StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider VC content while creating meaningful connections with leading investors & entrepreneurs. Join us for an evening of intimate interviews with industry heavy hitters and impactful conversation.
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 watch some killer content, this event is for you. Get the inside scoop directly from sources you can trust. Previous events included interviews with Sam Altman (OpenAI), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), Katie Haun (Haun Ventures), Hans Tung (GGV Capital) and many more!
More speakers to be added to the lineup. Check back in for more updates.
Editor in Chief & General Manager TechCrunch
Campbell Brown is co-founder and CEO of Forum AI, an independent AI evaluation company helping AI labs, enterprises, and government contractors meet emerging requirements around bias, neutrality, and accuracy in high-stakes AI systems. Forum AI produces audit-grade evaluations for sensitive domains like politics, foreign affairs, and mental health, where errors, bias, or hallucinations create real compliance, commercial, and reputational risk. The company’s expert-in-the-loop methodology scales the judgment of world-leading domain experts, including Antony Blinken, Kevin Mc Carthy, and institutional partners such as the Cleveland Clinic, Atlantic Council, and Manhattan Institute. Previously, Brown was Vice President of Global Media Partnerships at Meta, where she led teams overseeing news, entertainment, and sports partnerships across all Meta platforms and worked with governments and policymakers on content policy and misinformation. Before joining Meta, Brown was an award-winning journalist and anchor for CNN and NBC News. At CNN, she hosted “Campbell Brown,” a daily prime-time news program. At NBC News, she served as Weekend Today host and White House correspondent.
Campbell Brown has seen the media crisis from every angle. She reported the news, then ran what became the world’s most powerful news distribution platform as Head of News at Meta. Now, as people begin to shift towards AI as their primary way to get information, Brown is building a startup to ensure AI systems are accurate and trustworthy. If anyone knows what happens when information goes wrong at scale, it’s her.
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch. You can contact or verify outreach from Connie by emailing connie@strictlyvc.com or connie@techcrunch.com, or via encrypted message at ConnieLoizos.53 on Signal.
Most founders treat corporate VCs as a last resort. Nicolas Sauvage thinks that’s a mistake and he has the portfolio to prove it. The TDK Ventures president joins us to discuss how corporate capital works differently, what industrial giants actually want from their startup bets, and why founders should be paying attention.
Replit started as a browser-based code editor. It’s now one of the most direct threats to how software gets built and who gets to build it. Amjad Masad chats to us about what it takes to compete with players like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft from a scrappy SF startup, and how fast “anyone can build software” goes from slogan to reality.
As CTO of Uber, Praveen Neppalli Naga oversees the engineering and science powering one of the world’s largest real-time platforms. From AI-driven logistics to building flexible earning systems for millions of drivers and couriers, he’s shaping how technology operates at global scale. Naga shares lessons from Uber’s evolution and how to build resilient, high-impact systems in the age of AI.
Amjad Masad is CEO and co-founder of Replit, a company that makes coding accessible to billions on the planet from children making 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.
Praveen Neppalli Naga is Chief Technology Officer at Uber, where he leads the engineering and science strategy and technical execution. Since joining Uber in 2015, his focus has been creating outstanding experiences for customers while building a flexible earning platform for drivers and couriers. Prior to joining Uber, Praveen held engineering leadership roles at LinkedIn. There, he spent seven years building early products and data infrastructure, contributing to the foundation for LinkedIn’s rapid growth. Originally from southern India, Praveen moved to the US in 2002, and went on to earn his master’s in computer science from the University of Nebraska. Passionate about community and mentorship, Praveen serves as an executive sponsor for the “Women at Uber” US&C Employee Resource Group. He is also committed to supporting other parents of Autistic children, drawing from his firsthand experience with his own son.