Tim Tully taught himself to code at age 6 and still codes daily. Here's how computer science took him from startups to AI investing at Menlo Ventures.

• Tim Tully taught himself to code when he was six and went to school for computer science.
• He started his career in software engineering at startups and later worked at Yahoo and Splunk.

Venture capitalist Tim Tully's programming experience began at age six, when he taught himself to write code and make video games on an Apple II computer. Fast-forward to the present: Tully has a data center in a basement and is known to deploy software and try out startups' APIs when he's sussing out potential investments. He's also written code for some of his portfolio companies.

Using his technical expertise as a former programmer and CTO, Tully is helping amass an impressive portfolio of AI startups at Menlo Ventures.

The firm, which has backed Chime, Warby Parker, Roku, and Uber, has historically focused broadly on early and growth-stage startups across the consumer, enterprise, and healthcare sectors.

More recently, Menlo has planted its flag in the generative AI space as frenzy in the sector is creating new opportunities for early-stage startups. The firm closed a $1.35 billion fund last year specifically for investing in fledgling AI startups, and it's already been an early backer of AI powerhouses including vector database Pinecone, LLM developer Anthropic, enterprise data cleaner Unstructured, conversational AI system Neon, automated data cleanup program Cleanlab, and many others.

For Tully, one of Menlo's key check-writers in this space, having a background in computer science and operating experience has been necessary when it comes to evaluating potential AI investments.

"I'm still coding every day," he said. "That really helps me for my job, and I think it's really hard to be a VC and invest in a deeply technical product if you don't have a technical background. I'm actually using this stuff."

Before becoming a VC, Tully worked at startups and led engineering teams

For Tully, who grew up in the Bay Area, computers and games have always been a core part of his life. He had an Apple II computer and cassette tape player that plugged into a TV on a rolling cart, which is where he taught himself to code by playing video games and reading through manuals.

He said an early game of his, coded using Applesoft BASIC, was a text-based adventure game in which players would get lost in a forest and navigate through a maze, answering a series of fork-in-the-road puzzles to chase down the treasure.

As a teenager, Tully had a bank of modems at his mom's house to organize a bulletin board system – a pre-internet computer server that other users could dial into – to host pirated video games.

After college, Tully gravitated toward startups, becoming a software engineer at the dot-com-era companies iScale and Pillar Data Systems, the latter of which he left in 2003 and was eventually acquired by Oracle. He spent 14 years at Yahoo, working his way up to lead engineering for Yahoo, AOL, and its media properties, which included the Huffington Post, Tumblr, Polyvore, and Flurry, and managing a team of more than 850 people.

In 2017, Tully joined data analytics company Splunk as its chief technology officer and senior vice president of product and engineering and managed the company's migration to the cloud. While he loved his team at Splunk, Tully said that he was always interested in the investing side of the tech world, and his interest was further piqued by his wife, Jess Lee, who has been a partner at Sequoia since 2016.

"Growing up in the Valley, I had this in the back of my mind, and I thought that as a technical person, I could do the job differently, so I began to take some calls," he said.

One of those calls eventually turned into a job offer at Menlo Ventures, and Tully joined the firm as a partner in 2021.

"This was an opportunity to be part of the next wave of folks that joined the firm, which was exciting to me because I'm a builder," he said.

At Menlo Ventures, Tully writes checks for AI startups at the app and infrastructure layers

Since joining Menlo, Tully has invested in nine startups, including Pinecone, which raised a $28 million Series A in 2022; Neon, which raised a $46 million Series B in 2023; Unstructured, which raised a $40 million Series B in 2024; and JuliaHub, an AI programming startup that raised $24 million in 2021.

Another of his portfolio companies, AI quality management software startup True Era, was acquired by Snowflake earlier this year.

For Tully, finding camaraderie with technical founders has been a winning strategy so far in his VC career.

"My background helps me connect with technical founders because they want investors who they can talk shop with," he said. "I've managed teams and have been CTO of a public company."

He's also written code as a way to help win over startups in the broader Menlo Ventures portfolio. In 2022, another Menlo partner, Naomi Pilosof Ionita, was working to land a deal for fintech startup Orb. The company didn't have a software development kit, so Tully wrote them one, printed out a link to the devkit, rolled it into a scroll, and delivered it to the startup. That helped seal the deal, and Ionita led Orb's $14 million Series A funding round.

While Menlo has been bolstering its portfolio with AI-infrastructure startups, Tully said he's excited about opportunities at the application layer. This means looking at various vertical AI categories, including legaltech — he wrote a $14 million seed check for the AI legal assistant Eve, which was announced in 2023 — as well as marketing and automation.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Tully is also trying out various AI coding copilots, and he says that the tech is making him "50-60% more productive if I'm being honest."

"I'm really high on AI coding assistants," he said. "Opportunities in this space are pretty compelling."

Correction: October 8, 2024 -- An earlier version of the story misstated the year Pillar Data Systems was acquired by Oracle, which was in 2011, not in 2003, which was when Tully left the company. It also said that Menlo Ventures invested in Eve in 2022, and the correct year is 2023. .