In the last Winter 2023 batch, we had Chinmay Chauhan, Hy Sia, Jessica Chao, Shawn Low, Sylvia Yin, Tessa Wijaya, and YC Ng joined us as Visiting Partners. A Visiting Partner is someone who was a founder before - being a founder is a unique experience, and we think founders will only be able to receive nuanced advice from people who have been in a founder's shoes.

Over the course of 3 months, they helped us with…

• Hosting Office Hours: These 1:1 sessions are where founders will update on their progress against growth goals, and discuss challenges, priorities, and next steps with the Partners. ‍
• Attending Group Office Hours: Every other week, multiple partners meet with a handful of companies to lend their experience. These sessions are a great chance to tap into the collective learnings and experiences of batch mates to gain ideas and perspectives to problem solve.‍
• Preparing for Demo Day: Our Visiting Partners also help founders prepare for Demo Day via the Fundraising Bootcamp. This is typically around the last month of the program when they help founders iterate on their pitch.

We're excited to announce that for the Summer 2023 batch, we have seven amazing Visiting Partners - welcome back Jessica Chao and Chinmay Chauhan, and welcome Aaron Yip, Dayana Yermolayeva, Karine Hsu, Rob Liu and Zach Cheng!

Meet the Summer 2023 Visiting Partners

Aaron Yip

Aaron Yip is the co-founder and CEO of Issa, a VC-backed software infrastructure platform for immigration and hiring.

Aaron's experiences span across a wide variety of industries and functions: he was a formerly Silicon Valley executive in software, product and growth, and built and shaped the innovation strategy at Houzz as the Lead Inventor, where he led an AR/VR research lab of 20+ researchers and co-authored the majority of the company's patents and technological breakthroughs that helped reach $400 million funding at a $4 billion valuation. Previously, he was the Head of Storytelling in Viva (founded by Google and Harvard engineers), where he oversaw market expansion from the US to 20+ countries across Latin America.

Aaron also has 4+ years experience as a humanitarian worker, serving migrants and refugees in 27 countries on 4 continents.

Chinmay Chauhan

Chinmay Chauhan is the Co-Founder and President of BukuWarung (YC S20), which builds bookkeeping, digital payments, and e-commerce solutions for the 60 million MSMEs in Indonesia. At BukuWarung, Chinmay led product and technology functions, grew the organization to 400 people, and helped raise $80M in funding.

Prior to BukuWarung, Chinmay was the Director of Product at Carousell and a Product Lead at Grab focused on fintech solutions.

Chinmay has a BTech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay).

Dayana Yermolayeva

Dayana was the Founder of JiPay, a fintech startup for migrant workers in Southeast Asia that raised funding from leading investors such as East Ventures, SHL Capital and the Hong Kong government, and grew the user base by 20x in 12 months.

Dayana has a triple-degree programme run jointly by the University of Southern California, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Bocconi University in Milan. Dayana currently drives Strategy & Ops for Inflow, a Series A healthtech building a science-based app for managing ADHD.

Outside of work, Dayana is a Private Pilot passionate about flying tiny planes to cool places.

Jessica Chao

Jessica Chao is a Partner at Iterative, where she leads healthcare investments. She's also a Venture Partner at SVLC, a Latin America focused venture fund, as well as a Biotech Advisor to Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s official startup accelerator.

Previously, Jessica was the Director of the Clinical Innovation Center at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) where she developed the infrastructure and capacity to accelerate innovations that solved the most critical delivery system problems in healthcare. There, she's worked with over 100+ startups. She was also a Product Designer at Weave (YC S14), Principal at Sage Growth Partners and Co-Founder of Healtho, a consumer health information company.

Jessica has an MBA from John Hopkins University, a PhD in Pharmacy and a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Washington.

Karine Hsu

Karine Hsu is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Slope, a hybrid creative agency and venture fund focused on working with startups. Since 2019, Slope has partnered with over 200+ startups to help design, launch, and grow brands like Superhuman, Daily Harvest, Olympus DAO, and more.

Her previous venture was a YC-backed startup in the e-commerce space, and previously led growth and marketing at companies like Affirm and Verishop. She loves supporting founders to help them think through marketing, brand, and storytelling.

Karine is a Harvard University alum.

Rob Liu

Rob Liu is the founder at ContactOut, a recruitment intelligence tool designed to help recruiters find deep insights on their talent pool. He bootstrapped the company to an 8-figure revenue, 7-figure profit business. The company is used and loved by more than 350,000 users, including recruiters at more than 78% of the Fortune 500.

He's also a Limited Partner at Hustle Fund, Iterative, Blackbird Ventures, and angel investor.

Zach Cheng

Zach is the Co-Founder of ReferralCandy, a referral platform that helps small and medium businesses grow. Referral Candy raised their Series A from Amnasia, Innosight, and BAF Spectrum.

Zach is a Masters of Management Science & Engineering graduate from Stanford University.