When I started Ascend in 2019, I realized even though I was o-l-d OLD, I had more in common with the folks in town who were earlier in their professional investing journeys than the venerable VC’s I’d pitched as a founder. I admire and respect the new wave of Seattle/Pacific Northwest venture capitalists, and thought it would be fun to profile some of our region’s up and coming VC talents in these pages. —KW
I was fortunate enough to meet James Wu when he had the idea for his first startup, and we invested shortly thereafter. James has a high EQ and is intellectually honest, a combo that makes him a great bet to become a steallar VC at First Round now that he has switched sides of the table.
What made you decide to be a professional investor?
Early on in my career, I cofounded AdaptiLab to help companies grow their machine learning and data science teams from hiring to productivity. As a technical CEO, I was able to empathize with the pain points of our customers, who were Heads of Machine Learning, and understand the unique challenges they faced. At the same time, I had to learn many key elements of company building, such as founder-led sales, team-building, and fundraising – all while iterating on a complex product and staying aware of the newest machine learning trends and innovations. Through this experience, I felt there was a growing opportunity for more specialized investors to support technical founders building their companies from zero-to-one.
When the opportunity to be First Round’s dedicated AI/ML & Infrastructure Investor came up, I was excited to leverage my unique skill set and experiences as a founder, operator, and researcher to help the next generation of technical founders. I understand the value of having investors who can assist with hard problems like sharing feedback on early prototypes, providing guidance on growing a developer community, architecting a complex machine learning system, sharing context around shifting trends in open-source software, making introductions to elusive MLE or DevOps candidates, and more.
In my current role at First Round, I focus on partnering with founders building AI/ML, Data, Devtools, and Security companies at the earliest stages of their company’s journeys.
What did you do before becoming an investor and how does that benefit your founders?
From conducting ML and data privacy research in academia, to rolling up my sleeves and building a startup from founding to acquisition, to leading new machine learning projects at a fast-growing unicorn, I’ve experienced first hand the pains of building a startup and growing into the role of CEO as a technical founder.
After a research stint in academia, I cofounded AdaptiLab as a technical cofounder with one of my best friends to help companies scale their machine learning and data science teams. Being first-time founders, we had to quickly learn how to conduct customer discovery interviews, iterate on product feedback, figure out pricing and enterprise business models, fundraise from VCs and angels, and many more exciting elements of company building. We raised a seed round and signed Fortune1000s and Unicorns as customers. After AdaptiLab was acquired, I joined Amperity, a unicorn startup building an enterprise customer data platform, where I led new applied machine learning projects and contributed to patents and research papers on their core machine learning and data systems.
All of these experiences have prepared me to become a partner that founders, especially technical ones, can rely on. Throughout a founder’s journey, they will encounter questions or challenges that their backgrounds will not have prepared them for. I hope to be the investor they turn to when they need additional context or a collaborative working session to figure out the right strategy to move forward. Whether it’s figuring out how to incorporate machine learning into your product, understanding best practices for hiring and leading teams, or learning how to conduct customer discovery calls and sell your product as a technical founder, I’ve gone through many of the same experiences, and can empathize with the same thorny problems.
Why should founders want you on their cap table?
First Round is focused on being the world’s best partner for founders at the very first stages of company creation. When founders work with us, they get investment team members (including me!) working side-by-side with them on their business' challenges.
On top of that, our Operating Team is ready to support founders through the toughest parts of company building. Whether it’s our Pitch Assist Team crafting a Series A deck, our GTM Team finding prospective customers through Discovery Assist or our Talent Team connecting them to top-tier candidates, we're here to help across all their needs!
What's your sweet spot(s) in terms of check size, valuation, and vertical?
While First Round is a generalist firm (our portfolio), we have a number of distinct practice areas. I personally focus my investing on AI/ML & Infrastructure. This means I spend most of my time with AI/ML, dev tools, data infrastructure, and security founders. I'm also very interested in applications of ML to specific verticals or business problems, recently healthcare and life sciences.
Typical check size ranges from $1.5M to $4M, but we’ve gone higher and lower in some cases. Currently, our average initial investment is around $3 million.
What one portfolio company do you want to hype for us here?
Rewind.ai! Rewind is building the search engine for your life that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard. It creates a searchable recording of what happened when, who said what during that Zoom meeting and every instance someone has ever brought up expense reporting hacks. You can try out their product now for free. Cofounded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek.
What do you think the next ten years looks like for Seattle/Pacific Northwest startups?
I'm very excited for the future of Seattle's startup ecosystem. So many talented founders have been locked up at Amazon and Microsoft for the last decade, and I think the recent economic downturn combined with the wave of advancements in AI/ML has spurred many more founders to take the leap on starting a company. As a Bellevue native who built my startup primarily in Seattle, I'm looking forward to supporting the next wave of infrastructure companies being built in the region.
What song is currently getting the most run on your Spotify/Apple Music?
I don't really listen to much music but love podcasts. I've listened to every podcast from Acquired.fm and The Logan Bartlett Show. They're the best prepped podcasts telling interesting founder stories and startup journeys.
Favorite shoes?
Adidas Ultraboosts 1.0-3.0
Favorite cooking ingredient?
I could eat eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and I have go-to dishes I'd cook for each.