Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups.

Megan Quinn doesn't invest in hype. She invests in infrastructure.

As a General Partner at Spark Capital, Megan has backed some of the most important infrastructure companies of the last decade: Databricks, Snyk, LaunchDarkly, and HashiCorp. But studying Megan Quinn investments isn't just about admiring her portfolio. It's about understanding how a former operator evaluates technical founders and infrastructure businesses.

And trust me, if you're investing in developer tools or B2B infrastructure, there's a lot to learn here.

Who is Megan Quinn?

Before joining Spark Capital in 2016, Megan spent years in the trenches as an operator. She was VP of Product at Square, where she helped scale the product from early adoption to mainstream use. Before that, she worked at Google on AdWords and was a product manager at several startups.

This operator background matters. A lot.

Most VCs have never built products, managed engineering teams, or dealt with the messy reality of scaling infrastructure. Megan has. And you can see that experience reflected in every aspect of how she evaluates Megan Quinn investments.

She joined Spark Capital specifically to focus on enterprise infrastructure, developer tools, and technical B2B companies. Not because it was trendy (it wasn't in 2016), but because she understood the massive shift happening in how companies build and deploy software.

What's Megan's Investment Thesis?

Megan has been pretty clear about her focus areas. Let's break down what she's actually looking for:

Developer tools and infrastructure: The vast majority of Megan Quinn investments fall into this category. She backs companies building the picks and shovels that engineering teams use to build, deploy, and scale applications.

This includes developer security tools (Snyk), feature management platforms (LaunchDarkly), data analytics infrastructure (Databricks), and infrastructure-as-code tools (HashiCorp).

Bottom-up adoption with enterprise monetization: Sound familiar? This is similar to what we've seen from other successful investors. But Megan takes it further. She's not just looking for products that developers like. She's looking for products that become mission-critical to engineering workflows.

When a tool becomes mission-critical, procurement gets involved. And when procurement gets involved, deal sizes get bigger.

Technical founders with deep domain expertise: Look at any list of Megan Quinn investments and you'll see a pattern: these are founders who worked on these exact problems at scale companies before starting their startups.

The founders of Databricks worked on Apache Spark at UC Berkeley. The founders of HashiCorp were infrastructure engineers who built internal tools at previous companies. These aren't MBAs who read a Gartner report and decided to start a company. These are engineers who felt the pain firsthand.

How Megan Evaluates Technical Founders

I've been tracking Megan Quinn investments for a while now, and there are clear patterns in how she evaluates founders and companies.

She looks for technical depth, not just technical competence: There's a difference between founders who can code and founders who understand distributed systems, security models, or data infrastructure at an architectural level.

Megan invests in the latter. She's looking for founders who can make technical decisions that will matter three years down the line, not just ship the MVP.

For early-stage investors, this is hard to evaluate if you're not technical yourself. But you can ask questions: What technical decisions have you made that you're most proud of? What trade-offs did you consider? How did you think about scalability from day one?

She values product intuition in B2B: Here's something that separates great B2B investors from average ones: understanding that B2B products need product intuition too.

Just because you're selling to enterprises doesn't mean your product can be clunky. Megan looks for founders who obsess over user experience, even when the users are developers or DevOps engineers.

LaunchDarkly is a great example. Feature flags aren't sexy. But LaunchDarkly built a product that developers actually enjoy using. That matters.

She thinks deeply about market timing: One of Megan's superpowers is understanding when infrastructure markets are ready for new solutions.

She invested in Databricks as big data was becoming mainstream. She backed Snyk as DevSecOps was emerging as a category. She invested in LaunchDarkly as continuous deployment and feature management were becoming critical.

This isn't luck. It's deeply understanding technology adoption curves and seeing when pain points become acute enough that companies will pay real money to solve them.

What Can We Learn From Spark Capital's Portfolio?

Let's dig into some actual Megan Quinn investments and what they reveal about her approach:

Databricks: This is probably the most successful company in Megan's portfolio. It's now valued at over $40 billion.

What made this a good investment? The founders were the creators of Apache Spark, so they had deep technical credibility. But more importantly, they understood that the real opportunity wasn't just building better open-source software. It was building a commercial platform that made it easy for companies to actually use that software.

The lesson: open-source credibility can be a massive advantage for commercial products. But you need to solve the "last mile" problem of making it easy for companies to adopt and pay for.

Snyk: Developer security is notoriously hard. Developers hate security tools that slow them down. Security teams hate tools that developers ignore.

Snyk solved this by building security tools that fit into developer workflows. Not separate dashboards that nobody looks at. Tools that show up in the IDE and pull requests where developers actually work.

Megan saw that the shift to DevSecOps wasn't just a trend. It was a fundamental change in how companies think about security. And Snyk was positioned perfectly to ride that wave.

LaunchDarkly: Feature flags seem like a simple concept. But LaunchDarkly built a platform that became mission-critical for how engineering teams ship code.

