Operators, not only analysts.

Minh founded Mandalore Partners and designed its Venture Capital as a Service model: corporate venture programmes run with the discipline of a fund rather than the reporting cycle of an innovation department. Two decades across technology and finance sit behind that model, enough time to have watched most corporate venture units get built, stall, and get quietly wound down. He speaks publicly on the subject, including on BFM Business, where he explains why an externally operated programme survives a change of CEO and an internal one usually does not.

Minh Q. Tran LinkedIn profile

Sonny founded Misfit Wearables and sold it to Fossil Group. He covers IndustryTech for Mandalore, which is to say AI, IoT and robotics: the companies where the hard part is manufacturing something physical at a cost that works, not writing the software. Founders in that category tend to be told by generalist investors that their gross margin is wrong; Sonny has already lived that argument from the other side.

Sabine co-founded Alchemy and spent twenty years inside insurance, including at Lloyd's of London. She built Startupbootcamp InsurTech, co-edited and co-authored The InsurTech Book, and lectures on the InsurTech Executive MBA at Bayes (formerly CASS). That combination is the reason corporate insurers take a Mandalore introduction: she has sat on their side of the table, and she knows which internal objection is really the one blocking a pilot.

Oleg has spent twenty-five years in software architecture and has run his own software firm since 2008, delivering more than sixty projects across fintech, e-learning, blockchain and AI. He holds an M.Sc. in atomic physics. On a diligence call he is the person who asks what the system actually does when the third-party API is down, the question that separates a demo from a product.

Florian lectures at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and the University of St. Gallen, holds a Ph.D. in Management (HSG), and co-authored The Current InsurTech Landscape. He brings the academic read on where insurance distribution is actually moving, which is a useful corrective when a sector gets loud.

François is an X-Telecom graduate (X91) with an INSEAD MBA (2003) and leadership roles behind him at eBay, eYeka and Lulu dans ma rue. He is also a certified coach, which matters more than it sounds: much of what a venture partner does after an investment is help a founding team have a conversation it has been avoiding.

Anna holds a Master in Economic Law from Sciences Po Paris and a BA from Bowdoin College, and worked on M&A at Paris law firms before joining Mandalore in 2020. She handles the structuring work that makes a cross-border corporate co-investment possible rather than theoretically interesting.