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: Founders must deliver 10x value narrowly before expanding their platform vision
“You've got to be able to zoom in on the end user, zoom in on how you make their life 10 times better with your product and how you can uniquely solve that problem. So you sell the product, but then you can market the vision to us.”
Sim: Cybersecurity will be exempt from the tech antitrust M&A freeze
“Very few, huge M and A's because of antitrust, maybe save cybersecurity, which has national security interests and those things tend to go a little bit faster.”
Sim: Unicorns will acquire private startups to build platforms before IPO
“You're going to see more private to private as well. And the reason why that makes sense for a private company is because if you're a one product company, going back to the platform play, you're going to go, you're going to have to buy another product or two a…”
Sim: Most 2024 tech IPOs will be down rounds from the ZIRP era
“Look, the margin majority of companies that go do go public this year will be down rounds from the prior rounds, especially if they're raised towards the Zerp era.”
Sim: Software net dollar retention will normalize to 110% to 115%
“From there, you know, this new cohort of customers, I think that retention is going to get back to a place where it's more like one, 10. So that can be one, 31, 40, but maybe healthy numbers like one, 10, one, 15.”
Sim: Investors should challenge founders during good times and support them during bad
“When things are going really, really well, that's when you challenge the foundries even more. And when things are shitty, that's where you kind of pick them off from the ground and maybe kind of cheer them on a little bit. So I call that my three CH is cheer, …”
Sim: Microsoft's AI leadership will drive cloud market share and H2 revenue
“Because of their lead on everything AI that they're taking market share on the cloud side. So I think that that's going to drive a lot of their business. And I'm hoping that by the back half of the year, you know, you start seeing some of the revenue numbers r…”
Sim: Enterprise AI adoption requires dedicated AI security
“I think that there's no AI in the enterprise without AI security. And I think that's a completely new category now.”
Sim: Inception rounds split into discovery, classic, and Megatron jumbo tiers
“The point is the three rounds are, there's a discovery round, which my opinion is less than two million. So it's usually like maybe a first time founder exploring a new market. It would graduate to the next round, which would be a classic. And a classic round,…”
Sim prefers structuring Boldstart inception rounds at $3M to $4M
“I would prefer Your classic structure of three to four million dollars, to be honest with you.”
Sim: Repeat founders avoid pre-seed rounds to prevent extra equity dilution
“A lot of times founders who are second and third time founders don't want to even be called to have a pre-seed round because it presupposes you need a seed round. And what does that mean to you, Harry? It means that if you have a pre-seed round and you have a …”
Ed Sim: Boldstart will split $8M–$10M seed rounds for exceptional founders
“The way that we've evolved now is that sometimes I have to play ball, Harry, right? Sometimes there are some exceptional founders where, okay, you know what? I will split. An eight to ten million dollar round for that exceptional founder, depending on what tha…”
Sim: Boldstart funded Snyk through three pre-Series A capital rounds
“You know, guy from sneak, Harry, do you know how many rounds he raised before? He raised his A three rounds of capital before his A. Guess who gave him all three rounds?”
Ed Sim: Only 25% of cloud migration is complete
“We're still only 25% of the way of migration from on-prem to Cloud right now”
Ed Sim: Top Infrastructure Startups Still Raising Growth Rounds at $250M-$400M Valuations
“There's still pockets Of opportunity where people are going from one to three to four million in the infrastructure space that I see to 10 to 12 kind of on the forecast and they're still raising at two 50 to 400 now.”
Sim: Startups solving hard technical problems appear slow before hitting rapid growth
“Some of the hardest problems to solve will take longer and it'll look like your slowest plotting company to start with. But in the long run, to your point, these things are the ones that can actually go, you know, hit the J curve pretty quickly.”
Startups taking on incumbents must build baseline table-stakes features first
“No matter how, how, how big of a vision you have, you still need at least the table stakes of, you know, check box of four things that they may need before they even believe in your vision. So it takes longer.”
Ed Sim: Underwrite tech startups assuming 10x to 14x forward multiples
“So you've got to build your business and your investment strategy and your ownership strategy around looking at a world where we get 10 to 14 for the best companies forward next year's numbers.”
Pre-cloud enterprise startups required $4M to $5M Series A rounds
“A traditional way of building an enterprise startup would usually require at least four or five million dollars in an A round up, up until the point that, The newer entrepreneurs took advantage of the cloud and open source.”
Enterprise founders achieve repeatable success easier than consumer entrepreneurs
“And in consumer, I think it's harder to be a repeat consumer entrepreneur, right? Because you typically start an app, you know, let's say, and launch that thing, and then you try to start another one, but you can't bring that same customer base over. You've go…”
Modern SaaS scales via marketing and inside sales, not field reps
“Instead of building a huge regional direct sales force, you know, Today you may bring on a marketing person to be a lead generation machine, right? And then you have built an inside sales force to kind of, you know, follow up on those leads, and then you bring…”
Legacy enterprise IT will be replaced by micro-enterprise architectures
“I think the whole monolithic IT infrastructure is getting turned upside down. I like to think of the world as becoming You know, I almost call it the micro enterprise, right? Instead of kind of buying these monolithic, five million dollar, ten million dollar s…”
BoldStart Ventures strictly keeps seed valuation caps below $10M
“We'll just say sub 10, and it could range from much lower to, you know, upper, up on the upper range. It depends on who the founders are, what their background is, and, you know, and how much they're raising.”
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 → |