What Amplify is all about
The first investor
for technical founders.
for technical founders.
Amplify has been investing in and supporting technical founders since 2012. We’ve been early backers of multiple generations of your favorite technical products, from Datadog and Fastly to dbt, Temporal, Chainguard, and Runway.
We lead investments from a company’s first round through Series A, and support founders all the way until IPO. The Amplify team is based out of the Bay Area, and we’re currently investing out of our sixth fund.
An ode to technical founders
Today engineers and researchers are an obvious bet. But they weren’t always such a hot commodity.
We’ve come a long way
In today’s world, who reigns supreme more than the technical founder?
Engineers and researchers are the colloquial movers and shakers of our time. They are the ones who build things, the ones who get things done. Their companies and their culture have driven most of the economic progress over the past decade; FAANG makes up more than 10% of the entire American stock market’s value. And it is researchers and engineers – not their business counterparts – who are relentlessly driving the impending AI revolution, driven by sheer curiosity and passion.
But it wasn’t always that way. Just a short 20 years ago, engineers were far from the celebrated change makers they are today – they were nerds, nerds tucked away in a cubicle somewhere writing Assembly. Instead it was business people, credentialed MBAs in crisp dark suits, white shirts, and a passable golf game who were entrusted with the capital and decision making power to build businesses. Engineers built the product, sure. But they didn’t build the business.
Not only that, but the front lines of IT – led by the companies that were running at the largest scale, pushing technical boundaries, and willing to try new, unproven software – were not in Silicon Valley. They were in New York, and for the most part they were banks, hedge funds, and high frequency trading firms. If you wanted to understand where infrastructure was going, you spent time on Wall Street, learning about their problems and what software they might be willing to pay for to solve them.
But a new guard was emerging: Google, Facebook, AWS, all starting to reach hyperscale around the early 2010s. Starting to define what hyperscale even means. These engineer-led companies grew to sizes that dwarfed anything the old guard of IT could even conceive of. The story goes that the Facebook infrastructure team met with Oracle and asked them what their largest deployed database was. They said a cluster of a few 250TB DBs (1PB total), to which Facebook replied: that’s cute. Ours is 50PB.
The sheer scale that these so-called internet companies were operating at – 24/7 and completely global – started to uncover a completely new set of unsolved software and infrastructure problems. How do you handle massive production data stores? How do you deploy quickly and safely? How do you build reliable, resilient services when you have hundreds of millions or even billions of users? And how do you monitor it all?
At the same time, the cloud was changing software dynamics. In AWS and GCP and friends, you scale out, not up. But the software of the time – including Postgres and MySQL, which still struggle with this today – was built for a scale up world. It was becoming clear that this was a major platform shift, and with all platform shifts, everything would need to be completely rewritten and rebuilt. We needed a new generation of companies, building infrastructure and software products for the next 20 years. For these engineer-led companies pushing the literal physical boundaries of IO and storage.
It was engineers and researchers – technical startup founders – who answered that call. Who better than the people who discovered and experienced these problems themselves first hand to go out and build solutions for them? Datadog, MongoDB, Elastic, Twilio, Hashi…all created in this era, all led by highly technical founding teams, all setting out to solve their own problems. Amplify was lucky enough to get a front seat as the first institutional investors in Datadog and Fastly, more than 10 years ago.
The thing about technical founders is that they are all about the details. When you’re a technical founder building technical products, your buyer is just like you. You are creating tools for other craftsmen. It is the ultimate test of attention to detail and nuance. Everything counts. These endeavors require a level of excellence and dedication scarcely seen in other areas of software. It’s pretty neat.
But neat as it may be, it was just an idea, because a decade ago you would have to have been crazy to think that these technical misfits were going to build huge B2B businesses. They didn’t look anything like the kinds of people who started companies that made money. They didn’t have MBAs. They had never sold software before. They wore Megadeth tees. But over a decade ago, in the midst of all of that, we started Amplify predicated on this one belief: that the script was going to flip, and it was going to become the era of the technical founder.
Amplify has been investing in these technical founders for 13 years now. We’ve backed hundreds of engineers, researchers, and otherwise creative tinkerers who go out and against all odds take a shot at making a product that fellow craftsmen might regard with little more than scorn. We’ve been the first investors in Datadog, Fastly, Chainguard, Temporal, dbt, and Runway, companies whose founders felt compelled to solve interesting problems because these problems are their problems.
Today, the landscape has changed. Every company is a software company. Everyone is operating at hyperscale. There are now dozens of public companies run by technical founders and (thus) just as many investors out there with teams focused on the technical founder. The fringe belief Amplify was predicated on is now an obvious one.
Yes, the technical founder reigns supreme, as far as infrastructure and developer tools are concerned. But what’s next?
