Ed Sim
Founder & Managing Partner, boldstart ventures. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderauthor@edsim ↗LinkedIn ↗boldstart.vc ↗
Ed Sim specializes in inception- and seed-stage investments in enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, SaaS, and AI, having backed companies such as Snyk, Protect AI, Kustomer, Clay, and Superhuman at formation. He previously co-founded Dawntreader Ventures and publishes the newsletter What's in AI/Infra/VC.
1shows
3appearances
88statements
24resolved
11supported
3contradicted
46%fully supported
23said about them ↓ Everything Ed Sim said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Sim: Apple edge AI developments will not generate meaningful revenue in 2024
“My short would probably be, I mean, just what everyone's looking at now is just Apple right now. I think Apple, You know, you've got an iPhone growth issue over there at Apple, but the one thing that gets me excited about Apple is the idea of machine learning …”
Sim: Boldstart's fastest-growing 2021 vintage startups are Israeli infrastructure companies
“We have over a dozen Israeli founding teams right now, and two of my fastest growing companies in fund five vintage 20, 21, which had, you know, funded inception to now from zero to about two million of ARR were both Israeli infrastructure companies.”
Ed Sim: Incubating companies is unscalable unless it is a firm's sole focus
“And by the way, this is not incubating a company. That's not a scalable model. And that's, unless that's all you do.”
Sim: Superhuman founder locked $10M Series A in separate bank account untouched
“Then he raised pre raised a ten million dollar A round. He put it in a separate bank account and said, I'm not going to touch this thing. I'm literally just going to put it there. I don't want to see it. It's in a separate bank account. I'm only going to opera…”
Sim: Snyk Would Have Failed Without Continuous Internal Funding Prior to Series A
“If Guy went out trying to raise capital from someone else and I didn't have enough capital to give to him, he would have gone out of business.”
Ed Sim: Enterprise IT spending is re-accelerating
“Enterprise IT spending is re-fucking accelerating right now.”
Ed Sim: Pre-seed startups raising $500K-$1M don't need a board
“If you're raising 500 K to a million, that's what I think of pre-seed, then yeah, you probably don't need a board. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need a fucking board.”
Ed Sim: Startups raising $3M-$4M should avoid SAFE notes for priced rounds
“If you're doing a classic round of you're raising three to four million, I like to tell the founder that, hey, you should probably not do a series of safe notes here because you never really know what you own, especially in conversion. You want to actually do …”
Ed Sim: Tech M&A volume will increase as investors seek liquidity
“I think we're going to see a lot more M and A's kind of coming ahead right now.”
Enterprise software markets repeat and rebuild identical tools every 10-15 years
“So that's what happens in enterprise. It's the same shit getting rebuilt every 10 or 15 years in a different way with a different pitch.”
Sim: Snyk took nearly three years to reach $1M in ARR
“It took him two and a half years to kind of get out there and get his first, you know, two and a half to three to get his first million of ARR.”
Ed Sim: Tech IPO window won't reopen until Fed cuts interest rates
“I think it's very simple. Mr. Jerome Powell signaling to the world that interest rates are under control now. And the air has been taken out of the balloon and the interest rates have to go down.”
BoldStart Ventures refuses to invest in single-founder startups
“Well, I, we never liked single co-founder, co-founded companies or single founders, number one.”
BoldStart Ventures requires founders to be engineers actively building product
“And secondly, they have to be engineers. Engineers, Building product. That's really important.”
Seed startups relying on analyst reports for market sizing are uninvestable
“If you have an analyst report to kind of show us, then it's probably not worth investing in, you know, at the seed stage.”
Developers increasingly drive enterprise software purchasing decisions bottom-up
“I think developers are increasingly wielding more and more power in the enterprise these days, and it's one of those things where they're, you know, coding or develop, or using a new technology, they'll download it, or they'll try a free version, then they'll …”
New York seed valuations are consistently lower than Silicon Valley
“I think that the New York valuations tend to be a little lower than the Valley.”
AI will infiltrate every enterprise software category within five years
“I think I'm seeing a lot of kind of AI, not AI platforms, but AI being infiltrated across every segment of enterprise software. And I'm also seeing a lot of stuff where messaging is going from consumers to the enterprise as well. Messaging meaning you know, al…”
Sim: Third-time founders raise $10M at inception versus $1M for first-timers
“A third time founder is going to raise ten million dollars out of the gate and they may very well deserve it. Whereas a first time founder may get one.”
Sim: Having 36 months of cash runway does not mean you have a business
“Just because you have 24 or 36 months of cash doesn't mean you have a business.”
Sim: Early VCs need valuation discipline to succeed on $300M to $500M exits
“Cause if early guys will do well, as long as they're not paying 50 to 75 Brie for some of these inception rounds, you know, if they exit a three to 500, but you need more of those to return a fund. So it changes the dynamics of everything where ownership matte…”
Sim: Two-thirds of startup bridge rounds yield positive outcomes
“I'd say probably two thirds work out more positively than negatively, but the ones that work out can be outliers.”
Sim: SecurityScorecard surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue in 2023
“Security scorecard. The market's not big enough. It's not, this is not that they did over a hundred million of error last year.”
The other half of the tape: Ed Sim's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 11 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 16Rahul Vohra 3Guy Podjarny 2Hussein Kanji 1Adam Besvinick 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 23
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Superhuman's Rahul Vohra on How To Measure Product Market Fit, How To Construct A Process To Increase It & How To Implement A Strong Feedback and Reporting Cycle To Sustain It
- 20VC: Inside The Mind of A Leading LP: How LPs Evaluate New Fund Managers on Everything from First Meeting to Portfolio Construction To Fees and Carry with Lisa Edgar, Managing Director @ Top Tier Capital Partners
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2016 2 mentions in 1 episode
2015 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20 VC 093: Where Is The Micro VC Market Going with Samir Kaji @ First Republic Bank
- 20 VC: Running Lerer Hippeau Ventures Like A Startup with Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner @ Lerer Hippeau Ventures
- 20 VC FF 025: Crowdfunding Gimlet Media and Why The Nature Of Startup Equity Is Changing with Erin Glenn, CEO @ Betaworks' backed, Quire
- every mention in 2015, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ed's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, boldstart ventures | 3 | 88 | 46% 11/24 | full record on 20VC → |