1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple more of your examples of what you’ve invested in.

Alex Benik: Sure. At Battery, I was an investor in a company called Packet, which was a bare metal hosting provider. It was acquired by a large data center company Equinix. The founders Zac and Jacob Smith are twin brothers and have gone on to found a company called Datum.

Datum is a sort of modern CDN without the content. It’s a delivery vehicle for developers. The definition of developers is rapidly changing—you’ve vibe coders and users of Lovable or similar platforms. They are building applications and want them instantly deployed and highly performant globally, without needing to understand the complexity of how the internet really works—peering, DNS, interconnection—all of the plumbing that underlies globally deployed infrastructure. The goal of Datum is to abstract that for developers, being very aware that the definition of a developer is changing rapidly, and the kinds of AI-native applications they’re building is also evolving quickly.

Sramana Mitra: They’re going to market through hosting providers? How are they going to market?

Alex Benik: They’re still building the product and experimenting with a number of potential go-to-market strategies. It’s possible they’ll go to market through other SaaS vendors or direct to developer, and build a community that way—perhaps similarly to the way that products like Vercel or Supabase go to market.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a first-time founder in your portfolio you’d like to talk about? These two are both repeat founding teams, right?

Alex Benik: Yes, they’re both repeat founding teams.

I have a company called DataFlint in Israel. The founder is a first-time founder. He was previously at a company called Granulate, which Intel acquired, but he wasn’t the CEO. He was the lead data scientist and is now building a tool for optimization of Spark.

Whether Spark jobs run on Databricks, AWS, or on your own infrastructure using open-source Spark, it’s a tool for debugging performance problems and deep optimization across infrastructure and application code. He’s a highly technical founder, first-time CEO, and a solo founder. He has a strong first employee who is effectively a co-founder.

Sramana Mitra: Solo founders are something we have been supporting all along. We started 1Mby1M in 2010. We’ve always supported solo founders, but the industry did not. There was a lot of pushback against solo founders. Everybody wanted co-founder teams—two or three people.

Now that is changing. That seems to be shifting. There are a lot of solo founders doing a lot very quickly and making great progress.

Alex Benik: In general, I’m not dogmatic about teams or solo founders. I’m certainly comfortable working with solo founders. You’re right. The amount that a single developer can accomplish now, particularly with modern tools, has increased dramatically in the past two years.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, immensely.

Alex Benik: We’ve seen shifts like this in the past—when cloud and AWS came to be. The velocity and team size required to build a modern SaaS application accelerated greatly. You didn’t have to buy hardware or deploy infrastructure. That was a great thing for the industry and allowed many more people to attempt startups without raising as much capital.

I think the same thing is happening now. It’s another paradigm shift—one that again makes it much easier for a smaller number of people with a smaller amount of money to test out ideas and businesses.

As a venture capitalist, that’s a great thing. More people can take more shots on goal more easily, and I’m excited.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures
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