Amir also shares building and shutting down his own software company, becoming one of Cypress’s early employees, and coining the term “developer experience.”
What we talked about
Amir Rustamzadeh’s background: from Jet Propulsion Labs (NASA) to Cypress to partner at Firestreak Ventures
Amir grew up obsessed with robotics, spending every spare hour on it in the garage. His mentors through high school were all JPL employees who pushed him to apply for a summer internship. He started in 2008 when JPL was working on the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, the one later named Curiosity by a young girl who won the naming competition. He expected to be hands-off as a young intern, but ended up writing code and contributing directly to the AEGSE project as part of JPL’s Robotics division, section 347.
Two summers at SpaceX before it was famous
In 2008, just as Amir was transitioning from JPL intern to the AAPX academic part-time program, one of his mentors dropped a popular science magazine on his desk. The cover had CGI renderings of the Falcon 9 rocket. He said he was leaving to go build that. SpaceX then called Amir. He balanced college with two summers at SpaceX in 2010 and 2011, working on the Dragon capsule’s first commercial docking with the International Space Station. The company was young, the building literally under construction, and the culture was full-contact sport. He says both JPL and SpaceX permanently shaped how he thinks about mission-critical engineering and managing risk.
Leaving academia and finding Cypress
Amir left a PhD program in battery systems research, frustrated that Tesla was outpacing his lab with far more funding, and started his own enterprise software company. While running client projects, he discovered an early open source project that would become Cypress, started using it, and got very vocal on Twitter about where testing and developer tooling should go. The Cypress team noticed and eventually asked him to join. He shut down his company, sold everything down to a single duffel bag, and moved cross-country from LA to Atlanta.
Coining the “developer experience” term
At Cypress, Amir built what he describes as a compression of product, engineering, and marketing into a single function. He searched LinkedIn for anyone with the title “DX engineer” and found nothing. Shortly after, Vercel, Netlify, and others started renaming their developer relations teams to DX engineering teams. Amir sees it as an elevation of what developer relations should have always been.
How founders convinced Amir to become an investor
By his fifth year at Cypress, VC firms started knocking. He began advising portfolio company founders and was struck by how much the best ones extracted from him. They’d ask sharp questions, go apply the conversation, and come back with results. That feedback loop hooked him. He eventually partnered with Walter Khak, a 40-year venture veteran, informally collaborating on deals before formalizing Firestreak. The turning point was when he couldn’t honestly tell founders he had time for them while still running other obligations.
What makes a founder a force of nature
Nine times out of ten, it’s the person. The first filter is simple: can Amir actually hold a conversation with this person? The best founders are undeniable and have a level of energy and drive that stands apart from everyone else. Amir describes it as sensing someone who is “destined to do something” even if you can’t see the shape of it yet. The best ones you never have to worry about: parachute them onto an island and they’ll either find their way back or build something great on it.
Vibe coding vs. agentic engineering: both are expanding
Amir pushes back on the dev community’s dismissal of vibe coding. He frames it as the next evolution of the web: Web 1.0 was read-only, Web 2.0 let people publish, and now vibe coding lets anyone ship full applications. At the same time, he’s deep into agentic engineering himself, running over 1,200 end-to-end tests on a personal project and building formal context management structures for Claude to handle spec deviations, amendments, and discoveries. He doesn’t think it has to be one or the other, both modes will expand and likely converge over time.
Developer experience in 2026: taste is the new table stakes
The things that once differentiated great developer experience (solid docs, good SDKs, clean APIs) are now table stakes. Any company can ship a great baseline out of the gate. Amir backed Speakeasy as an example of a company that makes SDK generation essentially automatic. The new differentiator is taste. Companies that can poke above the noise on that dimension are the ones he watches closely.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hi everyone. Welcome to Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. My name is Victoria Melnikova. I’m the head of new business at Evil Martians, and today I’m thrilled to introduce Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak. Hi Amir.
[00:00:22] Amir Rustamzadeh: Hi. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:23] Victoria Melnikova: How are you today?
[00:00:24] Amir Rustamzadeh: I’m good. I’m good. We, we crossed paths last month.
[00:00:28] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:00:29] Amir Rustamzadeh: And, you know, frankly, I’ve usually tried to dodge podcasts, but, uh, but you were asking so many good questions and I think we hit it off. So I’m happy to be here with you to have this discussion.
[00:00:39] Victoria Melnikova: I think it’s gonna be invaluable for our listeners. And you are a VC that specializes in early stage developer tools, so.
There couldn’t be a more perfect fit than this.
[00:00:50] Amir Rustamzadeh: That’s right. Yeah.
[00:00:51] Victoria Melnikova: So I’m very lucky to, to be sitting here and asking you questions and I want to start with something that’s really remote from our topic today, but [00:01:00] it is kind of coming in full circle for me. Our podcast is called Dev Propulsion Labs, and I did a little bit of research on your bio and your first job on LinkedIn is working at Jet Propulsion Labs at NASA, which is actually the inspiration for our name.
[00:01:16] Amir Rustamzadeh: Oh really? Wow. Okay.
[00:01:17] Victoria Melnikova: So. It’s kind of cool that I would never think in my life that I would have somebody sitting here who actually worked there, but it’s cool. So your background is actually as an electrical engineering, right? That’s
[00:01:30] Amir Rustamzadeh: right. Yeah.
[00:01:30] Victoria Melnikova: How, like, walk us through your early days
[00:01:34] Amir Rustamzadeh: mm-hmm.
[00:01:35] Victoria Melnikova: Maybe you school and then the, the beginning of your career.
Sure. And I don’t want yet. To bridge the conversation over to Dev tools, but let’s just focus on the early,
[00:01:46] Amir Rustamzadeh: I mean, look, yeah, I’ve been an engineer most of my career. Before I became an investor I was very lucky, you know, as a young up and coming engineering student to have these these awesome working experiences.
And that was [00:02:00] mostly used to the fact that, you know, you’re kind of at the right place at the right time and you know, right out of high school. I was part of the, the robotics program, like many people that get into this game are, and I was absolutely, um, you know, it completely consumed me. Like every, I just thought about robots and all that jazz every day, every night.
I’m sure my grades got a hit because I was just mostly in the garage working on that stuff. But then I, I was graduating high school and, and some of my mentors, they were all jet propulsion employees.
[00:02:31] Victoria Melnikova: Hmm.
[00:02:31] Amir Rustamzadeh: They said, Amir, you should apply to kind of come join for the summer. You know, it never really even crossed my mind to do that, but I did and I got accepted and this was, this is 2008, so around that time, JPL was working on the Marsh Science Laboratory Rover, which later some little girl named a Curiosity Rover.
Uh, she won the naming competition. But that’s what we were working on at the time. And you know, I thought I would go in there as a young little intern, [00:03:00] you know. Won’t be able to touch anything. But no, that was far, far from the case. We were working on this project called The Actuator of Ground Support Electronics, something, A-E-G-S-E.
It was part of the, the famous Robotics division section 3 4 7 at JPL, and I was kind of at the heart of everyone I respected. This was the same lab that inspired Wally Robots. You would actually see some of the wally looking robots around there. That was just an amazing experience. When you’re so young, you know, you haven’t seen much, but, but you have so much in your heart and you know you want to, you want to immerse yourself there.
And it was awesome. I got to contribute directly to a lot of things, wrote code and did all that. But the thing towards the end of the internship, I was like, yeah, I’m done. You know, I have to go to college. And my mentors were like, well, no, stay because we need you for all, all this stuff and here and there and, and they kind of took a liking to me.
