Meet The Speakers
TECH Panel
Current State of Tech Founders
Sydney Holness is an investor at Collab Capital, where she leads the firm’s health tech thesis and backs companies shaping the future of care. A magna cum laude graduate of Florida A&M University, she began her entrepreneurial journey building a startup at ACT House before interning at Precursor Ventures and leading Apple’s App Design Series at Ed Farm.
She is deeply committed to expanding access to venture and education. As co-founder of the Black Venture Capital Consortium HBCU program, she has helped open pathways for the next generation of investors and founders. She also served as an adjunct professor at Morehouse College, teaching entrepreneurship and innovation.
Sydney serves on advisory boards including Miami Dade College, Georgia Tech, Founders on the Yard, and Bank of America’s Breakthrough Labs. Across her work, she focuses on supporting innovative founders and strengthening the ecosystems around them.
Sydney Holness
Investor, Collab Capital
Jay is a partner on the investing team at a16z crypto, where he focuses on application layer venture and liquid opportunities.
Prior to joining a16z in 2022, Jay was an investor at Maven Ventures, a seed-stage consumer software fund, where he led the firm’s crypto investing. Before Maven, Jay was an Analyst in Goldman Sachs’ Global Markets Division for two years. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Jay graduated from Amherst College, where he studied Law and was a member of the Men’s Track & Field team.
Jay is a proud Chicago native and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Outside of work, you can often find him playing basketball, running, cooking, playing the piano. He's also an avid writer, publishing on crypto, consumer software, and sports culture on his Substack blog, The Blueprint.
Jay Drain Jr.
Partner, a16Z Crypto
Gabriel Williams is a Senior Product Manager at Squarespace, where he builds products helping entrepreneurs grow their audience and scale their business. Originally from Maryland and now based in NYC, he doesn’t come from a traditional technical background. Equipped with a communication degree, a family of entrepreneurs, and a few failed business attempts in college that shaped how he approaches building products. That scrappy path led him through product and growth roles at fast-paced startups like Flocabulary and BentoBox before both were acquired. Outside of work, he regularly partners with local businesses in Maryland to advance AI literacy in his community.
Sr. Product Manager, Square Space
Gabriel Williams
Healthcare Panel
Breaking into Healthcare as a First-Time Founder
Ashlee Wisdom
Founder & CEO, Health in Her Hue
Ashlee Wisdom is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Health In Her HUE, the premier digital health platform aimed at reducing racial health disparities by leveraging the power of technology, media and community to improve health outcomes for Black women and women of color.
Wisdom holds over a decade of experience working across the healthcare industry at companies such as Weill Cornell Medicine, NYC Health + Hospitals, and Junto Health. Her previous roles span grants management, clinical research and consulting strategic healthcare investors.
As a public health innovator and an advocate for equitable access to quality care, Ashlee has successfully raised over $4 million in venture capital funding to advance Health In Her HUE’s mission. Under her leadership, the platform has grown into a critical resource for Black women, connecting them to culturally responsive providers, evidence-based health content, and supportive peer communities.
Ashlee serves as a board member of the nonprofit Peer Health Exchange. Her leadership has been recognized through several prestigious fellowships and awards, including being named a 2025 Echoing Green Fellow, an Aspen Institute Healthy Communities Fellow, a First in FemTech Award recipient by FemTech Focus, and a Rock Health Top 50 in Digital Health honoree. Her thought leadership on health equity has been featured on Good Morning America, CBS News, ESSENCE, EBONY, Business Insider, Forbes, and Vogue, and she has shared her insights in a TEDx talk.
Wisdom holds a Master of Public Health in Healthcare Policy and Management from New York University’s School of Global Public Health and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University.
Justin Williams is a Principal at Seae Ventures, a $200M healthcare venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies transforming care delivery and improving health outcomes. His investment focus spans behavioral health, women’s health, diagnostics, and technology-enabled care models.
Justin currently serves as a Board Director for Willow Behavioral Health and Bloomwell Autism Therapy, and as a Board Observer for Functional Fluidics and Kiyatec, where he works closely with founders scaling innovative healthcare solutions.
Prior to venture capital, Justin worked in investment banking, healthcare consulting, and the biopharmaceutical industry, experiences that shaped his focus on supporting founders building impactful healthcare companies. He holds a graduate degree in biotechnology from Morehouse School of Medicine and a finance degree from the University of Georgia where he was a Division 1 collegiate athlete.
Justin Williams
Principal, Seae Ventures
Brian Gibbs
Blavatnik Fellow
Brian holds a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he focused on elucidating the role of genetics using multiple animal models and embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells to study congenital heart defects. As a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute, Brian studied the role of Hedgehog signaling in regulating cardiac progenitor cells during heart development using novel in vivo mouse models and in vitro embryonic stem cell systems.
Prior to joining as a Blavatnik Fellow, Brian was a life sciences venture analyst with experiences in venture capital, technology commercialization, and patent law. His background covers supporting startup development from academia to evaluating early to mid-stage biotech companies for investment opportunities.
