About the organizers
As investors and practitioners, Apoorva, Tim and Naomi hope to share their experiences, failures and successes and help equip the next generation of technical founders with the right GTM toolkit.
You’ll hear from serial entrepreneurs and fellow founders and get practical guides and examples that you can bring back and apply to your startup.
Apoorva Pandhi
Apoorva is a partner at Foundation Capital and focuses on data infrastructure, developer tools, ML/AI, analytics and cloud based applications.
His journey with venture started more than a decade back at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to Foundation, Apoorva was the VP of Enterprise Sales at Quid, a growth stage NLP and ML platform and before that co-founder of Funnl Labs, which was an ML platform focused on aggregating and personalizing communication.
Apoorva’s deep understanding of go-to-market design and appreciation for technical insight gives him a unique lens when it comes to all aspects of investing and working with technical founders.
Naomi Walker-Garrett
Naomi is the Head of Platform at Essence VC and is passionate about supporting early-stage technical founders through their startup journey.
Prior to Essence, Naomi spent six years at Formative Search Partners helping startups like Retool, Dataminr, and CircleCI scale the GTM and Engineering teams.
With over a decade of B2B GTM experience, Naomi has experience building out and leading sales, post-sales, marketing, and RevOps functions across both VC-backed and bootstrapped startups.
Timothy Chen
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.