Meet our investor mentors
Pauline Cristofari
Corporate Development, Google
Pauline is leading the strategy and scouting efforts for the Google Assistant Investments program. Pauline joined Google's corporate development team in September 2018 and has led projects for several Google product areas including Maps, Devices & Services and Assistant. Prior to Google, Pauline worked at Lenovo in their open innovation arm looking at AR/VR, AI and IoT innovative solutions in the bay area.
Marc Ladin
General Partner at VoicePunch
Marc Ladin is a founder and General Partner at VoicePunch, an early-stage venture firm investing in voice AI and audio tech startups. He spent most of his career as a CMO helping build tech startups in messaging, security, and internet services, with several successful exits. Marc calls Los Angeles home and is grateful he doesn’t know how to work an ice scraper.
Leslie Jamison
EVP of Klick Ventures
As the EVP of Klick Ventures, Leslie leverages her expertise in business, marketing, science, and human insights to identify and de-risk venture opportunities and grow them into successful businesses within healthcare that improve the lives of patients. Previously, Leslie built and led the Brand Strategy Team at Klick Health, drawing upon a 25-year proven track record in building successful brands that create meaningful connections with customers. As part of her mandate, she established a center of excellence in brand development that helped fuel the agency’s hypergrowth. Prior to joining Klick, she served as the Managing Director & Partner of an independent insights-driven brand consultancy that was sold to a global marketing communication network of companies She has an MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University. In 2019, she was recognized with a PM360 ELITE Award for strategic excellence in the healthcare industry.
Matthew Leibowitz
General Partner, Plaza Ventures
Matthew is a seasoned growth-stage technology investor and career VC, having originated, managed and completed dozens of transactions. During his tenure at B.E.S.T. Funds, Matthew oversaw dozens of growth-tech finance investments with consistent double-digit returns and co-created multiple funds.
John Brennan
President and Managing Partner, JWB Advisory Partners
John Brennan is the President and Managing Partner of JWB Advisory Partners serving as an advisor to CEOs, Boards of Directors, and private equity investors across the technology, consumer, digital health, and life sciences industries. John’s experience includes having served as President and Chief Operating Officer of a venture-financed informatics company and Senior Vice President of a Private-equity financed CRO as well as President and Managing Director and Senior Vice President and Managing Director of two global management consultancies.
Jonathan Lowenhar
Founder & Managing Partner, ETW
Jonathan loves working with entrepreneurs - whether as an operator, advisor or board member his passion has been to help early companies to launch, young businesses to grow and maturing enterprises to reach scale. Over the last 15 years he's successfully managed a $1B business segment for a large public company, led the turnaround of a distressed $100M+ revenue business, launched and sold a venture-backed startup and led the rapid growth of a fintech enterprise software business.
Lesley Ross
General Partner, ETW
Lesley has worked in tech for 14 years as an operator in growth and analytics roles. She founded Quantified Ardor in 2016 to support growing startups around the world on data-driven decision-making. She has also spent the last 7 years as a startup advisor (including as a mentor for Google For Startups since 2016) while holding multiple COO positions for startups at various stages.
Leslie Fine
General Partner, ETW
My career as a startup founder and product leader began after earning my PhD in Game Theory and Behavioral Economics from Caltech. In 2008, I founded my first startup, Crowdcast, and successfully exited the company in 2012. Following Crowdcast, I helped lead three more startups: Spigit (SVP Product), tenXer (Head of Product), and Swerve (Founder, CEO). After my four startup experiences, I ventured into the enterprise world and joined Salesforce (VP Product), where I helped ship the company’s first AI product. But it was through my involvement in Salesforce’s M&A process that I ultimately realized I wanted to return to startup life.
Devan Batavia
General Partner. ETW
For the last 10+ years, Devan has built and led go-to-market teams for 3 organizations, Jive which went public in 2011, Origami Logic was acquired by Intuit, and TripActions, still a public company valued at over $5B at last check. Building startups has fed his ambitions for years, and he joined Enjoy The Work so that he could impact not just one startup, but rather a portfolio of them across the globe
Anu Nigam
Managing Partner. ETW
Ever since Anu joined his first startup in 1996, He enjoys working with small, driven teams, helping to transform cutting edge technologies into real businesses. His first two startups revolutionized fiber-optic telecommunications, resulting in two acquisitions among the top 10 largest VC-backed M&A deals of all time. After the .com crash, he shifted his sights to consumer internet and started one of the world’s first social networks, hi5.com, which grew to 60M MAU. Later in his career he followed the explosion of smart phones to found an app discover site that organically attracted 15M installs.
Ned Renzi
General Partner. ETW
Ned has been involved with startups ever since founding his own software company in the mid 1990s, the bulk of his career has been defined by venture capital. In the early 2000s, He co-founded Pittsburgh-based VC firm, Birchmere Ventures. Over the following 20+ years at Birchmere, we raised and invested six funds and our portfolio companies achieved a cumulative market valuation of $15 billion. Through those funds, I was fortunate to work with dozens of amazing entrepreneurs.
Rick Hartwig
General Partner. ETW
With more than 20 years as a technology product development and marketing executive, Rick has helped grow companies from seed stage to series F. He led multiple companies through acquisition as a VP or CMO, and has worked with numerous CEOs to successfully raise $100M+ in funding. Later, as he moved into consulting and advising, he sought to become an even better company advisor and leadership coach. He became certified with both the College of Executive Coaching and International Coaching Federation as part of this effort.
Yanush Cherkis
General Partner. ETW
Yanush has had a few careers in various industries, but independent of his functional roles, the most important skill he mastered is the ability to ask good questions. He developed that skill over a 20 year career that has spanned banking, entrepreneurship, personal coaching and startup advising. He helped start 6 businesses, including co-founding a software company that they built from start-up to a profitable multi-million-dollar global operation to a successful M&A exit.