So then they went and found the budget to have me stay on longer. But this is also a very [00:04:00] interesting time, and I’m sure this was probably gonna be your next thing, is that this was 2008 when the market crashed and not far from Pasadena was this other company called SpaceX that was beginning to poach a lot of the employees there.
And I remember on the day I switched from being an interim to like a more, it was called A A PX program. Your academic part-time. Yeah. So you get to go to college while working there. One of my mentors, the day I got that, that kind of offer letter, he came and put a popular science magazine on my desk and then he said, I’m gonna go build that.
And the thing that was on the, the magazine cover was the CGI renderings of the, the Falcon nine Rockets. Wow. That were being built. And then I’m like, what are you talking about? This is JPL, this is the All Stars. What do you mean We’re doing this March stuff. And he is like, I’m out man. I’m like, ugh, okay.
I kind of finalized my work at at JPL and you know, they were laying off a lot of people ‘cause it’s the 2008 crash. So I was like, all right, back to [00:05:00] school. Go learn finger or two about a thing or two. But then I got a phone call from the folks at, at SpaceX. They were like, Hey, we need people like you. Can you consider like coming, coming on?
And, and I said, sure man. I interviewed and. Got in. And then for like the next two summers, I balanced that between school and, and, and, and SpaceX. So this would’ve been 2010 and 2011, which was also a very interesting moment because at that time, SpaceX was not well known. The company was very much under construction.
I mean, the building we were working in was literally under construction. They, they had not successfully done a, a docking with the space station yet. Mm-hmm. So that dragon capsule we kind of see on the news a lot now. That had not happened and so we were working on that. The first commercial docking with there and the JPL experience and the SpaceX experience when you’re that young and you’re still learning, was very formidable on me in [00:06:00] terms of what true high intensity mission critical engineering looks like.
How you manage risk, because all of those things were risky. These weren’t like little CRM projects, right? Mm-hmm. It tests you to your core. JPL was a lot more chill because it was more of a campus.
[00:06:18] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:19] Amir Rustamzadeh: Kind lifestyle. But SpaceX was full contact sport. It took everything outta you, sweat, blood, and tears in like the truest ways.
And I would sleep in the office for days and day out. And my girlfriend at the time who had started dating, who’s now my fiance actually. She would bring me these care packages because I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t leave the office, I would sleep in my car. But it was super exciting. And when you’re at that age, you know, there’s like, what else are you gonna do?
This is like the most amazing thing. So the people there, and of course, you know, Elon and, and the type of culture, he said, like, I think impacted a lot of the, the Jins there. And frankly, most of the company was very young. Yeah. Like, you walk in at 4:00 AM everyone’s like 20 something. Mm-hmm. [00:07:00] With nothing better to do than do this stuff.
So anyways.
[00:07:03] Victoria Melnikova: Wow. Why didn’t you stay in space?
[00:07:06] Amir Rustamzadeh: Great question. And it kind of goes back to the thing of like. It does wear you out. Yeah. When you’re working, especially at that time, I think now probably is probably a little bit more of a balance in these companies, but at that time, you know, a lot of this stuff was unproven.
You know, even at that moment you had, you know, Neil Armstrong going to Congress saying, commercial space should not be a thing, it should only be a government thing. There was a lot of people against the company. Mm-hmm. And in fact, there was protests outside the building every single day. People saying, you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that.
It was very tough, tough place to be, but I, I still wanted to continue it though. The thing was, you know, at SpaceX there was a culture of don’t go back to school. Hmm. Don’t go get your advanced degree. Just learn on the job, stay here. And a lot of my, you know, friends at the time that were, you know, middle of, you know, sophomore year, maybe senior year or something like that, they were [00:08:00] like, Amir, I’m not going back to school.
I’m gonna stay for me. You know, I knew I had to at least get my degree and, uh. And my parents would not be, you know? Yeah. They would be disappointed. And so I went back to school and then I got kind of pulled into a PhD program. Yeah. And I started doing, you know, other research I got out of it because, uh, you know, I got pulled into kind of.
Other fields of research. Yeah. And never really returned to the aerospace stuff. Yeah.
[00:08:27] Victoria Melnikova: Are you still passionate about it or it’s,
[00:08:28] Amir Rustamzadeh: yeah, I mean it’s, I mean, some of the coolest things you can, you can work on it. It does require tremendous sacrifice at a place like SpaceX. Yeah. So you have to kind of be willing to make that sacrifice.
And I think when you’re that young and you’re in your twenties, you can do that. But now I’m kind of at a different point in my life. Yeah. Where, you know.
[00:08:46] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about that. So you, you, you made a transition to dev tools. Mm-hmm. You were one of the early employees at Cypress, right? That’s
[00:08:54] Amir Rustamzadeh: right. Yeah.
[00:08:54] Victoria Melnikova: How did that happen for you? Because you mentioned that you got pulled into other areas, but [00:09:00] some time passed between.
[00:09:01] Amir Rustamzadeh: That’s right. So when I was, when I was in my PhD program, I was very disgruntled by academia and how slowly it was moving. I was doing battery systems research and. Tesla was doing everything we were doing in the lab with, with a lot more funding.
So I was like, why am I, why am I here? So, and I kind of understood that, you know, this whole mentality of government and academia and industry working together towards a common goal was, was kind of a fake concept.
[00:09:29] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:30] Amir Rustamzadeh: So I left and I kind of wanted to do my own thing at that point, and I had mostly done hardware stuff.
So I was like, okay, if I’m gonna do something on my own, I have to probably do it in software land. So I started my own enterprise software development company right after leaving graduate school. And the pitch there was, you know, we could pretty much build, you know, high quality software very fast. And, and that was, that was a great business.
You know, I was, I was kind of happy with that, but it wasn’t a product business and that’s [00:10:00] kind of more my, more where I probably can find more passions in. But around that time I had discovered this open source project, which is what became Cyprus. And I was, you know, I needed it for my work and I was very vocal about like what it is and what it should be and where the industry should go around that.
And I was probably a loud mouth on Twitter at the time about it. It was to the point where, you know, the folks they were working on at the time, you know, it caught their interest. Yeah. It’s like, who’s this dude on the internet that just keeps talking about this thing That led me to kind of, you know, connect with the people in the company and they were like, Hey, you should probably like join us.
I actually was so kind of passionate about this thing. I said yes, and I, you know, shut down my own business. I packed my bags. I actually sold everything I had. I went down to one duffel bag and then I moved cross country from LA to Atlanta to kind of commit myself to this company, which is what was required at the time.
And thankfully, [00:11:00] you know, I learned a lot throughout that process. Yeah. And it paid off.
[00:11:02] Victoria Melnikova: So you kind of coined the term developer experience at Cyprus. Yeah. You lack that whole department and built it from ground up. Right.
[00:11:09] Amir Rustamzadeh: That’s right. Around that time, the, you know, we were building a developer tool and the thing was.
We had to capture mind share. Like anything, any VCs or any, you know, all they care about is how many developers you had on your platform. So. It was very difficult to kind of set up a traditional company where you have like a marketing department, you know, that that markets to developers. Mm-hmm. I didn’t feel like that was, that was like the totally right way to go about it.
At the same time, I think when you’re building a product org around a developer tool, that has to also look different as well. Yeah. So I knew there was kind of this amalgamation and a compression of roles around product engineering and marketing that had to happen. Then we started just calling it like developer experience.
