- Tim Tully taught himself to code when he was six and went to high school for pc science.
- He began his profession in software program engineering at startups and later labored at Yahoo and Splunk.
Venture capitalist Tim Tully’s programming expertise started at age six, when he taught himself to write down code and make video video games on an Apple II pc. Fast-forward to the current: Tully has a knowledge middle in a basement and is understood to deploy software program and check out startups’ APIs when he is sussing out potential investments. He’s additionally written code for a few of his portfolio corporations.
Using his technical experience as a former programmer and CTO, Tully helps amass a formidable portfolio of AI startups at Menlo Ventures.
The agency, which has backed Chime, Warby Parker, Roku, and Uber, has traditionally centered broadly on early and growth-stage startups throughout the buyer, enterprise, and healthcare sectors.
More lately, Menlo has planted its flag within the generative AI house as frenzy within the sector is creating new alternatives for early-stage startups. The agency closed a $1.35 billion fund final 12 months particularly for investing in fledgling AI startups, and it is already been an early backer of AI powerhouses together with vector database Pinecone, LLM developer Anthropic, enterprise information cleaner Unstructured, conversational AI system Neon, automated information cleanup program Cleanlab, and lots of others.
For Tully, one among Menlo’s key check-writers on this house, having a background in pc science and working expertise has been essential in the case of evaluating potential AI investments.
“I’m nonetheless coding every single day,” he mentioned. “That actually helps me for my job, and I feel it is actually exhausting to be a VC and put money into a deeply technical product if you do not have a technical background. I’m really utilizing these things.”
Before turning into a VC, Tully labored at startups and led engineering groups
For Tully, who grew up within the Bay Area, computer systems and video games have at all times been a core a part of his life. He had an Apple II pc and cassette tape participant that plugged right into a TV on a rolling cart, which is the place he taught himself to code by enjoying video video games and studying by manuals.
He mentioned an early sport of his, coded utilizing Applesoft BASIC, was a text-based journey sport wherein gamers would get misplaced in a forest and navigate by a maze, answering a sequence of fork-in-the-road puzzles to chase down the treasure.
As a teen, Tully had a financial institution of modems at his mother’s home to arrange a bulletin board system – a pre-internet pc server that different customers may dial into – to host pirated video video games.
After faculty, Tully gravitated in the direction of startups, turning into a software program engineer at Dot-com period corporations iScale and Pillar Data Systems, the latter of which was acquired by Oracle in 2003. He then spent the following 14 years at Yahoo, working his approach as much as lead engineering for Yahoo!, AOL, and its media properties, which included Huffington Post, Tumblr, Polyvore, and Flurry, and managing a group of greater than 850 folks.
In 2017, Tully joined information analytics firm Splunk as its chief expertise officer and senior vp of product and engineering and managed the corporate’s migration to the cloud. While he beloved his group at Splunk, Tully mentioned that he was at all times within the investing facet of the tech world, and his curiosity was additional piqued by his spouse, Jess Lee, who has been a companion at Sequoia since 2016.
“Growing up within the Valley, I had this behind my thoughts, and I assumed that as a technical particular person, I may do the job in another way, so I started to take some calls,” he mentioned.
One of these calls finally changed into a job provide at Menlo Ventures, and Tully joined the agency as a companion in 2021.
“This was a chance to be a part of the following wave of parents that joined the agency, which was thrilling to me as a result of I’m a builder,” he mentioned.
At Menlo Ventures, Tully writes checks for AI startups on the app and infrastructure layers
Since becoming a member of Menlo, Tully has invested in 9 startups, together with Pinecone, which raised a $28 million Series A in 2022; Neon, which raised a $46 million Series B in 2023; Unstructured, which raised a $40 million Series B in 2024; and JuliaHub, an AI programming startup that raised $24 million in 2021.
Another of his portfolio corporations, AI high quality administration software program startup True Era, was acquired by Snowflake earlier this 12 months.
For Tully, discovering camaraderie with technical founders has been a successful technique to this point in his VC profession.
“My background helps me join with technical founders as a result of they need traders who they will discuss store with,” he mentioned. “I’ve managed groups and have been CTO of a public firm.”
He’s additionally written code as a approach to assist win over startups within the broader Menlo Ventures portfolio. In 2022, one other Menlo companion, Naomi Pilosof Ionita, was working to land a deal for fintech startup Orb. The firm did not have a software program growth package, so Tully wrote them one, printed out a hyperlink to the devkit, rolled it right into a scroll, and delivered it to the startup. That helped seal the deal, and Ionita led Orb’s $14 million Series A funding spherical.
While Menlo has been bolstering its portfolio with AI infrastructure startups, Tully mentioned he is excited nowadays about alternatives on the software layer. On one hand, this implies taking a look at numerous vertical AI classes, together with legaltech – he wrote a $14 million seed examine for AI authorized assistant Eve in 2021 – in addition to advertising and automation.
And, maybe unsurprisingly, Tully can also be attempting out numerous AI coding copilots, and he says that the tech is making him “50-60% extra productive if I’m being trustworthy.”
“I’m actually excessive on AI coding assistants,” he mentioned. “Opportunities on this house are fairly compelling.”
