Monica leads Venture Capital for CPP Investments, based out of San Francisco. Monica joined CPP Investments in the fall of 2019 to launch the fund's global VC program. CPP Investments makes LP fund investments with leading VC managers, has a passive manager co-investment program, and also participates as a direct venture investor.

Monica has a track record of building, leading, and investing in high-growth tech environments. Monica is an initial founder of Workplace by Facebook, a standalone enterprise SaaS business that harnesses Facebook's consumer collaboration technology with over 30,000 enterprise and SMB customers. Prior to Facebook, Monica was at Box, where she was part of the 2015 IPO team and pioneered programs for industry-leading customer growth. Monica also experienced hyper-growth on the New Ventures team at Starbucks, executing long-term growth platforms via acquisition and partnerships.

Monica built her strategic and analytical foundation at McKinsey & Company, where she spent 10 years serving consumer and tech clients on growth strategy, go-to-market, and innovation.

In her spare time, Monica is an active angel investor/advisor to emerging tech companies, passionate about international development, and stays busy with her husband and three kids.

Andrea is a Partner at Cambridge Associates and Head of Global Private Investments, where she leads a 50-person global team sourcing and underwriting private equity, growth equity, distressed, and venture capital funds, as well as direct, co-investment, and secondary investment opportunities. Her career with CA spans nearly two decades. Andrea regularly co-authors in-depth private investment research, backed by over 40 years of CA’s proprietary data, most recently focused on growth equity, co-investing, and investment level benchmarking in private equity and venture capital.

Andrea is frequently asked to keynote at private investment industry conferences worldwide. She is also a faculty member at the International Limited Partner Association (ILPA) Institute, where she has taught classes for 10 years. Andrea joined Cambridge Associates in 2001 as Head of International Private Equity and Venture Capital Research. Prior to that, she was a Senior Director in the Leveraged Buyout Group at Prudential Insurance. There, she led early efforts to benchmark Prudential’s $5 billion buyout portfolio, and domestic and European private equity and venture capital fund investment portfolios, among other investment responsibilities.

Matt Diestel is an Investment Director and investment committee member within QIC’s Global Private Capital group where he is responsible for North American buyouts, venture capital & growth, and co-investments. Prior to joining QIC, Matt was an Investment Officer within the private equity group at CalSTRS where he focused on middle-market buyout, co-investment, and credit-related opportunities. Before joining CalSTRS, Matt worked at UBS and Morgan Stanley.

Dennis Clark is the Senior Managing Director of Corporate Venturing and Open Innovation at Honda Innovations. Dennis leads Honda’s open innovation initiatives and strategic partnerships with startups and venture capital firms globally. Before joining Honda, Dennis worked in early stage venture capital building bridges between technology upstarts in Silicon Valley and multinational corporations. Early in his career, Dennis spent eight years in Japan working in a variety of sectors including commercial banking and international civil service.

Cathy Gao is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures focusing on enterprise software, security, HR tech, and vertical software investments. Cathy worked on Sapphire’s investment in Moveworks.

Prior to joining Sapphire, Cathy was an investor at AXA Venture Partners where she invested in rapidly-scaling enterprise software, FinTech, and InsurTech companies. Previously as an operator, Cathy spent time in business operations at Gusto, a venture-backed company that provides payroll and HR services to SMBs. She started her investing career at TA Associates and was also on the M&A team at Blackstone.

Cathy graduated from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with a bachelors in Economics with a concentration in Finance. She was born in China and has also lived in Houston, New York, and Boston.

Alastair Goldfisher is venture capital editor at Venture Capital Journal, which is owned by PEI Media. Alastair reports on the venture community, creating content for venture firms raising funds and seeking investment opportunities and limited partners looking for compelling investments in venture managers. Alastair has worked as a business journalist since 1994, and he’s been with the group that publishes Venture Capital Journal since 2003. Previously, he was founding editor of California CEO and before that was a reporter with the Silicon Valley Business Journal. He graduated from San Jose State with a bachelor’s in magazine journalism and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, sons and pets. Alastair is a vegan, likes to exercise, takes lots of photos, and his two favorite drinks are espresso and beer. Reach him via Twitter at @agoldfisher. You can also see his writing work at VCJ.

