Episode
Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast
- Podcast
- Dev Propulsion Labs
- Published
- Apr 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3550
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://rss.com/podcasts/dpl/2709476
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/episodes/firestreak-partner-amir-rustamzadeh-what-vcs-look-for-in-devtools-founders-evil-martians-podcast/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/firestreak-partner-amir-rustamzadeh-what-vcs-look-for-in-devtools-founders-evil-martians-podcast.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com