Backing Technical Founders with Amplify Partners Founder Sunil Dhaliwal | Founding the Fund 2

Speaker A: And this is the number one thing I say to anyone who beats a path to my door asking about it here. I want to start this fund and you've done this. What do you think? You better have a reason for existing. Why do you need to exist? What's the gap? Where do I fit into this ecosystem? And what can I do differently than somebody else? I don't think a lot of people think about that.

Speaker B: Welcome back to another episode of the Rune podcast.

Speaker C: Claudia, I'm curious, do you know who the first venture capitalist was?

Speaker D: No, I don't actually, Matt.

Speaker C: I know it's kind of one of those questions that I think a lot of people take the claim for. I think people believe it was Arthur Rock, who famously actually was an HBS alum. So shout out. But he was the first, check, if you can even call it that, into Fairchild Semiconductor.

Speaker B: Wow, that is a throwback for sure.

Speaker C: I feel like he wasn't even sure he was starting a fund at the time. He literally just said, these are eight really smart people and I probably should put some capital against this. And what was it, the 1960s, maybe even the 50s? And really that became what we call today venture capital.

Speaker D: I mean, it's so funny you say that, because the company that he first

Speaker B: backed sounds like a story we would tell.

Speaker D: I mean, we've been telling so many

Speaker B: incredible founding stories of raising capital, building a team, building a business, becoming a unicorn. But there's so many parallels to that when you start a fund, if you think about it.

Speaker C: Yeah, honestly, it's been an opportunity of a lifetime to tell over 140 founding stories of zero to IPO companies. But we haven't taken a keen look at the investment vehicles and ultimately the startups themselves, which are the venture firms that have taken many of these companies through that journey.

Speaker B: I mean, the way that AI is changing the companies that are being built, it's fundamentally changing the strategies and theses of, um, incredible funds.

Speaker D: When I was back as, uh, the

Speaker B: founder of priv, I always found it so interesting that the questions were always on us.

Speaker D: But I had questions about how my

Speaker B: VC that I've built a multi year relationship with, got started. It's like quite crazy bringing billions of dollars together to put their faith into the next generation of iconic founders.

Speaker C: I couldn't agree more. I take for granted that I understand what things like an LPAC is, right? A limited partner advisory committee and how these decisions get made. And oh my gosh, VCs have bosses too. So in this season we're going to sit down with respected venture capitalists to talk not only about the companies that they've backed, but the firms they've built.

Speaker D: Uh, so with that, I'm excited to open the door.

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Speaker B: the Room podcast, we're joined by Sunil Dhaliwal, Founder and Managing Director of Amplify Partners. Sunil has spent nearly three decades backing some of the most ambitious technical founders in Silicon Valley. After beginning his career at uh, Bettery Ventures during the height of the dot com era, he spent 14 years learning the craft of venture capital before launching Amplify in 2012 as a solo GP. What started as a conviction that technical founders building tools for other technical founders was being overlooked has since grown into one of the most respected seed stage firms of its generation. Today, Amplify manages billions in assets and has been an early partner to category defining companies including Runway Databricks, Hitouch, Hex and and Many others. But this conversation isn't just about venture capital. It's about what it means to build an institution from scratch. How trust compounds over decades, why craftsmanship remains one of the most durable competitive advantages, and how to distinguish genuine innovation from hype in moments of change. We'll talk about Sunil's path from Georgetown to Battery Ventures, the early days of raising Amplify's first fund, the founders who took a chance on an emerging manager, lessons Learned from nearly 15 years of building a firm, and how he thinks about the future of AI dev tools and VC itself. Whether you're a founder, an aspiring investor, or someone interested in the long game of building enduring institutions, there's a tremendous amount to learn from Sunil's journey. So with that, let's open the door.

Speaker C: All right, first of all, Sunil, thank you so much for joining us today in the room.

Speaker A: Happy to be here.

Speaker C: We're super happy to have you. We'd love to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So we're curious, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

Speaker A: Growing, uh, up for me was Western New York, Rochester. Um, not a super glamorous place, but it was an amazing spot to grow up.

Speaker C: Fair.

Speaker A: Um, it was a small town suburb. And, uh, it was, uh, Kodak Xerox town back then. That's what it was. And that's how my, my father and mother got there. He was an electrical engineer, an immigrant who went India to the UK, UK to Canada, Canada to the US when they were actively recruiting engineers in the late 60s, like, come here and we will set you up. And oh, by the way, your wife can get a master's in education because New York State needs teachers, which is what she did. Um, so my mother was a schoolteacher. Uh, she taught third grade. And my father was an electrical engineer at big companies for a bunch of time. And where that started actually influenced me was he left that job and became an entrepreneur, um, probably when I was like 8, 9 years old. And there was a couple different journeys along the way. There was always the side hustle, so there was always the rental apartment and rental apartments. And most of my first money was made like cleaning out, helping rents after tenants moved out and painting and hanging drywall and doing all sorts of stuff. But, um, you know, he started a printed circuit board business in the 80s when that was a thing you could still do. Uh, and then ultimately became a contractor building and renovating homes. So I kind of saw that up front, what it was like up close and personal to, to you know, be under capitalized in a boom bust real estate developer world and what it was like to do something commodity as it was getting commoditized by, you know, Asian manufacturing. And so like staying one step ahead and knowing what it felt like to be nimble and just make it work. As a founder, I don't, I didn't realize that was what I was seeing, sure back then, but that's exactly what I was seeing back then.

Speaker C: Um, lots of early exposure to the art of the side hustle and then ultimately making that your mainstay and also just seeing that energy coming from your family and parents and what it took. I mean for you watching all of that, did you internalize that and think you were always going to become a founder yourself?

Speaker A: Not, not at all. I think the only thing I probably internalized was this real difference in agency. I think the idea that like my parents weren't just, I get a job, I get a paycheck, I live my life. They had aspirations of what they wanted for themselves, for us. And they were like, we're going to go get it and this is how we're going to go get it. And it doesn't happen between the hours of 9am M and 5pm it happens in every other minute around there. And that's where they were making themselves better and taking risk and they were, you know, putting. What they didn't have was, was equity capital. They had, they had sweat equity. So they just worked. You know, it was being the, the leasing agent, the property manager and uh, the contractor all on rental properties at the same time. As you know, my, my father moved to New England for basically a year or two to go learn a business with a childhood friend of his who was in this business in New England. And so, you know, it didn't really think, he didn't really think twice to be like, yeah, I'm going to be gone a lot. Like I'll come back on the weekends when I can, but like I got to go live there and learn this thing. And we're like, okay, yeah, that's just kind of what it was.

Speaker C: So growing up, then you ended up yourself in Georgetown. Uh, so not too far, but a little far from home.

Speaker A: Well, I actually, uh, in the full circle of like learning from your failures and mistakes. I got into one out of the seven colleges I applied to out of high school. The one college I got into was University of Rochester.

