Empowering the Future of Data Infrastructure and Dev Tools
At Essence VC, we bridge the gap between technical brilliance and product success. With a deep understanding of both worlds, we craft compelling stories, nurture founders' growth, build thriving communities, and assemble exceptional engineering teams.
Experience the essence of innovation with us.
We don’t try to be “value add”
We only succeed if we make a difference.
Here’s how:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
— Name
“…constantly gives highly valuable product feedback and makes his stellar network of advisors and founders available to us”
— Name
“You’re the best investor we could have asked for”
— Name
“The most valuable angel on our cap table.”
— Name
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.
The Essence Family
Here is everyone that is part of this family:
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.
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.
Franciska Dethlefsen
GTM Advisor
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.
The Essence Family
Here is everyone that is part of this family:
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Torq is a no-code automation platform for security and operations teams. With Torq, frontline security professionals can easily create automated flows that help them respond to threats faster, remediate risks automatically, and deliver better security to their teams.
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.
The Essence Family
Here is everyone that is part of this family:
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