The Startup Battlefield is one of the highlights of Disrupt, and we can’t wait to see which of the thousands of applicants will be selected to pitch to panels of top-tier VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. It’s always epic, and every contender is on the road to making a huge impact on the world.
The judges’ feedback provides insight into their criteria to determine whether a company is viable. Get a front-row seat to their expert feedback and learn the key qualities that make a startup thrive, only at Disrupt 2024.
We’re thrilled to reveal our next group of investors who will assess the startups and follow up each pitch with an intense, revealing Q&A. Be on the lookout for more big names being announced soon!
Morgan Beller, General Partner, NFX
Morgan is a general partner at NFX, a seed-stage venture capital fund. Most recently, Morgan was at Facebook, where she originally joined as part of the corporate development team in May 2017. Her main project was trying to answer the question, “How should Facebook be thinking about blockchain?” This evolved into creating the dedicated blockchain team, which later became Diem and Novi. Morgan was head of strategy for Facebook’s Novi. Prior to Facebook, Morgan ran corporate development at Medium, where she led the Embedly acquisition and helped develop the subscription strategy. Before that, Morgan was on the Deal Team at Andreessen Horowitz. For the latter half of her time there, she solely focused on the early-stage ecosystem.
Shravan Narayen, Partner, IVP
Shravan is a partner at IVP who invests primarily in enterprise infrastructure and applications built by opinionated founders solving deep technical problems. Shravan’s investments include Perplexity, Baseten, Chainguard, Cortex, Eightfold, and Glean. Prior to IVP, Shravan has worked across all phases of a startup’s life cycle, from pre-PMF to IPO, most recently in product at Snowflake. He strives to bring that context as he partners with founders building the next generational companies.
Jon Rosenbaum, Managing Director, Insight Partners
Jon (also known by friends and co-workers as “Rosie”) joined Insight Partners in 2014. He focuses on vertical and horizontal application software and is responsible for executing transactions and assisting in portfolio management post-close. He has also specialized in helping portfolio companies source and execute M&A. He is currently a board director at many Insight companies, including 6sense, LeanTaaS, SimpleNexus, Templafy, Florence, ComplianceQuest, and Earnix. Some of his exits include Docusign (NASDAQ: DOCU), nCino (NASDAQ: NCNO), Frontline Education (acquired by Thoma Bravo), and CloudCraze (acquired by Salesforce).
Sharon Winter, Vice President, Atomic
Sharon is a serial entrepreneur and company builder at venture studio Atomic, specializing in the critical 0-1 phase of startup development. Her superpower is taking ideas and transforming them into successful companies. At Atomic, Sharon has been instrumental in ideating over 100 businesses and building over a dozen companies to Series A, leveraging her expertise working with engineering, design, growth, and business operations. Before joining Atomic, Sharon founded eight profitable companies across diverse industries, including entertainment, media, gaming, CPG, and SaaS, achieving two successful exits. Her background in industrial and robotics design and human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University has equipped her with the skills to quickly understand and adapt to various markets. Sharon’s goal is to achieve product-market fit faster, making her a vital force in Atomic’s mission to build the next generation of market-leading companies.
Sangeen Zeb, General Partner, Google Ventures
Sangeen is a general partner at GV, focusing on high-growth AI and enterprise investments. He works with both early- and late-stage startups, and his investments include Chronosphere, Courier, Lacework, and Medallion. Before joining GV in 2021, Sangeen was an investor with Founders Circle Capital, where he helped lead the firm’s investments in Attentive, Algolia, Cohesity, Confluent (IPO), Databricks, Segment (acquired by Twilio), Robinhood (IPO) and UiPath (IPO). He spent over five years at Centerview Capital, where he sourced investments in Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft) and Sauce Labs (acquired by TPG) and began his investment career at Summit Partners.
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The winner of Startup Battlefield, who will walk away with a $100,000 equity-free prize, will be announced at Disrupt 2024. This is your opportunity to witness the future of tech — make sure you’re there! Grab your tickets here. Save up to $600 if you register before August 24.