As is tradition, along with the annual Midas List, TrueBridge publishes the Brink List – a shortlist of investors who have been making a name for themselves in VC and are poised to break into the Midas ranks in the near future.
Over the past five years, Brink Listers have made good on their promise. Almost a quarter of the 53 investors on prior Brink Lists have since made it onto Midas, and many more continue to hit key milestones in their VC careers.
Below is the latest class of Brink List investors to watch closely now and in the future.
Phin Barnes, First Round Capital
Over the past eight years at First Round, Phin has worked his way up from intern to leading investments in some of the firm’s most promising portfolio companies, including Blue Apron, Birchbox, and SmartThings.
Phin, a proud sneakerhead and hip-hop aficionado, began his career as the second employee at AND1 Basketball, where he helped scale the sneaker company from $15 million to over $225 million in revenue. Later on, Phin channeled his love of sports, product development and brand building into technology, and founded ResponDesign—an independent video game company and creator of the first fitness game for Xbox and Playstation 2.
Today, Phin is known for his passion for product and design, whether it be Birchbox’s customized beauty products or a SmartThings hub, as well as his passion for evolving the “UX of VC” – and making every meeting into a positive impact for founders, VCs and all firms involved.
Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
Even with an impressive three degrees in engineering and computer science, from three countries – Greece, the UK and the US – Niko believes education and pedigree matter far less for an entrepreneur than passion and appetite for learning. Recently named a managing director at General Catalyst, Niko applies the same intellectual curiosity that led him throughout his academic career to his work with entrepreneurs, focusing especially on product-driven companies in virtual and augmented reality and those tackling the issue of rising housing prices.
Niko’s notable investments include Snap, Paribus (a price tracking app acquired by Capital One), and ClassDojo (the creator of classroom communities). He also serves on the boards of machine learning company Castle Global, real estate crowdfunding startup RealtyShares (as an observer), and two companies currently in stealth.
Ashley Carroll, Social Capital
While relatively new to the investment side of VC, Ashley has proven many times her ability to create great product. Before joining Social Capital in 2015, where she’s now a partner, Ashley held product management leadership roles at DocuSign, Optimizely, and SurveyMonkey, joining each as an early employee and playing an integral role in their respective hyper-growth phases.
Ashley initially joined Social Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, but within a few months, she was captured enough by the firm’s ambitious mission (to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems) to join full time. She currently serves on the boards of mPharma, a pharmacy benefits manager for sub-Saharan Africa, and Sempre Health, an individualized healthcare pricing platform that improves medical adherence and profitability. She also co-led Social Capital’s investment in mParticle, a multi-channel customer data platform for marketers, and serves as a key advisor to the company.
Jerry Chen, Greylock Partners
Jerry is a long-time veteran of enterprise technology, having spent 10 years at VMWare, a pioneer in virtualization technology. At VMWare, Jerry launched dozens of products, including several “1.0” releases, and founded the company’s Cloud Application Platform and Enterprise Desktop business units. He was also part of the team responsible for Cloud Foundry, the open-source, multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service that has since become an industry standard, and coined the term “virtual desktop infrastructure” (VDI) as part of VMWare’s enterprise desktop and application virtualization businesses.
Since joining Greylock in 2013, Jerry has channeled his operational experience into creating and defining new product categories for the enterprise, as well as developing a go-to-market framework for scaling product. He currently sits on the boards of Docker, Attic Labs, Cato Networks, Gladly, and Rhumbix – companies helping to transform the enterprise and the way we work – and is a board observer at Cloudera.
Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
As a Wyoming native, Pat’s first job was a roofer. But he only truly appreciated what it meant to be a builder when he shared in the ups and downs of creating a company.
Since joining Sequoia Capital in 2007, where he’s currently on the growth team, Pat has gravitated towards companies with the courage to bulldoze incumbents through the application of next-gen technology, like MarkLogic (the enterprise NoSQL database) and ServiceNow (the enterprise management workflow platform), as well as those breaking new ground in existing industries, like identity management company Okta, which recently debuted on NASDAQ.
When he isn’t on a 4am conference call with his founders – as recalled by HubSpot co-founder…