What Megan understood: in a world of continuous deployment, feature management becomes critical infrastructure. Not a nice-to-have tool, but something that sits in the critical path of shipping code.

The pattern across these investments? Megan backs companies building tools that become foundational to how engineering teams work. Not nice-to-have tools. Must-have infrastructure.

What Should Early-Stage Investors Learn From Megan's Approach?

Studying Megan Quinn investments has taught me several tactical lessons:

Infrastructure timing matters more than you think: Infrastructure adoption follows predictable patterns. First, big tech companies build internal tools. Then startups emerge to commercialize similar solutions. Then enterprises adopt as the technology matures.

Megan is exceptional at investing in that second phase. Not too early (when only the bleeding edge will adopt) and not too late (when the market is saturated).

As early-stage investors, we need to understand where in this cycle a particular infrastructure category sits. Are we investing before the market is ready? Or after the winners have already emerged?

Technical depth beats technical breadth: It's tempting to invest in founders who have worked on lots of different things. But in infrastructure, depth matters more than breadth.

Megan consistently backs founders who spent years working on one specific problem domain. They're not generalists who decided infrastructure was hot. They're specialists who understand their space better than anyone.

Developer adoption is the new enterprise sales: The old enterprise sales model (get a meeting with the CIO, do a six-month pilot, negotiate a contract) is dying. The new model starts with developers adopting tools bottom-up.

Megan understands this shift better than most. She looks for products that can spread through engineering organizations organically, then convert into paid enterprise deals.

Open source can be a moat, not just a marketing strategy: Several Megan Quinn investments leverage open source strategically. Not just as a way to get adoption, but as a way to build communities, establish standards, and create switching costs.

But here's the key: these companies don't just open-source their core product and hope for the best. They build commercial offerings that solve real problems for enterprises.

What About Product-Led Growth in Infrastructure?

Megan has been vocal about the importance of product-led growth in B2B infrastructure. But what does that actually mean?

Frictionless onboarding: Developers should be able to start using the product in minutes, not weeks. No sales calls required to try the product. No lengthy procurement processes to get started.

Value before payment: Users should see clear value before they hit any paywall. This is different from freemium. It's about structuring the product so developers can accomplish real work before money changes hands.

Natural expansion: The best infrastructure products naturally expand within organizations. One team starts using them, sees value, and tells other teams. Then individual teams hit limits and need to upgrade to enterprise plans.

This is the playbook that companies like Databricks, Snyk, and LaunchDarkly followed. And it's something every infrastructure investor should understand.

What's Different About Infrastructure Investing?

Infrastructure investing requires a different mindset than consumer or even traditional B2B investing. Here's what Megan's approach teaches us:

Sales cycles are long, but retention is exceptional: Infrastructure deals take months to close. But once companies adopt infrastructure, they rarely switch. The switching costs are just too high.

This means early metrics can be deceiving. A company might not have explosive growth in year one. But if they're landing the right customers and those customers are genuinely adopting the product, the long-term value can be massive.

Technical moats actually exist: In consumer products, moats are hard to build. In infrastructure, they're everywhere. Network effects, switching costs, deep technical integrations. Companies that solve hard technical problems can build real defensibility.

Megan looks for these moats from day one. Not just competitive advantages that could erode. Technical moats that get stronger over time.

The best infrastructure founders are missionaries: Infrastructure isn't sexy. You're not building the next viral app. You're building tools that make other people's jobs easier.

The founders who succeed in infrastructure are the ones who genuinely care about solving these problems. Not the ones who think infrastructure is a good market opportunity. The ones who are obsessed with making developers' lives better.

What's the Bottom Line for Angel Investors?

Megan Quinn's approach to infrastructure investing comes down to a few core principles: back deeply technical founders, focus on bottom-up adoption with enterprise monetization, understand market timing, and look for products that become mission-critical infrastructure.

If you're serious about building a portfolio in developer tools or B2B infrastructure, joining a community like Angel Squad can help you connect with other investors who understand these markets and can help you evaluate technical deals.

Key takeaways for early-stage investors:

• Prioritize founders with deep domain expertise in their specific infrastructure category
• Understand the difference between nice-to-have tools and mission-critical infrastructure
• Look for bottom-up adoption that can convert to top-down sales
• Pay attention to product experience, even in B2B infrastructure
• Evaluate market timing carefully in infrastructure categories
• Focus on technical moats that strengthen over time

Most importantly, Megan's success comes from her operator background. She's not just reading pitch decks and looking at metrics. She understands the technical problems these companies are solving because she's dealt with them herself.

That's the real lesson here. Whether you have a technical background or not, successful infrastructure investing requires genuine curiosity about technical problems and respect for founders who spend years solving them. Study how investors like Megan evaluate these companies, and you'll make better investment decisions in one of the most valuable categories in venture capital.