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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Today, I'm handing things over to TechCrunch's venture capital and startups editor Julie Bort.

She's exploring the rise of solo VCs and who's rewriting the traditional venture playbook.

Julie sat down with Tim Chen, the solo investor behind Essence VC, who just closed his fourth fund, raising $41 million, quote, without even trying.

Tim, welcome to the show.

Thanks to having me.

All right, so you are, you're almost like an accidental VC.

You started out as a software engineer doing deeply technical infrastructure work.

And tell us a little bit about the path that landed you to

become a VC. Yeah, I never even know what a VC even means. Right. So the path really,

so I joined a bunch of startup as engineer. I kind of saw a VC. I never even talked to one.

And it really starts to really click to me what a VC kind of does when I was a founder,

where I was actually driving up in Del Sandhill Road back in 2016.

I started a startup and I've now had first contact with them.

I have to raise money from these people that all dressed in pack a no one sweatshirts and looking really serious.

And once they start talking to me,

talking to us as founders, why they will be great for us, why you should take their capital,

I start to have this realization, oh, wow, this is actually how they are talking about themselves.

This is why they should take their money from these big logos and all these big portfolio companies. So along the short, I was a founder.

I raised my seat round and we have a small exit to a company called Caldera.

And that is when I, after that journey, raising money, running my own company, having helped

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