Backing Technical Founders with Amplify Partners Founder Sunil Dhaliwal | Founding the Fund 2

The Room Podcast - Claudia Laurie and Madison McIlwain

Sunil Dhaliwal shares his journey from founding Amplify Partners to building a trusted venture firm focused on technical founders. He reflects on early lessons in agency, craftsmanship, and the importance of solving real

Key takeaways

• Start with purpose—ask why your fund exists

Transcript preview

this is the number one thing to I say to anyone who beats a path to my door asking about it you don't want to start this fund and you've done this what do you think you better have a reason for existing why do you need to exist what's the gap where do I fit into this ecosystem and what can I do differently than somebody else I don't think a lot of people think about that of those questions that I think a lot of people take the claim for. I think people believe it was Arthur Rock who famously actually was an HBS alum so shout out but he was the first check if you can even call it that into Fairchild Semiconductor. Wow that is a throwback for sure. I feel like he wasn't even sure he was starting a fund at the time he literally just said these are eight really smart people and I probably should put some capital against this and what was it the 1960s? And really that became what we call today venture capital. I mean it's so funny you say that because the company that he first backed sounds like a story we would tell I mean we've been telling so many incredible founding stories of raising capital building a team building a business becoming a unicorn but there's so many parallels to that when you start a fund if you think about it. Yeah honestly it's been an opportunity of a lifetime to tell over 140 founding stories of zero to IPO companies but we haven't taken a look at the investment vehicles and ultimately the startups themselves which are the venture firms that have taken many of these companies through that journey. I mean the way that AI is changing the companies that are being built it's fundamentally changing the strategies and feces of incredible funds. When I was back as the founder of Prive I always found it so interesting that the questions were always on us but I had questions about how my VC that I've built a multi-year relationship with got started. It's like quite crazy. bringing billions of dollars together to put their faith into the next generation of iconic founders. I couldn't agree more. I take for granted that I understand what things like an L-pack is, right? A limited partner advisory committee and how these decisions get made and oh my gosh VCs have bosses too. So in this season we're gonna sit down with respected venture capitalists to talk not only about the companies that they've backed but the firms they've built. So with that I'm excited to open the door. earlier when I was building my startup PRIVE. If you're building a startup, every minute matters, but it's surprisingly easy to lose hours to onboarding, paperwork, fixing payroll issues, or setting up laptops for new employees. We've ran into this constantly, and it's not hard work, but it's constant and it adds up. That's where rippling comes in. 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Perkins Kewey's interactive website, startup percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more go to startup percolator.com and Perkins Coe coi.com. This episode of The Room Podcast, we're joined by Sunil Daliwall, founder and managing director of Amplify Partners. Sunil has spent nearly three decades backing some of the most ambitious technical founders in Silicon Valley. After beginning his career at Bettery Ventures during the height of the dot-com era, he spent 14 years learning the craft of venture capital before launching Amplify in 2015 capital before launching as a solo GP. What started as a conviction that technical founders building tools for other technical founders was being overlooked, has since grown into one of the most respected seed stage firms of its generation. Today, Amplify managers billions and assets and has been an early partner to category defining companies, including runway, data bricks, high touch, hex, and many others. But this conversation isn't just about venture capital, it's about what it means to build an institution from scratch. How trust compounds over decades, why craftsmanship remains one of the most durable competitive advantages, and how to distinguish genuine innovation from hype in moments of change. We'll talk about Sunil's path from Georgetown to Battery Ventures, the early days of raising Amplify's first fund, the founders who took a chance on an emerging manager, lessons learned from nearly 15 years of building a firm, and how he thinks about the future of AI, Dev Tools, and VC itself. Whether you're a founder, an aspiring investor, or someone interested in the world, long game of building and during institutions, there's a tremendous amount to learn from Sunil's journey. So with that, let's open the door. All right, first of all, Sunil, thank you so much for joining us today in the room. Happy to be here. We're super happy to have you. We'd love to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So we're curious, where did you grow up? And how has that shaped your view of the world? Growing up for me was Western New York, Rochester, Rochester. We're not a super glamorous place, was an amazing spot to grow up. It was a small town suburb and it was a Kodak Xerox town back then. That's what it was and that's how my father and mother got there. He was an electrical engineer and an immigrant who went India to the UK, UK to Canada, Canada to the US when they were actively