Engineering Founders

Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which version of an idea to pursue. Lee also shares how to navigate risks as a founder, tips for expanding your product’s niches, how generative AI growth will impact DevTool development, and how to maintain conviction when faced with discouragement head on.

ABOUT LEE EDWARDS

Lee Edwards (@terronk) is an Olin College alum from the Class of '07 majoring in Engineering with a focus in Systems Design. After a brief role as a mechanical engineer at iRobot in Bedford, MA, Lee's career became focused on building software and team at startups - Pivotal, SideTour (which was acquired by Groupon), and Teespring. After a few years investing as part of Bloomberg Beta's Open Angels program, he joined Root Ventures as a partner, investing venture capital in early stage deep technology startups. Lee also co-founded Parcel B, a loose organization of Olin alumni who invest in Olin entrepreneurs and run programs for Olin students interested in learning more about the startup ecosystem.

"If you can create something with enough value where people are gonna start paying for it, that can de-risk in your mind like, 'Okay, I might be onto something…' but it doesn't always have to be revenue. It's not, 'Is someone willing to pay X dollars a month?' It's actually a higher bar than that. It's like, 'Is someone gonna switch from VS Code or Vim or Emacs or TextMate and use your editor a few hours a day?' That's a really high bar. You have to really love the product and watching that number go up. It's a really good indicator that what is being built is the right thing.”

- Lee Edwards

SHOW NOTES:

• What inspired Lee to transition from eng leadership to the world of venture (2:06)
• Factors that led to a successful transition from side project to full-time work (4:11)
• Recommendations for gaining conviction when facing discouragement (6:04)
• Considerations during pre-product phase conversations with founders (8:52)
• Questions to help founders begin testing which ideas are worth pursuing (12:46)
• Navigating risks as a founder & what qualities VCs are looking for (15:34)
• Insights for founders having to expand their niches right away (17:19)
• Questions to ask to define the context & identify GTM strategy (24:05)
• Business models that are inherently misaligned with venture (26:30)
• Identifying differentiation in the era of generative AI (29:14)
• How the DevTool landscape will evolve with the rise of AI (34:08)
• Lee’s perspective on how AI will impact programming & coding (35:50)
• Rapid fire questions (37:53)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• [Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters by Mark Suster](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-hunters-7fdecf58f4f6#:~:text=Deer are right-sized for,to your standard terms %26 conditions.))
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy advisor, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher, Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of Strategy rooted in the notion of Power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create Power. And create Power it must, for without it your business is at risk.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/