boldstart ventures

Congrats Ed Sim! Clearly a testament to the amazing founders in the boldstart ventures portfolio representing the latest in developer tooling, cybersecurity, and infrastructure software!

🎙️ Listen in - so enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with friend Steve Brotman tracing back to early days in NYC Enterprise tech ecosystem in mid-90s 👴🏼 to why we started boldstart ventures, the evolution of what a first check means from seed to pre-seed to #Inception and what we look for in founders... Oh yeah, we are as 🔥 up as ever about the current platform shift powered by AI (just a tech infused in all enterprise software) and have 💰 to deploy!

Let's not overthink an investment at #Inception. We can spin wheels dligencing until death but at end of day it comes down to the founders and what unique insight they are bringing to this new company that gives them an unfair advantage and right to win. 9,999 things can go wrong but if 1 goes right, how big can this be? Investors esp. with new markets that don't exist can get hung up on TAM (total addressable market) but what I find is that for many of these new markets there is what I call "intuitive TAM" or just using your common sense that if a product like this were to exist, how many folks would use and what would they pay. Keep it simple and focus on what matters - founder market fit. Founders, if investors keep asking for more and more references to convince them that there is a there there, they are not the ones for you and move to the next Forgot to add, it's goes without saying that the unique insight has to be paired with our confidence in your ability to conceive, build, and ship product and to understand and zero in on the end user, have the empathy of a day in the life and how your product/service makes their lives 10x better with vs. without your product Knowing who your first 5-8 hires, usually all engineers and builders, also indicates your ability to tell a story, to sell and recruit talent, to show a history of leadership and best sign is folks following you from last company

Let's not overthink an investment at #Inception. We can spin wheels dligencing until death but at end of day it comes down to the founders and what unique insight they are bringing to this new company that gives them an unfair advantage and right to win. 9,999 things can go wrong but if 1 goes right, how big can this be? Investors esp. with new markets that don't exist can get hung up on TAM (total addressable market) but what I find is that for many of these new markets there is what I call "intuitive TAM" or just using your common sense that if a product like this were to exist, how many folks would use and what would they pay. Keep it simple and focus on what matters - founder market fit. Founders, if investors keep asking for more and more references to convince them that there is a there there, they are not the ones for you and move to the next Forgot to add, it's goes without saying that the unique insight has to be paired with our confidence in your ability to conceive, build, and ship product and to understand and zero in on the end user, have the empathy of a day in the life and how your product/service makes their lives 10x better with vs. without your product Knowing who your first 5-8 hires, usually all engineers and builders, also indicates your ability to tell a story, to sell and recruit talent, to show a history of leadership and best sign is folks following you from last company

Hot off the press 🎉 Gen AI is progressing at an astonishing pace. Just look at OpenAI's Sora – the ability to create high-quality, lifelike videos and images via prompts is opening up many creative opportunities for individuals and enterprises alike. I'm thrilled to present my piece on Stable Diffusion, a cornerstone of this advancement. Stable Diffusion is revolutionizing how we think about marketing and security. For marketing teams, it challenges traditional methods, offering innovative ways to engage audiences with dynamic visual content. On the opposite spectrum, it pushes security teams to adapt and develop new strategies to keep up with the evolving capabilities of AI. I'd like to thank our team at boldstart ventures for helping me put this piece together. Please feel free to reach out if you found this interesting. I would love to connect with thought leaders and builders working on infrastructure solutions to help drive innovation in AI! Read it here: https://lnkd.in/ebDr7KAH #AI #Venture #Sora #OpenAI #EnterpriseInfrastructure #stablediffusion #Security

Catch founder Ed Sim discuss some traits in the best enterprise founders and the importance of understanding the "why"

Ed Sim is the Founder of boldstart ventures, partnering from Inception with developer first, infrastructure and SaaS founders. He loves working with engineering-driven founders with bold ideas and laser-sharp focus on product well before writing their first lines of code. Ed has been in the trenches with Snyk, Kustomer (sold to Meta), BigID, Blockdaemon, Superhuman, Security Scorecard, Front and so many more from inception. Ed also co-founded MState in 2017, an enterprise blockchain lab in partnership with IBM, where seed investments include Fireblocks and Amberdata. He is a true partner from day one—helping bold founders start, scale, exit and have fun along the way. Ed has been recognized as a top-10 investor on the Forbes Midas Seed List for the last two years, and as the No. 1 seed investor in the Business Insider Seed 100. Prior to boldstart, Ed was a Co-Founder of Dawntreader Ventures, where he inception investments in Greenplum (sold to EMC, Pivotal—IPO), GoToMeeting (sold to Citrix), and LivePerson (IPO). Previous to that, he worked at J.P. Morgan, where he learned how to code and build quantitative trading models. Ed graduated from Harvard College and was a four-year letterman on the men’s lacrosse team. Topics: - Key qualities boldstart looks for in technical founders aiming to reinvent the enterprise - Developer tools, cybersecurity, and infrastructure in modern enterprises - The long-term outlook for AI investments versus short-term market reactions #EnterpriseAI #AIinEnterprise #VCInsights #TechInvesting #AI

💪🏼 Pumped for boldstart ventures to be partnered at Inception with Guy Podjarny for a 3rd time (Blaze - sold to Akamai, Snyk 📈, now Tessl) Ambitious + exciting as the Tessl team incl. friends Simon and Anna Debenham REIMAGINE software dev with "AI Native Software Development"

Rarely do you get a chance to partner with an amazing founder and friend for the 3rd time! So we're super 🔥 up for boldstart ventures to join Guy Podjarny and the amazing Tessl team on this journey to bring AI Native Software Development to the world Biggest idea yet! There are lots of amazing AI tools for developers which are optimizing existing developer workflows with bolt-on AI but what if you reimagined software development with AI-first principles? As Tessl states, "We believe software development - and software developers - would be more needed than ever, but they will look substantially different." ❤️ continuing our partnship w/friends Tom Hulme, GV (Google Ventures) once again similar to Snyk

If I could encapsulate some of my learnings in VC and inception investing over 28 yrs in 100 minutes, this is the one to watch or listen to. Turner Novak took me back to the Valley of Death for boldstart ventures, why an amazing + supportive wife/partner is 🔑 to starting anything + oh yeah, lots of my 👴🏼 sayings + frameworks on Inception investing + boards. 🙏🏼 for one of the most fun + in depth conversations I’ve had on venture.