Natalie Vais

General Partner, Early

Natalie has always loved deeply technical products — first as an engineer, later as a product leader, and now as an investor. She believes the best founders find ways to hide technical complexity with the right layers of abstraction, creating products that are both powerful and delightful to use.

Natalie spent her early career working on distributed systems and gained an appreciation for what it takes to build and sell platforms to developers. She served as Director of Product at an analytics startup (later acquired by Twitter) and eventually became a Product Lead at Google. There, she worked on the Core Infrastructure team (Search and Ads) and eventually helped launch Google Cloud Firestore. Her venture career began at Amplify Partners, where she invested in technical projects at their inception, including companies like MotherDuck, TigerBeetle, and PostgresML.

Now, as a General Partner at Spark Capital, Natalie focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise software companies, particularly those that serve developers. She says, “I love thinking about backend technology and infrastructure—especially databases and data platforms—that enable powerful software experiences. Nothing great gets built without a great foundation.”

Beyond the technical aspects, Natalie is drawn to founders who take unconventional paths, convinced that seeing the same problem through different lenses can lead to the most valuable insights.

Companies
Adept
AllStripes
Capella Space
Cruise
Discord
Harmonix
Instawork
North
Postmates
Proletariat
Standard Metrics
Zum

Yup.