Technical Investing with Sunil Dhaliwal

Robotics, genomics, and backend infrastructure: as an investor, it can be difficult to assess the viability of a startup that is on the cutting edge in any of these areas.

A robotics startup requires a team with an integrated understanding of hardware and software. A genomics company will not only have to develop a successful healthcare product, but will have to bring it to market through regulation. And in the world of backend infrastructure, building a business that will be differentiated from giant cloud providers gets harder every day.

Amplify Partners is a venture capital fund with an emphasis on technical investments. Their portfolio includes infrastructure companies like Datadog and Gremlin, as well as pharmaceutical and hardware companies.

Sunil Dhaliwal is the founder of Amplify Partners, and joins the show to discuss the thesis of Amplify. The investments that Amplify makes are in technical companies–which makes these financing decisions complex enough to require detailed, individualized research. But there are commonalities among the founding teams. Sunil lays out a useful rubric for anyone who is looking to learn about venture capital investing.