AI and Infrastructure Investing: Insights with CRV's Brian Zhan

Brian Zhan is an investor at CRV, where he focuses on investing in early-stage infrastructure software companies. Prior to that, he worked on product development at Facebook and Starburst. Brian joined the original Presto creators (who co-founded Starburst to offer fully managed Presto) to build Starburst's batch analytics product from scratch. He interviewed users to build the business proposal and roadmap, hired an engineering team, and led the go-to-market strategy. Building an active open-source community of over 200 companies using Starburst's open-source product Trino (renamed from Presto) for batch analytics was a key achievement. His work's popularity is evidenced by many companies like Salesforce, Lyft, Zillow, and TreasureData giving talks, writing blogs, and publishing research papers about Starburst/Trino for batch analytics. Brian was also featured in many influential data forums like dbt Coalesce, DataIQ Talks, and Data Fabric Summit, showcasing his significant contributions to the field. - Early-Stage Infrastructure Software Investing - Open-Source Community Building - Transition from Product Development to VC #VentureCapital #InfrastructureSoftware #OpenSource #DataAnalytics #StartupInvesting