Speaker C: Nice.

Speaker A: So I went to University of Rochester. It was not my plan. I was uh, you Know, I fashioned myself a, uh, somewhat of a smarty pants. I skipped a grade. I graduated high school at 16.

Speaker C: Oh, my gosh.

Speaker A: But I had, you know, very little idea of what it meant to focus myself and work hard and move in a direction. And I think my grades and everything reflected, reflected that. But my, my self perception was very different than maybe other people's perception of me. And that's when you do that, you end up going 1 for 7 on your college applications.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker A: Um, so I went to Rochester for a year. I loved it. I thought I would be there forever. I, um, I was urged to apply to maybe transfer by.

Speaker C: By whom?

Speaker A: Uh, I had a high school teacher who was very influential on me, Deborah Doyle. Uh, and she kind of was like, every year somebody doesn't get what they want. And this year it was you. And you actually, I don't want you to think that this is where you ought to be. You ought to be at XYZ Place. And she didn't know where that was. I think I applied to Cornell, and then I pulled that application because I'm like, I've been an upstate New York my entire life. I m gotta get out of here. And I applied to Penn, and they were like, they wrote me back. There was no emails. Send me a letter, and they're like, you don't have the transfer requirements. No, thanks. Like, they just didn't even let me finish the application. They're like, you're done. Um, and I applied to Georgetown sight unseen, because they had a nice brochure and a business school. And I was like, I like the hustle, man. I like the business.

Speaker C: Let's go.

Speaker A: And I applied, I got in. And the first time I ever saw Georgetown was the day I moved in.

Speaker C: Okay, go Hoyas.

Speaker A: Mid-90s. That's how it worked pre Internet. Like, that's how things went. Um, so that's how I got there a year later. Um, and I loved my experience at Rochester, and, uh, I loved my experience at Georgetown even more. Um, and that was kind of my entree into starting to figure out what I was gonna do with my life.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I mean, first of all, that's not on your LinkedIn, by the way. I did extensively scrape that.

Speaker D: So.

Speaker C: Glad to know the true story behind the dual educational double check.

Speaker A: I don't think you stayed hard.

Speaker C: Oh, no. Okay. That's on me. Good learning. And I guess thinking about the moment you went all the way down and then all the way back up to Boston, just two years out of that experience at Georgetown, you found yourself at Battery Ventures. Do I have that correct?

Speaker E: That's right.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker C: You know, how did you find what was Venture at the time? Like, was that an easy thing to stumble upon?

Speaker A: Venture. Uh, so I did tech banking. I worked for a firm that was called, ah, Alex Brown. For people who are like tech history aficionados. Like, Alex Brown was part of the AOL IPO and the Microsoft ipo. The four horsemen of Specialized Tech bank were Alex Brown, H and Q. Montgomery, Robertson Stevens. Names that nobody today knows anything about. But Alex Brown was really a special place because it was, you know, other people were like, we're gonna go to New York and work on high yield offerings and, like, merging dupont and Dow. And I was like, that sounds stupid. Like, what do you want to do? I was like, well, I sold software one summer. I wrote software one summer. I'm gonna see what if I can do and do stuff in tech. And Alex Brown was a place that we got to do really interesting small stuff in tech. Um, I did not want to be a banker. After two years of being a banker, that wasn't easy. But, um, being around growing companies, being around small companies, um, getting close to management teams and founders and seeing what it was looking like to build public, built businesses. By contrast, we took businesses public. We raised $30 million in certain IPOs. $100 million was a big IPO back then. You know, these are companies that probably had 10 million of quarterly revenue. And we're like, right in the S1, working three months to like, get this thing on the road, flying around, high five and raising 50 million bucks. So it's different types, different moment in time.

Speaker C: Different time.

Speaker A: Um, but it really was the on ramp for me to say growing companies, technology companies, and being closer to, you know, getting them going was I wanted to do. By the way, that didn't take me to venture. I thought, maybe I'll go carry a bag and I'll sell something. I'll work in bd. Um, true story. One of the meetings that I, uh, got, I convinced one of my managing directors to introduce me to this venture capitalist that he knew. And this guy's name is Rick Burns. And Rick was the founder of Charles River Ventures, CRV. And Rick started CRV in the 70s. Um, such a generous guy. So nice. And he sat me down for lunch and I told him, hey, I want to do this. I'm really interested in what you guys do. He's like, don't come here. This is, you know, being venture capitalist is stupid. You don't know anything about anything, like go to Oracle and sell software. And I was like, okay, maybe I should go to Oracle and sell software. Uh, fast forward a couple months and I'm, uh, considering going to Battery. And I asked Rick what I should do and he was like, well, battery, it's not matrix, but it'll work. And I was like, okay, that's all I need. I got to think of the dumbest idea ever. So I thought I'd go to Battery to basically work for a couple years, maybe make some money, go to business school, maybe go find a real software job to go get.

Speaker E: Um,

Speaker A: and that was again a different time. There weren't Venture jobs. I didn't think about Venture as a career. I thought about it as something that I would go and do and learn. And then I'm now 27 plus years

Speaker C: of doing this and you became the true apprentice to become the master. 14 years at battery. It was not always up and to the right. There are a few major world economic moments that I can think of that happened during your time there. Could you just walk us through a little bit of some of those seasons and some of the learnings that you really have taken with you through to today?

Speaker A: Yeah. 98. I joined, um, I remember vividly we went on a week long like retreat. One of the partners took the associates on like a week long like Outward Bound style in the wilderness. We disappeared for a week and we came back. We found a, like a gas station in rural Utah and we grabbed the newspaper and we were like, oh my God, do you see what Yahoo stock did in the last week? Like things were just literally starting to accelerate in 98. And uh, and it was a wild up into the right moment. It was for the next couple years. I'm very grateful for showing up at Battery at that moment. Um, I've said to people many times, wherever you were in 98, it either went straight up or straight into the ground and Battery, and that whole world went straight up at that moment. So I got to do a lot of things that I wouldn't have gotten to do because things were going so fast and furious. I had the first management team ask for me to be a member of their board when I was 24 years old.

Speaker D: Wow.

Speaker A: And they were like, no, no, we don't want that senior partner guy. We want you. Like, you know what we're doing. I want to work with you. Looks like me. Um, but yeah, you know, that was a really great moment. Um, but what went up came down. And I don't think that was nearly as educational as the next five years. Um, a lot of my view of how to invest, uh, how to manage a firm, um, relationship with founders, relationship with limited partners, um, what cycles mean in the grand scheme of company building and our industry, a lot of it was really informed by sitting around watching billions of dollars of gains turn to zeros and working out broken companies for years and years. It was a real education.

