A native of Northern California, Traci Des Jardins has six restaurants in San Francisco, including Jardinière, Arguello, The Commissary, Mijita Cocina Mexicana, Public House and TRANSIT.

Before opening Jardinière in San Francisco in 1997, Des Jardins worked in some of the highly acclaimed kitchens in Los Angeles, France, and New York City. Classically trained in French cuisine by some of the best chefs and restaurateurs in the world, Des Jardins' style is also influenced by her Mexican and French-Acadian grandparents, who taught her how to cook. Throughout her more than two decades in San Francisco, Des Jardins has continued to focus and evolve her style of cooking as well as her restaurants. Over the course of her successful career she has trained and groomed many chefs and front-of-the-house personnel, many of whom now help operate her growing group of restaurants.

Known as one of the top female chefs in the country, Des Jardins is a two-time James Beard award-winner and has earned a number of industry accolades throughout her career including:

James Beard Foundation’s “Rising Star Chef of the Year,” 1995
Food & Wine Magazine’s “Best New Chef,” 1995
San Francisco Magazine’s “Chef of the Year,” 1995
Winner of  Esquire Magazine’s “Best New Restaurant” (Jardinière), 1999
James Beard Foundation nomination for “Best New Restaurant" (Jardinière), 1999
James Beard Foundation Award for “Best Chef: Pacific,” 2007
Winner of “Iron Chef” title (vs. Mario Batali) on Food Network's Iron Chef America, 2007
Finalist on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters 3, 2011
Winner of Esquire's Knife Fight, 2014
Semifinalist for James Beard Foundation’s “Outstanding Chef,” 2015

Des Jardins sits on the board of La Cocina, a San Francisco based non-profit business incubator. She is a deeply committed activist and philanthropist working with hunger-relief organizations such as Share Our Strength, Citymeals On-Wheels and other non-profits such as amfAR.

Serena Dugan founded Serena & Lily with partner Lily Kanter in 2003. Originally conceived as a line of nursery furnishings, the business has since expanded to become a robust lifestyle brand – furnishing all rooms in the home. While at Serena & Lily, Serena served as Chief Creative Officer and Lead Designer. As a textile designer by trade, Serena’s contribution to the brand was balanced between the executive and creative functins, with her textile designs anchoring the brand for 14 years while she directed the creative side of the growing brand and business.

Prior to starting Serena & Lily, Serena had 10 years experience as a decorative painter, textile designer, and fine artist, designing for corporate clients, interior designers and private clients nationwide. She is now returning to her roots as a fine artist and has re-established Serena Dugan Studio. Her studio is focused on creating custom, highly specialized textiles and furnishings in focused collaborations.

Serena holds a BA in Psychology from Wake Forest University, and was trained in Fine Art and Design at the Lorenzo de’ Medici Art Institute in Florence, Italy and MSUD in Denver, CO.

Sarah Friar is Chief Financial Officer of Square. Sarah joined Square in July 2012 from salesforce.com, where she served as SVP of Finance & Strategy. Prior to salesforce.com, Sarah worked at Goldman Sachs for over 10 years. She previously worked for McKinsey in both London and South Africa.

Sarah sits on the Boards of New Relic (NEWR), a software analytics company, Slack, a business communications platform, and is the vice-chair of the Board of Spark, a nonprofit passionate about changing the lives of at-risk middle schoolers through mentorship. Sarah is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Finance Leaders Fellowship Program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She earned her MEng in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management from the University of Oxford and her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar.

Meghan FitzGerald Tuohey has been in the publishing and advertising industry for over 20 years.  In April 2011, Meghan founded Poppy Media, an Advertising Rep-Firm base in Sausalito, CA.   Poppy Media sells marketing and advertising programs to national clients in the Western US and Canada.  Poppy Media represents the following media properties: Food Network Magazine, the newly launched Pioneer Woman Magazine w/Ree Drummond, Traditional Home, The Meredith Luxury Portfolio of magazines, domino magazine and domino.com.     