Joseph is a Managing Director, Head of Secondaries and a member of the Private Equity Investment Committee. He has over 20 years of experience in private equity. Prior to joining Capital Dynamics, Joseph was a principal at Coller Capital in New York where he was responsible for the origination, evaluation, and execution of secondary portfolio transactions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics (Honors) from Stanford University, and an MBA and a Juris Doctor in Law from the University of California, Los Angeles. Joseph also holds the professional designation of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).

Karan Mehandru leads the Venture Capital practice for Steadfast Financial. He focuses on the Future of Work, leading investments in SaaS, big data, cloud computing and mobile startups. Before joining Steadfast, Karan worked at Trinity Ventures as a General Partner, where his Investments have included Auth0, Cohesity, Outreach, MileIQ (acq. Microsoft), Preact (acq. Spotify), RJMetrics (acq. Magento) and Simply Measured (acq. Sprout Social). Prior to Trinity, Karan worked at Scale Ventures and spent almost a decade in GTM operating roles.

Brian Smiga is the co-founding partner at Alpha Venture Partners, an innovative late-stage venture fund that invests growth capital in category-leading technology companies (Lime, Wish, Careem, Coupang, Getaround, DoctorOnDemand) sourced from a network of 300+ early stage venture firms. Brian also serves as an advisor to Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a twenty-year-old venture firm that’s invested in 220 technology companies.

Prior to Alpha Venture Partners, Brian was the CEO and founder of Preclick, (sold to Smilebox), where he developed popular photo software licensed worldwide by HP, 3M, Sandisk, Walmart, Costco, CVS, and Walgreens. Prior to Preclick, Mr. Smiga was CEO at 3Path, (sold to Cadmus), an Intel and Goldman-Sachs backed early “Dropbox”, and the SVP of Product & Marketing at 1ClickCharge, an early “Paypal”, where his leadership resulted in a profitable exit to CMGi.

In the 1990s, Mr. Smiga began his career as a developer at Booz & Co, and in Silicon Valley, was co-founder and President of Portfolio Software and Actioneer, where he co-authored five collaboration software patents and licensed award-winning software to Apple, IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, AOL, 3Com, Acco, and Mastercard. Brian received a BA from Swarthmore College, and graduated first with a Masters of Philosophy from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. Brian is the founder of TEDxAsburyPark.

Amit is the Director of US Investments & Partnerships at Mahindra Partners Ventures, the Corporate Venture Capital of Mahindra Group. He has over 15 years in early stage venture investments across diverse areas ranging from cloud-native technologies, enterprise security, IoT, DevOps, smart manufacturing, robotics, mobility, clean-tech and ag-tech. His investments include Scoot Network – ride share electric scooters, Avaamo – Conversational AI, Cloudleaf – Cloud native IoT sensor mesh, Agtech AI Imagery – Resson and Gamaya, amongst others.

Amit has also pioneered industry leading research out of Stanford University on Corporate Venture Capital. In 2019, he was named as one of the Top 100 corporate venture capital professionals by Global Corporate Venturing. Amit has a Management degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he graduated as the Robert Joss Scholar.

Jeff is the Senior Investment Analyst at Arizona’s Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS) which provides retirement befits for Arizona’s police officers, firefighters, corrections/detention officers, and elected officials. He has gained responsibility for the capital appreciation opportunities portfolio and has recommended investments and directed due diligence for 15+ alternative asset mandates during his time with PSPRS. Prior to joining PSPRS, with working proficiency in the German language, Jeff lived in Germany teaching English at Leipzig University gaining both stronger communication skills and experience in leading staff teams, providing mentoring, and managing relationships with diverse clients and colleagues. He received an MBA from IE Business School and a BS in Finance and Economics from Grand Canyon University.