How Investors Think About Data

Lauren is a Partner at Sequoia, where she focuses on data, infrastructure, and climate tech. She works closely with several Sequoia companies, including Statsig, Census, and Deno. Previously, Lauren served as Director of Product at Segment. She started her career in software engineering and did some early-stage investing on the side for a number of years before joining Sequoia.

Leigh Marie Braswell is a principal at Founders Fund focused on data & ML infrastructure and applications. Before joining Founders Fund, she was an early engineer & the first product manager at Scale AI, where she originally built and later led product development for the LiDAR/3D annotation products, used by many autonomous vehicles, robots, and AR/VR companies as a core step in their machine learning lifecycles. Leigh Marie is originally from Alabama, and loves to play poker, run long distances, and scuba dive.

Pete Soderling is the founder of Data Council and the Data Community Fund. As a former software engineer, repeat founder and investor in more than 40 data-oriented startups, Pete’s lifetime goal is to help 1,000 engineers start successful companies. Most importantly, Pete is a community builder — from his earliest days of working with the data engineering community starting in 2013, he has witnessed the unique power of specialized networks to bring inspiration, knowledge and support to technical professionals. 

Previously, Pete founded Hakka Labs (a social network for software engineers), Stratus Security (an early cloud-based API platform) and mechanikal (a software development agency in NYC). He is a graduate of New York University, has spoken at events such as TEDx, O’Reilly Strata and QCon, and has worked actively in supporting technical founders around the globe.