Rachel Chalmers
Previously a research VP who led 451 Research’s infrastructure practice to discover the likes of VMWare, Cloudera, and Splunk, Rachel has deep experience in venture capital and launching startups, having worked with Merian Ventures, Ignition Partners, and...
Rachel Chalmers is a partner at Generationship. Her extensive experience in software began with her early work as a technology journalist, documenting new case studies for Australia’s rapidly-developing IT sector and eventually providing extensive editorial coverage of developing standards in Web development for leading publication Computerwire.
Her natural curiosity and fascination with emerging tech soon led her to industry analysis. As the VP of 451 Research’s infrastructure practice, she unearthed a growing sector of tooling for developers and data experts and discovered technology titans-in-waiting Splunk, VMWare, and Cloudera in the process. She grew the practice to a multi-million dollar business eventually sold to Standard & Poors Global.
Rachel has held leadership and advisory positions with a variety of software companies, including Honeycomb, Autodesk, and Compaas, focusing on key areas such as honing marketing messaging, product positioning, and overall go-to-market strategy.
A venture capital expert, Rachel has also spent more than a decade discovering, investing in, and mentoring successful startups. Her tours of duty include working as principal at IGNITION PARTNERS, then as venture partner at Merian Ventures. She also served as managing director at Alchemist Accelerator, where she assisted a new generation of startups in finding their audiences and their voices while zeroing in on product-market fit.
Rachel is also an outspoken advocate for diversity, inclusion, and taking a human-centered approach to tech, having advised The Ada Initiative, a not-for-profit organization built to support women in technology. She has also launched Generationship, a podcast that discusses the potential impact of AI on society.
We wanted operators, not advice you can read on Twitter. The Heavybit partners know our business at the atomic level.
Everybody at Heavybit is genuinely motivated to help you succeed and will do everything in their power to do that. It's tough starting a company, and it's really nice to have a cohort of people you can ask for advice and then help others in return.
Heavybit helped us navigate the uncharted waters of building a dev focused enterprise offering.
Few investors understand what it means to create a developer category from scratch. Heavybit not only invested in Netlify as a company. They also helped to champion the Jamstack.
Skills
Product Discovery
Frameworks for product discovery in developer tools: design partners, user research, personas, competitive analysis, and building for developer flow. Covers customer interview techniques, discovery processes, evaluating feature requests, and knowing when to pivot.
- +19
Developer Communities
How to build, measure, and scale developer communities that create real business value. Covers community strategy, engagement models, community health metrics, champion programs, and balancing community interests with business goals.
- +18
Cloud Infrastructure Security
Practical cloud security controls for startups building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Covers secure cloud environments, identity and access management, infrastructure-as-code, remote access strategies, and encryption decisions.
- +2
Lead Generation & Marketing Ops
Building efficient lead generation pipelines and marketing operations at developer tools and B2B SaaS companies. Covers lead scoring, marketing automation, account-based marketing, marketing stack selection, and aligning sales and marketing metrics.
- +13
Vertical SaaS Strategy
Strategies for building and scaling software companies focused on specific industry verticals. Covers compound startup models, network effects, vertical pricing and monetization, professional services as go-to-market, building for non-technical users, and platform expansion within verticals.
- +8
Content from the Library
Generationship Ep. #59, Containers Should Actually Contain with Emily Long and Alex Zenla
On episode 59 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers speaks with Emily Long and Alex Zenla, co-founders of Edera, about rethinking the foundations of cloud and AI security. They explain how an IoT side project became an approach to workload isolation built around Xen and Rust, and why AI agents are making stronger security boundaries increasingly urgent. Along the way, they discuss complementary leadership skills, fundraising lessons, and the value of questioning the industry’s technical assumptions.
Generationship Ep. #58, Quantum Uncertainty with Anastasia Marchenkova
On episode 58 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Anastasia Marchenkova. They explore what it will take to move quantum computing from promising hardware to useful, production-ready systems, including better orchestration across quantum, classical, and AI compute. Anastasia also discusses open-source infrastructure, the limits of AI automation, and her larger vision of making powerful computing and scientific tools more broadly accessible.
Generationship Ep. #57, Attention is Currency with Navneet Kaur
On episode 57 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Navneet Kaur, founder of FemTech India and TechThrive Ventures. Together they explore why women's health innovation must extend beyond Western markets, how AI is reshaping femtech, and what founders need to understand about trust, culture, and personalization when building global healthcare companies.
