William Lin
Creator at The Investor Field Guide
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder, CEO
2023 - Current
Taking a love of building to the next level and putting all of my eggs in one basket: an IAM startup. We're manifesting the combination: amazing team, delightful solution, scalable company.
AKA Identity simplifies labor-intensive and ineffective identity and access management processes.
Co-Creator
2018
The Security Tinkerers is a community of professionals to educate, mentor, and generate opportunities for both todays and the next generation of leaders.
Security Tinkerers is a Computer and Network Security company.
Creator
2022
I wrote a book about Venture Capital after 20,000 hours of experience and learning from hundreds of people that I admire within the ecosystem.
Venture Partner
2022 - 2023
A year of fun between supporting startups, writing about startups and preparing for my next startup!
Founding Team, Managing Director
2015 - 2023
Started Forgepoint Capital with my co-founders in 2015 to create one of the most active venture capital firms in Cybersecurity.
Forgepoint Capital is a venture capital management company to invest in cybersecurity startups mainly in Europe, Latin America and Israel.
Series B Investor
2021 - 2023
Problem: Legacy IT Data Security solutions don't scale, are difficult to deploy and manage. Solution: Modern architecture with automated data discovery, classification and lineage. Category: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) & Data Detection & Response (DDR)
Cyberhaven is a software company that provides technology to trace and protect the flow of data.
Raised $136,500,000.00 from Khosla Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Redpoint, Gerhard Eschelbeck, Adams Street Partners, Vertex Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, Amol Kulkarni, Ash Devata and Costanoa Ventures.
Series A Investor
2020 - 2023
Problem: Not enough visibility, consistency and scalable guardrails in cloud environments. Solution: Translate security policies and best practices into code, integrate into development pipelines and enable remediation with visibility. Closest Category: Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Concourse Labs is a company that accelerates enterprise digital transformation through automated cloud governance.
Raised $15,200,000.00 from Forgepoint Capital, 83North and Capri Ventures.
Series A Investor
2020 - 2023
Problem: Managing end-user entitlements with least privilege principles is unmanageable at scale. Solution: Mix of expertise, automation and services to provide actionable remediation, mature IAM hygiene and minimize credential misuse's blast radius. Closest Category: Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)
SPHERE is a cutting-edge identity hygiene platform built to automate human processes at scale, providing immediate time-to-value
Raised $45,000,000.00 from Forgepoint Capital and Edison Partners.
Founding Investor, Board Advisor
2019 - 2023
Problem: Unmanageable data stores in a global and cloud world. Solution: Data classification via ML, graph analysis, access control and response capabilities. Category: Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Cloud Security & Database Activity Monitoring
The Data+AI Security company. We safeguard data, detect threats, ensure compliance & reduce AI risks, so you can Innovate with Confidence
Raised $35,700,000.00 from Forgepoint Capital, W11 Capital Management, The Syndicate Group and Prefix Capital.
Visiting Fellow
2018 - 2023
Series A Investor
2018 - 2023
Problem: Providing customers a consistent and delightful login across multiple applications. Solution: Leverage pre-built integrations and tokenized credentials to provide an customer identity service to developers. Category: Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
LoginRadius is a SaaS-based CIAM platform that offers customer registration services, profile data storage, and cloud integration solutions.
Raised $19,327,769.00 from Forgepoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital, Real Ventures, Yaletown Partners and M12 - Microsoft's Venture Fund.