Partners
Sophie Liao
Sophie is a three-time fund manager, having founded Oyster Ventures after honing her VC skills at Rothenberg Ventures where she was a Managing Director, and Draper Dragon where she was a Venture Partner. Prior to venture, Sophie managed Mergers and Acquisitions at Eight Solutions and FFD Labs, and launched her career in media by producing and anchoring at CCTV and Travel Channel, from which she was subsequently poached by Cameron Pace Group to lead Business Development.
Kenneth Ballenegger
Kenneth is a repeat entrepreneur turned venture investor. Prior to starting Oyster with Sophie, he co-founded Republic Crypto in 2017, where he served as Chief Strategy Officer. He is also an active angel investor in over 70 companies. Kenneth has enjoyed a long career in Silicon Valley: he led institutional fund products at AngelList, designed an algorithmic investing platform for Hone Capital, was Co-founder & CTO at FreshPay, the first Bitcoin debit card, was on the founding team as Architect & Head of Mobile Engineering at Chartboost (acquired by Zynga for $250M), and worked in engineering at Tapulous through its acquisition by Disney.
Chris DN
Chris has 12+ years of experience investing and driving operational efficiencies. His venture experience originated at Sequoia Capital where he was responsible for monitoring Sequoia’s global investment portfolio and operational excellence. He was also a former investor at Valia Ventures and GoingVC Partners. Operationally, Chris was a top fin-tech consultant at Accenture and Blackrock, is the founder of the Venture Capital Operations Association (VCOA), and was on the founding team as COO of Relatus — a B2B platform that helps startups raise capital through their relationships.