Ashmeet Sidana on moving from a partnership with Foundation Capital to being a Solo GP, investing in technical teams, and the upside and downside of data.

Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

On this week’s show, we are joined by Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer at Engineering Capital, a seed stage firm with $139.5M AUM.

Prior to founding Engineering Capital in 2015, Ashmeet spend nearly 10 years at Foundation Capital which he joined after various technical roles at companies such as VMware and Silicon Graphics.

His investments include Azure (NYSE: AZRE), Netsil (acquired by Nutanix), Palerra (acquired by Oracle), Freewheel (acquired by Comcast), InQuira (acquired by Oracle), Altor (acquired by Juniper), Appurify (acquired by Google), PrivateCore (acquired by Facebook) and StackStorm (acquired by Brocade).

Ashmeet received an MBA from Wharton, MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BS in Computer Science summa cum laude from USC.

I’ve long considered Ashmeet to one of the most versatile and thoughtful GP’s in the market and his comments on this week’s show illustrate that.

In this episode we discuss the following topics:

01:14 Ashmeet’s accidental journey into VC

02:16 Learnings from the late-great Kathryn Gould when he was thinking about starting his own firm.

05:37 The goals he set forth to the type of firm he wanted to build

07:22 Choosing to be a solo GP versus another partnership

11:53 Managing time effectively as a solo GP

14:26 What he believes to be the trigger point to adding a partner

17:56 How fund size relates to strategy

20:11 Why Ashmeet chose to grow his fund size over time

21:22 Technical risk and how it relates to capital needs

24:01 What the rush of capital means to both founder and investors

27:03 Competition between specialist seed firms and multi-stage large firms

29:55 Trends coming out of the pandemic

34:04 Why data is the new oil, but also has asbestos type of properties

35:52 His biggest learning as a VC

36:54 Ashmeet’s biggest miss

38:24 The people he has learned from the most

Mentioned in this episode:

* Engineering Capital

* Foundation Capital

* Kathryn Gould

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Ashmeet. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com