recruiting engineers in the late 60s. Like, come here and we will set you up and, oh, by the way, you're can get a master's in education because New York State needs teachers, which is what she did. So my mother was a school teacher. She taught third grade. And my father was an electrical engineer at big companies for a bunch of time. And where that started to actually influence me was he left that job and became an entrepreneur probably when I was like eight, nine years old. And there was a couple different journeys along the way. There was always the side hustle. So there was always the rental apartment and rental apartments. And most of my first money was made cleaning out apartments after people, tenants moved out and painting and hanging drywall and doing all sorts of stuff. But he started a printed circuit board business in the 80s when that was a thing you could still do. And then ultimately became a contractor building and renovating homes. So I kind of saw that up front what it was like up close and personal to, to, you know, to, be under-capitalized in a boom bust real estate developer world and what it was like to do something commodity as it was getting commoditized by Asian manufacturing and so like staying one step ahead and knowing what it felt like to be nimble and just make it work as a founder. I didn't realize that was what I was seeing back then. Sure. Back then. But that's exactly what I was seeing back then. Lots of early exposure to the art of the side hustle and then ultimately making that your main stay. energy coming from your family and parents and what it took. I mean for you watching all of that did you internalize that and think you were always going to become a founder yourself? Not at all. I think the only thing I probably internalized was this real difference in agency. I think the idea that like my parents weren't just I get a job, I get a paycheck, I live my life. They had aspirations of what they wanted for themselves, for us and they were like we're going to go get it. And this is how we're going to go get it. And this is, and this is how we're going to get it. And this is how we're going to get it. And this is, and it. And this is how we're going to get it. And this is how we're going to get it. And this is of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. it happens in every other minute around there and that's where they were making themselves better and taking risk and they were putting what they didn't have was equity capital they had they had sweat equity so they just worked you know it was being the the leasing agent the property manager and the contractor all on rental properties at the same time as you know my father moved to New England for basically a year or two to go learn I with a childhood friend of his who was in this business in New England and so you know it didn't really think he didn't really think twice to be like yeah I'm gonna be gone a lot like I'll come back on the weekends when I can but like I got to go live there and learn this thing and we're like okay yeah it's just kind of what it was so growing up then you ended up yourself in Georgetown so not too far but a little far from home. Well I actually in the full circle of like learning from your failures and mistakes I got out of the seven colleges I applied out of high school. The one college I got into was University of Rochester. Nice. So I went to University of Rochester. It was not my plan. I was, you know, I fashioned myself a somewhat of a smarty pants. I skipped a grade. I graduated high school at 16. Oh my God. But I had very little idea of what it meant to focus myself and work hard and move in a direction. And I think my grades and everything reflected that. But my self-perception was very different than maybe different than maybe other people me and that's when you do that you end up going one for seven on your college applications sure so I went to Rochester for a year I loved it I thought I would be there forever I I was urged to apply to maybe transfer by I had a high school teacher who was very influential on me Deborah Doyle and she kind of was like every year somebody doesn't get what they want and in this year it was you and you actually I don't want you to think that this is where you ought to be you ought to be at x y z place and she didn't know where that was I I think I applied to Cornell and then I pulled that application because I'm like I've been an upstate in your time I got to get out of here and I applied to Penn and they were like they wrote me back there was no email so they were a letter and they're like you don't have the transfer requirements no thing like they just didn't even let me finish the application they just didn't let me finish the application man. I like the business. Let's go. And I applied. I got in and the first time I ever saw Georgetown was the day I moved in. Okay, go boy us. Mid 90s. That's how it worked pre-internet. Like that's how things went. So that's how I got there a year later. And I loved my experience at Rochester and I loved my experience at Georgetown even more. And that was kind of my entree into starting to figure out what I was going to do in my life. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, first of all that's not on your LinkedIn, first of all that's not on your LinkedIn, the true story behind the dual educational degree. I don't think I don't think you stay hard enough. Oh no okay that's on me good learning and I guess thinking about you know the moment you went all the way down and then all the way back up to Boston just two years out of that experience at Georgetown you found yourself a battery ventures do I have that correct that's right that's right you know how did you find what was venture at the time? like was that an easy thing to stumble upon? venture so I did tech banking. I did that Alex Brown for people who are like tech history aficionados like Alex Brown was part of the AOL IPO and the Microsoft I believe. So you know the four horsemen of specialized tech banking were Alex Brown H and Q Montgomery Robertson Stevens names that nobody today knows anything about but Alex Brown was really a special place because it was you know other people were like we're gonna go to New York and work on high yield offerings and like merging DuPont and Dow and I was like that sounds stupid like what do you want to do? I sold software one summer, I'm gonna see what if I can do and do stuff in tech and Alex Brown was a place that we got to do really interesting small stuff in tech. I did not want to be a banker after two years of being a banker that was really easy. But being around growing companies, being on small companies, getting close to management teams and founders and seeing what it was looking like to build, you know, public build businesses by contrast, we took businesses, we took businesses, we took businesses. public we raised 30 million dollars in certain IPOs, 100 million dollars was a big IPO back then. You know these are companies that probably had 10 million of quarterly revenue and we're like right in the S1, working three months to like get this thing on the road flying around high-five and raising 50 million bucks. So it's different types, different moment in time. Different time. But it really was the on-ramp for me to say growing companies, technology companies and being closer to, you know, getting them going was what I wanted to do. By the way that didn't take me to venture. I thought maybe I'll go carry a bag and I'll sell something, I'll work in BD. True story, one of my meetings that I got, I convinced one of my managing directors to introduce me to this venture capitalist that he knew, and this guy's name is Rick Burns and Rick was the founder of Charles River Ventures, and Rick started CRV in the 70s. so nice and he sat me down for lunch and I told hey I want to do this I'm really interested what you guys do he's like don't come here this is you know being venture cable is stupid you don't know anything about anything like go to oracle and sell software and I was like okay maybe you should go to oracle and sell software fast forward a couple months and I'm considering going to battery I asked Rick what I should do and he was like well battery it's not matrix but it'll So I thought I'd go to Battery to basically work for a couple years. Maybe make some money go to business school, maybe you go find a real software job to go get. And that was, again, a different time. There weren't venture jobs. I didn't think about venture as a career. I thought about it as something that I would go and do and learn. And then I'm now 27 plus years of doing this. And you became the true apprentice to become the master. 14 years at Battery. It was not always up into the rate. major world economic moments that I can think of that happened during your time there. Could you just walk us through a little bit of some of those seasons and some of the learnings that you really have taken with you through to today? Yeah, 98 I joined. I remember vividly we went on a week-long retreat. One of the partners took the associates on like a week-long outward bound style in the wilderness. We disappeared for a week and we came back. We found a gas station in rural Utah. and we grabbed the newspaper and we were like, oh my God, do you see what Yahoo stock did in the last week? Like things were just literally starting to accelerate in 98. And it was a wild up into the right moment. And it was for the next couple years. I'm very grateful for showing up at Battery at that moment. I've said to people many times, wherever you were in 98, it either went straight up or straight into the ground. And Battery in that whole world went straight up. that moment. So I got to do a lot of things that I wouldn't have gotten to do because things were going so fast and furious. I had the first management team ask for me to be a member of their board when I was 24 years old. And they were like, no, no, we don't want that senior partner guy. We want you, like you know what we're doing. I want to work with you, you know, it looks like me. But yeah, that was a really great moment. But what went up came down and I don't as the next five years. A lot of my view of how to invest, how to manage a firm, the relationship with founders, relationship with limited partners, what cycles mean in the grand scheme of company building and in our industry. A lot of it was really informed by sitting around watching billions of dollars of gains turn to zeros and working outbroken companies for years and working outbroken companies for years and years. Like it was really informed by, you know, sitting around watching billions of dollars of gains turn to zeros and working out, out broken companies for years for years for years. it was a real education. Well, you know, many years later you certainly turned venture into a permanent career when you co when you founded Battery, sorry, when you found it Amplify in 2012, initially as a solo GP. Let's maybe like peel back the curtain a little bit. Tell us kind of what the aha moment was coming out of battery where you sort of sat down and said, I'm going to do this myself. Yeah, so there was some things that we started to do at battery. maybe a function of necessity. We were not kind of first call for all sorts of series A deals in infrastructure where we were, you know, we had didn't have as strong as a presence in