Speaker D: Well, you know, many years later, um, you certainly turned venture into a permanent career when you, when you founded Battery. Um, sorry, when you founded Amplify in 2012, um, initially as a solo GP. Um, let's maybe like peel back the curtain a little bit, tell us kind of what the aha ah moment was. Um, coming out of Battery where you sort of sat down and said I'm going to do this myself.

Speaker A: Yeah, so there were some things that we started to do at Battery that were maybe a function of necessity. Um, we were not kind of first call for all sorts of series A deals in infrastructure where we didn't have as strong as a presence in infrastructure on the West Coast. A little bit more maybe in Boston, where I was focused at the time, the brand wasn't synonymous with if I'm this type of founder, this is where I go. So we came up with different ways we were going to go do things and um, we thought, okay, let's do a couple late stage things. But really what we can do is we can go earlier. And doing seed stage stuff was not uh, the purview of most large firms at that moment in time. But a, uh, handful of us started to aggressively do seed and so that started to work or at least we got the inkling that there's a gap here. And the more it got clear to me that there was this gap and the gap wasn't just people weren't doing seed, it was the moments changing and the cloud is coming online and developers and engineers can build things way cheaper and faster than they ever could before. Um, it's allowing you to get max progress on short dollars. That's what venture is. And uh, there's this group of people that actually are being really overlooked. They don't look like the 42 year old guy coming out of Cisco who's done two companies before, who's ready to do the third one. They were neck beard DevOps people. They were kind of geeky back end folks that never sold anything. They just were very non traditional as founders. And I'm thinking to myself, these are kind of the people making max progress they're the people who know these problems better. They understand where the world's going. And the world is changing really fast. So that looked like a gap. Um, I don't think I aspired even at that moment, to go be a founder and start a firm. It wasn't till the very clear moment that battery was like, hey, we're doing a whole bunch of stuff, and it isn't what you're doing. And it was a really clear conversation about them going right and me going left. And then it crystallizes things really quick as to whether or not you believe that that strategy is the strategy that you're going to go bet your career on. And then that moved very quickly to think about, okay, how do I start this firm? How do I put the pieces together? Who's going to actually get behind me to do it right? And that was a different time. 2012 was not like today. There was no real capital formation for new funds. When I kind of said to certain people, including my now partner, Mike Dawber, hey, you should come with me and do this. We're going to start a fund. And he's like, what do you mean? People don't start funds? Like, there's like 20 of them. I know the names.

Speaker C: Right, right.

Speaker A: You know, and m. I'm like, no, no, we're going to start one. It was just different.

Speaker D: Well, not to get too ahead of ourselves, but Amplify now has over $2.7 billion in assets under management. Congratulations. Um, across multiple funds. But we're curious, in that early journey, who was the first person to say yes to investing in Amplify?

Speaker A: Oh, the first person, the very first person was an individual. His name's Mark Hastings. And I give Mark a ton of credit. Mark, um, had been at CIBC Ventures. He had spun some assets out, uh, of. He bought some assets out of Anderson Consulting or Anderson's Venture Group. Post the dot com bubble. He did incredibly well with that. He started, um, his own firm, uh, he now runs. He's the CEO of a firm called, uh, psg, Providence Strategic Growth. Um, but I remember having lunch with Mark at an Italian restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and I was sitting down with him and I'm like, I think there's this thing and there's these type of founders and these engineers, and nobody's doing this. The valuations are really good, and I think these companies can get big fast. And I don't think any of the big firms are focused on it. And he kind of cut me off one way through, like, bite A pasta? And he's like, so you're gonna do this? And I was like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. He's like, well, if you do it, will you take my money? And I was just so floored.

Speaker C: What a compliment.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I was so floored that not like, he was, like, ahead of me. I didn't go there to, like, ask for money. I went there to, like, actually go, like, am I dumb? This is not the right thing to do. He's like, yeah, you should do it. Yeah, I'll give you money. And I was like, really? Who else would give me money? And then I started asking, and people started saying yes.

Speaker C: Did it take more Italian lunches? Was that the.

Speaker A: Well, I. You know, the. The thing that I think about founding things, particularly if you've had a career, let's say you're not, um, maybe right at the beginning of your career, but let's say you're in your. Your late 20s, 30s. I was 36 when I started amplifying, um, is you go call on those people who know you, and what I'd say is, there's a whole group of people who are going to show up and they're going to back you because you're you. I had someone say to me specifically, like, we didn't care if you open an ice cream stand if you're going to business, like, we're backing you. And it's a feeling that floors you. But you realize it's a decade plus of goodwill built in relationships and people showing you, you know, showing. Seeing you in action, uh, that is a powerful thing. And I think a lot of founders who are, you know, whether you're starting a firm or whether you're starting a company, um, it's a scary thing to go back and cash in political capital with these people who you revere and respect and you trust. My first boss is Alex Brown, former partners and founders of Battery. These founders I had worked with, um, we had talked about some Seattle entrepreneurs in common that I respected. You know, there were people who I just really looked up to, and they're like, yeah, that makes sense. But really, I'm going to do it because it's you. And that is both really empowering and it's also really scary because if it doesn't work, you know, what does that say about you? Um, and that's a big thing to do when you're trying to find something.

Speaker D: The ecosystem, you know, between then and now has changed in many ways, but there's some common through lines Right. Like, the Max Progress founder also looks different than, you know, a few years ago and a lot of emerging managers were starting funds. Um, what would you say the similarities and differences are between starting a fund now versus when you went through the process?

Speaker A: Similarity, for sure. And this is the number one thing I say to anyone who beats a path to my door asking about it here. I want to start this fund, and you've done this. What do you think? Um, you better have a reason for existing. And I think a lot of people's reason for existing, unfortunately, isn't more nuanced than I think. It'd be fun to be a venture capitalist or I want to make money or. Or it's all very kind of inwardly motivated. The way I think about this is, um, why do you need to exist? What problem are you solving? And it's a very obvious thing if you're a founder of a company. Like, what's the gap? Where do I fit into this ecosystem, and what can I do differently than somebody else? I don't think a lot of people think about that in venture, and especially now, where the world was maybe awash with emerging managers and micro funds and super angels that, you know, made it very hard to distinguish what was durable and what wasn't. Now more than ever, I don't think you've really got a reason to get capital from other people. If you can't answer that question of, like, why you? What's your edge? What do you bring into the market that isn't there? What do you see that other people don't see? Um, it's possible to just say, like, I'm going to work harder and like, my network is better, my brand is better. Those are ways to differentiate. But, um, I think specifically for sophisticated capital, the bar has gotten a lot higher. And I don't think a lot of people think about it from the perspective of those investors to say, well, what are you giving me that I don't get? And why are you explicitly better than the things I already have? That's an important question. Uh, that really hasn't changed. What I think is different is the resources that are available to anybody looking to start anything, whether you're a company founder or a venture founder or just orders of magnitude different, like the notion of even what we're talking about right here as content. But someone might glean like a half of an insight from that didn't exist. And you could multiply that out times every accelerator, every online class, every meetup, the amount of this information that is that is kind of disseminated way bigger and it's also pushed down earlier and earlier. Like it blows my mind that I'm having conversation with you guys who have done a ton in your careers, but are also very early in your careers. And the amount that you know about this, and I compare that to where I was at, you know, five, six, seven years out of school. Like, you're light years ahead of where people of our generation were. Because entrepreneurship, capital formation, investing, building companies, it is an industry in and of itself. It's a destination. It's not this little sidelight. Like I got stuck in it 27 years ago. How did I end up doing this? People come out now and are trying to do it. Right.

