Bogomil Balkansky
- Seed/Early
I’m a very intuitive person. If I try to be overly rational and put all the pros and cons in a spreadsheet, I get myself into trouble. But if I follow my gut, I rarely make mistakes.
Backstory
Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities. I found myself in the U.S. because I was lucky enough to come of age right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and got a scholarship that made it possible for me to leave communist Bulgaria. I started swimming with whales because a wildlife photographer I follow on Instagram put out an invitation for a trip. And I’m at Sequoia not because I planned to become a VC, but because fate connected me with the right people—namely Roelof, who I knew from Stanford GSB, and Carl, who I’d worked with closely for years at VMware.
On the lookout for
Markets come and go, so we need to move in lockstep with their evolution. The logical domains for me are cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, open source, observability as well as SaaS apps for sales and marketing, because that’s where my background is. But I try to follow the advice several of my partners gave me when I first joined Sequoia—don’t specialize too narrowly, and get out of my comfort zone.
In terms of specific companies and entrepreneurs, I’m looking for the same things I did when I was running large teams and hiring people: iconoclastic thinking, the courage to break paradigms, defiance of common wisdom. Ideas that aren’t obvious and that challenge my own assumptions. I’m also looking for charisma, but that can manifest in different ways. Maybe you’re a great salesperson, but maybe you’re a deep thinker or an amazing technologist or an exceptional recruiter. It’s magnetism.
Get in touch with BogomilPersonal Side
- Cooking
- Entertaining
- Diving
- Wildlife photography
- Married life
Press & Media
Companies
Current Companies
| Company Name | Short Description | Current Stage | Founders | First Partnered | collapse |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bigeye | Bigeye improves data quality at scale with observability, incident management and automation. | Growth |
| Early (2021) | Collapse |
| Chainguard | Chainguard helps organizations secure their software supply chains through products, tooling, and education. | Early |
| Early (2022) | Collapse |
| CloseFactor | CloseFactor transforms the B2B go-to-market process with machine intelligence | Early |
| Seed (2021) | Collapse |
| Cortex | Cortex helps engineering teams improve their service-oriented architecture. | Early |
| Seed (2020) | Collapse |
| Cyera | Cyera transforms the way organizations secure data in the cloud with Data Reality. | Early |
| Early (2022) | Collapse |
| Infracost | Infracost helps engineering teams understand how their code changes will affect their cloud costs. | Early |
| Seed (2021) | Collapse |
| Mutiny | Mutiny is a no-code AI platform helping marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue. | Growth |
| Early (2021) | Collapse |
| Release | Release provides ephemeral environments as a service that can be used in QA and staging. | Early |
| Seed (2020) | Collapse |
| Rockset | Rockset is a real-time analytics at cloud scale. | Growth |
| Seed (2016) | Collapse |
| Stemma | Stemma is a fully managed data catalog, powered by the leading open-source data catalog, Amundsen. | Early |
| Seed (2020) | Collapse |
| Temporal Technologies | Temporal enables any software application to handle failures gracefully and in a user-friendly way. | Growth |
| Seed (2019) | Collapse |
| Wiz | Wiz secures everything built and run in the cloud. | Growth |
| Early (2020) | Collapse |
| Zeet.co | Zeet makes it easier to interact with your cloud, so you can spend your time building applications instead of configuring infrastructure. | Arc |
| Seed (2022) | Collapse |