Aileen Lee is the founder of the early-stage venture firm Cowboy Ventures. Before Cowboy, she spent roughly a dozen years with the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she worked with numerous companies, including Bloom Energy, Blue Nile, Rent the Runway, and TellMe. Aileen, who has degrees from MIT and HBS, has also held operating roles at Gap Inc., The North Face, and Odwalla and started her career at Morgan Stanley.

Bradley Tusk is the founder of Tusk Ventures, which has gained a foothold in Silicon Valley by working closely with companies like FanDuel and Tesla that are disrupting highly regulated industries. Tusk is also a longtime political strategist who was formerly Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager. Not last, he runs seven-year-old Tusk Strategies, which develops and runs political-style media campaigns for a host of Fortune 500 companies.

Amy Chang is the cofounder and CEO of Accompany, a startup that's building the second largest database of people behind LinkedIn -- all in the service of becoming a virtual personal assistant for users. Chang -- who has raised $40 million for the company -- was a product manager at eBay before becoming the global head of product at Google, where she spent seven years. She's also Cisco's youngest board member.

Vivek Ramaswamy has been making waves in the biotech world since creating his company, Roivant, in 2014, to acquire drug candidates that have been forgotten or abandoned for largely strategic reasons. Investors love him for it, too; they've given him more than $1 billion in funding to date. In exchange, the Yale Law School grad and former hedge fund analyst has delivered them the biggest biotech IPOs in 2015 and 2016 through two spin-off companies that Roivant has created around separate drug candidates.

A former fashion assistant and contributor for Teen Vogue and W magazine, Emily Weiss started her beauty blog, Into the Gloss, to focus on what she concluded was a lack of beauty product coverage elsewhere. By 2014, the NYU grad had launched a beauty line, Glossier, with four products. That small portfolio that has since turned into a beloved brand that regularly racks up waiting lists for its brow gels and serums and has attracted $35 million from investors along the way.

Eric Liaw is a general partner at the later-stage investment firm Institutional Venture Partners, which he joined in 2011 from Technology Crossover Ventures. Earlier in his career, Eric, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford, worked in Morgan Stanley’s tech investing banking group. Eric sits on the board or is board observer of a wide variety of companies, including Glossier, The Honest Company, GitHub, and App Annie.

Semil Shah is the founder of Haystack, a series of micro-seed funds that count among their portfolio companies Instacart, DoorDash and Managed by Q. Semil is also a venture partner with the cross-border firm GGV Capital and a frequent guest editor for StrictlyVC. Before jumping into investing, Semil worked at Rexly (acquired by LiveNation) and Swell (acquired by Apple), helping build and market consumer-facing digital media mobile applications.

Connie Loizos is a longtime journalist and the founder of StrictlyVC, a news organization centered around a daily e-mail newsletter that provides readers in the startup industry the news they need to start their day. Connie got her start in Silicon Valley at the original Red Herring magazine in the late '90s. In addition to running StrictlyVC, she is Silicon Valley Editor at TechCrunch.