Welcome Anna Debenham (Snyk)! Announcing boldstart's newest Operating Partner.
At boldstart, our sole focus is to partner with technical founders well before they write their first line of code and help accelerate the path to product market fit. We’ve seen what great is having partnered on day one with enterprise leaders like Snyk, BigID, Kustomer and many more, also know that every single hire and decision made in the early days has a cascading effect. With that philosophy, we’ve been adding operating partners from existing portfolio companies to bring in a particular set of skills that boldstart founders can leverage to turbocharge their path to success.
We’re thrilled to announce that Anna Debenham has joined our team. She was one of Snyk’s first hires (employee #4), starting as an engineer, and later transitioning into product. In our opinion, one of the most important determinants of futuref success revolves a team’s ability to ship the right product quickly and iterate rapidly. Anna knows first hand how to help founders navigate the myriad of challenges founders will face on the journey from product idea to v1. This involves hard decisions around who to build for, who to hire, what features to add/delete, and what to prioritize.
We first met Anna almost 5 years ago (thanks Guy!). I was visiting Snyk in London, and we met for an early breakfast.
Anna showed me how she helped the team at Snyk prioritize user feedback, focus engineering resources with a tight product roadmap, experiment, and most importantly — measure success with a rapid feedback loop. I learned a lot about what it takes to build and ship quickly, while staying focused and growing a team around it.
Fast forward and Snyk now has millions of developers using its product every single day, and we are 🔥up to have Anna bring that experience to the team at boldstart. She is a force multiplier for any founder leading product development as her experience building developer-first products from scratch to scale is unmatched.
What is most exciting (but perhaps not surprising) is that Anna has “productized” her best practices into a framework which she and we at boldstart will be releasing over the coming months. One added bonus is that Anna is based in London and given our sizable portfolio in Europe and Israel, boldstart founders have even more local coverage!
If you’re a founder thinking about your next infrastructure or developer first company, reach us at @boldstartvc as the whole team is ready to work for you. Welcome Anna to boldstart!
You can follow Anna on twitter and stay tuned for more!
