Raising The Barr

We’re excited to get to introduce our newest Principal at Amplify Partners – Barr Yaron! Barr embodies the essence of everything that we look for in an investor. She possesses an intense curiosity across a wide range of technical (and non-technical) domains. Barr has a highly unusual background. She was a data scientist, product manager, intern at the White House and has even assisted with digital strategy for Beyoncé (Beyoncé!!!). Barr has a deep sense of empathy and truly understands the mindset of founders that Amplify aspires to work with.

When Barr was preparing to graduate from Business School, it almost seemed like pursuing a job in Venture was too easy.  She had already built an accelerator for Women Founders in Israel and working with entrepreneurs was already part of her day-to-day life. Instead, she chose the less obvious path for her, and blossomed as a product manager at dbt, where she focused on metadata management. This is a theme throughout Barr’s career, she often follows her curiosity and takes the road less traveled, and in doing so gains relationships, experiences, and empathy that she would have never had otherwise.  What stood out to me, though, was whenever I spoke to Barr, she often had to squeeze in our Zoom catch ups between her work as a PM and meetings with entrepreneurs.  Barr routinely introduced us to amazing founders, all in her spare time.  

As the entire team got to know Barr throughout the past few years the only question anyone asked was, “when are we going to hire her?”. Not only was her blend of technical skills – data science, data engineering, and machine learning – ideal for what we do at Amplify, everyone that we knew who had ever worked with her truly loved and deeply respected her. A true force of optimism, we could all see Barr not only helping find and shape the next generation of technical founders, but we could also see her becoming their closest confidant.

Upon reconsidering her decision to go into venture, Barr now saw a new challenge – to find white space in markets where other investors only saw competition; to build deeper relationships that would transcend diligence processes and board meetings; to identify applications of cutting edge technologies in markets seemingly impenetrable to innovation. We know that Barr will continue to take the path less traveled in her new role at Amplify and will find opportunities to make us all better investors.

We’re fortunate to add her to a team which we are deeply proud of. Feel free to drop her a note at barr[at]amplifypartners.com, learn more about or follow her @barnanas if you’d like to wish her welcome.