Company Info for buzzd.com | IcebreakerMembers
Kane Sarhan is Vice President of Brand at SH Group, Starwood Capital Group’s hotel brand management company that oversees the development and management of the Firm’s two luxury lifestyle hotel and residence brands, 1 Hotels & Homes and Baccarat Hotels & Residences. In this role, he oversees strategic marketing, partnerships and public relations efforts for both new brands, driving the recent launch of 1 Hotels Brand, which debuted in South Beach in March 2015 and New York City, 100 steps off Central Park in August 2015, as well as Baccarat Hotels & Residences Brand which opened the doors to its first property March 2015 in New York.
In addition to his role at SH Group, Kane is the co-founder of Enstitute, where he worked to reinvent higher education through apprenticeships with the best entrepreneurs in the world. Previously, he launched and ran his own magazine, The College Gossip Chronicles, raised over $100,000 for hackNY, a non-profit in New York City, and was Creative Director at LocalResponse, a top New York City tech startup.
Kane has been named to the 2013 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, a 2013 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2012 Francis Hesselbein Institute NEXT Leader of the Future, and Business Insider calls him a “Top 25 Young Innovator in New York Tech” and one of the “31 most important LGBT members of the tech community.” Kane speaks often on innovation, education and serendipity and has been featured in The New York Times, PBS, Forbes Magazine, CNN, The Huffington Post, and Fast Company. 
At Eniac, we call Nihal the human Rolodex—he’s built thousands of connections with the world’s top companies and brands, often the hard way. Since 1999, he founded five startups: Philly2nite → UrbanGroove → Chapter 7 bankruptcy; ipsh! → acquired by Omnicom (NYSE: OMC); buzzd → LocalResponse → acquired by BlueCava. The scars are real, and so are the stories.
Nihal started investing early, spotting breakout companies like AdMob (acquired by Google), Alloy, Brightwheel, Tala, and Uber. He and his wife are now active angel investors and LPs backing nearly 100 underrepresented founders and fund managers.
He’s also deeply committed to giving back. Nihal co-founded Project Ahimsa, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to disadvantaged youth in India—where his parents immigrated from in the early ’70s. He also helped launch Help Main Street to support restaurants during the pandemic, and The 100k Pledge, a platform tracking economic empowerment in Black communities.
You’ll often find Nihal running along the Hudson River with founders and the Pitch & Run crew, or spending time with his wife Reshma—founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First—and their two boys, Shaan and Sai. Their bernedoodle Steve (RIP Stan) is always close by.
Nihal’s also the engine behind Eniac’s social events and the host of the Human Unicorn Pod, now streaming on Spotify and YouTube.
He holds a BA in Philosophy and a BSE in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. 
