Hamilton E. James, Executive Vice Chairman, Blackstone
Keynote
Hamilton (“Tony”) E. James is Executive Vice Chairman of Blackstone, and a member of Blackstone’s board of directors. He is also a member of Blackstone’s Management Committee and sits on the firm’s various investment committees. Mr. James previously served as the firm’s President and Chief Operating Officer.
Prior to joining Blackstone in 2002, Mr. James was Chairman of Global Investment Banking and Private Equity at Credit Suisse First Boston and a member of the Executive Board. Prior to the acquisition of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette by Credit Suisse First Boston in 2000, Mr. James was the Chairman of DLJ’s Banking Group, responsible for all the firm’s investment banking and merchant banking activities. Mr. James joined DLJ in 1975, became head of DLJ’s global M&A group in 1982, founded DLJ Merchant Banking, Inc. in 1985, and was named Chairman of the Banking Group in 1995.
Mr. James is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Costco Wholesale Corporation, and has served on a number of other corporate Boards. Mr. James is Chairman of the Finance Committee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Mount Sinai Health System, member of the Center for American Progress Board of Trustees, Vice Chairman of Trout Unlimited’s Coldwater Conservation Fund, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Wildlife Conservation Society, Advisory Board member of The Montana Land Reliance, Advisory Council member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Chairman of the Education Finance Institute, Advisory Board member of the Max S. Baucus Institute at the University of Montana, and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of American Ballet Theatre. He is also a former member of the President’s Export Council and a former Commissioner of The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
In 2018, Mr. James co-authored the second edition of Rescuing Retirement, a book proposing a solution to America’s looming retirement crisis. The first edition was published in 2016. He has also published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Harvard Business Review and other major publications.
Mr. James graduated magna cum laude with a BA from Harvard College in 1973 and was a John Harvard Scholar. He earned an MBA with high distinction from the Harvard Business School and graduated as a Baker Scholar in 1975.
Karen Gordon Mills, Senior Fellow, Harvard Business School
Moderator
Karen Gordon Mills served in President Barack Obama's Cabinet as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013, and was a member of the President’s National Economic Council. Mills is currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, where she is part of the entrepreneurship faculty and a leading authority on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and innovation. She is the author of the book Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, as well as a number of Harvard Business School white papers and publications.
Mills has spent 25 years in venture capital and private equity, including as a partner in several firms. She is currently president of MMP Group, whose investments include companies in software services, food, skin care, and large-scale data analytics. She is Vice Chair of Envoy, an immigration services provider, and a Director of Churchill Capital II and Clarivate Analytics.
Mills also serves in leadership roles for several policy organizations, including: Chair, Advisory Committee for the Private Capital Research Institute; Co-Chair, Bipartisan Policy Center’s Main Street Finance Task Force; Member, Council on Foreign Relations; Member, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee; Director, National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a Member of the Harvard Corporation and a past Vice Chair of the Harvard Overseers.
Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She has served on numerous public boards, including Arrow Electronics, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Triangle Pacific Corporation, and Guardian Life Insurance. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, and is a frequent guest on news outlets, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, with recent op-ed placements in American Banker, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.
Tricia Glynn, Managing Director, Advent International
Keynote
Tricia Glynn is a Managing Director at Advent International, one of the largest and most experienced global private equity firms. With offices on four continents, Advent has established a globally integrated team of more than 200 investment professionals. Since 1989, Advent has invested $47 billion in over 350 companies across 41 countries. In 2019, Advent raised $17.5 billion for its ninth global private equity fund, GPE IX, and $2 billion for a technology-focused companion fund to GPE IX, Advent Tech. Prior to joining Advent in 2016, Ms. Glynn spent 15 years investing across both Bain Capital Private Equity and the Private Equity Group of Goldman, Sachs & Co. She has closed transactions across the retail, healthcare, business services, real estate and media sectors both domestically and internationally.
