This StrictlyVC event will deliver an insider perspective on New York City’s bustling VC scene and wider trends in the community, along with the opportunity to meet and build connections with leading investors, entrepreneurs, and executives. Join us on September 10, 2026, at the West Village’s Ideal Glass Studios located at 9 W 8th Street.
Exclusive VC insights and networking at StrictlyVC
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 get insights you can’t find anywhere else, this event is for you. Get the inside scoop directly from sources you can trust, curated and hosted by the TechCrunch team.
We’re excited to return to New York City to gather the venture community and the startup scene it’s fueling at Ideal Glass Studios right in the West Village. It’ll make for the perfect backdrop for an evening of networking and expertise, and we have even more speakers to come!
Join us in NYC
$180
General Admission
Agenda
Our lineup of speakers is still growing. Check back in for updates.
As more of our work and relationships move online, live sports remain one of the few experiences that consistently bring people together in person. Collaboration Fund’s Craig Shapiro and DC United CEO Jason Levien discuss why community has become a valuable asset, how sports organizations are evolving into powerful business platforms, and where investors see the biggest opportunities at the intersection of technology, fandom, and real-world connection.
After building one of the most influential consumer startups of the last decade, Tristan Walker is writing a new chapter. In this conversation, he’ll discuss what he learned from Walker & Company, why he’s building Heirloom Craft, and how his approach to leadership, brand building, and entrepreneurship has evolved in today’s AI-driven startup landscape.
No sessions on this day. or choose another day.
Past StrictlyVC speakers
The StrictlyVC programming is never short of fireside insights from the top voices in the VC and startup world.
Sam Altman
Co-Founder & CEOOpenAI
Tekedra Mawakana
Co-CEOWaymo
Meredith Whittaker
PresidentSignal
Amjad Masad
CEO and Co-founderReplit
Sonali De Rycker
PartnerAccel
Baiju Bhatt
FounderAetherflux
Navin Chaddha
Managing PartnerMayfield
Jay Graber
CEOBluesky Social
Katie Haun
Founder & CEOHaun Ventures
Daniel Lurie
Mayor of San FranciscoCity and County of San Francisco
Tekedra N. Mawakana is the co-CEO of Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company.
As co-CEO, Tekedra oversees the company’s strategy for the wide adoption of the Waymo Driver. She boasts 20+ years of experience advising consumer technology companies to advance their business interests globally.
Tekedra currently serves on the Board of Directors for Intuit and the Advisory Council for Boom Technology. She is a social impact-focused angel investor and an Advisor and LP with the Operator Collective.
Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Amjad Masad is CEO and co-founder of Replit, a company that makes coding accessible to billions on the planet from children creating 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.
Sonali joined the Accel team in London in 2008 and has witnessed the European ecosystem come of age firsthand. She focuses on consumer (especially marketplace), next generation financial services and software companies.
Sonali was responsible for Accel’s investments in Spotify, which went public in 2018; Letgo, which joined forces with OfferUP in 2020, and Avito, which was acquired in 2015 by Naspers. In addition, Sonali led Accel’s investment in Calastone, which was acquired by The Carlyle Group in October 2020. Sonali’s current portfolio contains a number of high-potential companies, including: Kry, the pan-European digital health platform; Monzo, the digital, mobile-only bank; Primer, the automation platform for payments and commerce; Shift Technology, the leader in AI-driven fraud software; sennder, Europe’s number one digital freight forwarder; Soldo, the spend management platform, and Wallapop, the mobile marketplace for online goods. Recent investments include eldercare online marketplace Lottie, Omnea, the AI-powered procurement orchestration and supplier risk management platform, and Taito.ai, which automates performance enablement with AI.
Prior to Accel, Sonali was a partner at Atlas Venture. Sonali was born and raised in Bombay, India. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Baiju Bhatt is the Founder and CEO of Aetherflux, a U.S. aerospace company delivering energy to planet Earth with space solar power. He Co-Founded Robinhood in 2013 to democratize finance for all. Today, Robinhood is a publicly-traded company with more than 20 million customers, and he still serves on the Board. Mr. Bhatt holds a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University.
