The 2023 Midas Brink List: Venture’s Up-And-Coming Investors Shine In A Tough Environment

Each year in conjunction with the publication of the Midas List, TrueBridge and Forbes publish the Brink List to highlight emerging VCs who are building a reputation for smart investment decisions and access to great companies. Nominees are evaluated based on qualitative and quantitative measures that weigh an investor’s momentum, position, reputation and other variables. This is the third year we’ve called upon a panel of investors previously named to the Brink List to provide their insight into the selection process. Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures and Lachy Groom of LGF served on our panel this year and there’s no doubt their input and breadth of industry knowledge made the list stronger.

Our 2023 Brink List is reflective of where the venture industry is headed as a whole – they are smart, creative, hardworking partners whose diverse experience and backgrounds are helping to shape not just their portfolio companies, but the tech world more broadly. Since we started publishing the Brink List in 2011, 30 investors named to it have gone on to make the Midas List with an additional nine named to the Midas List Europe or Midas Seed List. We’re pleased to present this year’s Midas Brink List.

Amy Cheetham

Costanoa

Partner

Key Deals: Flexio, Highline, Highnote, Kevala, Malga

Before joining Costanoa in 2019, Amy Cheetham ran North American sales strategy and operations at Zuora ZUO , a public enterprise software company. Prior to that, she spent three years investing in growth-stage technology companies at Summit Partners, where her investments included Podium, InfoArmor and onXmaps.

Cheetham began her career on Wall Street at JP Morgan, where she spent time as a technology investment banker and as an equities trader focused on financial services. Her experience at JP Morgan and Summit Partners has helped inform her ability to assess sectors, see opportunities and threats and weave those and other critical factors into sound investment judgment.

Nicholas Chirls

Notation

General Partner

Key Deals: Bison Trails, Circle, Parsec, Stellar XLM Health, Talos

Nick Chirls has been a fixture in the New York City tech ecosystem since he began building and investing in startups in 2009. In 2015, he co-founded Notation with his partner Alex Lines, where he focuses on inception-stage investing in product-focused founders based in New York City. In addition to the investments he's sourced and led in Circle, Runwise, Talos and others, Chirls serves on the board of directors for Sawyer and as a board observer at QA Wolf. He previously served on the board of Bison Trails from inception through its acquisition by Coinbase in 2021.

Chirls was previously the head of seed investing at Betaworks, one of the first NYC startup studios and investment firms. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he has dedicated his career to serving founders and growing the tech community in New York.

Elad Gil

Gil Capital

CEO

Key Deals: Airbnb, Airtable, Coinbase, Deel, Figma

Elad Gil is the co-founder and chairman at Color Genomics, where he has been an operating executive and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Airtable, Anduril, Anchorage, Coinbase, dbt Labs, Deel, Figma, Flexport, Gitlab, Gusto, Instacart, Notion, Opendoor, OpenSea, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Retool, Rippling, Samsara, Square, Stripe and Navan (formerly known as TripActions).

He previously served as CEO of Color and VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, where he ran various product teams including Geo and Search. He joined Twitter with its acquisition of MixerLabs, an early developer-centric platform infrastructure provider, where he was co-founder and CEO.

Gil spent many years at Google GOOG , where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting that team up and running. He was involved in three Google acquisitions (including that of the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and other key mobile products.

Gil has also held product management and market seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies and worked at McKinsey & Co. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and has degrees in mathematics and biology from University of California San Diego.

Sonya Huang

Sequoia

Partner

Key Deals: Apollo, Fintual, Glean, Gong, Streamlit

Sonya Huang joined Sequoia in 2018 and has grown her role within the partnership since then. She has worked with a number of AI companies since 2019, including Gong, Glean and Streamlit. Her recent focus has been helping the ecosystem understand the emergence of generative AI, and in the fall of 2022 she published an influential market landscape and related market map that popularized “generative AI” as the definition of this emerging category.

Huang has continued to be an influential voice on AI in recent months and regularly appears on broadcast and in the press. She also co-hosted Sequoia's AI Ascent event in March, bringing together 100 of the leading minds in AI. In addition to AI, Huang works in a broad range of sectors, from enterprise software (Apollo) and data infrastructure (dbt, Census) to fintech and LatAm (Fintual).

She graduated from Princeton with a major in economics and minors in computer science and statistics/machine learning. Before starting at Sequoia, she worked at TPG and Goldman Sachs.

Eric Liaw

IVP

General Partner

Key Deals: Aiven, Datadog DDOG , DeepL, Dream Games, GitHub

Eric Liaw is a general partner at IVP and has been with the firm since 2011. He partners with founders and CEOs solving real-world problems in ways that resonate with their customers, with investments across enterprise, fintech, consumer and gaming. Liaw is a hands-on strategic advisor, counseling organizations to build the right team, business structure and customer loyalty to help accelerate their growth up to IPO and beyond.

Liaw has led IVP investments in companies such as Aiven, Datadog, Deputy, Dream Games, GitHub, Glossier, IEX, Klarna, MasterClass, Sorare, Supercell, UiPath, Whoop and ZipRecruiter.

