Show Notes

• (01:48) Sarah talked about the formative experiences of her upbringing: growing up interested in the natural sciences and switching focus on terrorism analysis after experiencing the 9/11 tragedy with her own eyes.
• (04:07) Sarah discussed her experience studying International Security Studies at Stanford and working at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
• (07:15) Sarah recalled her first job out of college as a Program Director at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies — collaborating with academic researchers to develop computational approaches that counter terrorism and piracy.
• (09:48) Sarah went over her time as a cyber-intelligence analyst at Cyveillance, which provided threat intelligence services to enterprises worldwide.
• (12:22) Sarah walked over her time at Palantir as an embedded analyst, where she observed the struggles that many agencies had with data integration and modeling challenges.
• (15:26) Sarah unpacked the challenges of building out the data team and applying the data work at Mattermark.
• (20:15) Sarah shared her opinion on the career trajectory for data analysts and data scientists, given her experience as a manager for these roles.
• (23:43) Sarah shared the power of having a peer group and building a team culture that she was proud of at Mattermark.
• (26:41) Sarah joined Canvas Ventures as a Data Partner in 2016 and shared her motivation for getting into venture capital.
• (29:47) Sarah revealed the secret sauce to succeed in venture — stamina.
• (32:00) Sarah has been an investor at Amplify Partners since 2017 and shared what attracted her about the firm’s investment thesis and the team.
• (35:28) Sarah walked through the framework she used to prove her value upfront as the new investor at Amplify.
• (38:35) Sarah shared the details behind her investment on the Series A round for OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that leverages Apache TVM to enable their clients to simply, securely, and efficiently deploy any model on any hardware backend.
• (44:39) Sarah dissected her investment on the seed round for Einblick, a Boston-based startup that builds a visual computing platform for BI and analytics use cases.
• (48:45) Sarah mentioned the key factors inspiring her investment in the seed round for Metaphor Data, a meta-data platform that grew out of the DataHub open-source project developed at LinkedIn.
• (53:57) Sarah discussed what triggered her investment in the Series A round for Runway, a New York-based team building the next-generation creative toolkit powered by machine learning.
• (58:36) Sarah unpacked the advice she has been giving her portfolio companies in hiring decisions and expanding their founding team (and advice they should ignore).
• (01:01:29) Sarah went over the process of curating her weekly newsletter called Projects To Know (active since 2019).
• (01:05:00) Sarah predicted the 3 trends in the data ecosystem that will have a disproportionately huge impact in the future.
• (01:11:15) Closing segment.

Sarah’s Contact Info

• Amplify Page
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Medium

Amplify Partners’ Resources

• Website
• Team
• Portfolio
• Blog

Mentioned Content

Blog Posts

• Our Investment in OctoML
• Announcing Our Investment in Einblick
• Our Investment in Metaphor Data
• Our Series A Investment in Runway

People

• Sunil Dhaliwal (General Partner at Amplify Partners)
• Mike Dauber (General Partner at Amplify Partners)
• Lenny Pruss (General Partner at Amplify Partners)
• Mike Volpi (Co-Founder and Partner at Index Ventures)
• Gary Little (Co-Founder and General Partner at Canvas Ventures)

Book

• “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (by Robert Pirsig)

New Updates

Since the podcast was recorded, Sarah has been keeping her stamina high!

• Her investments in Hex (data workspace for teams) and Meroxa (real-time data platform) have been made public.
• She has also spoken at various panels, including SIGMOD, REWORK, University of Chicago, and Utah Nerd Nights.

Be sure to follow @sarahcat21 on Twitter to subscribe to her brain on the intersection of data, VC, and startups!

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