Something Ventured · 2025-11-11 · 1h 0m
Lee Edwards is a General Partner at Root VC, a San Francisco-based deep tech seed fund. They recently raised their 4th fund of $190 million. But before he became a venture capitalist, Lee was an engineer. He was most recently CTO at Teespring. Previously, Lee was a mechanical engineer at iRobot, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, Lead Engineer at SideTour (acquired by Groupon in 2013), and engineering manager for GrouponLive. He graduated from Olin College of Engineering with a degree in Systems Engineering. So not the type of person you'd expect to become a venture capitalist. In this episode he talks about unconventional leap from hands-on engineering at Pivotal Labs and Teespring to the high-stakes world of seed-stage investing in devtools, AI, and hard tech. We discuss - it gets a bit technical - the magic of pair programming (and why it's the ultimate anti-slacking hack), the ADHD-fueled superpowers of VC life, and Lee's early days tinkering with QBASIC on a Gateway 2000.
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