Navin leads Mayfield as Managing Partner. Under his leadership, Mayfield has raised eight U.S. funds and guided over 80 companies to positive outcomes. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors seventeen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Navin’s investments have created over $120 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs.
During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public and 27 have been acquired. Navin was one of the earliest Silicon Valley investors to leverage the promise of tech in India. He is Vice Chair of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund and advisor to Neythri.org.
Navin is an active philanthropist dedicated to supporting education, expanding opportunities for underrepresented communities, and addressing food insecurity.
As an entrepreneur, Navin has co-founded or led three startups including VXtreme: a streaming media platform, acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media; Rivio/CPA.com: a SaaS provider for small businesses, and iBeam Broadcasting (NASDAQ:IBEM): a streaming media content delivery network. Navin holds an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, where he was honored with the distinguished IIT Alumni Award.
Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky, a public benefit company building an open social network. Previously, she built Happening, a site for social events, and developed Zcash, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency. She has also worked as an organizer at digital rights nonprofits.
Katie is the Founder and CEO of Haun Ventures where she and the team raised a $500 million early stage fund and a $1 billion acceleration fund to invest in the future of web3. Previously, Katie was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where she co-led the firm’s three crypto funds. She joined in June 2018 as its eleventh general partner and first female general partner. Prior to a16z, Katie spent a decade as a federal prosecutor focusing on fraud, cyber, and corporate crime alongside agencies including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. While with the U.S. Department of Justice, Katie prosecuted RICO murders, organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. She also held senior policy positions at Justice Department headquarters in both the National Security Division and Attorney General’s office where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. While in the private sector, Katie has testified before both the House and Senate on the intersection of technology and regulation. She has taught a course on crypto at Stanford Business School and on cybercrime at Stanford Law School. Katie clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katie also served as a member of the board of directors of Coinbase from 2017 to 2024.
Daniel Lurie was born and raised in San Francisco. Daniel founded Tipping Point Community in 2005. Under his direction as CEO, Tipping Point has raised over $500 million to help house, employ, educate and support hundreds of thousands of Bay Area families. Former Mayor Ed Lee selected Daniel in 2013 to lead the San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee, an effort that brought over $240 million in economic impact to the region. Following
the devastating fires in the North Bay in 2017, Daniel and Tipping Point partnered with 90 Bay Area business and community leaders to organize Band Together – a benefit concert that raised $17 million for those hardest hit by the deadly fires. In total, Tipping Point’s Emergency Fire Relief Fund raised over $34 million.
He is a graduate of Duke University and obtained his Master’s in Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He lives in the City with his wife Becca and two school-aged children.
Ethan Thornton is the CEO and founder of Mach Industries, a next-generation defense technology and manufacturing company. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before launching Mach in 2023. Thornton’s ultimate goal is to create decentralized strategic capabilities that guarantee the defense of freedom worldwide.
The Collaborative Fund is one of New York City’s flagship investment groups, with a particular focus on climate technology and consumer industries. They’ve invested in everything from Kickstarter and Reddit to Sweetgreen and Beyond Meat, among dozens of other successful exits. And yes, there are plenty of AI investments within their portfolio as well.
Partnership Opportunities
TechCrunch offers many ways for partners to engage directly with our attendees before, during, and after the event. If you’re interested in learning more about how your company can be a part the event, get in touch with our sales team below.
Disrupt 2026: Meet the connections that’ll change everything
Join 10,000 founders, VCs, and operators on October 13-15 for high-signal networking, real deals, and tactical insights you can use immediately. Register now to save up to $330 on your pass. Get up to 30% off with bundle passes.
TechCrunch offers many ways for partners to engage directly with our attendees before, during, and after the event. Get in touch with us to learn more.
