Demo Day Funds

Liz began her involvement with YC with her company, WayUp (YC W15). Liz was Co-Founder and CEO over 8 years, raising $40M+ in venture (from General Catalyst, Index, Box Group and many more). Under Liz's leadership, WayUp exited via merger in 2021 with Yello, a JMI Equity company. About one year after the merger, Liz left and returned to YC as a Visiting Partner, where she advised over 100 companies throughout the S22 and W23 batches. Liz began angel investing in 2016 and has now invested in over 40 companies (almost always at the Seed), including Scale AI, Ramp, and Ro.

Christopher founded BackType (YC S08), a SaaS analytics company he sold to Twitter in 2011. At Twitter, he helped launch Ads and was responsible for the Ads Center until 2014, which grew revenue to $1.4B. Chris is an active investor in startups like Benchling, Coinbase, Republic, Supabase, and 100+ more. He previously served as a Venture Partner for Entrepreneur First and as an advisor to Menlo Ventures and Y Combinator's Startup School.

Ethan is a scientist, biotech entrepreneur, and angel investor with a focus on platform technologies in all areas of biology. He founded Perlara (YC W16) in 2014 as the first biotech public benefit company focused on rare diseases. Current investments include AsherBio and Ochre Bio.

Benjamin Bryant is a former high-frequency trader, classic rock addict, and co-founder of the music marketing platform Earbits Radio (YC W11, acquired 2014, Kiz Studios). Benjamin was the founding marketer of Pebble Smartwatch (YC W11, acquired 2016, Fitbit), where he helped pioneer the Smartwatch industry. He currently heads up the Small Android Phone project, a 40K+ person community out to build the perfect sized Android phone. Benjamin has invested in 115 YC companies since 2017.

JJ was co-founder and CTO of WayUp (YC W15), the leading DEI recruiting platform used by millions. Before WayUp, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., advising insurance, banking, and healthcare clients. JJ got his start in angel investing while at WayUp, leveraging his hands-on programming work as CTO to source and invest in tools that he evaluated or used personally. Some of his investments include early checks into dbt Labs, Ramp, Retool, Hightouch, and others. He maintains a private annotated index of his evaluations of nearly all developer and data tools, fintechs, and insurtechs to come out of YC since 2015. Most recently, JJ was a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator for the S22 and W23 batches.