Gaby Darbyshire is a lawyer turned entrepreneur, tech executive and investor with more than 25 years of experience in company building in London, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

Born in Beirut and raised in London, Gaby began her career as a barrister at Middle Temple, practicing environmental and criminal law. As a barrister, Gaby worked on massive multi-year environmental cases involving nuclear power and land contamination. She also founded a charity supporting Death Row inmates in the Caribbean and worked pro bono on death row appeals to the Privy Council.

After leaving the Bar, she spent several years as a management consultant working on strategy projects in the high tech, utilities, financial services and pharma industries. In the late nineties, this work led her to Silicon Valley, where she became an executive and co/founder at several startups. In 2003, she moved to New York, where she co-founded Gawker Media, one of the most pioneering journalism companies of the digital age. As COO, she helped build Gawker Media into the largest independent online publisher of its era, with beloved media properties including Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9, and Lifehacker - as well as the infamous Gawker. She subsequently ran Framestore Ventures, a corporate incubator inside the Oscar-winning visual effects company, developing and investing in original IP in film, TV animation, and AR/VR, and prior to Dangerous Ventures, was a co-founder and CEO of QXR Studios, a transmedia interactive games studio.

Gaby holds a MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and a law degree from City University. She serves as Chairman of the Board of Fragment Media Group, publisher of Nautilus magazine and The Daily Dot among other titles; as a Board Member at GOOD/Upworthy, the social impact company; and at Global Witness, the international NGO that works to break the links between natural resource exploitation, conflict, poverty, corruption, and human rights abuses worldwide.

When not at work, Gaby can usually be found outdoors, preferably in or on the water (which includes snow) doing any number of athletic pursuits, or nose deep in a book or a crossword puzzle. Since the pandemic, she has also become a nifty pickler, and makes a mean harissa. Fun fact: She also built an electric car when she was 15 years old, and was allowed to drive it in the local town in the UK before she got her official driver’s license.