• Engineer-turned-founder — deep technical background
• Founded Hyperpilot — acquired by Cloudera, which led him to start Essence VC in 2019
• Decade of experience leading engineering in enterprise infrastructure and open-source communities
• Hosts quarterly virtual conferences on LLM inference, multimodal AI, etc.
• Publishes Open Source Startup podcast
• Maintains a 50-company job board to help founders hire early engineering talent

• Data infrastructure (databases, observability, data quality)
• Developer tools (workflow engines, security tooling, cloud cost optimization)
• Applied AI (vector stores, MLOps, model evaluation, LLM agents)
• Pre-seed stage, deeply technical first-time founders

62-company portfolio across data infrastructure, developer tools, and applied AI. LPs include Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Ethan Kurzweil (Chemistry VC), Martin Casado (a16z), Michael Kim (Cendana Capital).

• Excellent fit — Essence VC explicitly invests in "agents that unlock LLM use cases"
• His technical engineering background means he can deeply evaluate AI agent infrastructure
• The $250K–$700K check size is perfect for earliest-stage AI agent companies
• Four funds deep (scaling from $1M to $41M) shows a proven, growing platform
• The Open Source Startup podcast and LLM conferences show he's deeply embedded in the AI infra community
• His job board and hiring support is uniquely valuable for early-stage teams
• Seattle location outside main VC hubs may mean less competition for deals