Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart) - S02E05

In this episode we speak to Ed Sim, Founder and General Partner of Boldstart, a venture investor specializing in DevTools and software. Ed has invested in developer-focused companies like Snyk, Slim.ai, and Jit Security. We discuss what engineers should think about when working on side projects, when and if they should seek out investors, how to pick the good ones, whether raising money is even needed, and what the role of open source is.

About Ed Sim

Ed is the Founder of Boldstart Ventures, a day-one partner and true believer for developer first and SaaS founders. Boldstart is a lead investor and often partners with technical founders at company formation, helping accelerate their path to product market fit.

Ed is currently a board member/observer of Snyk, Kustomer, BigID, Blockdaemon, Env0, Dooly, and Cape Privacy. Other notable day-one investments include Superhuman, Security Scorecard, and Front. Ed previously co-founded Dawntreader Ventures where he led first round investments in LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN), GoToMeeting (acq. By Citrix), and Greenplum (acq. EMC/Pivotal). Ed has a BA in Economics from Harvard.

Things mentioned:

• Snyk
• Slim.ai
• CodeSee
• Atomic Jar 
• Testcontainers
• Akamai
• SourceClear
• Node
• RubyGems
• DigitalOcean
• Atlassian
• Twilio
• GitLab
• Bitbucket
• Greenplum
• Eucalyptus
• Cape Privacy 
• Gavin Uhma
• Dropout Labs
• TensorFlow encrypted
• MongoDB
• Elasticsearch
• Red Hat JBoss
• Boldstart.vc
• What’s Hot in Enterprise IT/VC

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/edsim

Or by email: [email protected]

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Recorded: 2021-10-15.