Sophie is an investment associate at GSV Ventures. Prior to joining the firm, she spent 4 years at Goldman Sachs building a team that helps source and syndicate all of the firm’s direct, private-market investment opportunities, primarily to institutionalized family offices. She graduated from Dartmouth College Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in economics and psychology. She has a passion for behavioral economics and loves thinking about how to weave the decision sciences into new businesses to help them gain traction. She grew up in Newton, Massachusetts with two brothers, a sister, and a Goldendoodle named Roxy.

Amanda Porter is the Head of Talent at GSV Ventures based in Chicago. She supports talent acquisition, performance management, and development across GSV Venture Funds and the GSV portfolio companies. Amanda previously led the cross-functional scaling of a higher-ed edtech startup, Packback, from a handful of team members to 80 employees. This is where her passion for intentionally building teams flourished and now she brings this focus to helping GSV portfolio companies with their talent strategy. Amanda is a competitive marathoner and relishes creating goals and processes for talent acquisition and management. Through hard work and determination, Amanda cultivated relationships with brands like Nike and lululemon. Amanda graduated from Lewis University where she ran on scholarship for cross country and track and holds a BA in Sports Management and a minor in Coaching.

Thea Knobel is the Vice President of Platform and Marketing at GSV Ventures. She is focused on the investor and startup community, brand strategy, strategic portfolio support for founders, and GSV backed initiatives like the ASU+GSV Summit. Thea has venture capital investment experience at 2 VC funds and the Techstars LA Accelerator. At Techstars Thea worked on the venture team for the LA Accelerator sourcing and evaluating startups. She also was a Marketing Associate in the program working with founders on designing their communications strategies. Thea is passionate about education. Starting in high school she cross-age tutored lower school students. During her masters she worked with underserved high school students on their college applications. Now she guest lectures at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Thea graduated with honors awarded to 1% of graduate students from USC Marshall School of Business with a M.S. in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She also sits on the advisory board of ThinkNow, a technology-driven market research firm that provides multicultural insights. Thea is multilingual, a public speaker, and an avid world traveler.

Vignesh Rajendran is an investment associate at GSV Ventures. Vignesh interned at GSV in summer 2018, prior to joining the GSV team full-time in August 2019. Vignesh is a 2019 graduate of Princeton University where he earned a BA in computer science and co-directed the Princeton Entrepreneurship club. Vignesh wrote his senior thesis on decentralized blockchain applications.  

Tess Manning is a Principal at GSV Ventures based in San Francisco. Tess joined GSV in September 2019 after graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business in spring 2019 where she was a Teaching Assistant for “Diverse Leadership in Education.” Her Stanford summer was spent at GSV portfolio company, Pluralsight. Prior to business school, Tess was a client success and top sales executive at Andela, another GSV portfolio company, and was also the head of talent at Timehop, a mobile app with 25mm users that displays a user’s historical social media content. Tess has a passion for dance and founded a 501(c)(3) that taught dance in New York City homeless shelters.

Molly Rowe is an investment associate at GSV Ventures. Prior to joining the GSV team in July 2019, Molly worked as a summer associate at Keystone Capital, and has previous venture capital experience from her time as an MBA intern working for Connectivity Ventures Fund in New York. Molly completed her MBA in 2019 from NYU Stern, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from George Washington University in 2017 with a degree in Information Systems and Technology Management.