He holds a B.A. in economics with a minor in computer science and an M.S. in management science and engineering, both from Stanford University.

Saam Motamedi

Greylock

General Partner

Key Deals: Abnormal Security, Adept AI, Apiiro, Cresta, Snorkel

Saam Motamedi is a general partner at Greylock Partners where he partners with entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on building companies in AI, cybersecurity and SaaS.

Since joining Greylock in 2016, Motamedi has built a promising portfolio spanning enterprise software, serving on the boards of security companies such as Abnormal Security, Apiiro Security and Opal Security; and AI companies including Adept AI, Cresta, Predibase, Snorkel and others still in stealth.

Prior to joining Greylock, Motamedi founded Guru Labs, a machine learning-driven fintech startup, and worked in product management at RelateIQ, one of the first applied AI software companies. He holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University.

Nnamdi Okike

645 Ventures

Co-founder and Managing Partner

Key Deals: Eden Health, Iterable, Overtime, Panther Labs, Shift5

Nnamdi Okike, the co-founder and managing partner of early-stage VC firm 645 Ventures, has a track record of investing in leading software companies, with over $9 billion of exit value.

645 invests at the seed and Series A stages and uses its Voyager software platform to help founders scale to the growth stage. Select portfolio companies that have reached that growth stage include Bespoke Post, Eden Health, FiscalNote, Goldbelly, Iterable, Overtime, Resident and Squire. The firm has over 40 active companies in its portfolio in the areas of enterprise SaaS, infrastructure software and consumer technology. 645 portfolio companies have been acquired by Google, Facebook, Expedia and private equity firms.

He previously spent eight years at Insight Venture Partners, a $13 billion venture fund, where he invested in 17 companies and had nine exits. Those exits included Mimecast, Despegar, Folhamatic, Hitwise, Simplifile and others.

Okike received his B.A., J.D., and M.B.A., all with honors, from Harvard University. He serves on the boards of the New York Roadrunners, the Partnership Fund of New York City and Mount Sinai, as well as the Investment Committee of Phillips Andover Academy.

Brandon Reeves

Lux Capital

General Partner

Key Deals: Chronosphere, Hadrian, Hugging Face, OpenStore

Brandon works with early- and growth-stage companies across a variety of sectors and industries. He has partnered with founders across machine learning, open source infrastructure, developer tools, aerospace and defense, supply chain, crypto, techbio and more.

Prior to joining Lux, Reeves was on the investment team at Capricorn Investment Group. He started his career at Texas Instruments TXN , where he was a field applications engineer supporting Tesla TSLA .

Reeves grew up in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Terrence Rohan

Otherwise

Managing Director

Key Deals: Figma, Front, Hugging Face, Notion, Patreon

Terrence Rohan is an early-stage investor and the managing director of Otherwise, a founder-angel fund that discreetly enables a network of top founders to make multi-stage venture investments. In addition to running the firm’s operations, Rohan also invests from the fund.

As a venture investor at Otherwise and previously at Index Ventures, Rohan has worked with some of the top founders of the last decade. He invested in the seed and growth rounds of Figma, where he also served as the company’s first board director. He has invested in Notion, Hugging Face, Vanta, Robinhood, Patreon, Front, Pachama, Justworks, Circle and Browser Company, to name a few.

Rohan has helped build multiple new funds. He co-created and eventually led the first seed fund at Index Ventures before incubating the firm’s inaugural angel fund, for which he served as general partner and co-founder. In 2017, he launched Otherwise, a novel founder-angel fund inspired by the one he created for Index.

Before becoming an investor, Rohan held various roles in product marketing and product development at Google and YouTube. He holds an M.S. in management from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, an M.S. in philosophy from The London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in philosophy from Colgate University.

Wendy Xiao

Northzone

Partner

Key Deals: 3Box/Ceramic Protocol, Livepeer LPT , Magic Labs, Spring Health, Thirty Madison

Wendy Xiao joined Northzone in 2015 and is a partner leading the firm's New York office. She was at the forefront of the Web3 movement in 2016 and initially led Northzone's investments in crypto and blockchain infrastructure companies. She now invests more broadly in the healthcare, consumer and developer tools sectors, where she has invested in 13 companies, six of them unannounced. These investments include Spring Health, which recently closed its Series D at a $2.5 billion valuation, and Magic MAGIC Labs, a crypto wallet with 20 million users globally.

Her investment thesis over the years has focused on companies that change consumer behavior. That has taken her on a tour of some of the most exciting technological advances in the U.S. and Europe impacting the biggest challenges of our time, such as mental health, affordable childcare, data privacy, financial wellness and corporate governance. She loves working closely with founders, starting as early as the seed stage, and prides herself in empowering and supporting them to realize their full potential.

Prior to Northzone, Xiao founded the co-working and childcare company CoHatchery and consulted at A.T. Kearney and Accenture ACN . She is a Chinese-American mom of two, which shapes her view of the world tremendously.