Surprise – the world is changing again. AI is coming for every piece of software and technology that we take for granted. Every domain and every tool is becoming more technical. There are twice as many software engineers graduating every year as there were a decade ago, and they’re spreading throughout the world in places previously untouched by these kinds of technical minds. Even the human genome is being digitized, as biology slowly starts to contend with software and AI. Everywhere, engineers, scientists, and researchers are running up against a new class of problems…
…would you bet against them?
Engineers and researchers are the colloquial movers and shakers of our time. They are the ones who build things, the ones who get things done. Their companies and their culture have driven most of the economic progress over the past decade; FAANG makes up more than 10% of the entire American stock market’s value. And it is researchers and engineers – not their business counterparts – who are relentlessly driving the impending AI revolution, driven by sheer curiosity and passion.
But it wasn’t always that way. Just a short 20 years ago, engineers were far from the celebrated change makers they are today – they were nerds, nerds tucked away in a cubicle somewhere writing Assembly. Instead it was business people, credentialed MBAs in crisp dark suits, white shirts, and a passable golf game who were entrusted with the capital and decision making power to build businesses. Engineers built the product, sure. But they didn’t build the business.
Not only that, but the front lines of IT – led by the companies that were running at the largest scale, pushing technical boundaries, and willing to try new, unproven software – were not in Silicon Valley. They were in New York, and for the most part they were banks, hedge funds, and high frequency trading firms. If you wanted to understand where infrastructure was going, you spent time on Wall Street, learning about their problems and what software they might be willing to pay for to solve them.
But a new guard was emerging: Google, Facebook, AWS, all starting to reach hyperscale around the early 2010s. Starting to define what hyperscale even means. These engineer-led companies grew to sizes that dwarfed anything the old guard of IT could even conceive of. The story goes that the Facebook infrastructure team met with Oracle and asked them what their largest deployed database was. They said a cluster of a few 250TB DBs (1PB total), to which Facebook replied: that’s cute. Ours is 50PB.
The sheer scale that these so-called internet companies were operating at – 24/7 and completely global – started to uncover a completely new set of unsolved software and infrastructure problems. How do you handle massive production data stores? How do you deploy quickly and safely? How do you build reliable, resilient services when you have hundreds of millions or even billions of users? And how do you monitor it all?
At the same time, the cloud was changing software dynamics. In AWS and GCP and friends, you scale out, not up. But the software of the time – including Postgres and MySQL, which still struggle with this today – was built for a scale up world. It was becoming clear that this was a major platform shift, and with all platform shifts, everything would need to be completely rewritten and rebuilt. We needed a new generation of companies, building infrastructure and software products for the next 20 years. For these engineer-led companies pushing the literal physical boundaries of IO and storage.
It was engineers and researchers – technical startup founders – who answered that call. Who better than the people who discovered and experienced these problems themselves first hand to go out and build solutions for them? Datadog, MongoDB, Elastic, Twilio, Hashi…all created in this era, all led by highly technical founding teams, all setting out to solve their own problems. Amplify was lucky enough to get a front seat as the first institutional investors in Datadog and Fastly, more than 10 years ago.
The thing about technical founders is that they are all about the details. When you’re a technical founder building technical products, your buyer is just like you. You are creating tools for other craftsmen. It is the ultimate test of attention to detail and nuance. Everything counts. These endeavors require a level of excellence and dedication scarcely seen in other areas of software. It’s pretty neat.
But neat as it may be, it was just an idea, because a decade ago you would have to have been crazy to think that these technical misfits were going to build huge B2B businesses. They didn’t look anything like the kinds of people who started companies that made money. They didn’t have MBAs. They had never sold software before. They wore Megadeth tees. But over a decade ago, in the midst of all of that, we started Amplify predicated on this one belief: that the script was going to flip, and it was going to become the era of the technical founder.
Amplify has been investing in these technical founders for 13 years now. We’ve backed hundreds of engineers, researchers, and otherwise creative tinkerers who go out and against all odds take a shot at making a product that fellow craftsmen might regard with little more than scorn. We’ve been the first investors in Datadog, Fastly, Chainguard, Temporal, dbt, and Runway, companies whose founders felt compelled to solve interesting problems because these problems are their problems.
Today, the landscape has changed. Every company is a software company. Everyone is operating at hyperscale. There are now dozens of public companies run by technical founders and (thus) just as many investors out there with teams focused on the technical founder. The fringe belief Amplify was predicated on is now an obvious one.
Yes, the technical founder reigns supreme, as far as infrastructure and developer tools are concerned. But what’s next?
Surprise – the world is changing again. AI is coming for every piece of software and technology that we take for granted. Every domain and every tool is becoming more technical. There are twice as many software engineers graduating every year as there were a decade ago, and they’re spreading throughout the world in places previously untouched by these kinds of technical minds. Even the human genome is being digitized, as biology slowly starts to contend with software and AI. Everywhere, engineers, scientists, and researchers are running up against a new class of problems…
…would you bet against them?