This VC just closed on $60M to fund ‘technical risk,’ saying other VCs mostly do not - TechCrunch

Ashmeet Sidana, a longtime VC who struck out on his own in 2015 to form Engineering Capital, just closed his third and newest fund with $60 million in capital commitments from a university endowment, a fund of funds, and three foundations.

That’s thanks in part to Sidana’s track record, including the sale of the cloud monitoring startup SignalFx to Splunk for $1 billion after it raised $179 million from VCs, and the sale of the cloud application monitoring startup Netsil by Nutanix for up for $74 million in stock after it raised just $5.7 million.

–which centers on working with teams “that you can feed with two pizzas,” yet whose narrow technical insights can have broad applicability — was also an apparent draw.

TC: You talk about pursuing founders with technical insights?

Facebook was started with the consumer insight that people want to be connected with each other.

Another technical problem is rooted in all of us wanting to give our infrastructure over to the cloud but not our data?

[Editor’s note: the company says it enables the field level protection of data without requiring any application code changes.] Or Robust Intelligence is an even newer investment that’s solving the problem of data contamination in artificial intelligence?

AS: Most people think investing in technical insights is expensive, but it can be very capital efficient if you are working with software.

VMWare was started by a technical insight addressed by two people.

Most think they have to go after a big market and solve a big problem, but the magic of doing a startup is to focus on an incredibly narrow problem that has broad applications.