Founders Everywhere: Emma Lawler
Emma Lawler is the co-founder & CEO of Velvet. They make infrastructure for startups to unify disparate data sources and ship real-time product features.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
The best companies in the world are built on top of resilient data infrastructure, allowing them to make products that feel personalized and delightful. They do this by hiring an expensive engineering team, focused exclusively on data interoperability and scale.
Velvet offers this best-in-class data infrastructure to teams of any size. Unify all your data in one place, write SQL queries with AI, and ship real-time features.
Emma Lawler and Chris Hendel are both second-time founders with backgrounds in product and infrastructure. They’ve spent the last decade building software at companies like Fitbit, Pebble, MongoDB, and theSkimm.
What is Velvet’s North Star?
Velvet makes data infrastructure accessible and interoperable. The product is designed for engineers, but any product stakeholder can write production-ready SQL queries on top of live data. As a result, teams of any size can experiment with their data and ship better features, faster.
Stripe, Shopify, and the App Stores are great examples of ecosystems that offer infrastructure-as-a-service for payments, e-commerce, and consumer apps. We aim to do the same, but for data infrastructure.
Tell us about some recent milestones Velvet’s crushed.
We recently launched our AI SQL editor, which is an interface on top of a startup’s unified data. Simply connect your data sources - like databases, third-party tools, and events - and ask natural language questions to return live results.
Once you save a query - you’ll be able to share it with collaborators, set notifications, and turn them into API endpoints that can be used anywhere. It’s easy to get set up - try it out!
Who are your competitors and what sets Velvet apart?
Data infrastructure incumbents are convoluted and overpriced. There are data warehouses like Snowflake, customer data profiles like Segment, and data analytics like Mixpanel. Each of these are an investment in themselves and then require dedicated engineering resources to implement and maintain over time.
Velvet is a day-1 hygiene product, a bundling of backend features that you would otherwise need an expensive in-house team to orchestrate. We unify all your data in one place, provide an accessible user experience, and make it interoperable from day one.
What have been some of your greatest challenges founding Velvet?
Time efficiency and focus make a huge impact on our ability to ship high-quality features. Lingering projects, scope creep, and perfectionism can get in the way of validating our ideas with real customers. We’ve gotten better at identifying the most important tasks, and ruthlessly prioritizing our time.
At our stage, the right team matters more than anything else. The product will evolve, but the team has to be ambitious, committed, and focused. I’m lucky to have found the right co-founder, and a great team of expert engineering contractors who are willing to iterate quickly.
Velvet was born out of our own experience with shipping early-stage products. Internally, we “dog-food” the product to collaborate on data requirements and ship new features. Reach out if you’d like to try it out!
Fun fact: My first company was a remote work marketplace, so I've lived in 9 cities around the world. Now I live in NYC - partly because it lives up to the chaos of moving around all the time.
Listen to the Venture Everywhere Podcast Decoding Data, with Emma Lawler and Scott Hartley, on Apple & Spotify.