Within Advent, Ms. Glynn leads investments in the Retail, Consumer and Leisure sector, and she invests globally. Her current directorships include lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU), where she also serves on the Nominating and Governance committee, and First Watch, a farm-to-table brunch restaurant chain with over 350 domestic restaurants. In 2018, Ms. Glynn was involved in Advent’s acquisition of Walmart Brazil (now Grupo BIG), Brazil’s third-largest food retailer, in a corporate carve-out from Walmart Inc. In December 2019, she led Advent’s newest investment in the beauty sector in Olaplex, a founder-led, efficacy and science-based hair care brand. Other Advent retail and consumer portfolio companies include Aimbridge Hospitality, Serta Simmons Bedding and Sovos Brands, comprising food brands noosa yoghurt, Michael Angelo's and Rao's Homemade. She serves on Advent’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
In addition, Ms. Glynn is on the Board of Trustees for the Boston Medical Center, Board of Overseers for the Boston Ballet, a Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the NationSwell Council.
Ms. Glynn earned an AB in Biochemical Sciences, cum laude, from Harvard College and an MBA, with high distinction, as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School. She lives in Newton, MA, with her two children.
Jon McNeill, Advisory Partner, Advent International
Moderator
Jon McNeill has founded and scaled six companies, led teams creating tens of thousands of jobs and delivered multi-billion dollar returns for investors. He is the 2012 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and in 2013 he was named "Most Admired CEO" in Boston. He has also operated at scaled companies leading hypergrowth in revenues and operations. Jon was President at Tesla from 2015-2018, before becoming the COO at Lyft in 2018. He began his career at Bain & Company. He serves on the boards of Lululemon, TruMotion and the Brigham & Women’s hospital in Boston. McNeill is a graduate of Northwestern University.
Jim Breyer, Founder & CEO, Breyer Capital
Keynote
Jim is the Founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, a premier venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. Jim has been an early investor in over 40 technology companies that have completed highly successful public offerings or mergers. As a lead investor and Director, many of these investments returned well over 100 times their cost, and over a dozen more have returned well over 25 times their cost.
Jim is the Co-Chairman of IDG Capital based in Beijing, with offices in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. IDG Capital was the first firm to bring venture capital into China, and Jim has been passionate and has a long track record of successfully investing in China and partnering with leading Chinese entrepreneurs. He is also a Co-Founder of Accel KKR based in Menlo Park, CA.
Over the past several years, Jim has developed a deep personal and investment interest in long-term oriented entrepreneurs and teams working in artificial/augmented intelligence (AI) and human assisted intelligence (HAI) and he has made numerous investments in this space.
Jim currently serves on the board of directors of Blackstone (BX), and has previously served as a investor/lead Director at 21st Century Fox, Dell, Etsy, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Wal-Mart, and many other highly successful technology companies. Jim is currently an Emeritus of the Advisory Board at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. He is also an Emeritus of Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s senior governing board; a member of Harvard Business School’s Board of Dean’s Advisors, a member of Harvard University’s Global Advisory Council since inception; a founding member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at Stanford’s School of Engineering and a Chairman of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund as well as a founding member of The Stanford University Human Assisted Intelligence (AI) Program which was launched in March, 2019.
In addition, Jim is a long-time active volunteer as a Trustee of SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles, and Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).
Josh Lerner, Professor, Harvard Business School
Moderator
Josh Lerner graduated from Yale College with a special divisional major. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department.
Much of his research focuses on venture capital and private equity organizations. (This research is collected in three books, The Venture Capital Cycle, The Money of Invention, and Boulevard of Broken Dreams.) He also examines policies on innovation and how they impact firm strategies. (That research is discussed in the books Innovation and Its Discontents, The Comingled Code, and The Architecture of Innovation.) He co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program and serves as co-editor of their publication, Innovation Policy and the Economy. He founded and runs the Private Capital Research Institute, a nonprofit devoted to encouraging access to data and research, and has been a frequent leader of and participant in the World Economic Forum projects and events.