Prior to founding Poppy Media, Meghan worked for top publishers in New York City and San Francisco, including: Ziff Davis, Time Inc. and Conde Nast.   While in NYC, Meghan worked as the Associate Publisher for Family PC and as the Director of Travel and Resort Advertising for GOLF magazine.  Meghan currently works with a diverse group of advertising partners, such as Airbnb, California Closets, CA Table Grapes, Clorox, Del Monte, The National Honey Board, Minted.com, Serena & Lily, Shutterfly, Smucker’s Pet Brands, Starbucks, The Mine.com, Torani, and Yogi Tea.

Meghan resides in Sausalito, CA and is married with 2 young daughters.  Meghan grew up in New Canaan, CT and graduated from UCLA, where she was recruited to dive on the Varsity Swimming and Diving team.  When she is not working or at a daughter’s sporting event, she enjoys Pilates, playing golf, skiing or peace and quiet with a good book.

April Gargiulo is the Founder and CEO of Vintner’s Daughter, a luxury skincare company committed to performance-driven quality-focused, non-toxic skincare. She launched her first product, Active Botanical Serum in 2012 bucking industry standards by using whole organic plants and methodical formulation methods versus low-quality fillers and formulation short cuts. Vintner’s Daughter quickly became a benchmark for quality and performance in the beauty world and is coveted by top beauty connoisseurs and industry professionals around the world. Before starting Vintner’s Daughter, April spent 8 years at the helm of her family’s Napa Valley winery, Gargiulo Vineyards. There, she helped build the winery’s reputation for terroir-driven, “first growth” Cabernet Sauvignon. Before Napa, April spent 6 years in Manhattan where she worked for design leader Vitra. Through Vintner’s Daughter April commits 2% of every bottle sold to charities benefitting women and children worldwide. She is married to fellow entrepreneur, Mitch Lowe (also her co-CEO) and has two young daughters. April has an undergraduate degree from Duke University.

Kara's Cupcakes is the vision of executive pastry chef, Kara Lind. A somewhat rebellious child, Kara's sweet tooth is almost legendary in her family. The daughter of a dentist, Kara's love for sweet treats was discouraged by her parents.  She learned early in childhood to hide candy and other sweets throughout her family home.

This appreciation of sweets is among Kara's earliest and strongest memories. As an advertising sales executive and passionate home baker, Kara realized the importance of following her dreams and enrolled in pastry school. With the goal of furthering her baking skill set, she diligently embraced this program.

A small word of mouth cupcake catering business soon was born. It quickly became so popular that demand for her cupcakes exceeded her ability to fill the orders. Before long, the first Kara's Cupcakes bakery and retail store opened in San Francisco, followed by more across Northern California. 

Today, a mom and entrepreneur with nine busy bakeries selling her famous cupcakes, Kara can still be found most mornings working in the kitchen with her dedicated pastry staff. She visits the farmers markets regularly, looking for inspiration, and sourcing seasonal items for upcoming cupcakes flavors. Thankfully, as the owner of a cupcake bakery she no longer needs to hide sweets, preferring to share her new finds.

Since 2006, Kara’s Cupcakes has continued its focus not only on its local and sustainable business and baking practices, but also ongoing philanthropy donating over 5 million cupcakes to the community and local charities. Last year, the company gave away more than 450,000 cupcakes to feed the needy and over $30K to local charities for schools, non-profit organizations, etc. The company’s sustainable focus and green practices led to an award for "Beyond the Check - Community Partnership in Sustainability" by the San Francisco Business Times

Kristen Koh Goldstein co-manages the direct private investments for AthenaPartners, her family office. She is also the Co-Founder and Executive Chairwoman of HireAthena and the Acting CFO of AngelList, both portfolio companies. Other investments in the portfolio have included Salesforce, Twitter, Anaplan, Jet.com, Blue Bottle Coffee and many others.

Driven by her own need, Kristen started BackOps (now HireAthena) in 2010 to enable skilled moms to work from home while their young children are at school. In 2013 with institutional backing from several investors including Sherpa Capital, eVentures, Google Ventures, and HVF Labs, the company was able to build the software (Scalus) to scale the business nationally, creating an all-in-one solution for workflow, process automation, and communication.