It was kind of a term that was getting, you know, pushed around here and there at the time. But no one really [00:12:00] had the title of
[00:12:01] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm
[00:12:01] Amir Rustamzadeh: DX engineer. And I would go on, you know, on LinkedIn to see if that was actually a title anybody had for a role. And nothing came up. And I would check it regularly. And my concern was, if I’m gonna build a team, you know, do these people even want to take on that title?
Yeah. Like how is it gonna impact their careers? Right. But we did it anyways. And, and, and then shortly after we saw, you know, a lot of the companies we now know and love, like Versal and Netlify and many other folks, they started renaming their developer relations teams to, to dx engineering teams. And they, the way they did it was a little bit different than, than what we did, but people started to kind of broadly accepting mm-hmm.
This developer experience engineer concept, which is great because I think it was probably an elevation of what developer relations should, should be today.
[00:12:49] Victoria Melnikova: Shortly after Cyrus, you became an investor.
[00:12:52] Amir Rustamzadeh: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:52] Victoria Melnikova: Right? How did that, how does that happen to people?
[00:12:55] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah. How does that Yes. I think in my fifth year at [00:13:00] Cypress mm-hmm.
You know, once the company reaches a certain point, it starts to kind of capture the attention of, of the venture community at large. Like, well, who are the people at this company who’s really driving stuff at this company? Towards my fifth year, I started getting more knocks on the door about, Hey, Amir, you know, you should go join this company.
Mm-hmm. Uh, you should go advise here. You should, you know, invest here. You should do all these things. And, and for, for, for, for a while. I said, no, you know, I’m pretty focused on what I’m doing here. But they kept knocking and they eventually kind of caught me at the right time where I was, okay, let’s see what’s, what’s out there.
They would say, Hey, maybe you should go talk to our portfolio company founders. Mm-hmm. Maybe you can help them with something. And I, my view of of it was, what do you want me to tell them? If you’ve done this, you are so humbled by the whole ordeal that you don’t feel like you can go around giving people advice on how to fix their company or magically resolve their, their issues.
But I [00:14:00] took the calls anyways thinking that I would meet some interesting people, have some good conversations at the least. But what I discovered throughout that, that process. Was that the, the most capable founders just had this amazing way of getting information outta you. Like they were really good at it.
And it was, to my own surprise, and you know, people that have done a lot of things and kind of done the grind, they kind of demote their knowledge. They’ve built up over time. They kind of discounted in the back of their head. But it just takes somebody to say the right word and be like, did you say this thing?
Yeah. And they’re like, well, lemme tell you about this thing. And more importantly, many of these founders would actually go on and leverage the discussions we had to go to like enact change in their companies and they would come back with real results. And I was always shocked by that. ‘cause I was like, I didn’t even know you were listening, you know?
Mm-hmm. Most people don’t listen. And so that kind of over time, you know, I caught, caught the bug for it. [00:15:00] It was around that time where I crossed paths with my now partner at Fire Street, Walter Khak. He’s an amazing guy. You know, he wanted to collaborate with somebody that was kind of on the ground.
Mm-hmm. And, and kind of understood all this landscape. And so we were kind of, you know, informally collaborating on deals here and there. And then we kind of formalized it a little bit more later. And then I kind of got to the point where, you know, I was like, Hey, I think I need to do this thing full time because I didn’t feel right looking founders in the eye and say, yes, I do have time for you.
When there was some other company I had to deal with. Some operators kind of manage the
[00:15:40] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:15:41] Amir Rustamzadeh: Super Angel, you know, operator thing, and I think it’s doable. But, but at that time I, I was like, Hey, I, I think I need to kind of give more of myself to, to kind of what, what this is. Maybe in the future I’ll find a way to balance that.
[00:15:55] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. But
[00:15:55] Amir Rustamzadeh: at that moment, I knew I had to do it more of a, in a full-time capacity. And that’s kind of what [00:16:00] led to fire streak.
[00:16:01] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:01] Amir Rustamzadeh: And me becoming a full-time investor.
[00:16:04] Victoria Melnikova: You pronounce yourself as this very hands-on investor, what do you bring to the table?
[00:16:09] Amir Rustamzadeh: Great question. So the, and this is like the number one question for every investor, what do you do?
Look, it, it, it varies from person to person, fund to fund, and it, and it’s impacted by the size of the fund and, you know, the firm and, and all that jazz. When I first got started into this, it was gonna be very more so around product. Mm-hmm. Go to market and the kind of stuff that, you know, like developers who need help with programming.
Right. But it was kind of the stuff that, um, a lot of developer tools founders just don’t focus on, which is, how do I actually get people to look at my thing? And so at first, you know, I, we worked very closely with founders on that stuff, and. You know, a lot of people knew my work at Cypress, so that kind of, you know, respect for it.
And they, they, they, you know, so we would have [00:17:00] just broad product level discussions and I still do that to this day with a lot of my founders mm-hmm. On a regular basis, you know, as kind of like a thought partner. But what I figured out is that the most valuable thing I think any investor can provide is to actually be the person that picks up the phone.
You know, and those kind of like dark moments, those little mini crises. And that’s really what a lot of founders need. You know, you never really want founders to, to kind of rely on you. You want them to, to kind of bring you into the fold and leverage you
[00:17:37] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:17:37] Amir Rustamzadeh: As much as they can, but you never want ‘em to rely on you.
And so for me, I kind of stand ready for kind of those key moments. Mm-hmm. And so if you can do that even a few times, you know, throughout the, the journey of the company. And that’s, that’s fantastic. But frankly, now for, for a lot of our companies, I’m just talking to our founders day in, day out, you know?
Yeah. On a [00:18:00] regular basis, on every little topic about the company. Yeah.
[00:18:03] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. And I mean, things are moving so fast, right? Yeah. The market is changing so at, at such a pace and such a volume that it’s really, I’m sure it’s very stressful for a lot of founders to navigate the space and it’s not usual, right.
I bet what you saw at Cypress years ago was not at this, at this space, right? No.
[00:18:23] Amir Rustamzadeh: No.
[00:18:24] Victoria Melnikova: So let’s talk about your portfolio companies just to name a few Hy Fees, right? Is it, is it a Fire Street company? Perplexity?
Mm-hmm.
[00:18:34] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah.
[00:18:35] Victoria Melnikova: Daytona.
[00:18:36] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah.
[00:18:37] Victoria Melnikova: Lovable. Yes. Some of the names that I, I’m sure, like all of us already know because it’s, it is just.
They’re on the surface. What are some others that you,
[00:18:47] Amir Rustamzadeh: you can mention? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the, the ones that, that, uh, I think I’m the most proud of are the ones that we invested at the earliest stages.
[00:18:54] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:55] Amir Rustamzadeh: Where we kind of got to see them as like just a couple of people, you know, in a [00:19:00] room. So, of course, lovable is, is one of those, you know, kind of stories that’s, that’s in the now.
But there are other ones, like, we invested in this chip company called Etched. When they were early on, just brilliant founders doing a very hard thing at an age that you would never expect. You know, there’s another company called aru, which is not a developer tool, but also very young founders. Mm-hmm.
And I think now we have about five to seven unicorns about now in the portfolio. I think some of ‘em have big names. Some of them are, are kind of big in their own right, but don’t have the big name just yet in mm-hmm. In kind of the general zeitgeist.
[00:19:38] Victoria Melnikova: So you catch them very early, right Seed.
[00:19:41] Amir Rustamzadeh: We try to, we try to
[00:19:42] Victoria Melnikova: seed series a
[00:19:43] Amir Rustamzadeh: pre-seed, pre-seed, pre-seed, seed, sometimes series A.