Speaker C: Well, on the Internet itself, which is where we all live in, democratized this access to. And so it's almost interesting to be like a meta component of the industry today that we're all helping build the Internet. We've built it and here it is and now this is what it means. We're all on it.

Speaker A: And the downside of that is everyone has this knowledge. Everyone can be really good. And again to why do you exist and how good are you and how different are you? Well, you're not just competing against the 15 people who finished their analyst programs at tech banking and were like, I think venture capital sounds cool.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. Like I, I knew 20 analysts in tech banking and I knew by name, like which ones were going to go, which work for which partners at which firms. Like it was that small. Now you're competing against everyone around the world who has an Internet connection and can m, like make themselves available. So, you know, double edged sword. Right.

Speaker D: And I think sometimes building a team helps you compete in that crowded environment. So you mentioned Mike a couple of times. I'd love to dig in there. Mike Dawber joined you two years after you started Amplify.

Speaker A: A little bit less than that, but yes.

Speaker D: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the decision around bringing him on and really what you saw in him that made that decision come to life. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, what I see in Mike Dauber is an odd question. No, Mike, um, was better at almost everything I did. So it's pretty easy when you're like, oh, that person's better than me. I would like to work with them.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, the beauty was, is I don't think people appreciated how good Mike was at what he did. And so that was like the, that was my opening. But Mike said no. As I mentioned earlier, I was like, we're gonna Go do this thing. And he's like, what are you talking about? I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna make partner at this place. And you'll see. And, you know, they did want to be a partner, but at some point, I think Mike's entrepreneurial ambitions were like, you know, I do think that doing it with you would be more fulfilling and we could put our fingerprints on this more. Um, but Mike was my partner from the day I brought him in. I didn't, I didn't, uh. It wasn't my firm that he joined. It became our firm. And that was my opening offer to him. You come do this together with me. And, um, that was actually pretty important for the culture of the firm we created and the culture of our partnership. Nobody has a 50.1 to somebody else's 49.9. We have to agree on everything. And that's, of course, evolved as now we've brought Sarah and Lenny and built a real partnership. But, um, it's a high trust thing that you've got to do with someone that you respect a lot and you think has your interests at heart just as much as their interest at heart. I don't know if I could have done what I did with very many other people. There's maybe two or three other people of all times that I could have done it with. But Mike was a guy at that moment who, um, was my number one choice. And he wanted to do it and he believed in what we were doing, and he lived a lot of the same opportunities and gaps in the market that I lived. So I think he saw it the same way.

Speaker D: Venture is often known as an apprenticeship type business. Um, as you've scaled the amplify team, how did you think about the types of people you would bring on and what culture you ultimately cultivated?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, team building and culture is a, uh, tricky thing in Venture. Um, and what I'd always say about this is there's no one way to do this. Everybody does it very differently. There are some firms where everyone exists to be in support of one person who's clearly the firm. Um, and that has advantages and it has disadvantages. We've worked really hard to create a firm that isn't the dynamic, um, where we have very gradually built up the people that were kind of coming up behind us in terms of their overall responsibility to the firm, but very quickly built them up in terms of their independent brand, their presence and their capabilities. A lot of that really comes down to who's great. I think there's sometimes A tension for a lot of firms that say, well, I'll know you're great when you return a bunch of money. And by the time someone's returned a bunch of money, they're gone somewhere else if they're really good and they're chomping at the bit to do more. If you do that wrong, you get a whole bunch of people with no business writing checks or being in position of responsibility and you push them forward and you can create a lot of problems for other people's capital. So there is this really difficult tension. And if I think we've done one thing well, um, you know, we've been extraordinarily diligent about scouting talent.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: And we've been extraordinarily persistent about getting the talent. We want to come join us. Most people who have joined Amplify is the thing we talk about internally, have turned us down at least once. Most people, and we're like, that's okay, we're coming back, we're not going anywhere. And you know, over time they come in and they see that it's, it's kind of what we said it was. Um, and we've also tried to work really hard to give people rope when they deserve it. You know what we say internally is we want your ideas in the fund. We push decision making to the edge. And in the early stage business in particular, one of the things we believe is, um, you do not have a monopoly of good ideas in one person. Doubly so when you're talking about someone who's done the business for 25 years. Pattern recognition is actually an anti pattern in a lot of ways. When you're an early stage investor, you have to be able to look at exceptions. You have to be able to see things differently. And that's what our 20 somethings and 30 somethings are. Associates and principals and partners. That straight up conflict with my worldview on so many things investing wise and where technology is going, their passion and pounding the table for like this is what we should do. We've got room for that. Like we take that risk and we want them to take that risk. We want to push those decisions out to those people. We don't have an investment committee model. We have uh, just a model where like a sponsoring GP can just say, yep, we're doing this. They do it with trust and other people's feedback. But we make that happen so that people get their ideas in. And that is probably the most effective way for us to get people trained in the art of like, oh, this is how I make decisions. Yeah, I'm going to take risk.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker D: That's incredible. Well, Amplify is known for investing in technical founders, um, craftsmen building tools for other craftsmen. Um, as you know, going back a few years as um, an emerging manager, how did you think about the delicate balance of getting founders to say yes when you're not necessarily a big platform or a big brand name, um, and sort of having the benefits of that individual investing in that company?

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Speaker A: room that's exactly what you just described is I think the, the, the plight of every emerging manager.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is like I'm really good. If you just knew about us or give us a shot, trust me with your guy, we'll work, we'll work really hard for you. We'll do. You know, it is, it's something that builds very carefully is particularly if you're coming into the business new. Um, you know, your reputation gets built one deal at a time.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know, whether it's a deal you do or a deal you don't do, it's just one step at a time. Um, and you're ultimately selling yourself. You know, do you want me on your team versus that other person on the team? And you got to be able to win those things. They have to be able to make room for you. It's easier when you don't have to lead deals. It's easier when you can follow. You know, that's a benefit of being a smaller emerging manager. But if you kind of track our evolution as a firm, m, you know, fund one. I was very Clear. Like, our goal is going to be to lead some, but partner on most. Fund two, we were working really hard to lead, and it was really hard in fund two. We got our ass kicked a lot in fund two. Um, by fund three, we were like, you can have us or them. And the founders were like, ah, okay, I guess we have to pick. Okay, we pick you. And so, like, a lot of these companies that, um, we were lead investors in in that period of time, um, I know you've had Barry McArdle and Kaitlyn Kohlra from Hexon. That was in that period of time. Uh, Chris Valenzuela from Runway, um, you know, the folks at dbt, um, Tristan Handy. Those were all at a period of time where we weren't trying to politely fit into some large firms round. It was like, you want to work with us? Okay, you got to decide. And that's a big moment for emerging firms, is when you get your, you know, you can no longer befriend to everybody.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Um, and that, of course, continues to evolve. Now a lot of people see us as incumbent. It's a wonderful feeling when, when, um, you find some mega platform actually has a kill sheet about you and your firm. When we compete with Amplify, this is what we say. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's right.

