Neda Emami

I'm currently working on a salsa startup as a co-founder, and I also serve as committee chair and head of events and marketing at Bay Angels, which is the second oldest angel investor network in Silicon Valley and has been around for 27 years. In my role, I'm in charge of hosting events and bringing investors and founders into one room. My personal goal is bringing more angel investors who actually write checks in front of the startups and founders who are looking for funding, and making it so much easier because there's so much noise out there. I want to make sure that founders don't waste their time chasing people who are not writing checks, because I have been on both sides. I've been a founder and I've been there, so I really want to create that environment for founders. I also believe that anybody can be an angel investor, so I'm an advocate on that as well. I do a lot of writing about that on my LinkedIn, and I believe anybody can start doing angel investing, especially people who have executive-level job titles in companies. Before this, I was a full-time founder building a marketplace called SAG.io, which was like Airbnb for outdoor gear rental. My mission was to make outdoor activity affordable and accessible for everyone. I worked on that startup for almost 3 years and we had really good traction, but because of the emergence of AI, it was pretty difficult for us as a consumer marketplace to raise funds, so I decided to pivot and start working on another startup and also start the angel investment part. My final goal, maybe in the next 2-3 years, is starting my own fund. I actually have a background in biomedical engineering - that's what my bachelor's is in - and I worked in that field for almost 10 years doing business negotiations and business partnerships, which is where I made my negotiation muscle strong and learned how to close any deal that I wanted to close.