[00:19:47] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:47] Amir Rustamzadeh: You know, we’ve done some later stage stuff and we do have a kind of a growth portfolio, but, but our kind of main craft is, is the pre-seed and seed.
[00:19:56] Victoria Melnikova: How do you recognize those? Because it, it’s very hard at [00:20:00] very early stages to tell what’s gonna happen, right? Mm-hmm.
[00:20:03] Amir Rustamzadeh: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:03] Victoria Melnikova: What are some things that, let’s, let’s focus on.
Let’s kind of cover two grounds. What, what are you looking for in a founder and what are you looking for in the business? Or are those maybe even inseparable and you
[00:20:19] Amir Rustamzadeh: look at them together? No, I mean, they, they’re, they’re not inseparable, but, but yeah, they are distinct things, you know, that we consider, look, some of these companies are so early, we have no idea where they’re gonna go.
Like at all. They pivot, they change, they change their name, they change your market. So at that early of the stage, I mean, you know, you hear. Investors, you know, always say, oh, we, we backed the founder, you know, and they figure out everything else. And that’s true, you know, but you know, there is no silver bullet advice on how you find the clear winner early on.
I think if anybody could claim that, then, you know, they would be, they would be somewhere else. [00:21:00] And so for us, and this is kind of what I learned over time, is that. Can I actually like talk to this person? Can I have a good conversation with this person? Can I work with this person? And I think just that filter alone, that’s, that’s one layer of the filter.
[00:21:16] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:18] Amir Rustamzadeh: I think that like leads you to lean in a little bit more and learn about them. The other thing is you kind of. You kind if that, that’s like their true answer, right? You kind of know early on with some of them of, of course, look, the, in VC we work off the power law, so we make more mistakes than, than, than, than, mm-hmm.
You know, wins. But I think for a lot of the ones that you know, have grown to become big, you kind of on the call sense something, you know, some people don’t like to say it’s a gut feeling or something else. I mean, sometimes it is frankly. I don’t try to index on my gut. Yeah. Because I’ll be wrong more than, more than [00:22:00] anything.
But you can kind of sense that this founder, they’re kind of like a, a force of nature.
[00:22:06] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:22:06] Amir Rustamzadeh: You know, like you go through life, you meet all sorts of people, and most people are kind of the same, you know, they kind of say the same things. They act the same way. They have kind of the same level of energy.
Then when you meet like one of those firecracker founders, it’s like, it’s so undeniable, you know? Yeah. And, and some of them haven’t really matured into their like, full Pokemon form, you know? But, uh, just yet in the early stages, but, but you kind of, you kind of can tell mm-hmm. Like, this person is destined to do something.
[00:22:36] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:36] Amir Rustamzadeh: And you don’t know exactly what that’s gonna look like. What. They always kind of find a way, and that’s what you want in a founder. I mean, look, some of our founders, I guess maybe a good way to formalize it is that the best ones are the ones that you never have to like worry about.
[00:22:53] Victoria Melnikova: Mm.
[00:22:54] Amir Rustamzadeh: They’re kind of people that you can kind of drop in somewhere and they kind of figure it out.
You know, you parachute ‘em on an island [00:23:00] and they, they’ll find their way back. Or they built something great on the island in of itself. And those are the founders that like really energized me and over time I’ve gotten better and better at, at kind of mm-hmm. Figuring out who those people are. But it’s this cat and mouse game that kind of never ends.
[00:23:14] Victoria Melnikova: And what about the product? Do you even care about the product that they’re early stage? Oh yeah, of course, of course. You know how they say you need to show certain revenue, you need to show certain clients. I mean, at Preed stage, do you,
[00:23:26] Amir Rustamzadeh: so Yeah, of course at pre-seed, you know, a lot of ‘em don’t have much to show.
But, but now more than ever, you know, because it’s gotten so much easier to build stuff faster. There is more to show, there’s more of a product to see. Of course we still get kind of, you know, pitches that are just like a single PDF, you know? Yeah. And at that point, you really have to index on the people and the team and the market.
But we kind of look at whatever’s in front of us and try to make, you know, our, our best guess at that point in time. [00:24:00] But I would say nine times out of 10, it’s heavily cured towards the person.
[00:24:05] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:05] Amir Rustamzadeh: Um, because you can have a great product, but if you, if you don’t have that firing you, if you will. It’s gonna go nowhere.
[00:24:10] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:24:11] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah.
[00:24:11] Victoria Melnikova: You know, there is this trap of like over engineering your pitch tags for investors. What would be your advice regarding pitch tax? Like especially at pre seed stage, is it okay if I just do like a really solid piece of text that describes me and my product, or do I need to do like really pretty
[00:24:27] Amir Rustamzadeh: No, I mean presentation.
I know a lot of founders spend time on that, like they purify it in Figma and things like this. I mean, look, thank you. You know, but, uh, but I mean, I prefer like a notion memo.
[00:24:39] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:24:39] Amir Rustamzadeh: More than anything. ‘cause it’s just, just give us the facts. Show us that you can kind of articulate it and that clearly show us that you can, you know, like lay out a plan, lay out a vision of some sort.
Those are the ones like, we enjoy reading. And actually you find, you know, this is kind of advice to founders when you do it in that format, you say [00:25:00] more of substance. Mm-hmm. Whereas with slides, you kind of have to, you know, the, the format kind of, I think takes away some, some of the fidelity of the content you can give.
And this is just for the pre-seed, right? For later stages. Yeah. Do your, do your thing, bring out the decks, you know, but I, I prefer, like, more long firm memos from, from founders. Mm-hmm. I think that’s way more helpful.
[00:25:21] Victoria Melnikova: Do you intentionally focus on developer tools or it just comes naturally to you?
[00:25:27] Amir Rustamzadeh: So, I mean, developer tools, infrastructure, I mean, those things kind of overlap Yeah.
In some sort of Venn diagram. But, so that’s, that’s been a heavy focus, but it’s not the only focus. You know, we’ve invested kind of in, in, in a lot of categories including, you know, cybersecurity, vertical ai, that kind of thing, and, and some odd stuff. But, but you know. Infrastructure is, is, is, is my kind of like personal wheelhouse.
Yeah.
[00:25:52] Victoria Melnikova: How have the past couple of years been for you? Because I know that it’s, I, I see the founder side of things, [00:26:00] but for you as an investor mm-hmm. With this uprise of AI startups, also, let me say that with vibe, code and maybe quality of products, go, goes down. There are more people that are able to build.
So it feels like there are more products out there, more builders out there, more opportunity out there. As an investor, how do you navigate the space? Has it changed for you at all as to maybe like the volume of work that you need to do to sift out the diamonds, you
[00:26:29] Amir Rustamzadeh: know? Yeah. Diamonds in the roof.
[00:26:30] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:26:31] Amir Rustamzadeh: So look. You know, investing world, you kind of have to fine tune yourself with the market.
[00:26:37] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:37] Amir Rustamzadeh: And with the wave of, you know, adoption, that that’s taking place. When I got started Venture, it was just the window of time. Right at the end of the zero interest era where VCs were like lost and confused and like licking their wounds kind of thing, and the start of the AI wave.
So there was like a few months gap, and that’s when I got started. And at that point in time, [00:27:00] everything I would look at just felt so obsolete and outdated. Yeah. It felt like the same stuff I would see, you know, as a developer in like 2014, you know? Yeah. 2012, it was kind of the same old things. Yeah. There was no new ideas out there.