In the 1993-1994 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs. Over the past two decades, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, now in its fifth edition, and the textbook Venture Capital, Private Equity, and the Financing of Entrepreneurship.) He also established and teaches doctoral courses on entrepreneurship, teaches in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and leads executive courses on private equity. He is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor and Chair of the Entrepreneurial Management unit.
Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Swedish government’s Global Entrepreneurship Research Award and Cheng Siwei Award for Venture Capital Research. For information on Josh’s compensated outside activities, please see www.bella-pm.com.
Dayna Grayson, Co-Founder and General Partner, Construct Capital
Keynote
Dayna is a co-founder and general partner at Construct Capital after serving as a partner at NEA for 7 years (2012-2019). She invests at the early stages in entrepreneurs seeking to transform industries from enterprise automation in to consumer products and services. She is a director of Desktop Metal, Framebridge, Evenly, and Tulip, among others (including Onshape, acquired by PTC). She invests in companies that leverage emerging technology to reinvent markets, greatly expanding the total addressable market through automation. She's well versed in technologies such as 3D printing and advanced production and always looking for the next market ready tech that can be vertically integrated to change consumer experiences. Dayna founded the NEA Design Studio in 2013 and works closely with technologies that drive design, engineering and automation.
Prior to joining NEA, Dayna was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners in Boston where she focused on seed and early stage consumer internet and SaaS investments. She is an active member of the startup communities along the east coast including Boston and New York.
Previously, Dayna led product design efforts at Blackbaud [BLKB], the leading global provider of software to nonprofit organizations. She managed products throughout their life cycle as the company grew to over $130 million in revenue and completed a successful public offering. Dayna started her career as a consultant at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young and graduated from University of Virginia (Systems Engineering) and Harvard Business School.
Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Visiting Associate Professor, Finance department, MIT Sloan
Moderator
Matthew Rhodes-Kropf is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Finance department at MIT Sloan where he teaches entrepreneurship. Rhodes-Kropf is also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures as well as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Rhodes-Kropf’s research on venture capital and exits has been published in many leading finance and economic journals. His work seeks to understand how capital markets interact with the creation of new firms, their financing, growth, governance, and their ultimate exit through a successful IPO or sale or through failure. He has published in leading finance and economic journals, including The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, The RAND Journal of Economics, and The Journal of Business. His 2004 paper "Market Valuation and Merger Waves," published in The Journal of Finance, was nominated for the Brattle Prize for Best Paper in Corporate Finance in 2005.
Previously a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management department at Harvard Business School, Rhodes-Kropf has also published many HBS cases. His work has been profiled in the Financial Times, The Economist, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Kauffman publications, Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, PeHub, and many popular blogs. He is regularly quoted in major print media such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Financial Times, and has discussed his work on television, with appearances on CNBC, BBC, and CNN. Matt gives talks throughout the world on the financing of innovation. At Harvard Matt taught the VCPE (venture capital and private equity) course in the MBA elective curriculum and in executive education programs. He also oversees myriad student ventures and has advised literally hundreds of founders. He was also formerly the Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor of Business at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, where he taught entrepreneurial finance and received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Rhodes-Kropf is also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures. Previously he founded RK Ventures, the predecessor to Tectonic, where he managed two successful funds. Matt invested in companies such as Rackspace, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Xenex, Kymeta, Humatics, and Axioma among others. Matt was formerly the CFO of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, where he worked with the founder to launch the firm and the world’s first Alzheimer’s imaging agent. Matt also helped launch a hedge fund as the COO, and has advised many financial firms including Correlation Ventures. Matt is presently a director at Xenex, Avant-garde Health, 55-ip, and at Neighborhood Trust and an advisor to Kymeta and Humatics.
A graduate of Duke University, Rhodes-Kropf holds a BA in computer science and economics and an MA and PhD in economics. Matt is currently on the advisory board for Duke University’s Graduate School.