Ray is Bay Area native who discovered his passion for sciences on the complex rather than pure side - computers, biology, space - at an early age. Before founding Affinity in 2014, Ray was pursuing his bachelor's in computer science at Stanford. Halfway through his degree, he realized how far modern network management was from its global maximum, so he left Stanford to fix it. Ray is passionate about speaking about how to use data exhaust for powerful insights that better products and companies.

Brian Smiga, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned marketer, is a Partner at Alpha. Brian also advises Pritzker Group Venture Capital on deal origination and relationships. Prior to Alpha Partners, Brian was the founder and CEO of Preclick, (sold to Smilebox), where he developed photo software licensed worldwide by HP, 3M, Sandisk, Walmart, Costco, CVS, and Walgreens. Prior to Preclick, Mr. Smiga was CEO at 3Path, an early Dropbox, an Intel and Goldman-Sachs backed startup, and the SVP of Marketing at 1ClickCharge, an early Bolt, where his product launch resulted in a sale of the company to CMGi. Since first working with Mr. Brotman at 1ClickCharge, Mr. Smiga advised Brotman-backed portfolio companies: Altruik, Headliner, Knovel, and Mobile Commons. In the 1990s, Mr. Smiga began his career as a developer at Booz & Co, and in Silicon Valley was the founder of Portfolio Software and Actioneer, where he co-authored six collaboration software patents and licensed top-rated software to Apple, IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, AOL, 3Com, Acco, and others. Brian received a BA in Liberal Arts from Swarthmore College, and a Masters of Philosophy in Literature from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. Brian is the founder of TEDxAsburyPark, the top-ranked TEDx conference on the US east coast, and a board member of the Roothbert Fund, a scholarship grant program for graduate students whose daily actions are guided by spirituality.

Sakib Dadi is a vice president in the San Francisco office where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments in developer platforms, infrastructure, and gaming. He has been involved with Bessemer’s investments in Guild Education, LaunchDarkly, ManyChat, npm (acquired by GitHub), Okera, Periscope Data (acquired by Sisense), Piazza, Pinpoint, Sila Nanotechnologies, and Team SoloMid.

As a Partner, Parikshit is engaged in investments and operations at all stages of the fund, from sourcing to growth. He is responsible for the execution of follow-on investments for the IndieBio portfolio. Parikshit started his career at IndieBio and has seen firsthand what it takes to build a deep tech startup, sitting right next to the founders, in the trenches. Observing recurring dichotomies, the hard decisions, and human costs when it comes to prototyping, company building, and market discovery at the earliest stages has been foundational in defining his investment and operational lenses. To that end, he works in high resolution with portfolio companies on milestone mapping, building data rooms, and health/techno-economic modeling. Fascinated by volume and value tradeoffs, he is passionate about systematizing IndieBio’s investment theses and platform development by researching and implementing investment instruments and tech stacks. Parikshit actively tracks the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning research, with a deep interest in novel computation architectures for biology. In addition, Parikshit’s investment thesis research spans project finance for new infrastructure and problems in operations research to fine-tune the means of production and distribution.