So once the wave kind of started to hit off towards late 2022 and 2023 and onward, you know, everything was new. Everything was new. All the low hanging fruit ideas were out there for the taking. And so during that time, you know, we deployed heavily and it was kind of in those 20, 23, 20 24 timeframe that, you know, we kind of invested some of our, into some of our best companies.
But now in 2026. We have now entered a different phase in, in this kind of new wave of technology, where now a lot of these companies have kind of settled into where they need to be to kind of play the next phase. And a lot of investors are looking for the broader adoption. You know, how do we deploy these things into the enterprise?
Mm-hmm. How do we get more people on board? [00:28:00] The models have gone really good, so, you know, no more excuses on certain things. I know myself and a lot of. My colleagues in other firms we’re kind of watching more than we are deploying. Mm-hmm. Even though deals are happening. Mm-hmm. We’re, we’re just trying to see, you know, what the next wave of, of of companies will, will look like.
But that’s the thing, you know? No, no year is the same over and over again. Yeah.
[00:28:25] Victoria Melnikova: Because you have quite an exciting portfolio. There are different companies. It’s hard for me to kind of formulate a question that is specific to like a type of company. Sure. Because for example, I think about lovable and it’s very different from Daytona.
[00:28:40] Amir Rustamzadeh: That’s
[00:28:40] Victoria Melnikova: right. Right. But they’re, they both sit on the AI kind of pedestal, so. What are some common challenges that companies at early stages face today? Maybe we can compare it to 2025, because in 2025, as you said, there was this market division, right? Like companies were trying to take place. [00:29:00] Now they’ve taken place and now they’re trying to approach enterprise and wider adoption.
So when you think about some maybe advice
[00:29:11] Amir Rustamzadeh: mm-hmm.
[00:29:12] Victoria Melnikova: That you gave or. Maybe some conclusions that even founders themselves arrived at. Maybe we can think about Daytona and lovable as examples and say what was the biggest challenge for them in 2025, and what is the biggest challenge for them now in 2026?
[00:29:30] Amir Rustamzadeh: There is kind of a similarity between Daytona and Lovable and the fact that they’ve both done a great job and they’re at very different stages, of course. Both founders have done a very good job at capturing mindshare very early on. Like once they saw their entry point and beachhead into the market, they really, they really took the opportunity, you know, in the, in the case of lovable, when they first started, it was, it was, you know, it was tough.
It was this, you know, it was very early. The [00:30:00] models weren’t exactly there.
[00:30:01] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:30:01] Amir Rustamzadeh: But they were building kind of for the future of where the models would be. And I think what they done really well was. Kind of build one of the early tools in ai, you know, beyond the chatbots we use that it’s actually for the mass consumer.
And so they, they heavily, you know, invested in their, their brand and their market position around that brand and what that means. And it’s a fantastic name for the company. It’s just lovable. It’s, you know. You know, most developer tools won’t get named that way. I mean, when the first company, when the company first started, it was called GPT Engineer.
[00:30:35] Victoria Melnikova: Oh
[00:30:35] Amir Rustamzadeh: yeah. You know, but, but at least that was the name of the product. But the, the name of the company was lovable. And I remember going to like, sign the paperwork for it and it, you know, it said lovable. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that’s a weird name. Like,
[00:30:44] Victoria Melnikova: yeah,
[00:30:44] Amir Rustamzadeh: but what a brilliant name. You know?
[00:30:46] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:30:46] Amir Rustamzadeh: And, and I think that’s helped a lot.
I think that’s helped a lot.
[00:30:49] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:50] Amir Rustamzadeh: And of course they, they backed it with a great product, but they emphasized design much earlier. Then I think a lot of companies would, and they heavily leaned into their, into [00:31:00] their brand. And you know, when it comes to developer, you know, focused companies, it’s changed now.
But it used to be the case that nobody cared about that stuff. Like if the, if you even did a little bit of that, you were kind of a standout company in that regard. Like if you go back, you know, like in the earlier days of Versel or when it was called ze. Mm-hmm. You know, they cared a lot about design and I really respected that and, and that helped, you know?
Yeah, that definitely helped and I think it still helps ‘em today. It kind of, you know, it gives that, that, that kind of perceived value of, of the tool in the company. So I think Daytona has also has leaned in heavily into that. They care a lot about their market position. Making sure their name is out there and capturing Mindshare very early on in a very crowded market.
Yeah. Both Lovable and Daytona are in very crowded markets. Right around the time when we invested in Lovable, there was like 10 other companies Yes. That were saying the same stuff, but they won because they, they really figured out how [00:32:00] to poke their head out and I think founders really need to. You know, put, put some weight into that stuff.
Mm-hmm. Especially very technical founders that I think if I just cracked this little code here, the world will eventually figure out. I wish brother, I wish, but, but it’s just, it’s just not the case anymore. I think it’s a good, good, good trend. And maybe it’s not a trend, maybe it’s just how it should have always been because we get much more, more mature products early on and I think they, when you do that, you also care a little bit more about.
Your customers and how they perceive you, and you want to be less rough, you wanna be a little bit more polished.
[00:32:37] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:37] Amir Rustamzadeh: And I think that’s more important than ever if you’re trying to raise a lot of money and if you’re trying to go after the enterprise and things like that.
[00:32:43] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. So. Speaking, let’s say of Anton.
I’ve never met him, but I know what he looks like, you know, because every single hire that he does, he posts about it on mm-hmm. The socials. I see his team all the time in my feed, and it’s something that I’m sure [00:33:00] is not a mistake, right? Like he’s doing it on purpose, it’s his strategy and you can’t really hate on it ‘cause it’s like, it’s a beautiful thing to see.
The name and you know, all the hackathons. And I see some activities that they’re doing for like International Women’s Day, you know, and it’s just like lovable is out there all the time. And I’m not surprised that they won. And I’m very curious to see how the wider adoption happens, especially because. In our kind of professional community in the death to community vibe, coding is kind of like disregarded at this point.
Mm-hmm. You know, because there is this like negative connotation, AI slot, whatever. But when we think about the abilities of building that it gives to like an average user. My mom can build a little shop That’s right. Shop for her flower shop, for example. That’s right. Whatever it is, you know, so it actually makes you.
Think about what software is gonna look like tomorrow because it’s gonna be very custom, [00:34:00] unique.
[00:34:00] Amir Rustamzadeh: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:00] Victoria Melnikova: For every vendor or whatever, every user. What is your stance on vibe coding and today? Because right, right now there, as I see there are two terms. There is the vibe coded whatever, ai, AI law, and then there is Agen code.
Mm-hmm. Which is like more professional, polished. Workflows, AI workflows, and Daytona is serving the second. Mm-hmm. And lovable seems like it’s somewhere in the middle, is becoming more a consumer consumer application. So when you navigate the market today, what do you think the future holds? Like, are we gonna have agen.
Coding as the only way to create software. What’s gonna happen with consumer applications? Kind of give me your forecast as to how vibe coding and agenda coding is gonna play out and how our players are gonna take place. Sure,
[00:34:57] Amir Rustamzadeh: sure.
[00:34:58] Victoria Melnikova: In that, in that run,
[00:34:59] Amir Rustamzadeh: I think [00:35:00] there’s a place for both of those things. I don’t think, has he one or the other?
Maybe there’s a diagram and diagram that they overlap a little bit more and more over time, but. The thing with vibe coding, which you know, if you’ve been an engineer for a very long time and we know how opinionated we all are, it, we we’re so close to dis anything that frankly makes our world a little bit more accessible.
