Zachary Sherman

Zach Sherman is a New York City–based founder, engineer, and designer who now invests in early-stage technical founders. He studied economics (with work in corporate strategy and computer science) at Vanderbilt University, graduating in 2014. Early in his career he worked in product and engineering at SeatGeek while the ticketing company was still young, helping it scale into a leading marketplace for live events, music, and sports.

In 2016 Sherman co-founded Timber (Timber Technologies / Timber.io) in New York, serving as co-founder and CEO alongside CTO Ben Johnson. Timber built developer tooling for infrastructure monitoring and security and became best known for Vector, a vendor-agnostic, high-performance open-source observability data pipeline used to collect, transform, and route logs and other telemetry. The company raised roughly $5–6M before being acquired by Datadog in February 2021, where Sherman and Johnson joined the product and engineering organizations to integrate Vector into Datadog's platform. Sherman worked at Datadog as a Senior Product Manager following the acquisition.

Since Timber, Sherman has continued building and investing. He is the founder of Hyper, a video-collaboration platform for teams, and a co-founder of Haven, a maker of high-end home saunas. On the investing side he operates through Whoa Ventures (also associated with Union Square Labs), which he co-founded to back early-stage technical founders in infrastructure, developer tools, and B2B software. Public records credit him with founding four companies over his career (including the earlier, since-shuttered Bitcast).

• Invests as an angel / early-stage investor, concentrating on seed-stage technical companies.
• Focus sectors mirror his operating background: developer tools, infrastructure, observability, and B2B/enterprise SaaS, plus products that improve workplace productivity.
• Per his own site, he backs "early-stage technical founders" building infrastructure, developer tools, and B2B software — with a stated bias toward teams and products showing "strong taste."
• Brings a builder's-eye perspective: he has founded and sold an open-source infrastructure company, so he tends to relate to founders solving deep technical / developer-workflow problems.