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When I look at all the startups I’ve built or backed during my career as a founder and investor, I’ll admit they can seem a bit disconnected, covering everything from social to robotics to genomics to gaming. But as I reflect on my investments, on my own startups, and on how I want to spend my time moving forward, I’ve realized that many of those seemingly disparate dots are connected through a concept that I’m calling foundational [open] ecosystems — and the companies they spawn.

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The Eniac team has grown again, with the addition of Sofia Badalameti, who will be working as chief of staff to Eniac co-founder Nihal Mehta.

Sofia comes from a family of entrepreneurs. It’s even something she studied at the University of Richmond — along with her B.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Studies, she minored in Entrepreneurship and Journalism. Her experience wasn’t limited to the classroom, either: While in school, Sofia also started a successful quesadilla-making business that quickly cornered the market on feeding hungry college students.

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This past week, I attended ETHDenver. While no single conference can fully encapsulate a space as broad as web3, it still offered an opportunity to confirm that web3 is alive and well, and to get a sense of what’s top of mind for builders and investors (and yes, Eniac is still looking at crypto deals). Here are four observations I took away from the event:

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The position is based in our NYC HQ and the opportunity to partner closely with our co-founder Tim Young. We are looking for a team member with a balance of hustle, passion for learning, and strong organizational and communication skills — someone who is ready to play a key role in serving the founders we work with, as well as the broader startup community.

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I’m excited to share the news that Eniac led a $3.1 million seed funding round in Attention last year, which was announced today in TechCrunch.

We love working with repeat founders — and in this case, Attention’s Anis Bennaceur (CEO) and Matthias Wickenburg (CTO) actually used to compete against each other at their respective startups Mixer and Swipecast.

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This has been a year of uncertainty, inside and outside the venture industry, but Eniac was as busy as ever.

For one thing, we made some exciting additions to the team, with Rifki Zable joining as our Vice President of Finance, and Monica Lim joining as an investor. Both of them have already made Eniac better in countless ways — and we were thrilled to get to know them outside of Zoom, since the Eniac team is back in-person in our New York HQ. We even hosted a few events!

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As a seed investor, I’m always thinking about how to find the next unicorn before they’ve even built a product. Recently, I’ve realized that I’m looking for a new category of founder, which I’ll describe as “low code, higher go-to-market” — founders who may not have exceptionally strong technical chops, but make up for it with their strength in areas like sales, storytelling, and fundraising, as well as deep knowledge and connections in specific industry verticals.

Of course, it’s always been valuable to have someone with those skills leading a startup. (And we’re grateful to Alloy’s Laura Spiekerman for recently sharing so many relevant go-to-market insights with our founders.) But in the past, those teams would still need a technical co-founder. Now, many of them can get started without one, even if they can’t code at all.

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So you’ve built an amazing product — how do you actually get customers to use it and pay for it? That’s what Alloy co-founder Laura Spiekerman joined us to discuss during a recent conversation with founders in Eniac’s portfolio.

We’re proud investors in Alloy, a fintech unicorn. As Laura explained in a previous interview, its product serves as a “command center” for banks and fintech companies looking to centralize customer approval, fraud reduction, and other identity-related tasks.

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Birthdays have a way of sneaking up on you, especially as you get older. So I was amazed to realize it’s been 13 years (and three days) since we incorporated Eniac on November 19, 2009.

Of course, that’s not the only date you can point to as Eniac’s beginning. You could go back more than 25 years, to those early days when Hadley, Tim, Vic, and I — Eniac’s co-founders and general partners — first met as engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The position is a unique, in-person role based in NYC, as it provides the opportunity to partner closely with our co-founder Nihal Mehta. We are looking for a team member with a balance of hustle, passion for learning, and strong organizational and communication skills — someone who is ready to play a key role in serving the founders we work with, as well as the broader startup community.

Key responsibilities in this role include supporting Nihal in his day-to-day work to streamline operations across our founder network of portfolio companies, to maintain our operator network, and to provide additional marketing / content support.

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