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Developer tools are enterprise software
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LE
Lee Edwards
General Partner at Root Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Lee Edwards is the General Partner at Root Ventures in San Francisco, California, with a background in software engineering and mechanical engineering. Notable career highlights include serving as the CTO & VP of Engineering at Teespring and leading engineering teams at Groupon and SideTour, with investments in companies like Privacy Dynamics and Daily.co.
Lee Edwards currently holds the role of General Partner at Root Ventures, overseeing investments in various sectors such as messaging, developer tools, and AI at stages ranging from Pre-seed to Series A. With a strong foundation in software and mechanical engineering, Lee has made impactful contributions in leadership roles at Teespring and Groupon, while also investing in promising startups like Okteto and Superconductive.
Work Experience
General Partner
2018 - Current
Investing at the Seed stage in “hard tech.” Like the very first Silicon Valley venture firms, we love companies where the primary risk is technical and the founders have technical backgrounds. We invest out of our $150M Fund III, with a typical initial check size of $1-3M, often leading rounds and taking board seats, but sometimes co-leading or following. Like my other partners at the firm, I love everything hard tech, but I have a particular interest in pure software (new tech in AI and machine learning), deploying computer vision to novel applications, software tools and services (devtools), that enable developers and other makers and creators. My partners all have engineering backgrounds in other areas and invest in areas they know and have built in before. Check out Avidan, Kane, Chrissy, and Emily's profiles to read more about them.
Member of the Board of Trustees
2020
Vice Chair, Investment Committee Chair, Audit Committee
CTO & VP of Engineering
2015 - 2018
The mission of Teespring’s engineering team is: “To build the platform that lets anyone, anywhere turn ideas into reality.” Led engineering, product, data, design, and IT. This is where I learned how to be a wartime executive.
Teespring is a social commerce platform that allows people to retail consumer goods such as clothes, shoes, bags, and mobile cases.
Engineering Manager
2013 - 2015
SideTour was acquired by Groupon in September, 2013. Our engineering team joins GrouponLive to bring SideTour's local experiences to Groupon's 40M+ active mobile and web users. I lead the New York-based engineering team for GrouponLive, which includes all of the live ticketed events offered on Groupon, including concerts, events, theatre, and sports. Our team was part of the large effort to move Groupon off of its Rails monolith and into a NodeJS-based SOA backed by Ruby and Java APIs. Our relatively small team built and shipped on several front-end web and mobile projects and three backend services designed for web and mobile clients in the year and a half I was there.
Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that offers discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies.
Raised $1,387,000,000.00 from MIG Capital, RTP Global and Atairos.
Lead Engineer
2012 - 2015
SideTour is an online marketplace for local experiences, events, and tours. We offer customers the chance to book once-in-a-lifetime experiences like dinner with a Wall Street banker-turned Monk, luging with an Olympic silver medalist, and guided events hosted by local experts like one of the three female Masters of Wine in the United States or a tour of the world's largest outdoor graffiti museum guided by its curator. I joined SideTour immediately after it left the TechStars program as the first technical hire. I built a team of engineers around the practices I learned at Pivotal Labs, and learned how to adjust them to a growing seed-stage startup. I created an open and creative engineering culture that interacted seamlessly with the rest of the organization, from product and design to business development, editorial, and finance. We took a data-centric approach to product decisions and surfaced important business metrics to the entire company, and scaled the Ruby on Rails application as the company grew. SideTour was acquired by Groupon in September 2013. We continued operations, but largely stopped building new features on the SideTour platform, instead moving SideTour inventory onto the Groupon marketplace.
Software Engineer
2010 - 2012
Joined the Pivotal Labs New York office when it was just a corner in a shared office space, and left after we outgrew two offices, shortly before the company was acquired by EMC. Pivotal engineers practice agile and lean methodologies doing full-stack development and BDD/TDD, working primarily in Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML, CSS, testing with Cucumber and RSpec. They work closely with teams onsite, side-by-side with designers, product managers, and CEOs, enabling agile XP practices through pair programming with client developers. Agile software consultant for New York-area startups, including Case Commons, Red Rover (Tech Stars alumn second class), Five Star Basketball, and Bookish.
Mechanical Engineer
2007 - 2010
Engineer working on interdisciplinary, cross-platform technology for iRobot's Government and Industrial Division, third party Robot Developer Kits (RDKs), and research projects. Worked on various government contracts including MTRS, and the Robot Aware Head MK I and Mk II projects. Worked with internal startup division, iRobot Healthcare, doing mobile software development, software and hardware prototyping, and conducting user interviews and market research for very early investigation for the product that would eventually become iRobot's Ava mobile robotics platform. Created and demoed an Android application that drove an iRobot Create via mobile phone at Google/IO 2010.
iRobot is a technology company that designs and builds behavior-based AI robots.
Raised $230,000,000.00 from The Carlyle Group.
Education
Investments
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