Harvard Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Grid invite you to join for a fireside chat with SEAS Dean David Parkes, Alex Rampell, and Nellie Levchin on how today's most ambitious venture firms think about scale, capital, and long-term impact. a16z recently raised capital at historic levels, and you will hear from Alex and Nellie, co-founder of SciFi VC, how such stratospheric-level resources are deployed to back transformative companies.

Drawing on deep experience across venture, technology, and science-driven startups, the discussion will unpack Alex's provocation that “the best companies have hostages, not customers” - what it really means to build products people cannot live without, and how founders and investors identify and support those opportunities early. Expect candid insights, real examples, and a perspective shaped by operating at the frontier of venture capital.

Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's $1.5B apps practice. A serial entrepreneur who started writing software at age 10, Alex now invests across a wide range of B2B and B2C startup sectors and stages.

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Alex co-founded multiple companies including Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM), which he co-founded with Max Levchin. He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University.

Nellie Levchin started at PayPal in a junior product manager role and grew into a key early employee, then served as Chief Risk Officer at Peter Thiel's global macro hedge fund Clarium Capital Management before founding SciFi VC with husband, Max Levchin.

SciFi VC is the personal venture fund of PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and early Paypal employee, Nellie Levchin, focused on companies whose competitive advantages come from hard technical feats, network effects, and complex highly regulated industries.