E30: Sunil Dhaliwal, Founder of Amplify Partners on Lessons from 27 Years in VC

Intro

Sunil Dhaliwal has been in investing for 27 years, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures for 14 years before starting Amplify Partners. He founded Amplify 13 years ago with the thesis of backing technical founders. Interestingly, the “business guy” was more investable back in the 2010/11 era.

Amplify is an investor in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, Chai Discovery, Langchain, Anchorage Digital, Covariant, Runway ML, Temporal, Luma AI to name a few. These are either publicly traded or have privately achieved unicorn valuations.

They have launched a dedicated bio fund after their latest $900m fund announcement building on top of the success of their bio portfolio, Sunil explains on the pod why they are uniquely positioned to operate in the space.

We had a great conversation covering how to train junior investors, the madness of the dot-com era and how it rhymes with some of what we see today in technology bubbles, his investing philosophy, fundraising advice and more.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction 03:20 - What was going on in the Dot-Com bubble?08:15 - Collapse of the Telecom value chain 09:37 - Why the AI boom is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained 12:37 - OpenAI canceling Sora17:15 - Why brand and trust are self-reinforcing in enterprise software 19:17 - Shipping frequently as a mechanism to preserve vendor trust 22:58 - Debunking the SaaS apocalypse 30:23 - The Amplify playbook 38:05 - The shift from scale-up servers to agent-first platforms 41:42 - Progression timeline of autonomous agents 49:23 - Investing in Runway and the AI-meets-creativity thesis 52:08 - Why you're an idiot if your early-stage firm has an investment committee 55:00 - The failure of consensus markets and competing for growth deals on price 1:07:00 - Early-stage fundraising is a search problem, not a sales process 1:10:24 - Capping limited partner allocation at 10% 1:14:07 - The necessity of letting people learn from their own failures 1:14:58 - Launching a dedicated bio fund to capture compounding variables 1:17:57 - The art of training junior investors 1:26:05 - Why traditional biotech is a terrible place for returns 1:34:52 - How networks and relationship goodwill compound over decades 1:49:54 - Designing a platform team for recruiting and go-to-market execution 1:52:57 - Closing