Kristen's passion as an operator investor is to help promising companies to clear the growth stage from 20 - 50 employees (Series A/B) when startups must transition from maniacally building and scaling a product, to building a cross-functional team, a wildly different skill set. Ironically, precisely what made a homogenous team successful from 0 - 20 will often drive the team to fail from 20 - 50 because the need to quickly consolidate diverse, dissenting opinion is really hard. Sadly, many extraordinary startups fail to cross this chasm -- the blinders caused by sexism, racism and/or agism is paralyzing.

Prior to HireAthena, Kristen was a buyside investment analyst for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse (First Boston Asset Management). She was also the CFO of Loyalty Lab (now Tibco) and Director Finance of Epinions (now eBay), where she developed a deep expertise in financial operations.

Kristen, educated at Cornell (BS) and Harvard (MBA), is a mother of three who was motivated to start BackOps (now HireAthena) not only to create flexible work schedules for moms, but also to provide effective back office services to SMBs, startups, and family offices.

Cindy Padnos is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures, a seed stage firm investing exclusively in Enterprise cloud and mobile software companies seeking their first institutional financing. With three funds under management, Ms. Padnos has lead the firm’s investments in market leaders such as Allocadia, BrightEdge, CafeX Communications, Coupang, Hoopla, Influitive, Peerlyst and LitBit and has gained successful exits from her investments in Xactly Corporation (IPO NYSE: XTLY), Opsmatic (acquired by New Relic - NEWR), Sim Ops Studios (acquired by Autodesk - ADSK) and Sense Platform (acquired by Cloudera). Ms. Padnos has held board seats in more than a dozen venture-backed, private companies and has recently served as audit committee member of a public company and chaired the compensation committee of a private company through its successful IPO process.

As an operating executive in the tech sector, Ms. Padnos was founder/CEO of venture-backed Vivant (now part of ORCL), CEO of Acumen and VP marketing at Scopus (IPO). She has been recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech (Fast Company), Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley (New York Times) and dubbed ”Queen B2B” (VentureBeat). Cindy is also an advisory board member for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, for NTT’s Innovation Institute and for several entrepreneurship-focused nonprofits. She also the author of the widely cited whitepaper High Performance Entrepreneurs: Women in High Tech and a tireless advocate for creating more inclusive entrepreneurial environments. Ms. Padnos is a magna cum laude graduate of  the University of Michigan and gained her MSIA/MBA, with honors, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

Helen Russell is the co-founder and CEO of Equator Coffees & Teas. From its humble roots in a Marin County garage, Equator continues to grow, thrive, and stay faithful to its values under Helen's guidance. Under her leadership, Equator has grown from a small roaster and wholesale supplier into a national brand known for its values-driven approach, award-winning coffee, and impactful action around issues of environmental sustainability and economic empowerment.

Helen has led Equator's commitment to a sustainable, transparent approach that spans more than two decades. Through Helen’s guidance, Equator has deepened its relationships with the local community by opening five retail locations in the Bay Area. In 2011, Equator formalized its commitment to sustainability by becoming a certified B Corporation, making it the first California coffee roaster to do so.  In 2016, the U.S. Small Business Administration honored Equator by naming the company the "National Small Business of the Year."​

Helen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Northeastern University in Boston.

Debbie Sterling is the Founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, the award-winning children’s multimedia company disrupting the pink aisle in toy stores globally and challenging gender stereotypes with the world’s first girl engineer character.

Debbie is an engineer, entrepreneur, and one of the leaders in the movement toward getting girls interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). She was named TIME’s "Person of the Moment,” honored by the National Retail Foundation as one of 25 “People Shaping Retail’s Future,” and was recently added to Fortune Magazine’s prestigious “40 Under 40” list. In 2015, Debbie was inducted as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship and honored by the National Women’s History Museum with a “Living Legacy” Award for her work to empower girls around the world. Debbie received her degree in Engineering at Stanford University in 2005.