Pinned
Really excited to launch our fund 4!
Timothy Chen
9,843 posts
Timothy Chen
@tnachen
Founder of @EssenceVenture, Co-host of @ossstartup, @theinfrapod. Ex-CEO of @hyperpilotio. SVP of Engineering @cosmos.
- Infra / system people will become one of the most important builders in this AI era.
- Recently I've passed the 60 mark of amount of startups I've invested in (both via fund and personal), lots of small checks and all of them are quite early, but wanted to jot down few things I learned so far: 1) As many people have mentioned, you don’t truly know what is going to
- Exciting to announce the new fund from @EssenceVenture! It's been a amazing journey to start fund 1 since 2019 and now raised fund 3. Wrote a little bit of the motivation behind starting Essence VC as well ->Exclusive: Chatted with the indomitable @tnachen about his firm @EssenceVenture's $27MM third fund, investing in the hot infra, dev tools, and AI space, and succeeding as a solo GP. Check out more here on @BusinessInsider: businessinsider.com/tim-chen-essen…essencevc.fundEssence VC Fund III — Essence Venture CapitalI’m beyond excited to announce that Essence VC has raised fund III (27m) with an awesome set of supporters, ranging from institutions (Cendana Capital as an anchor LP, Vintage Partners, Sapphire...
- I'm thrilled to announce that @EssenceVenture is putting up our first virtual conference! LLM In Developer Tools 6/1 9:30 - 12:30 pm PST LLM / Foundation models are changing every tech product right now, and Developer Tools are being redesigned to incorporate AI.
- The most common thing I'm seeing early stage VCs telling folks is that you no longer need a technical cofounder and just find a product person and use AI to build your product. Wdyt?
- Just got off a few calls with VCs this week looking at companies raising their next round, and want to highlight a common challenge that came up especially raising after a seed. Especially in the infra and data world, raising the first money has become much more simpler given
- The vector database land grab has seems to begin now
- The bar of an MVP is going higher and higher as we see software becoming easier to demo with AI. At the same time the amount of work to have a production software is ironically going higher given the expectation and complexity. The challenge for 2024 is “how” you can demonstrate
- If covid forced us to learn how to work remotely, SVB is forcing folks to run a company with 250k
- An intro email summarizing me in 10 words “Tim has his own fund and is a good dude”
- A daily conversation I have with technical founders, is how much they drastically underestimate the amount of work and focus required to get GTM right. Writing code and putting something on product hunt isn’t all that is to it.
- When a VC says “Please come back when you have a few paying customers”, no matter what the tone is, it doesn’t mean you are just few paying customers away for them to lead your round. Treat it as a straight up no.
- It’s obvious that @flydotio @neondatabase is following the footsteps of @supabase and @vercel growing to become the places where devs like to run. And often the winning formula is developer experience, paired with architectural advantage as @nikitabase mentioned.