Speaker D: We've made it.

Speaker A: I love it. I feel your fear. That stuff is good to feel.

Speaker C: That's product market fit.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is product market fit. Like, you know, validation from your competition, the competition taking you seriously, overpaying dramatically when they see you in a deal, just trying to discredit you from the beginning. If you're a founder selling a software product, it's the same thing, you know, that you're doing something right. If. But, you know, we're in a different business.

Speaker D: Um,

Speaker A: uh, the great thing about the venture business is as much as we compete, you know, we do collaborate. Like, all these same firms that we are, quote, unquote, competitors with, you learn so much from. And there's so many talented people that you're like, I want their opinions around this board. I want them to help this founder.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: Like, we. There is an opportunity to get somebody in the next round. Hey, work really closely with this firm, and even if they're not going to make it, make sure you line them up for the next round. I know, you know, Barry talked about this with you guys at some point, like, people who passed or that he didn't get across the finish line. He absolutely lined them up for the future. And that's because there's just a lot of great talent out there that you can get to go help your company as a builder.

Speaker D: You mentioned Barry. We've also had Kashish from High Touch

Speaker A: on the podcast multiple times, right?

Speaker D: Yeah, multiple. Twice.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker D: Once in person. Um, all incredible founders. What is maybe the most non obvious sign that you've picked up on in determining who is a rockstar founder that you should be putting money behind?

Speaker A: I don't know if it's non obvious, but it's certainly the one that I think about the most is, is Velocity. The people that just when you, when you talk to them on one day and then you talk to them two days later and things are literally changing in real time. And like, whether it's good news is coming or they've thought about some feedback and they've processed it. Um, I work with a founder, um, named Brandon White, and Brandon runs, uh, Axiom. Axiom is a machine learning company. They're training models on biological data to predict cell tox. Don't do animal testing, do it in machine learning models.

Speaker C: Interesting.

Speaker A: We're going to get more accurate results for humans that way. Still clearly remember the process of talking to Brandon, who we had gotten to know years earlier, but kind of came back around when he and Alex formed up to do Axiom. One of the things that blew me away was I would ask Brandon a set of questions in the morning and by the afternoon Brandon would produce detailed documents. And first I thought he was doing it just for me and then I was like, oh no, this guy's thought about all these things and then these other things he hasn't thought about. The next time I saw him, we would be having an in depth conversation about his actual thinking about that. And I was like, you're fitting all that in alongside the recruiting, alongside the like training a model and alongside like trying to get other people lined up to give you compute. Velocity is just so key when, because all these companies at the early stage have to do a lot with a little and they have to move very, very fast to, say, ahead of competitors and be relevant for fundraising. So again, is it obvious or non obvious? Maybe it's obvious, but it's my highest probability predictor.

Speaker D: That's awesome. Well, investing in early technical founders, there's often this interesting balance of being too early and just being ahead of the curve and the market's going to catch up with where that thinking is. How do you think about distinguishing between the two?

Speaker A: I think we're too early. Lots on lots of Things. Um, and I think it's just, uh, the nature of the game if you're going to be an early stage investor is, you know, if you're not too early on a bunch of stuff, you're going to be too late. And those companies are very hard to go anywhere when someone's coming and pitching me right now on, hey, here, this, here's this novel low code framework to do. I'm like, it sounds really cool. How on earth are you going to go overcome Vercel's distribution? Uh, the lock in that so and so has. That's what too late looks like. Too early. Sometimes you're, you know, you're still seeing what people can do. You know, early markets scale quickly, but early markets still find product market fit. If you're wrong about whether or not somebody needs the thing you have, you're going to find out that nobody cares if you're right. But too early, you're going to find some number of people who care and then we're going to have a debate about how quickly things are going to grow. Great example of this is, um, Adrian McNeil, who started Foxglove. Foxglove. He came out of Cruise Automation. He said, we're building data platforms and observability tools for, for robotics manufacturers. We had to do this at Cruise. Nobody wants to do this. It's impossible. Dirty, crufty, bankless work. And it's really critical. And we're like, yeah, that makes sense. And for maybe a couple years of Cruise's life, excuse me, of Foxglove life, we were like, okay, people like it, but are there enough company building robotic systems and embodied AI systems that could actually use what you're building? And that was a lot of 2023.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: Little bit of 2024. And then 2025 hit and all of a sudden, you know, they can't keep the software on the shelves. They're hiring hand over fist. This is after the folks at Eclipse joined us in the company. And just last year, late last year, the folks at Bessemer joined for a big B round that's all on the back of the company starting to find a market that meets them. But they'd been there with the product and they'd been there with the vision from the beginning. I'd much rather be that guy than the one who's now like, you know what? I think robots are taking off. I think we can build some software.

Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Well, before we talk a little bit about the future of Amplify and what you're seeing in the market we know founder journeys are not always a straight line. Um, tell us something that didn't go quite as planned in the Amplify founding story.

Speaker A: Uh, in the founding story, you know and this goes back a little bit to the time um, I was like, like this is my self talk. I'm like I'm 36, done this for 14 years. Been on the Forbes Midas list.

Speaker C: Let's go.

Speaker A: I'm trained on. I've been trained at this place called Battery. I know lots of these LPs like First Name basis. I've been going to annual meetings with these guys forever and playing golf and having drinks and like, like I'm just gonna go out there and raise money. And in 2012 it took me a year to raise $49.5 million because you're walking out and people are like well how are you going to work when you don't have Battery behind you and oh, you're not doing consumer. Consumer's really hot right now. Why are you doing enterprise? Is there enterprise stuff throwback?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: And is this developer tools and cloud thing going to be big? It seems big. But doesn't that mean that Amazon's going to win at all? And you're selling through all these observations that people have which you know, it's just because it's not obvious at the moment. Um, it took a lot of time. You know I think I closed the first close of the fund was, was $13 million of capital and then I got to 20, then I got to maybe 15 and then 18 and then 22. And it wasn't until I think I had 25 million of capital closed that I was finally like, you know what, you got one month pencils down like if you're not in, you're not in, we're uh, out. And then magically people got some urgency and you know, raced past a 40 target, got the 50. That took a year.