[00:35:23] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:35:23] Amir Rustamzadeh: And by the broader masses. And you know, to lovable credit, one of the reasons they won is they focused on this TAM that we all ignored, which was any human that’s not a programmer. Yeah. Which is a pretty large, large tam. I think there’s a place for that. And I think it’s fantastic that you know, more and more people could actually build more advanced software.
You know, if you think about it like in the earlier days of the web, you know. Like this, the, the classical story of the web, right? There was Web 1.0 where we could only read then 2.0 where we could edit Yeah. And, and deploy stuff. [00:36:00] But if you think about it, the most ways people could contribute to the web nowadays for a very long time has just been like social media or you post a blog post or some article, right?
[00:36:10] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:36:10] Amir Rustamzadeh: That’s been how most people contribute to the web. With something with like lovable and vibe coding in general. Now more people can contribute to the web in the full sense of, of, of the platform, which is they can ship full applications themselves and that just maybe serves them, you know? Yeah. Or their small business.
Yeah. Or even medium sizes, whatever it may be. I mean, they’re even seeing large adoption in the enterprise, especially with internal tools.
[00:36:36] Victoria Melnikova: Oh yeah.
[00:36:36] Amir Rustamzadeh: So I think that’s fantastic and I think that is gonna just grow and become even more advanced. And so, you know, we don’t have to dislike vibe coding because it does serve a purpose for a large group of people.
At the same time, we have the rise of, you know, agentic Engineering, which I love, and it’s super fun, I think. It does ruffle some feathers [00:37:00] because, you know, for so many years, many programmers have had their identity in, you know, the specifics of the code. You know, there’s a lot of engineers and string companies which have built up their own little corner of the world Yeah.
Of how they, they control this code base and they, they only know what’s going on, but those days are over, you know, those days are over. Mm-hmm. I think both, both types of programming are gonna expand and, and probably convergent in certain places. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But we can dive into the agent engineer
[00:37:27] Victoria Melnikova: stuff.
Yeah. Do you, do you identity code?
[00:37:30] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yes, all the time. And you know, I’m all those investors that like touches the things I invest in. I’m deep into it heavily and I, I actually think it leads to less slop.
[00:37:45] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:45] Amir Rustamzadeh: And a lot of people say, oh, it’s all slop. It’s not good. And you know, we can’t review all this code and that’s true that we can’t review all of this stuff.
Mm-hmm. But what I’m getting out of it, it takes effort [00:38:00] and, you know, of course I come from a testing company, so I get a little bit more about the quality, but I think we are actually in a place now where, you know, we can actually ship very high quality software leveraging these tools and it’s only getting better.
Look, I, you know, I have this, this project that I’ve been working on. It has, you know, over like 1200 tests, end-to-end tests, you know, the scary ones, right?
[00:38:26] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:38:26] Amir Rustamzadeh: And writing all those tests with proper coverage and then actually seeing what it does and gaining full confidence. This was like my biggest dream in the days of Cyprus because our whole thing was, you know, just, just telling developers, please test a little bit.
Mm-hmm. Just please, you know. Like we are trying to create more advanced software. We have all these fancy new web frameworks.
[00:38:50] Victoria Melnikova: Yes.
[00:38:51] Amir Rustamzadeh: There’s, there’s so much more complicated, they have more state in the client, and that’s kind of what led to the birth of, of Cyprus. It was kind of the, the rise of these more advanced [00:39:00] web applications.
And so our whole thing was to go out and tell the world, please do better with testing. You know, but, you know, and we were pushing for like shifting left of, you know, test automation and all those things. But it’s very hard to kind of get the industry to adopt all that stuff. Mm-hmm. Because the C-suite never really prioritizes it.
They might say, oh, we ship great software, but you have no idea how many large companies, the ones that you know, scraped the skyline of San Francisco, have some of like the worst, you know, code quality in the world. And we saw it firsthand. That’s just how it is, you know? Mm-hmm. I do companies that we all like depend on, but they went like six months without any tests running, like, not even not writing, just like running the test they already have because they, it was so brittle and they had so little confidence in it.
So yes, we are getting more distant from the code. Mm-hmm. And then minutiae of, of it all. [00:40:00] But I think it’s actually, you know, in due time it will lead to much more high quality software. Mm-hmm. And that’s, that’s exciting in and of itself. Mm-hmm. I think that’s better for the whole industry at large.
[00:40:10] Victoria Melnikova: So what’s your unique AI code and setup?
What are the, some tools that you’re using?
[00:40:15] Amir Rustamzadeh: Well, you know, I’m cloud maxing like everybody. I have set up my own little like framework for high managed context.
[00:40:23] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:23] Amir Rustamzadeh: In a very large project. It’s a little excessive probably, but, but it helps me manage specs deviations from the A spec.
[00:40:33] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:34] Amir Rustamzadeh: Amendments to the spec, uh, discoveries along the way.
It, I have kind of created this like formalized structure.
[00:40:43] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:44] Amir Rustamzadeh: And then, you know, I smash claw with it and it works kind of really well. It’s kind of helped me around the memory problem to some degree.
[00:40:52] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:53] Amir Rustamzadeh: And I found that it leads to much better code reviews just because it’s so overtly [00:41:00] rigorous in laying out like what I want.
It does lead to more time, uh, in plan mode and spec mode. Like, you know, for this one project, I gotta spend like two weeks just on specking things out and it’s worth it, you know? Mm-hmm. It, it, it works.
[00:41:15] Victoria Melnikova: Kind of coming back to the term of developer experience, it seems like developer experience and what it means to people is changing too, because now that we are having agents work for us, code for us, we have this new workflows around it, you know?
How would you define a great developer experience in 2026?
[00:41:35] Amir Rustamzadeh: Well, the stuff that we worked very hard on in the past is just, it’s like super easy now, you know? Mm-hmm. If you remember, just even having good docs was, was like insurmountable thing. But now that’s, that’s a lot easier. I think we can get much better documentation.
It’s much easier to. Have better STKs now. Mm-hmm. I, I think there’s a whole new set of companies that, [00:42:00] that kind of simplify that. Mm-hmm. We backed one called speakeasy. Mm-hmm. They do a fantastic job of helping you create an SDK from your open, API spec and, and a bunch of other things. So I think. The hard stuff has now become table stakes, and every company can provide a great developer experience just kind of out of the gate, you know?
Yeah. Without a whole lot of effort. And so I think that pushes, you know, founders working on infrastructure and developer tooling, that whole world, they have to poke above that, you know, like it’s not just enough to have good docs anymore or, uh, you know, good little content or, you know, great APIs or anything like that.
That’s just assumed. Yeah. Uh, in these days. So. We kind of go through this other thing that we’re all talking about, which is taste, you know? And I think that pushes certain companies to, to poke out from the, from the noise.
[00:42:49] Victoria Melnikova: What about agent experience?
[00:42:51] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah. And we’ll see what that looks like. I think the things that you did for humans definitely helps the agents.
Like, again, [00:43:00] going back to docs, the fact that you write down everything. Mm-hmm. I mean, the poor agent can have something to look at. But yeah, more and more so than ever it’s gonna be, you know, more about how would the agent see this thing versus the human seeing this thing. And I try to do that in my own work as well, just.
You know, I always have like a whole nother thread of conversations with, with Claude. Mm-hmm. About how I can make it easier for other clot sessions.
[00:43:24] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:43:25] Amir Rustamzadeh: And that’s stuff compounds over over time.
[00:43:27] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s actually interesting because if you just do it over and over again, you’re wasting so much time.
