Essence Venture Capital

Having both deep technical background and personal operating experience, we dive deeper than others can and help brainstorm fundamentally different possibilities

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

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”

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 -> 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

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