Speaker E: That took a year.

Speaker A: And though. And the whole time I was sitting there trying to build a, build a brand and launch a firm and do deals and support my portfolio and I was doing this as basically a one, one man show. And so that did not go as planned. I, I thought I was going to be off to the races and I was like we're gonna have this berm and I have this fancy office and these people can bring me deals and I'll be getting into whatever I want. And you know it, it's take. It takes a lot of time to build.

Speaker C: It was amplify what brought you from Boston to the Bay Area?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, you know, a lot of people get, uh, angsty or think very introspectively about, well, what city am I in and is it on the rise and that. And I think I made a comment earlier to you before we started that

Speaker E: back in 2012, I told people, I can do an enterprise firm in Boston, I can do an early stage firm in Boston, I can't do an early stage enterprise fund in Boston. And I, and I felt that, you know, I had been spent the previous year basically commuting one week on, one week off, and I. It was pretty obvious to me that it was going to be easier to build what I want here. In hindsight, I think that was a great move. Um, the, the hilarious thing is now that Covid's hit, the amount of traveling

Speaker A: I do is, is, is lower because

Speaker E: we're not at every board meeting in person, but it's higher because a number of our virtual companies and founders in

Speaker A: Colorado and in Boston and New York

Speaker E: and in London, it's just roof. So, you know, it's, it's never, it's

Speaker A: never the same as what you imagine.

Speaker C: It's absolutely. Well, you really, you went where the puck is going in terms of location and how much SF has grown as an ecosystem since 2012. And one thing that I think has changed as well in terms of how VCs meet their target customers, I. E. Founders, is content. And of course, we're slightly biased in this one. We think content is a powerful platform. We like to refer as people as a platform, as a way of distribution strategy and getting in front. And when we were prepping for this interview, we noticed that you've really embraced that at Amplify. Both have an incredible blog and writing page on your own website, and then even some of your partners have their own substack and blogs like Sarah. So just curious how you thought about content as a wedge for the early Amplify story.

Speaker E: And to today, like all things, it starts when you have something to say. Yeah, uh, you have something that's worth saying. And, you know, you brought up Sarah, and I think Sarah is a. Sarah's just a really unique voice in the AI Uh, community. Sarah's been putting together dinners and get togethers at Europe.

Speaker A: You know, people knew her as like

Speaker E: the Pied Piper of getting all these amazing researchers together. Um, and when she just said, you know what, there's so many of these papers out there, there's so many interesting things going out and nobody's Curating them as to what's interesting. She's like, I'll start putting together Projects to Know. And Projects to Know is now probably like one of the most widely read, uh, you know, aggregators of technical content that gets, that gets put out there, um, regularly. Um, Justin Gage joined us, uh, to help our company with marketing. But Justin's real superpower is Justin's an amazing technical writer in and of himself. And he was like, so many of your companies, um, have these wonderful stories to tell, and they don't tell them in a way that's going to appeal to both the engineers as well as the business people, as well as the folks that might be customers and investors down the road. Um, just as really gets on those stories. And he got us doing it. I think the first time it really crossed over into, uh, like, hey, who should we be thinking about? Um, Amplify launched, uh, its first ever kind of separate fund or separate product just last year. We raised 900 million in capital, 200 million of which is dedicated to Amplify Bio One. So it's our first fund dedicated to the intersection of computing, AI and biology. Um, and as part of that, uh, we hired a partner who was kind of on a similar mission to go do that thing separately, almost closed his own fund, but decided to join us instead. Elliot Hirschberg. Elliot's been a writer, uh, for a long time and he was a researcher and pursuing his PhD and doing Steve investment agent investments. But he had also built a 25,000 follower substack writing about the intersection of AI and biology in the future of biology substack that everyone should strat to called the century biology. And,

Speaker A: um, we really came to believe

Speaker E: that Elliot shared our vision of like back in technical founders and what the future looked like and how one would do it the right way by reading what he wrote. And what a great example of like,

Speaker A: well, if this is getting us to

Speaker E: buy into this guy, everyone can buy into it. If you know, you, you hear someone on a podcast or you read what

Speaker C: they have, that's incredible. Thank you for peeling back the layers on some of those intentional and unintentional decisions that you found with this flywheel working and how content creates this trust in the market. And as you alluded to earlier, Amplify has earned the trust of technical founders to put you all on their cap table at the inception point. So you probably have a really interesting lens on this little thing we're calling the AI bubble. So we'd love to hear from you how you're thinking about dissecting hype driven rounds or hype driven products relative to the true technology innovation that is pushing us forward at this time.

Speaker E: Yeah, the AI bubble, um, exists, but it might not exist in the way that I think everyone, a lot of people talk about it. Um, I believe we're in a bubble that's valuation driven and more than hype versus reality driven. So a lot of times we say it's overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term. Uh, I go back, I look at the Internet bubble as a great proxy. History rhymes. It doesn't repeat. But the proxy there was, valuations got way ahead of where progress was. And when people go, oh, look at all the billions of dollars that were lost when the Internet bubble collapsed, um, I'd still ask the question, do you think more money was lost in the collapse of the Internet bubble or has been created by the Internet in the subsequent years and by orders and orders of magnitude? The answer is more value has been created. But if you had piled into whatever it was in, in the spring of 2000 at the frothiest prices, when pricing was maybe very disconnected to fundamentals, you had a very different take on whether it's a good time or a bad time to be an investor. So, um, let me draw a big distinction though, between then and now. Those businesses, a lot of people forget, did not have revenue and growth and use cases and traction. And one of the things that I think is very different today is there are a whole class of fast growing companies who have very real economic value propositions, defensible margins, market position, distribution along with accelerating revenue. That's a pretty good place to be in. Now we can all debate whether or not that's worth, um, 5 times revenue, 10 times revenue, 20 times revenue, or 3 times revenue, depending on growth rate. But what we don't have is like um, 500 times the future value of an eyeball. Right? Like, which is some of the conversations here having 20, 25 years ago. So in that way I'm like, well, this is a lot more grounded in reality. Um, I think there's also just uh, an equally large, if not larger opportunity for AI to kind of permeate most things. Because what is an AI company at this point, right? Software AI company, consumer AI company, hardware, semiconductor, data center buildouts, they're all AI companies. So I think that's just a proxy for how large the overall MIRA is going to be. And there, I don't think we're overhyped at all. Um, what gets Tricky for investors and for founders alike is when prices go up very quickly. The natural reaction for most investors is, well, I got to go earlier. If it's expensive to do this D round or something, when it's obvious I'm

Speaker A: going to do the B, and when

Speaker E: the B gets competitive, I'll go to the A.

