About William Lin
William Lin spent over a decade in venture capital. He was a founding partner of Forgepoint Capital, a venture firm investing in cybersecurity, AI, and infrastructure software, where he served as a Managing Partner.
In The VC Field Guide, he distills the venture capital investment framework he developed across years of evaluating founders, markets, products, and deals. The book is written for investors, entrepreneurs, operators, and anyone who wants a practical, repeatable way to understand how venture capital works.
The framework focuses on how startup investors assess opportunity size, founder-market fit, product differentiation, decision-making, and deal structure. That makes the book useful both for people trying to break into venture capital and for founders preparing to raise capital.
His investing centered on cybersecurity and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. He backed more than 30 companies across the two fields, including companies working at the intersection of security and AI. As a founding partner, he sourced and led diligence on investments, sat on boards, and helped portfolio companies build go-to-market: finding their first customers, building enterprise trust, and scaling. He is also a co-founder and president of Security Tinkerers, a nonprofit community that brings information security professionals together to share learnings, mentor one another, and create opportunities for the next generation of security leaders. He is now the founder of AKA Security, an AI-native security company. Its specialized AI agents run continuously inside an organization's environment, automating threat detection, remediation, response, and compliance, with least-privilege access and human-in-the-loop approval. Securing agentic access is among its use cases.
Lin focused on how good investors reason about uncertainty and asymmetric outcomes — the judgment behind a sound venture decision. The VC Field Guide: Fundamentals of Venture Capital was published by Wiley in 2023 to make that craft, traditionally learned through years of apprenticeship, teachable as a structured, repeatable process.