Right? That’s right. But if you are optimizing for those. Let’s say curve balls that Claude always, yeah. Needs on their way. So it’s, it’s much easier and saves a lot of time. So in 2026, we feel like the, the players have settled in, they’re gonna be growing a lot, right? They’re gonna be targeting enterprise and achieving this wider adoption.
Is there still opportunity for new startups to arise?
[00:43:58] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah. You know. [00:44:00] I, I think investors are not the best people to actually answer that question because it’s really the job of the founders to figure out the, you know, what’s next and what’s in the market. We have some ideas, you know, we think, but we’re beholden to, you know, the greatness of the next idea and the next founder to kind of show us, show us the next thing you know.
There’s always a dream of the next company. Mm-hmm. So I think there’s always room for the next great thing, but it is becoming growingly harder. So maybe we can chat about that, because I, I think we should probably have a sober conversation around what it means to create a, a developer focused company today and where the venture landscape is.
Yeah. And how that impacts that. I think most developer tool companies today, or people thinking about them are not venture scale businesses. They’re just not. They used to be at some point, but not really anymore. So you have to really think harder about, even if your project is starting from a very small idea.
How that can grow to be a, a broader platform. I’m not saying [00:45:00] anything new here, but that pressure is, is now very real.
[00:45:03] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:03] Amir Rustamzadeh: And it’s something you kind of have to know from the get go. It’s not enough to kind of create a little framework and then you may open source it and then get users.
[00:45:12] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:12] Amir Rustamzadeh: And then hopefully VCs would like you just enough because you got enough GitHub stars that you can, you know, build some commercial product around this thing.
Yeah. You know, I think you have to come out of the woodwork being way more commercial. Just to have a fighting chance. But it kind of, you know, pains me as like a former dev tools guide. You know, that this is the case, but, but this is, this is the world we we live in, you know?
[00:45:36] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:45:37] Amir Rustamzadeh: So always be thinking about how can I become really big business?
And one thing to mention here, and I’m just gonna mention as like a public service announcement. Yes. Because, you know, in this town, you know, in sf, like there’s sorts of people running around trying to create the next thing, right? But I’m always surprised by. How little people actually understand what a venture scale business is.
You kind of assume [00:46:00] that people know, you know, all this information is is out there. And of course, everyone should know and, and you should assume everybody knows, but I find that not to be the case. So I, I really, you know, advocate for founders to like, please think about like what the venture scale version of your idea could look like.
You might not know all the details upfront and that’s okay, you know? Mm-hmm. Ideas are fragile and they start small. But know that if you’re after venture dollars, you have to have venture ideas.
[00:46:28] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:46:29] Amir Rustamzadeh: Otherwise, I hope you can build some other, you know, smaller thing and that that’s okay too. You know, it’s okay to just be a business that makes money.
That’s, that’s totally okay.
[00:46:38] Victoria Melnikova: That that’s one thing that I think. A lot of people have a misconception about they think that they need to raise. Mm-hmm. And you don’t really need to raise if your business is already profitable. Like there, there’s, you know, if you’re able to, to get your clients and it pays your salary, you feel good about it.
Why raise
[00:46:56] Amir Rustamzadeh: if, if you’re, if you’re fine with that, that’s, that’s totally cool. And, [00:47:00] and again, as investors, like, we only want to back. Venture scale ideas. Mm-hmm. So you’re rather you not come and, you know, don’t, don’t pitch. Don’t go out there wasting your time doing that because you know it’s gonna be a world of pain later.
You know, just be thoughtful about what it means to be a venture business. I know in this town, because like, you know, we have accelerators that kind of, you know, back all sorts of ideas. It kind of, you know, it, it, it really attracts a lot of people into this. Mm-hmm. So I get where, where that comes from.
But if you’re playing this for the long term, you know, you gotta, yeah, you gotta think big as well. The other thing to say about this is that, and I think it’s really important for us to cover this, is just the state of venture and how it impacts this stuff. Look, the landscape of venture is constantly changing and, and people comment on it in all sorts of ways.
And depending on which firm you are, you’re gonna have a different perspective. But I’ll, I’ll share kind of maybe a, a broad state of the union. Yeah. For founders, which could be helpful. [00:48:00] Right now, most of the, the venture dollars are concentrated into a, you know, a handful of, of firms and the, the, the landscape has become, you know, more polarized.
You either a very large fund or you go much smaller.
[00:48:16] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:48:16] Amir Rustamzadeh: I think that’s, that’s, you know, you know, of course there’s people playing, playing the field in the, in the middle and it’s, it’s a difficult game, but it’s, it’s becoming like that. Mm-hmm. It’s kind of like barbell shape Yeah. Effect. You know, for us, we are playing the small side side of things.
We want to be nimble, we want to be fast, we want to be early, and our math is different for the bigger funds, different ballgame, different math. Now when it comes, you know, to the founders right now, because we’re in this kind of frenzy of who has which firm, you know, who has the signal? Yeah, who’s hot, who’s not.
That kind of thing. We’re so like. Enamored by all the content and the media around fundraising.
[00:48:58] Victoria Melnikova: Yes.
[00:48:59] Amir Rustamzadeh: You know, founders [00:49:00] want to get like the, you know, the marquee firms on the cap table early on, but you have to know the risks that, that, that kind of involves when a large firm invests in a very, very small company at the pree seed stage.
Founders need to understand that is. Not a full, you know, both hands, both feet in type investment. That’s somewhat of an options call for, for that firm, which means that, you know, you’re not top of mind. You know, they’re, they’re not the, you know, you’re not the top priority necessarily, and you’re just gonna have a very different experience.
Now, you might get told otherwise.
[00:49:36] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:49:36] Amir Rustamzadeh: You know, but the math is the math and the, you know, the, it is just how it works.
[00:49:43] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:49:44] Amir Rustamzadeh: And so I think founders should be, you know, cognizant of that when they’re fundraising. The other thing that happens when you have kind of very large funds, you know, investing in super early stage companies mm-hmm.
Is that it actually over inflates the seed market.
[00:49:59] Victoria Melnikova: Oh yeah.
[00:49:59] Amir Rustamzadeh: The, [00:50:00] the valuations get really big, super early and founders are kind of happy about it, you know, in some, some cases where they’re like, wow, my company, I just came outta the woodwork is already worth 30, $50 million. You know, it’s funny money and.
It’s just not the case. And what that does is it, it actually pushes out smaller, specialized investors from backing you. And these are the people that could help you more. They’re gonna be the ones that kind of are more blunt to you and, and yeah. And can give you the, the real kind of advice that you might need in the tough times.
But if you’re pushing out those people due to valuations, you’re, you’re, you know, it, it’s, it’s gonna be hard for you to kind of get that experience.
[00:50:39] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:50:40] Amir Rustamzadeh: And so that’s one of the challenges today in venture. That’s why it’s so rare to see, you know, companies with 5 million post valuation, 10 million, hell, even 15 million, you know, now.
Yeah, it seems like everybody’s coming out with work with, you know, 20 plus. I mean, we see stuff at, you know, lower as well, but it’s become more [00:51:00] rare. And this is, this kind of makes fundraising tough, you know? And, and the fundraising for your next round, even tough.
[00:51:06] Victoria Melnikova: Oh, yeah.
[00:51:06] Amir Rustamzadeh: Because the expectation is, is is pretty high.
[00:51:10] Victoria Melnikova: Can you explain this phenomenon that I am seeing these days? Not only companies are raising big, big rounds, but they’re also raising super fast. Mm-hmm. Like I’ve seen. Series B series C closed within one year and it doesn’t feel normal. Mm-hmm. Like, it feels like there has to be a lot of internal pressure to, to have to raise that much.
