Ed Zimmerman

Ed Zimmerman chairs Lowenstein Sandler’s Emerging Companies & Venture Capital practice, which he co-founded with Anthony Pergola at Lowenstein in the 1990s. Ed has been a growth company, startup and venture/M&A lawyer for 30 years. In 2025, Chambers ranked Ed among the top 10 best lawyers in Startups & Emerging Companies–USA–Nationwide (the only NYC-based lawyer in the top 10) and is also listed in M&A. Ed has been ranked by Chambers for 22 years. Best Lawyers in America named Ed 2017 NYC Venture Capital Lawyer of the Year. Ed worked on and served as committee co-chair for earlier versions of the National Venture Capital Model Legal Documents for Venture Deals. Ed has also published widely on venture capital, growth company and tech M&A, on topics including Board governance, down rounds/recaps, private tender offers, QSBS, stock options for startups, 83b elections and restricted stock in startups, and regarding venture funds (including in the 80 columns he published for the Wall Street Journal and the 40 columns in Forbes).

Ed serves as: an Adjunct Professor of VC at Columbia (since 2005), founder/Chair of VentureCrush (since March 2000), and previously, an adjunct professor of law at Rutgers Law School (1990s and early 2000s), and on the Wall Street Journal’s Panel of Experts. Ed also served as an advisor on VC matters to the President of France (discussed in this WSJ column). Ed has also testified as an expert witness on venture capital funds and related topics. Ed co-founded First Close Partners (see Wall Street Journal coverage) (since 2020), which invests into venture funds owned and run by underrepresented managers across the world and The Historic Fund (a nonprofit supporting Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) by donating fully-funded LP interests in a portfolio of VC funds into HBCU endowments). First Close Partners is the National Venture Capital Association’s 2024 DEI Impact Award recipient. Outside of First Close Partners, Ed has personally invested in 100+ VC funds and more than 150+ startups, predominantly in the US, Europe, and Africa. In addition to First Close and The Historic Fund, Ed’s Board service includes: Fisk University (an HBCU in Nashville, TN), Black Women Talk Tech, The Orchid Foundation and, previously, Center for Policing Equity, Harvey Mudd College, and the Saint Barnabas Hospital Foundation.

Ed also serves on the boards and/or LPACs of several venture capital funds (all of which have impact as part of their mandate), including 2050 (Paris), The Historic Fund, and Ingressive Capital (Lagos, Nigeria), and as an advisory board member of Ada Ventures (UK). Ed advocates on issues concerning racial equity, gender, the LGBTQIA+ community, reproductive rights and gun control. In February 2014, Ed co-organized (with the Obama White House’s Liaison for LGBTQ matters) a summit of LGBTQ leaders in the tech community at the White House. He separately co-organized an event at the White House on the Future of Work & AI in 2016. In 2014 at VentureCrushNY, Ed announced a pledge against gender bias in tech, which he later published on The Wall Street Journal’s Accelerators page, with subsequent coverage in Fortune magazine. In 2013, Ed published a column also on The Wall Street Journal’s Accelerators page, calling out bias in VC, noting a majority “of VCs had degrees from a small cluster of 10 schools … and a staggering 87% were Caucasian.”

He published a companion Columbia University case study (2013). He was a board member of and, since 1994, has been pro bono counsel to New York Live Arts (formerly Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company), which named Ed its 2018 Live Ideas Honoree. Ed was also a New York Women’s Foundation 2022 honoree. Ed was profiled for his advocacy for gender and racial equity in several books, notably Erika Brodnock, Ph.D. and Johannes Lenhard, PhD, Better Venture: Improving Diversity, Innovation, and Profitability in Venture Capital and Startups (2023), Pulitzer Prize winner Joann S. Lublin’s Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World (Harper Business 2016), and Julia Pimsleur’s Million Dollar Women: The Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs Who Want to Go Big (Simon & Schuster 2016).