infrastructure
infrastructure
infrastructure
Essence VC is an infrastructure focused early stage venture fund
We don’t try to be
“value add”
We only succeed if we make a difference.
Here’s how:
We develop stories
Technical founders are great at building, but not always great at telling the most exciting narrative to non-technical audience (e.g: investors, customers and more).
Having both deep technical background and personal operating experience, we dive deeper than others can and help brainstorm fundamentally different possibilities.
We develop founders
The path from a deeply technical background to a CEO is a unique transition, and having personal founder + operating stories, we have a unique empathy to listen and help work through the emotional and tactical journey to grow towards an effective leader.
We develop communities
Experiencing growing open source and developer communities from a first-hand experience, helps us have a unique network and tactical advice when it comes to building a new community or product traction.
We develop engineer teams
Hiring engineers is one of the hardest part of the company journey, yet has one of the largest impact to the company trajectory.
We were founders with senior engineering leadership experiences, that also have over tens of thousands developer connections through open source and developer communities.
We can help on hiring your founding engineer, head of engineer and more.
What Founders Are Saying
“Hands down the most valuable investor in our cap table.”
“The most valuable angel on our cap table.”
“You’re the best investor we could have asked for”
“…constantly gives highly valuable product feedback and makes his stellar network of advisors and founders available to us”
The Essence Family
Every founder we support becomes part of the Essence family,
that has quickly become every founder’s go-to community to ask questions and support one another.
Here is everyone that is part of this family ->
Acquired Portfolio
whoami
Timothy Chen
Managing Partner
Tim is the Managing Partner at Essence VC, with a decade of experience leading engineering in enterprise infra and open source communities / companies.
Prior to Essence, Tim was the SVP of Engineering at Cosmos, a popular open source blockchain SDK. Prior to Cosmos, Tim cofounded Hyperpilot with Stanford Professor Christos Kozyrakis leveraging decades of research to disrupt the enterprise infrastructure space, which later exited to Cloudera. Prior to Hyperpilot, Tim was early employee at Mesosphere and CloudFoundry.
Tim is also active in the open source space as an Apache member.
Naomi Walker
Head of Platform
Naomi is the Head of Platform at Essence VC and is passionate about supporting early-stage technical founders through their startup journey.
Prior to Essence, Naomi spent six years at CloserIQ helping VC-backed SaaS startups like Retool, Dataminr, and CircleCI scale their US organizations.
With over a decade of B2B GTM experience, Naomi has experience building out and leading sales, post-sales, marketing, and RevOps functions across both VC-backed and bootstrapped startups.
Essence Advisors
Franciska Dethlefsen
PLG Advisor
Franciska is a GTM Advisor to Essence VC and passionate about helping data and infrastructure startups get from 0 to 1. When she's not helping out the Essence portfolio, she also works with startups 1:1 in an advisory capacity.
Franciska is the Director of Product-Led Growth at Amplitude where she's leading the charge on PLG strategy and execution. Prior to that, she was Head of Growth at Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude) and before that Franciska built out the marketing function from scratch at Snowplow Analytics.
Allie Beazell
Marketing Advisor
Allie is a marketing advisor to Essence VC and focused on helping community-forward data and dev tools companies standup and scale their marketing functions. When she's not working with the Essence portfolio, she also works as an advisor to early-stage startups in a 1:1 capacity.
Allie currently leads marketing at Linear, with an emphasis on brand, growth, and product marketing. Prior to her current role, she was Marketing Chief of Staff and Director of Developer Marketing at Census, and also founded and built out the technical content marketing speciality at Animalz.
Kaitlyn Henry
Venture Partner
Kaitlyn Henry is the Chief of Staff at dbt Labs, where she oversees strategy, operations, and special projects. Prior to dbt, she spent 5 years as an investor at OpenView, a software-focused VC fund, where she specialized in investments in infrastructure, data, AI, developer tools, and security.
She was was formerly part of Amazon's machine learning team, supporting the development of Amazon's Featured Merchant Algorithms, and supported early stage startups as a member of the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.