Mariah "Roman" Lichtenstern

Summary

At the intersection of technology, entertainment, and venture capital, Mariah "Roman" Lichtenstern accelerates positive social, economic, and environmental impact through entrepreneurship. An alumna of UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA, she is the Founding Partner of DiverseCity Ventures and launched the Sacramento, CA chapter of the Founder Institute, which was recognized in Forbes Magazine as the 3rd most gender-diverse chapter in the world. She serves as an advisor for the California Clean Energy Fund’s CalSEED initiative, Berkeley Skydeck, Village Capital Finance Forward, FourthWave female founder accelerator, HaydenAI AI Ethics advisory, and Yale University School of Medicine’s Digital Innovation and Diversity Initiative. She is a coach for the NSF Convergence Accelerator and serves on the boards of FourthWave, StartupSac, and the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce. She is a member of UCLA Ventures and an Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellow (Win '20), where she developed the Tech Funding Equity Project to advocate solutions to the tech industry funding gap. She has been recognized by Venture Forward as a "Women in VC: Rising Starts to Watch," in Crunchbase as one of "39 Women Investors Inspiring a New Generation of Investors," and inPitchbook as "27 Black Founders and Investors to Watch." She has also been featured in Business Insider, Fortune Magazine, Law360, and other major publications. A multi-faceted "connector," Mariah works with amazing people she feels incredibly fortunate to know and strives to build bridges between those with privilege and those with valuable, but too often excluded, perspectives. She is driven to empower founders and filmmakers of all backgrounds, inclusive of those underrepresented by virtue of "otherness," including (but not limited to) gender/identity, culture/ethnicity, geography, and socio-economic status. Due to a high volume of inquiries, reasonable follow-ups on delayed LI / email response are appreciated.