Meet Noah Carr, the newest investor at Vertex Ventures US
Today, we’re thrilled to share that Noah Carr is joining Vertex Ventures US as General Partner.
Noah is an experienced investor, with over ten years of experience at firms including Bain Capital Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and most recently Point72 Ventures. At Point72 Ventures, Noah led the firm’s investments in enterprise technology, including (but not limited to) cybersecurity, data infrastructure, and developer tools.
Now, at Vertex, Noah is especially looking forward to working with early-stage founders tackling tough technical problems and building category-defining businesses. Partnering with entrepreneurs to drive success today can make an outsized impact on the world of tomorrow, he believes.
“I like the innovative piece of thinking about the next generation of infrastructure software technologies that will power every consumer and enterprise product that we use as individuals in society,” Noah says. “When you invest at the early stage, you have to contemplate how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, thinking 5 or 10 years in the future. If I can be helpful in that process, that’s the thing that’s exciting to me.”
By that same token, Noah says that he particularly values those founders who have a strong vision for the future they’re trying to bring about, and a beachhead strategy for how to start down the road that gets them there — but who also understand that things don’t always go to plan, and are able to adapt to all of the unexpected ups and downs of the startup journey.
In a more practical sense, Noah believes the best founders are the ones who are commercially-minded from their earliest days. The sooner that a company gets serious about building a real, sustainable business, the better. In a world where there are so many vendors large and small selling variations of the same products, the winners are those who master what he calls the “execution game.” That’s why he always looks for those with the ability to iterate quickly on their core idea, the better to find that all-important product-market fit.
“There’s a lot of really smart technical founders, but the ones that are able to tie a great product to an effective go-to-market strategy are the ones that make it massively successful and create real impact,” he says.
Working with startups
When it comes to working with startups, Noah describes his approach as “all in.” That could mean providing an outside perspective on a problem or challenge the CEO is facing, or it might mean just being an informed ear to whom the co-founders can vent after a bad day.
"Noah is an anti-pattern VC that develops his own thesis about emerging markets well before those markets become obvious,” says Jason Martin, co-CEO of Permiso. “From day one, he has been an invaluable partner and advisor. His empathy for founders, strategic insights, unwavering support, and deep understanding of our market have played a pivotal role in our growth and success."
Noah believes that the single highest-leverage thing he can do as an investor, however, is provide access to his network. That goes well beyond customer introductions, and into helping connect startups with the right individuals at the right time to take them to the next stage of their development. Across his career, he’s built a deep network of founders, operators, executives, experts, and later-stage investors in infrastructure software that he can bring to bear as the circumstances require. And in those situations where he doesn’t have the right expertise to call on, someone else at Vertex likely does.
“I think that’s the thing that ends up being compelling for founders, is that you have access and reach to a wide swath of not only the best investors who can support the company through their next phase of growth, but also the operators, domain/functional experts, other founders, entrepreneurs, angels and the full ecosystem of people that can be most beneficial to your company,” he says. “If you have the strongest network of the best people, then essentially you have the most effective tools to increase your probability of success of getting to the next level.”
The intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and IT infrastructure
In terms of technology, Noah says that he’s been keeping a keen eye on developments in the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and data / cloud infrastructure. As applications become ever more complex, he says that there’s increasing demand for ways to automate both the deployment and management of underlying infrastructure. That complexity also introduces brand-new ways for bad actors to exploit gaps in a system’s security.
The opportunity, he says, is for those building abstracted infrastructure components that are both easily automated at scale and hardened against attack. This dovetails, too, with what he sees as a movement towards security being increasingly thought of as part of the software engineering lifecycle, rather than separate from it.
“At the end of the day, this is just no longer a human-scale problem for someone to manage infrastructure in the most efficient way,” he says. “And so if you want to build the applications of the future, you need to be thinking about what are the systems that we actually want to build on that are at a higher and higher level.”
You can find Noah on LinkedIn here. You can reach out to Noah directly here.
