Screendoor

Jamie Rhode is a Partner at Screendoor, a fund-of-funds platform that invests in emerging venture managers and provides mentorship support. She previously spent 8.5 years at Verdis Investment Management, a single family office, where she focused on emerging venture managers, private equity, and hedge fund investment. Earlier in her career, she worked at Bloomberg in equity research and credit analysis roles, and holds a CFA charter and a bachelor's degree in Finance and Marketing from Drexel University.

Layne Heard is a Partner at Screendoor, a fund-of-funds platform that provides anchor LP capital to emerging fund managers alongside mentorship from experienced GP advisors. The platform focuses on supporting the development of new venture capital managers and helping LPs construct diversified venture portfolios.

Aileen Lee founded the seed-stage firm Cowboy Ventures in 2012 after more than a decade at Kleiner Perkins. She coined the term 'unicorn' for billion-dollar startups in a 2013 essay and co-founded All Raise, the nonprofit working to advance women in venture capital.

Kirsten Green founded Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and built it into the definitive consumer-focused venture firm, with early bets on Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Glossier, Chime and Hims & Hers. A former equity analyst covering retail, she pairs consumer-behavior research with early-stage investing and has been a fixture on the Forbes Midas List for seven straight years.

Hunter Walk led consumer product management at YouTube before co-founding the seed firm Homebrew with Satya Patel in 2013, backing companies such as Chime and Plaid. The pair later converted Homebrew to an evergreen, self-funded model and co-founded Screendoor, which invests in new fund managers. His blog on startups and venture has made him one of the most approachable voices in seed investing.

Andrew (Andy) McLoughlin is a partner at Uncork Capital, a Bay Area seed fund he joined in 2015, where he backs seed-stage B2B software companies. He previously co-founded Huddle, a London-based enterprise collaboration platform acquired in 2017, and built an angel portfolio of more than 40 startups including Intercom, Pipedrive, Tray.io, Bugsnag, Calm, and Postmates. A native of the UK, he received an OBE in the 2015 Queen's birthday honors for services to the British technology industry, and he is a co-founder and US Trustee of Founders Pledge as well as a founding board member of GBx, a network for British tech entrepreneurs in the Bay Area.

Robert "Rob" Hayes is an early-stage technology investor and former product executive. After a 1984-1988 B.A. in Political Economy at UC Berkeley and a 1993-1995 Columbia MBA in Finance, he worked on US-Japan trade at JETRO, localized products for GO Corporation, managed products at Geoworks, and then led Palm OS product work, Palm Ventures and PalmSource business development. In 2004 he became Omidyar Network's first venture investor, built its technology investing group and was contemporaneously credited with Digg, Krugle, Wikia and Metaweb. He joined First Round in 2006 to open its San Francisco office, leading the firm's investments in Uber, Square, Mint.com, eero, Gnip and Planet Labs; institutional and company evidence also ties him to TaskRabbit, Bowery Farming, UrbanSitter, DNAnexus, SimpleGeo, Outright, BillFloat, Dishcraft Robotics and Odeko. In 2018 he moved from investment Partner to Board Partner. First Round's current roster still uses that title, and Columbia explains that he no longer leads new First Round investments but supports existing companies and invests as an angel. Publicly attributable post-transition activity includes Solo, Kinema, ShareWell, Barndoor AI and Scorbit; these are treated as personal/angel investments unless a primary source says otherwise. His founder framework favors real and deeply felt problems, execution-focused teams that can move from market narrative to product detail, healthy co-founder dynamics, distribution awareness, early culture and diversity work, world-class hiring, zero-revenue cash planning and a durable North Star. Counterweights include his admitted Dropbox miss over valuation, investments whose operating outcomes disappointed—most notably Bowery's 2024 shutdown and eero's reportedly investor-unfriendly sale—and the broader criticism that Uber's investors tolerated governance and culture failures too long; no source establishes that Hayes personally held an Uber board seat. He remains publicly associated with Columbia Business School's board, is a current vice chair of The Noguchi Museum, and has disclosed only limited family detail: a wife, two daughters, dogs, cooking and California-coast travel.

Satya Patel is a Partner at Homebrew, the seed-stage venture firm he co-founded with Hunter Walk, which they deliberately kept as a two-person partnership focused on backing founders. Before Homebrew, he was VP of Product at Twitter, leading product management and support, and earlier co-led seed and early-stage Internet and digital media investing as a Partner at Battery Ventures. He joined Google in 2003 to work on product and partnership initiatives for AdSense, and previously held roles as a senior product manager at DoubleClick, a VC at two New York-based venture firms, and a strategy consultant. More recently, he and Hunter Walk launched Screendoor, a $50M+ investment vehicle providing institutional capital and counsel to underrepresented venture capitalists raising their first funds.

Charles Hudson founded Precursor Ventures, a seed-stage firm that typically leads the first institutional round for software and hardware startups, where he serves as Managing Partner. He previously worked as a Partner at Uncork Capital, formerly SoftTech VC. His investments include Shippo, TopHat, Vungle, Drone Deploy, The Athletic, Modern Health, Juniper Square, Noyo, and Incredible Health.

Eva Ho leverages her refugee upbringing and restaurant childhood to spot nontraditional founders and, as a founding GP at two seed funds, builds fund platforms and firm culture.

Wayee Chu co-founded a dedicated edtech seed fund in 2012 and, as an SFMOMA trustee and contemporary art collector, applies a long-standing early-stage education focus while framing founders as artists.

Zal Bilimoria, solo GP with product experience at Microsoft and Google, focuses on non-human genomics, synthetic biology and hard-science; he applies an engineering refactor-debug lens and tracks Net Promoter Score.