This StrictlyVC event will deliver an insider perspective on New York City’s bustling VC scene and wider trends in the community, along with the opportunity to meet and build connections with leading investors, entrepreneurs, and executives. Join us on September 10, 2026, at the West Village’s Ideal Glass Studios located at 9 W 8th Street.
Exclusive VC insights and networking at StrictlyVC
Mix and Mingle – Cocktail parties with killer content.
StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from Silicon Valley and the global venture scene. If you’re an investor looking to mingle with your peers and get insights you can’t find anywhere else, this event is for you. Get the inside scoop directly from sources you can trust, curated and hosted by the TechCrunch team.
We’re excited to return to New York City to gather the venture community and the startup scene it’s fueling at Ideal Glass Studios right in the West Village. It’ll make for the perfect backdrop for an evening of networking and expertise, and we have even more speakers to come!
As more of our work and relationships move online, live sports remain one of the few experiences that consistently bring people together in person. Collaborative Fund’s Craig Shapiro and DC United CEO Jason Levien discuss why community has become a valuable asset, how sports organizations are evolving into powerful business platforms, and where investors see the biggest opportunities at the intersection of technology, fandom, and real-world connection.
Keith Rabois has built a career by betting against conventional wisdom, think PayPal, LinkedIn, Square, Opendoor and Khosla Ventures. Join him for a conversation on where the startup ecosystem is getting it wrong, why AI is changing the rules of company building, and the bold ideas he believes founders should be pursuing now.
As AI makes it easier than ever to create products and content, what still brings people together? Famed founders Tristan Walker (Walker & Company) and Brynn Putnam (Mirror) join us to explore why community, identity, and shared experiences are becoming even more valuable in the AI era and how they’re building products that foster genuine connection.
For more than two decades, Deven Parekh has backed many of enterprise software’s defining companies through multiple technology shifts. He’ll share how the investment landscape has changed, what separates enduring businesses from short-lived hype, why strategic acquirers are paying record prices for the best software companies, and where founders have the greatest opportunity to build lasting value in the AI era.
The Collaborative Fund is one of New York City’s flagship investment groups, with a particular focus on climate technology and consumer industries. They’ve invested in everything from Kickstarter and Reddit to Sweetgreen and Beyond Meat, among dozens of other successful exits. And yes, there are plenty of AI investments within their portfolio as well.
Partnership Opportunities
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Tekedra N. Mawakana is the co-CEO of Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company.
As co-CEO, Tekedra oversees the company’s strategy for the wide adoption of the Waymo Driver. She boasts 20+ years of experience advising consumer technology companies to advance their business interests globally.
Tekedra currently serves on the Board of Directors for Intuit and the Advisory Council for Boom Technology. She is a social impact-focused angel investor and an Advisor and LP with the Operator Collective.
Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Amjad Masad is CEO and co-founder of Replit, a company that makes coding accessible to billions on the planet, from children creating school projects to enterprises running their business. Prior to Replit, Amjad worked at Meta, where he led the JavaScript infrastructure team and contributed to popular open source developer tools. In addition, he played a key role as a founding engineer at Codecademy, a prominent online coding school.
Sonali joined the Accel team in London in 2008 and has witnessed the European ecosystem come of age firsthand. She focuses on consumer (especially marketplace), next generation financial services and software companies.
Sonali was responsible for Accel’s investments in Spotify, which went public in 2018; Letgo, which joined forces with OfferUP in 2020, and Avito, which was acquired in 2015 by Naspers. In addition, Sonali led Accel’s investment in Calastone, which was acquired by The Carlyle Group in October 2020. Sonali’s current portfolio contains a number of high-potential companies, including: Kry, the pan-European digital health platform; Monzo, the digital, mobile-only bank; Primer, the automation platform for payments and commerce; Shift Technology, the leader in AI-driven fraud software; sennder, Europe’s number one digital freight forwarder; Soldo, the spend management platform, and Wallapop, the mobile marketplace for online goods. Recent investments include eldercare online marketplace Lottie, Omnea, the AI-powered procurement orchestration and supplier risk management platform, and Taito.ai, which automates performance enablement with AI.
