Jiake Liu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Outer, a Santa Monica-based outdoor living brand with a proprietary retail platform that’s turning customers’ homes into crowdsourced showrooms. He’s successfully raised from top-tier VC funds such as Sequoia Capital, Capital Today.

Jiake is also an avid angel investor and advisor for early-stage startups in Los Angeles. Jiake was born in China, grew up in Alabama, and resides in Los Angeles. He has a Computer Engineering degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and previously worked as an engineer in the telecom and video game industries.

Joy is a Creative Designer, Marketer, and Community Builder. She specializes in digital and print marketing, pitch deck design, branding, event planning, and public speaking. Joy’s corporate experience includes her role as the Head of Community at Everywhere Ventures, a globally backed early-stage venture fund, and various positions at MassChallenge, a network for global innovators. 

Joy authored “Dear Mountain: A Poetry Collection on Love and Loss” and holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where she studied Environmental Science, Architecture, and Economics. She was an active member of the Harvard College Debating Union.

Lauren Lee is an entrepreneur with a particular interest in hospitality and Consumer Packaged Goods. In addition to her position at Lair East Labs, she is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Away Bar, a Shanghai-based company bringing together ice cream and premium spirits from around the world.

Prior to starting her business, Lauren worked in corporate marketing and communications at a growth-stage healthtech firm, assisting executives on the product and business development teams in initiating deals with health systems and large pharmaceutical and biotech firms. She graduated Cum Laude with a bachelor’s in East Asian Studies, concentrating on China, from Yale University, where she founded a dinner and cocktail pop-up partnering with Michelin-starred chefs in New York and New Haven.

Han is a California based early-stage investor and entrepreneur with specializations in fintech, e-commerce and audio AI. Han holds an MBA degree from Columbia Business School. Before MBA, Han started his career as a TMT investment banker with JP Morgan in Hong Kong. He later shifted into the digital banking space as a project lead with DBS Digital Bank in Singapore. Han was also the co-founder and CEO of LGW, Singapore’s first e-commerce marketplace for skills-building education.

Minhao is currently the Strategy Manager at Didi Chuxing Technology Co. Minhao began his career as an engineer, designing buildings and bridges in the United States. As an entrepreneur, he leveraged engineering and digital technologies to optimize the food supply chain system in China from farm to fork. He holds a patent for his food production center. During his time as an MBA student, he helped food and agriculture startups in Southeast Asia and Africa in fundraising. Minhao has a strong passion for green and sustainable investing. He boasts extensive experience in investment and product management in Lighthouse Capital and Amazon.

Minhao holds an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, a M.S. in Civil Engineering from Syracuse University and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Tongji University. In his spare time, Minhao enjoys reading, traveling, and car racing. As a car racer, he spent months at Shanghai International Circuit and Ningbo International Speedway. He is also a photographer used to develop his own films.

Li-Ann is a strategy and operations leader with nearly 20 years of start-up, scale-up, and F500 experience in consumer-oriented companies and professional services.

She specializes in driving results in ambiguous contexts – improving strategic and operating processes, qualitative and quantitative decision support, and iterative execution.

Most recently, she has been focused on advising early-stage companies and enjoys tackling 0-1 problems with lightweight solutions. At Spotify, she worked alongside multidisciplinary teams to enable its 2018 public listing. As the company grew 10X, she scaled strategic planning cadences. She directly managed a team to deliver on various growth, efficiency, and compliance initiatives. At White & Case, she worked with executives to increase revenue and contain costs through process design, organization restructures, and systems implementations, rolling out global changes across 30 countries. She began her career as a consultant at E&Y, performing business analyses for clients in the media, retail, real estate, and beverage sectors and managing teams in the US, Asia, and EMEA.

Ruizhi is a serial entrepreneur and product manager with 10 years of hands-on experience in product development, user experience study, business strategy, and market research. He was the founding engineer at 3DM systems and developed products worth $140 million. Ruizhi has a strong technical background in Computer Vision Research, Robotics, Software Engineering, and IoT Hardware. Furthermore, he is the co-inventor of 4 granted US patents. Ruizhi holds an MBA degree from Georgia Tech.

Avi is the former Head of Product at Neeva where he joined the founders, former Google execs Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, as the first product hire. Before that, he was at Google where he led a product team building a new video ads business focused on shopping & commercial actions for YouTube which was the fastest ever to grow from $0 to $1 billion. 

Avi loves leading teams through the chaos & ambiguity of zero to one problems. He excels at product strategy, analytics & leadership.

Charlyn is a seasoned deal lawyer who brings a wealth of experience from the business and legal worlds into her practice. Prior to launching Rikka Law, Charlyn was a partner in the Technology Transactions & Privacy Group at Perkins Coie, one of the largest law firms in the United States. Before Perkins Coie, Charlyn was an associate at Arent Fox and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Charlyn has deep experience in drafting and negotiating complex commercial agreements, including strategic partnerships, cloud service agreements, data licensing and other technology agreements. She counsels clients on privacy and data issues. She has particular expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), virtual reality (VR)/ augmented reality (AR)/ immersive reality (XR), cloud services, blockchain, digital identity, and the Internet of Things.

Stephen Stanczak is the Principal at Ondyr Marketing, a digital marketing firm based in NYC. Stephen’s focus is on SEO, PPC, and Google Analytics, with a specialization on schema markup. Stephen has deep marketing experience including work on several digital marketing campaigns for companies such as Microsoft, General Electric and various SMBs. Stephen holds marketing degrees from Temple and Cornell University. He has spoken and mentored at Techstars, Baruch College, Techhub NYC, SEMrush Live, New York Marketing Association, and Grand Central Tech.