Speaker A: When the A is competitive, well, I'm

Speaker E: just going to go, you know, what's my option value pricing for a smart engineer leading a frontier lab. And you know, when those numbers kind of start to disconnect from reality and you go, wait a second, these three people need to do what to justify the billion dollar entry price. I think you, you recognize that from a capital perspective, um, there's probably going to be a lot of broken glass, um, by volume, but by number of companies, I think the odds are this mean more broken glass than not. But it doesn't change the fact that the things that work will work in outsized ways that will maybe make up for a lot of that broken glass. Um, this is probably the big debate that most LPs, GPs and founders all sit around talking about in an AI bubble. But, um, you know, two sides.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Well, you allude to the other half of your customer base, your LPs, as a, as a manager. Ah. And I think one of the most underrated and hardest things to do as a manager is actually doing what you say you're going to do to LPs. You kind of alluded to this cascading effect of when and where you allocate your dollars, especially given the competitive nature of the current environment. But it's clear that Amplify has been able to, over six funds, be able to consistently both generate returns and of course, do what you said you were going to do. What do you think LPs uh, are excited about for Amplify? How is it fitting into their differentiated portfolio?

Speaker E: Yeah, that changes over time. Um, I think early on Amplify was a, ah, kind of an interesting option bet on, um, you know, here's somebody who's done this for a while and you know, he thinks there's a gap and we've got a place for, you know, spotting some emerging talent and see what they can do. It's a cool, fun, you know, interestingly small fund size. That was then, and then over, over time it was, oh, there's this emerging franchise. And now they look at us quite differently. Now our promise to LPs is we

Speaker A: are institutional stewards of your capital.

Speaker E: We're a place where we can go out and ask to raise and manage $900 million in a year across three vehicles. And people go check you out to do that. Um, but I also think that what we have explained very clearly from the beginning, and Claudia, you mentioned this earlier, is we talk about we're for technical founders. And I think that idea wasn't obvious 10, 12 years ago of that, of being a category, and now it is a lot more obvious. I think there's a lot of firms that now say, you know, reverse check for technical. We're technical this, technical that. And that's all great, like it tells you you're doing something right. But I, uh, do think a lot of our LPs look at us and say that's a category of founders that will start, a category of companies that we want to be part of, who has their trust, who knows how to work with them, who's done hundreds of companies to know common pitfalls and mistakes, to get around, who's built an infrastructure and an operating platform to support those people. And I think, um, I would imagine that that's kind of what we represent to them. Um, the returns don't hurt, but, yeah, I think when they think of us as a product, I'm going to imagine that's what we represent.

Speaker C: But then you also earned the right to expand your product line. So you mentioned having the first ever debut bio fund for Amplify. Congratulations on that alongside the other raise two ra. Um, just tell us a little bit more about how you broach that conversation. I find LPs a little intimidating. So you go to your LPAC and you say, guys, we're going to do this bio thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker E: Um, we raised a couple hundred million dollars from VAIO in about two months at the moment when everyone was turning tail and running from Bio, you know, late 24, early 25. So, you know, if we pat ourselves on the back a little, that probably

Speaker A: speaks more to our credibility with our

Speaker E: LPs rather than how obvious or not

Speaker A: obvious the idea is.

Speaker E: I'm going to bet that within a year it's going to look very obvious because of the success of the companies in our portfolio and the move in this direction. I'm also betting that there's probably a lot of other firms that are like, oh, God darn it, I wish they dug. They did that thing. We should have done that thing. And the reason is, um, we've actually been doing this for a long time.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker E: Our very first AI investment in Amplify was in 2014. And it was a deep learning applied to Radiology company interesting, called Emletic. And while that company was well ahead of its time, you know, too early, uh, and wasn't, you know, ultimately successful from a venture return perspective, it was the first in many investments where we

Speaker A: started to see, oh, here's what it

Speaker E: looks like when you can apply AI to clinical healthcare, to pre clinical life sciences, to drug discovery, to drug development. And I think what we distilled out of that time, uh, or all that experiences was the fact that biology is a truly superhuman problem. I don't think people understand how probabilistic and not known in many ways biological processes are, um, the best of experimentation, best that yields the best of drugs still don't work for all people. They work for most people. And we're trying to get better about who do they work for and for whom are they not going to be so successful. That's really frustrating for patients, for clinicians, for people paying for therapies and trying to do all this better. And so if you told me you've got this data rich, very complex problem space where more information could help you be more predictive, you might just go a priori, you go, oh, that's a pretty interesting place to apply AI.

Speaker A: And I think in the long run

Speaker E: we're going to all see that the answer is, um, that's absolutely true.

Speaker A: What maybe made this the contrarian bet

Speaker E: at the moment was a lot of people had that observation, ourselves included, back in 2019, 2018. And you know, the wave one of tech bio really did leave a lot of people disillusioned. That was a version of hey, I'm a smart computer scientist, I'm going to go in and teach these biologists how it's done. Uh, and that ended very poorly. Very few companies have come out of it.

Speaker A: And I think a lot of the

Speaker E: biologists are still like seeing the computers can't make the drugs. Um, that's changing very quickly.

Speaker A: But they weren't wrong.

Speaker E: What's happening now is there's much more of uh, a confluence of really good factors that we think are going to

Speaker A: support a lot of companies.

Speaker E: So number one, the models and the progress in computing and AI are literal orders of magnitude better than they were even five years ago. We announced an investment today, um, we led a series A or CME series seed for a company called Boltz. Boltz is the most popular and widely used foundation model for researchers across academia, biotech and pharma. Um, and you know, Bolt is a perfect example of something that's whether it's protein Structure prediction or small molecule design, or any number of actual applications that matter in life sciences. Totally impossible. Pre alpha fold, totally impossible four or five years ago. So the technology change, big deal. The second thing that's a really big deal is, um, we're getting way better at interrogating biology, high throughput screening, getting the data. There's no corpus of Internet scale texts to go train on like language models. You actually have to make experiments, know how those experiments work, train on those results to make predictions and fill in the blank spaces. That's painstaking work. You got to figure out how to scale that up. But we're getting better at the tools for that. So there's now a moment where that's possible. And then the third thing, and this is far and away the most important thing as to why this matters now is people. Um, back in 2010, 2012, why Amplify started as a firm was there were these people who were really understood the new culture of building in the cloud and being developer first and moving quickly and moving right away. They understood the enterprise needs, they understood how to be able to work with hyperscale technology. Before that they couldn't have done anything, they didn't have the tools. But until those people were adequately trained and that culture was created, you couldn't do it. But when it happened, boom, uh, takes off. That's the moment we're in right now. In AI and bio, there are people who are classically trained in both biology and computer science. They think of both those domains as first class citizens. And we're seeing just the most amazing crops of founders appearing. Who goes, the future of biology is not going to be all in computers, but it's also not going to be all on, um, in wet labs and sitting on benches. We have to think about them both together. And when I think about the computing power and the high throughput biology combined with this new culture of people, we believe that this was worth taking all that effort that we've been doing in our main funds and going, you know what? This on its own needs, its own strategy, its own capital, its own people.

