David Arndt - Dawn Capital

David Arndt

Associate

David focuses on enterprise software investments across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Israel, with a particular interest in cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and data and analytics. He’s played a key role in our investments in Granulate, Vulcan, CluedIn and Firebolt.

David joined Dawn Capital from McKinsey, where he advised internet and tech clients on enterprise software markets and automation technologies. Prior to that, David gained investment experience at Dynamo Capital, a London-based hedge fund, where he covered cloud and he also spent some time with Goldman Sachs in their equity derivatives team.

He holds degrees in both physics and mathematics from the University of Vienna and the London School of Economics, and has been recognised as one of Europe’s most promising young VCs.

Connect

In conversation

Why B2B software VC?

Companies born today are built differently from the ground up, and incumbents try to capture previously inconceivable flexibility, modularity, and agility by moving to the cloud. We see massive room for growth for companies supporting and catalysing this transition.

Most exciting moment at Dawn?

Seeing a hugely exciting investment come together in a very short period of time, with a very high intensity due diligence phase and several sleepless nights.

What do you think is the most interesting trend in the industry, and why?

The advent of cloud has triggered a massive spur in the build-out of digital infrastructure and the structural shifts are massive, but not frictionless. I am most interested in the things that help cope with the challenges that arise in the process, be that tooling, resource optimization, orchestration, architecture, governance.

And the quick fire round…

Best piece of advice

Get a job you’d do for half the salary. (For the Partners at Dawn, please ignore this bit for my annual reviews :-)!)

Recipe for the perfect evening

Eating out, ideally Middle-Eastern! Huge fan of Israeli, Lebanese and Persian cuisine. Delamina is my favorite place to go in London.

The company you’d build

A very good question, perhaps optimizing for cold VC inbound! I would probably go for a landing page with zero information and cryptic header that reads ‘One API for everything’.

Best & worst thing in a deck

Best: a storyline that is supported by great numbers (even if very early). Worst: when the numbers paint a more positive picture than the data room.