Mm-hmm. That often what happens within the company that the founders need to raise that much.
[00:51:38] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah. Um, well you used the word need to raise, maybe, maybe that’s not the right word. Uh, want to raise? Want to raise? Well, look, there are valid reasons for it. Look, some companies are growing that fast. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, it just came out today, lovable is 400 million ARR just, and they, I think, added the last hundred in the last month.
There are companies that are truly [00:52:00] growing fast, they’re proper generational, you know, businesses that have, that have cropped up during this W wave and, and they’re earning the right to, to grow. Mm-hmm. And they’re getting the capital to do that. So that makes sense. And yes, the window of raising gets, gets shorter and shorter as investors are excited to, to put money in.
Then you have the other ones where you’re kind of like dumbfounded, but like, Hmm. I don’t think the revenue’s really there. I don’t think the growth is really there. So why is this happening? There is a bit of, of what I like, knighting ceremony. Mm-hmm. That, that, that larger investors do. You know, because they feel strongly about a certain market.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or category, and they kind of say can, can kind of see early on that hey, this founder at this company, I think has, has what it takes. So they. They overcapitalize them, you know, to some degree to, to effectively, you know, make them somewhat of the winner. And of course they still have to do the work to win properly and get customers and all that.
But there is a bit of that going on. [00:53:00] I don’t think it’s particularly good for the market. ‘cause again, it inflates valuations mm-hmm. Across the whole ecosystem.
[00:53:07] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:07] Amir Rustamzadeh: But it is something that’s, that’s happening. Mm-hmm. Now again, founders need to be really careful when they do that kind of raise, because I mean, you better grow into that, that valuation, right?
[00:53:18] Victoria Melnikova: It’s like that in Silicon Valley. If you remember in the first season when. They were given like a really big valuation, basically. Yeah. And they rejected it because the, the, I forget what her name is, the, the assistant was like, don’t do it. Don’t
[00:53:32] Amir Rustamzadeh: do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. She did the right thing.
[00:53:35] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:53:35] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah.
I mean, I think every investor watching the episode is like, that’s a good one, that she’s, she’s a good one, you know, like she, she did on a solid for telling them, man, that’s, that’s absolutely right. We would love to say that. Founders should raise the least amount of money at any given point in time. Now, I can say that on the mic and be happy about that statement, but I, I really feel for the founders in the moment because [00:54:00] they’re seeing their competitors.
[00:54:01] Victoria Melnikova: Oh yeah.
[00:54:02] Amir Rustamzadeh: Raise a bunch of money and it becomes. An arms race for capital.
[00:54:06] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:54:07] Amir Rustamzadeh: And so they feel also compelled that, hey, I need, I need to go raise too, because how am I gonna compete? Mm-hmm. You know, they’re gonna get all the, the right employees that I’m after. And that’s a whole nother part of, it’s like the, you know, winning of talent and there’s a whole war for all that going on.
Mm-hmm.
[00:54:22] Victoria Melnikova: So given that you have experience with all sorts of companies and you talk to a lot of founders in 2026, where do you feel is still the pockets of opportunity for, to tap into what are some areas that are not covered and you feel like, oh, I wish there was a good founder that turned on,
[00:54:39] Amir Rustamzadeh: you know, in infrastructure, land and dev tools.
I think most of the things I’ve thought about are like covered, you know, now I’m just waiting to see like maybe if you asked me two years ago, they were not covered, but now they’re covered. So I’m just waiting to see where that lands. Where I’ve bias towards investing in, in infrastructure land. Mm-hmm.
Are [00:55:00] companies that like have proper innovation underneath the hood. Mm-hmm. Like they’re truly doing something different. Mm-hmm. They’ve cracked the code on something.
[00:55:07] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:55:07] Amir Rustamzadeh: Not just that. You know, they have like developer adoption to some degree. Mm-hmm. Because that can go away, you know, overnight. So infrastructure land, what I’m watching are kind of like the next wave of, you know, of, of, of clouds that people will adopt.
Mm-hmm. I mean, with Daytona you have kind of like, Hey, we want to be the, the next kind of AWS for agents. And there’s all sorts of reasons for that. So I’m excited to see, you know, how that that plays out. There’s kind of this arms race around sandboxes. Mm-hmm. At the moment, you know, the fight for the, the house of the agents, if you will.
Right. So I think we have some kind of core categories now that are just inflight and influx, and I’m watching that very closely. [00:56:00] ‘cause if, if you can build a platform around that mm-hmm. Then that, I think is a, is a rich, you know, soil for, for a venture outcome.
[00:56:10] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. What about wider like, consumer applications with ai?
Do you feel like that is tapped to because I, I feel like it’s just starting to roll out.
[00:56:20] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, on the consumer side, I think it’s so early. I mean, look, most people we know outside of our tech bubble, you know, there’s at, at minimum they’re just playing with like. A simple chat bot, you know, today, they’re not bringing it into their day-to-day life.
Maybe That’s good. Maybe that’s helpful. Yeah.
[00:56:37] Victoria Melnikova: We can give it like that enough.
[00:56:38] Amir Rustamzadeh: Yeah, it’s, it’s all good. You don’t have to go full adoption on it. We’ll see. We’ll see where that, where that goes. You know, on the consumer side, there’s more around like content creation. Mm-hmm. There’s, there’s things like that.
I’m not too, too, like focused on those things. Mm-hmm. Because I’m maybe a little old school where I like my content made [00:57:00] by humans.
[00:57:00] Victoria Melnikova: I know,
[00:57:02] Amir Rustamzadeh: you know, things like this, you know? Mm-hmm. So, but, but we’ll see. I’m sure there’s someone younger than me that, that sees it completely differently. Mm-hmm. On that front.
[00:57:10] Victoria Melnikova: We have arrived at our final question, and it’s always the same for all the founders. It’s called Warm Fs question and it goes like this. What makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:57:22] Amir Rustamzadeh: Well, first of all, it’s fun. It’s fun to, you know, I consider it an absolute privilege to do the work I do and to work with the founders that I do, and also to work with my partner Walter.
He’s just like a amazing person, has been like a fantastic mentor to me. You know, guys like that, that have that much experience. I mean, he’s been investing for 40 years, you know, a quiet legend of the game. They don’t stick around, you know, and the venture game is very much an apprentice, you know, craft, if you will.
[00:57:53] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:57:54] Amir Rustamzadeh: And so I, I consider myself extremely privileged to kind of have his support and have his backing. And, [00:58:00] and so I think we, we enjoy working together. So I consider privilege just to get to work with someone like that. And then, I mean, wow. Like. Truly what a, what a blast to work with the founders that we get to work with.
I mean, we were both at Daytona’s, you know, conference the, the other day. What a great team. You know, what a great set of people. Hey, you kind of feel alive a little bit mm-hmm. When you get to be, you know, in the middle, in the thick of it all. So I’m excited to have a seat at the table, at least to, to watch.
Yeah.
[00:58:30] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you so much, Amir. It was a pleasure talking to you and. It’s so refreshing to, to get such raw, honest, humble advice from somebody like you. So my pleasure. Thank you for coming to the show. Of
[00:58:42] Amir Rustamzadeh: course, anytime.
[00:58:43] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you. Thank you for catching yet another episode of Dev Propulsion Labs. We at Evil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.
If you are a developer [00:59:00] tool needs help with product design development or SRE. Visit evil martians.com/dev tools. See you in the next.
