Announcing Amir Zohrenejad: Part-Time Partner

Heavybit is thrilled to announce Amir Zohrenejad as a part-time partner. Amir is a YC alum and an experienced investor in technology startups and real estate. His main area of expertise are database management systems and Applied AI.

Amir began his career at Microsoft, where he was a technical PM on the Windows Wireless and Office Communication Server teams. He then founded multiple companies including Dataherald (YC W21), an open-source text-to-SQL startup. He also actively manages a family office (Serai Capital Investments) and is an avid backcountry snowboarder.

How to Think About Building Startups

Amir likens building startups to normal people taking on a seemingly impossible athletic challenges. “There are things like mountaineering or finishing a marathon that don’t seem like they should be possible if you’re not an athlete. What you realize is that if you set that task as your singular goal, somehow the impossible becomes achievable.”

Amir recommends that founders avoid the temptation to spend days alone and locked up in a room writing software. “You need to build something people want. Founders need to go talk to users and make sure they understand those pain points well. For enterprise infrastructure, those customers are other developers or technical leads. Talking to customers in the early days is more important than building.”

“If you can’t find those first five or six people you hypothesize will be your early customers...you might not be the right founder to build that tool. Those first early users should be in your network. That’s one of the things I think investors look for in any technical startup: First, founder-market fit: Does this founder have deep expertise, and has lived in this general space? And second: Can what they’re building get very big?”

“This is why I recommend founders pick a big market, but start by building a very narrow version of what they eventually want to build. The goal is, within that narrow focus, to build a lot of mindshare and get people to start using your product. Revenue is important, but I would argue that having people using your product in the early days is far more important. Get it into people’s hands, get feedback, and iterate from there.”

Why Join Heavybit? (And Why Now?)

Heavybit’s experience with product validation and go-to-market were strong reasons to join. “When I was building my startup, Heavybit was the number one institutional firm I wanted to raise from, and why I originally became a limited partner. Heavybit understands how to build a community, how to sell products, and how to think about technical personas.”

Amir points out that Heavybit offers many resources to founders at any stage. “Founders should never think it's ‘too early’ to engage. For example, Heavybit has a lot of events specifically built for founders to meet other founders and developers. You can meet potential customers, potential co-founders, and engage with the Heavybit team if you want. Heavybit’s team, from the very beginning, helps founders refine their ideas and make introductions, even before you’re ready to fundraise.”

For founders on the fence, Amir suggests that the dawning AI age is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build something new. “This is probably a change that’s on the level of the invention of electricity, the Internet, or mobile. A lot of the momentum for early-stage companies comes from real customer usage, and there are opportunities to build the next cohort of generational companies. (And starting late does give someone else a pretty big advantage over you.)”

Founding a technical startup? Reach out to our team here.