Shila Nieves Burney is an awarding winning project manager, investor, mentor and advisor. Shila spent a 20+ year professional career working closely with leading organizations and exceptional talents to create solutions that address disparities through investment in human capital. Her super-power is connecting!

After spending a year sourcing investors for a startup that culminated in a $5M term sheet, mentoring and advising founders of color, Shila was able to see first-hand challenges diverse entrepreneurs face getting access to capital and the resources they needed to grow and scale their companies.

She founded Zane Venture Fund, a seed fund that would invest in underrepresented founders with the goal of closing the funding gap and generating high returns for investors, and Zane Access which provides early-stage companies led by diverse teams access to cross-functional experts, resources, best practices and customized content critical to accelerating growth. Zane Access™ launched the Pre-Capital program, a program designed to support founders in becoming capital ready. And, recently, the Zane Access™ University, which is an educational program for university entrepreneurs to help them build and grow innovation-driven and impactful ventures. 

Eric Bahn is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in software startups at the pre-seed and seed stages, backing founders who exhibit great execution and high velocity (we call it ‘hustle’).

Previous to Hustle Fund, Eric was an angel investor and venture partner at 500 Startups. And prior to becoming a professional investor, he spent over a decade as an operator and entrepreneur. Eric draws from his product and growth experience to advise his founders in scaling their own enterprises.

Eric is a native of Detroit, Michigan and first arrived to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University (BA, MA), which launched his career into software and startups. Eric is happily married with two kids.

Brian Brackeen is a General Partner at Lightship Capital, the $50 million dollar Cincinnati-based VC firm dedicated to backing underrepresented entrepreneurs in the Midwest. As General Partner, Brian oversees fund operations, leads the AI, Design & Engineering teams, and serves on the investment committee.

Brian is a thought leader in the Artificial Intelligence space, having founded and led a globally recognized provider of face recognition technologies. His leadership saw the company positioned alongside tech giants like Microsoft and Face++ as one of the industry’s foremost providers, with operations in the US and Asia. Brian’s early acknowledgment of the dangers associated with algorithmic ethnic bias, stance against the government use of facial recognition, and commitment to eliminating racial bias in its datasets inspired the current movement toward organized regulation and oversight of the technology.

Prior to becoming a tech entrepreneur, Brian served as a Senior Project Manager for Apple Inc. and as Senior Managing Consultant at IBM.

In addition to his work at Lightship, Brian lectures extensively around the world on entrepreneurship, code, the digital economy, AI and machine learning — and participates in mentorship programs for organizations like Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code and The School District of Miami, and is an advisor to the University of Chicago Science Commercialization Center.