Prior to Accel, Sonali was a partner at Atlas Venture. Sonali was born and raised in Bombay, India. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Baiju Bhatt is the Founder and CEO of Aetherflux, a U.S. aerospace company delivering energy to planet Earth with space solar power. He Co-Founded Robinhood in 2013 to democratize finance for all. Today, Robinhood is a publicly-traded company with more than 20 million customers, and he still serves on the Board. Mr. Bhatt holds a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University.
Navin leads Mayfield as Managing Partner. Under his leadership, Mayfield has raised eight U.S. funds and guided over 80 companies to positive outcomes. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors seventeen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Navin’s investments have created over $120 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs.
During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public and 27 have been acquired. Navin was one of the earliest Silicon Valley investors to leverage the promise of tech in India. He is Vice Chair of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund and advisor to Neythri.org.
Navin is an active philanthropist dedicated to supporting education, expanding opportunities for underrepresented communities, and addressing food insecurity.
As an entrepreneur, Navin has co-founded or led three startups including VXtreme: a streaming media platform, acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media; Rivio/CPA.com: a SaaS provider for small businesses, and iBeam Broadcasting (NASDAQ:IBEM): a streaming media content delivery network. Navin holds an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, where he was honored with the distinguished IIT Alumni Award.
Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky, a public benefit company building an open social network. Previously, she built Happening, a site for social events, and developed Zcash, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency. She has also worked as an organizer at digital rights nonprofits.
Katie Haun is Founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a global venture capital firm headquartered in Silicon Valley that manages billions in investments in digital assets and frontier tech. The firm’s institutional investors include prominent sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pensions, financial institutions, and other global organizations.
Katie is a sought after board member and personal investor. As Coinbase’s first and longest-serving independent director, she was an early architect of the company’s global regulatory strategy, serving through its IPO and subsequent growth as a publicly traded company. She also served as Chair of the Nomination and Governance and the Audit and Risk Committees. Katie is a personal investor in companies like Anduril, Anthropic, Cerebras (IPO), Coinbase, Cognition, Databricks, Deel, Edison, Figma (IPO), Groq (acquired by NVIDIA), Neko, OpenAI, Physical Intelligence, Replit, Revolut, and SpaceX.
Prior to her venture career, Katie spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. She secured successful jury verdicts in every case she tried and led high-profile prosecutions related to the Silk Road task force, the 2012 Hells Angels murder trial, and the Nuestra Familia prison gang RICO takedown. She also led cyber, corporate, and violent crime investigations in partnership with the FBI, Homeland Security, SEC, and Treasury, and established the DOJ’s first digital currency task force. At headquarters, she held senior positions in the National Security Division and the Attorney General’s office where her portfolio covered antitrust, tax, and national security. Katie represented the DOJ on CFIUS and the FBI Committee that approved all significant national security undercover operations.
She was later recruited as a General Partner to Andreessen Horowitz, where she co-led their blockchain franchise, investing out of three funds with billions under management.
She has testified as an expert on the intersection of technology and regulation before both houses of Congress, and taught at Stanford Business School and Stanford Law School. An honors graduate of Stanford Law School, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Daniel Lurie was born and raised in San Francisco. Daniel founded Tipping Point Community in 2005. Under his direction as CEO, Tipping Point has raised over $500 million to help house, employ, educate and support hundreds of thousands of Bay Area families. Former Mayor Ed Lee selected Daniel in 2013 to lead the San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee, an effort that brought over $240 million in economic impact to the region. Following
the devastating fires in the North Bay in 2017, Daniel and Tipping Point partnered with 90 Bay Area business and community leaders to organize Band Together – a benefit concert that raised $17 million for those hardest hit by the deadly fires. In total, Tipping Point’s Emergency Fire Relief Fund raised over $34 million.
He is a graduate of Duke University and obtained his Master’s in Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He lives in the City with his wife Becca and two school-aged children.
Ethan Thornton is the CEO and founder of Mach Industries, a next-generation defense technology and manufacturing company. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before launching Mach in 2023. Thornton’s ultimate goal is to create decentralized strategic capabilities that guarantee the defense of freedom worldwide.
Disrupt 2026: Meet the connections that’ll change everything
Join 10,000 founders, VCs, and operators on October 13-15 for high-signal networking, real deals, and tactical insights you can use immediately. Register now to save up to $330 on your pass. Get up to 30% off with bundle passes.
TechCrunch offers many ways for partners to engage directly with our attendees before, during, and after the event. Get in touch with us to learn more.