Speaker C: Well, I'm excited for this vision of the future that you described and no doubt will help millions of people, uh, in a very important category that to your point, has in some ways been underpenetrated in terms of what we've seen in terms of advancement and technology innovation. So I'm very excited to follow along to this fund. Um, and it goes without saying, but you've clearly built an incredible platform, top of its vintage uh, you mentioned being Midas list at Battery, but you have been on the Midas list for the seed managers within Forbes as well. So congratulations there. Um, looking forward, if someone was to think about starting a fund in, let's say, two years, how would you think about building trust at the market today?

Speaker E: Um, like most things, it's going to be based on what you do more than what you say. And so when I talk to people who want to be investors, I'd say, well, the first thing you have to do is be relevant to the entrepreneurs that you're talking about. You know, if you have some skills, and maybe they're in product, maybe they're in engineering, maybe they're in sales, go put yourself out there. Give, give of that to the people who need it, and you're going to create fans, people who go, oh, that was, ah, a really useful advisor to me. They punched above their weight in whatever dimension. That's a great way to get started doing things. If you're fortunate enough to have angel capital that you can work with, whether it's your own or somebody else's, you know, put that at risk, take, take bets behind people you believe in and technology that you think is going to happen, all of that is building up your individual credibility. Um, and then what are we talking about here? You know, brand speaking to the marketplace, having your ideas out there, Your ideas speak just as loudly when they're written down or spoken out loud. So, um, I think a lot of people who are doing those things repeatedly are making themselves relevant. And, well, then the results have to speak themselves. People gotta vouch for you. You have to have a good nose for what's coming next. And, you know, you have to have good ideas, but you do those things, I think you'll have an opportunity.

Speaker C: Well, thank you for sharing that. Many people look up to you as a pioneer in this space, so that will be helpful. Um, you know, we about five minutes left, so I'll ask one little question and then we'll go from there. But I guess, uh, you know, going back to the crux of Amplify. What made amplify, amplify, gosh, 14 years ago now, was the developer. Uh, the developer role has changed. It's become easier than ever to ship code to production. Also, it's been more needed than ever to be able to actually understand AI slop from actually, uh, you know, moving the needle code bases. So how are you thinking about this Persona of the developer who has underpinned your founder mindset for so many years? How do you think that's changing in the year to come?

Speaker E: Yeah, I think we've always said technical founder, developer really mattered in some contexts, but not in every context. And so I think what's actually happening is the definition of technical founder is expanding the number of people that come out that can call themselves technical. Um, whether it's because you're a data scientist or whether it's because you're a biologist, or whether it's because you're an AI researcher or whether you're, you know, you're just a, uh, programming whiz, those people are all technical.

Speaker A: What.

Speaker E: What I think matters more than anything now as technical skills are going to get more democratized, whether the tools get better or people's breadth is just larger.

Speaker A: What.

Speaker E: What really matters is insight on, um, problems. And I think one of the reasons that we also say, you know, not just technical, but we really care about people who understand their domain is you can't fake understanding of problems. I don't care how smart you are, technically, you want to go and jump three domains over and imagine your technical skills are going to unlock some new market. You're kidding yourselves. The people who are closest to problems and have lived them. Um, right. You know, Kashish and team who sat there building a travel business and were like, it's this data transformation thing that's super hard. And they fought with it and they built it on it, and they're like, we can do this better than others. Or if it was the data dog guys who, um, were wrestling with Amazon and said, nobody's building monitoring. We have to build the monitoring stuff that we need. And later they're like, no, everyone else needs. Those are just examples of companies being born out of insight, and that insight being born out of familiarity with a problem. And so I think that that's really going to be a defining characteristic going

Speaker B: forward as we look to the rest

Speaker D: of 2026 and as you embark on deploying Fun 6, um, what are you most excited about, both personally and professionally?

Speaker A: Oh, my God.

Speaker E: Personally, um, I need more boat time.

Speaker A: You get the water?

Speaker E: Um, no, personally, there's a lot. I turned 50 this month, which is insane. But, um, no, on the firm stuff, uh, and professionally, I am super excited about the crop of people that are now making m up the Amplify investment team. Um, a few years ago, people didn't know who Sarah Catanzaro was. And then I was like, oh, yeah, you know Runway? Yeah, well, Sarah Canzaro, like, she made sure Runway happened at Amplify and Uh, you know, Barry and Caitlyn Hex, like Sarah championed that deal and, you know, on and on and similar with Lenny, you know, High touch and DBT and chain guard and temporal. Um, people know that talent now that's there. What I don't think people understand is the quality of the talent that sits below them.

Speaker A: And I think the thing that, you

Speaker E: know, reflecting on my old man journey, the thing that I get most excited about, clearly more than anything now, is the quality of the people that we have and developing them into household names, if you will, where everyone else appreciates how good they are at me. I think we're going to see a lot more of that from us in the next couple of years. Um, you know, Elliot, I mentioned earlier on the bio sides, incredibly impressive. And Bar, uh, and Grace and Arjun Orion, all these people who are working with us and on our tech fund as well. Um, it's gotta watch the space. I think people are really impressed.

Speaker D: Well, as we come up on time

Speaker B: today, we'd love to ask the hero question of our podcast.

Speaker D: And we ask that the answer is not mom, even though it normally is really mom. Um, and that question is, who is a woman who has had a profound

Speaker B: impact on your life and career?

Speaker E: Life, uh, and career. Um, well, that's actually a really, that's actually a really easy one for me, um, because it does cross both life and career. Um, my wife, Margo Doyle, is, um, a badass businesswoman. Margo runs a $10 billion single family office, is the chief investment officer. She had a long professional career before she did that. And I think people who know her in the family office world and in the LP world, she is truly that amazing at what she does externally. But for me, um, her insights on this transition of like, you're going to go start a fund, you're going to go be a manager. Um, she's a very tough audience. You know, that doesn't make sense. I wouldn't say that he thought about it this way. Uh, you know, you can do this, that, um, everybody who found something needs somebody that tells them both the hard truth as well as, like, is willing to prop them up and say, you got this. And more than anybody else, that was her. Um, and it certainly was instrumental in the fact that Israel to amplify existing.

Speaker A: And, uh, even to this day, I think she's probably one of my closest sounding boards of how do you think about this problem and what should I be doing? And so invaluable is the word that I'd use.

Speaker D: Incredible. Well, Sunil, thank you so much for the time today. It's been incredible having you on the podcast.

Speaker A: Thanks. I really, really appreciate the time. It was great spending time with you both.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us at the Room Podcast. If you want more from the Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter@, uh, theroompodcast.com Newsletter we'll be back next week with a new episode. An inspirational guest Tuesday, 10am Eastern, 7am Pacific. See you in the room.

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