, Mac founded RareBreed VC, a $10M pre-seed fund that invests in exceptional founders outside of large tech ecosystems.
Moderator: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf | MIT Sloan
Matthew Rhodes-Kropf is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Finance department at MIT Sloan where he teaches entrepreneurship. Rhodes-Kropf is also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures.
Rhodes-Kropf’s research on venture capital and exits has been published in many leading finance and economic journals. His work seeks to understand how capital markets interact with the creation of new firms, their financing, growth, governance, and their ultimate exit through a successful IPO or sale or through failure. His 2004 paper "Market Valuation and Merger Waves," published in The Journal of Finance, was nominated for the Brattle Prize for Best Paper in Corporate Finance in 2005.
Previously a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management department at Harvard Business School, Rhodes-Kropf has also published many HBS cases. His work has been profiled in the Financial Times, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, and many popular blogs. He was also formerly the Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor of Business at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, where he taught entrepreneurial finance and received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Formerly, Rhodes-Kropf was a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Rhodes-Kropf is also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures. Previously he founded RK Ventures, the predecessor to Tectonic, where he managed two successful funds. Matt invested in companies such as Rackspace, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Xenex, Kymeta, Humatics, and Axioma among others. Matt was formerly the CFO of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, where he worked with the founder to launch the firm and the world’s first Alzheimer’s imaging agent. Matt also helped launch a hedge fund as the COO, and has advised many financial firms including Correlation Ventures. Matt is presently a director at Xenex, Avant-garde Health, 55-ip, Wyebot, Wayscript, and Neighborhood Trust and an advisor to Kymeta and Humatics.
A graduate of Duke University, Rhodes-Kropf holds a BA in computer science and economics and a PhD in economics. Matt was formerly the chairman of the advisory board for Duke University’s Graduate School and is currently on the advisory Board for Duke’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship program.