We’re excited to welcome Tanya Privé to the Silicon Foundry team. Tanya joins as a Partner, bringing a unique blend of entrepreneurial experience, strategic insight, and deep ecosystem expertise to our network.
Her career spans media, venture, and transformational consulting, where she’s advised C-suite leaders and high-growth startups alike. Tanya is known for her ability to build meaningful relationships, identify breakthrough opportunities, and connect the dots across industries in ways that unlock real impact. Her passion for leadership, her global perspective, and her track record of building vibrant communities make her a strong asset to our team and our Members.
You join us with a diverse background that includes Media, Consulting, and serving as a Co-Founder. To help us get to know you, what are three words that describe you and highlight your experience?
Connector, Learner, and Entrepreneur
As our Partner accountable for the Network, you’ll be engaging with our Members, Partners, Investors, Founders, and more. Tell us a bit more about your role with Silicon Foundry, and how you will be engaging across the network.
My role is focused on cultivating and strengthening some of the most strategic relationships across Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem, spanning academia, venture capital, startups, and corporate partners.
Why is this so important? Because one of the greatest values we can bring to our clients is access; access to the right people, early insight into emerging technologies, and an unbiased, well-informed view on where innovation is heading. To deliver that, we maintain meaningful touchpoints with top players driving innovation forward.
My function is to act as a liaison across these groups, bridging our clients with the broader ecosystem, from researchers at academic institutions (who are often ahead of market trends), to investors who are backing the next wave of transformational technologies. These investors not only provide capital but also shape what industries and innovations will emerge next.
At the same time, I partner closely with our internal team to ensure we are delivering exceptional value to our members. I see myself as a thought partner, helping design high-impact engagements, curating introductions, and building strategic relationships that align with the priorities of our clients.
At its core, this work is about fostering a network of trust, authentic relationships, insights, and opportunities, helping our clients not just keep up with the future, but help shape it.
Tell us about your time as a Co-Founder of a startup focused on bringing together entrepreneurs. You were with the company through the acquisition.
We built a community dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs—from meeting their co-founders and forming their companies, to building out their teams and advisor networks, and ultimately securing their first rounds of outside capital at the pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages.
At the core of this initiative was a fundamental belief: entrepreneurs are the catalysts for change and innovation. It was an incredible honor to build a platform that, by the time of our acquisition, had supported nearly 500,000 registered members.
Throughout that journey, we learned a tremendous amount about the entrepreneurial lifecycle, and had the privilege of guiding many founders through the key inflection points it takes to launch and grow a business. On the other side of the marketplace, we worked closely with a new generation of investors—individuals and emerging funds looking to access early-stage startups as part of their alternative investment portfolios.
For many of them, this was a difficult asset class to break into without deep ties to the ecosystem. We became a trusted partner to family offices, angel groups, and micro-vc fund managers, helping them source high-quality opportunities and understand best practices around early-stage investing.
As a result, companies in our network collectively raised over $130 million in early-stage funding. We successfully matched more than 6,000 co-founders, facilitated 2,000+ advisory board placements, and hosted 480 curated events across 40 cities in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, drawing over 24,000 attendees.
Our growth was also fueled by three strategic acquisitions, allowing us to merge with key competitors and become a true force in the space.
At the heart of it all was the challenge, and the privilege, of building a vibrant online-offline community at scale. That remains one of the most intellectually and personally rewarding experiences of my career, driven by a mission that was as meaningful as it was exciting: to support entrepreneurship on a global scale.
During your time consulting corporates on their transformational strategies, were there common themes you saw these senior leadership teams all trying to work through? What did you learn about how to help them make tangible changes?
After our company was acquired, I had the opportunity to join a small but mighty consulting firm called Legacy Transformational Consulting, consisting of a team that is truly masterful at causing breakthroughs in organizations and expanding what leaders see as possible. People hired us when they were looking to positively disrupt their culture, articulate and create a future much bigger than what they could see on their own, or elevate the performance of their team or organization to a whole new level. In those inflection points, we were the ones they called in.
During my time there, I had the opportunity to work with 227 senior leaders across a range of industries—primarily CPG, tech, and pharma—though our work was industry-agnostic. These engagements spanned C-suite teams, cross-functional leadership, and vertical organizational leaders within large corporations.
What became very clear through this work was a strong sense of pattern recognition. When you’re embedded inside a single organization, it’s easy to think that the dysfunction, politics, or personality-driven challenges you’re experiencing are unique. But they’re not. These dynamics exist in every organization. What’s different is how teams choose to engage with those challenges.
Our sweet spot was helping teams unify, elevate their individual and collective performance, and rebuild or strengthen trust among key players. And while these may sound like “soft skills,” they are, in fact, the foundation of every high-performing organization. At the core of every business is a network of relationships, and like any relationship, they take work. Teams don’t magically operate in harmony. They need to invest in building alignment, clarity, trust, and shared commitment.
We were fortunate to work with leaders who were willing to do that work. And the results spoke for themselves; market caps doubled, revenues grew, and in some cases, decades-long interpersonal conflicts were resolved in just a few days. You could feel the shift: a renewed energy, clarity of purpose, and a sense of relief and excitement about what was now possible. Once the interpersonal friction and unspoken barriers were removed, creativity and collaboration surged, and that had an immediate and lasting impact on the business.
To put it simply: there’s no shortcut to building a truly high-functioning, trusting leadership team.
As you engage with the venture ecosystem, are there any sectors, trends, or strategic focuses that you are particularly excited to see evolve or develop?
While there are countless sectors sparking exciting innovation, the one that excites me most is the rapid evolution of agentic technologies, including co-pilots, physical intelligence, and autonomous systems.
Much like the invention of the dishwasher or washing machine revolutionized domestic life, agentic tools and robotics promise to fundamentally reshape how we work and live. These technologies are essentially next-generation human assistants, designed not just to optimize tasks, but to actively collaborate with us. This creates the opportunity to free people from repetitive, low-leverage activities and enable a shift toward more strategic, creative, and fulfilling work.
We’re already seeing this play out. In 2024, over 37% of all VC funding went to AI startups, according to CB Insights, with a growing share focused on intelligent agents and automation platforms. From autonomous warehouse robots to software co-pilots that streamline knowledge work, these tools are beginning to augment human capabilities in truly transformative ways.
What excites me most is the re-skilling opportunity and the creative reinvention of workflows that come with this shift. I believe the companies that invest in these technologies, while also investing in their people, will unlock entirely new levels of productivity, engagement, and innovation.
That’s the kind of future I want to help build.
