About Amplify
Working With Us

How we work with technical founders

Amplify has over a decade of experience working with technical founders, and over time we've developed a good sense of how to help.

Our Build Team is a group of unusually effective leaders in sales, recruiting, growth, and marketing with decades of experience at technical companies. They work closely alongside Amplify companies in structured, goal-oriented engagements.

Tim Babcock
GTM, Sales

Building and scaling your go-to-market organization, hiring for critical roles, and finding the right sales motion for your customer.

LinkedIn

“Tim has been instrumental in shaping our go-to-market motion and strategy. He’s helped us accelerate growth in some areas while also helping us avoid potential missteps.”

Andrew McNealy
Andrew McNealy

“Tim came in and identified concrete gaps in our sales motion that immediately accelerated our growth. There’s really nothing more helpful than that.”

Naga Leviner
CEO at Picnic Health
Mark LaRosa
GTM, Sales

Winning early customers, technical strategy and outbound messaging, sequencing and prioritization for roadmap and features.

LinkedIn

“Mark helped our company scale before we had a full executive team. His mentorship, feedback, and engagement during our CRO search was indispensable.”

Grant Miller
Grant Miller

“Mark is an invaluable resource and an extension of our team. He’s in our Slack, I always text him and call him weekly. He knows how people buy technical products and companies' challenges as they go through it for the first time.”

Barry McCardel
CEO at Hex
Justin Gage
Growth + Marketing

Storytelling, messaging and positioning, content strategy, website, documentation and technical writing.

LinkedIn

"It would be hard to overstate how impactful Justin has been for WarpStream. He helped us cut through the noise and find our company’s voice in a crowded market. From initial launch, to marketing copy, to dealing with PR emergencies, and building our brand, Justin was instrumental in almost every aspect of our marketing success. If you’re trying to market and position a highly technical or developer focused product, you couldn’t ask for a better partner than Justin."

Richie Artoul
Richie Artoul

“Justin was instrumental in helping us with our launch: the new website structure and copy, our blog post, and even the press release have his fingerprints on them. It was really helpful having someone on board who can write, but understands developers too.”

Alana Marzoev
CEO at Readyset
Natasha Katoni
Talent + Recruiting

Hiring and retaining your team, building a diagnosable recruiting system, defining your talent brand, and creating a winning compensation pitch.

LinkedIn

"Natasha has been directly responsible for some of our best hires. In addition to consistently connecting us with the right people in her network, she provides valuable advice and guides us in the right direction for more challenging searches."

Josh Curl
Josh Curl

"Natasha is an expert in executing world-class people operations at every level of a startup. She taught me the tools to recruit the founding team, navigate delicate personnel issues, manage search firms, and build a stellar executive team. Even as we enter the growth phase of Eppo, Natasha remains my go-to resource for everything related to building a high-performing team."

Chetan Sharma
CEO at Eppo
Nate Remy

Mapping competitive talent markets, identifying and engaging talent, best practices and creative methods for top of funnel, and talent sourcing infrastructure.

LinkedIn

"Hiring top talent is arguably the most critical thing you can do as a startup. Nate and Amplify have been exceptional partners, helping us define our needs, refine job specs, and connect us with top-tier candidates."

Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Smith

"Nate is the best recruiter I've ever worked with—authentic, knowledgeable, and results-driven. He has a structured process, and an incredible network, and helps position your company and role to attract top-tier candidates."

Mahir Lupinacci
COO at System Initiative
Joshua Goldenberg
Design

Product, design and brand guidance, design systems, hiring, performance and organizational development, and operationalizing design.

LinkedIn

“As our company then rapidly grew, Joshua was (and remains) one of my most trusted mentors in scaling a design culture and collaboration that drives creativity, deep user empathy, and first principles thinking. I’m convinced he’s among the best in the world at what he does.”

Ray Zhou
Ray Zhou

“Joshua is a lot more than a Design advisor, but that's his ace. He's a trusted and grounding voice as we are working through the trenches of the earliest builds.”

Patrick Despres-Gallagher
CEO at Stage

The community for technical founders

Amplify's community of 150+ technical founders comes together at events, workshops, and on the good old web.

The community for technical founders
CommunityEvents

Build relationships with other founders from 100+ Amplify companies. We run tons of events to make sure you meet them. Yearly highlights include our Founder Retreat, Ski Trip, dozens of dinners, and much more.

CommunityWorkshops

We organize workshops run by people who have done it before, focused on solving a specific problem to technical teams. Think hiring your first technical marketer, when to think about engineering management, and how to instrument open source products for analytics.

Community#amplify-founders

The #amplify-founders channel is where you'll meet 150+ technical founders figuring it out alongside you, and ask questions about anything from laptop policies to data warehouses.

What Amplify is all about

The first investor

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

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?

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