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Ed Zimmerman chairs Lowenstein Sandler’s Emerging Companies & Venture Capital practice, which he and Anthony Pergola co-founded in the 1990s. Ed has been a growth company, startup, venture capital and M&A lawyer for 30 years, representing startups and growth companies from formation and financings (including down rounds and recapitalizations) through their sale, as well as the venture capital and growth funds that invest in them. Ed has advised hundreds of venture funds, in deals, fund formation and fund launches, disputes (including regarding carried interest among partners and cofounders) and other matters. Ed co-chaired one of the committees that worked on earlier versions of the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) Model Legal Documents, the industry-standard forms for venture financings, and currently participates in an NVCA working group on emerging venture managers. Chambers USA, Best Lawyers, and other prestigious global directories consistently rank Ed among the leading lawyers both in New York City and nationwide in Startups & Emerging Companies, M&A, and Venture Capital, with Best Lawyers in America naming him the New York City Venture Capital “Lawyer of the Year” (2017).

Ed is often involved in high-stakes venture capital-related litigation and disputes. He regularly represents venture professionals leaving or joining their firms, as well as funds, co-founders and partners in disputes over carried interest, track record, management company ownership and governance. For instance, Ed has served as an expert witness in a lawsuit involving disputed carried interest at a venture fund, testifying both at deposition and over multiple days at trial. Ed also has served as counsel to numerous startups and growth companies, shepherding them through sale despite ongoing lawsuits, arbitrations, internal investigations and overtly threatened litigation. Examples include Vistar Media’s approximately $700 million sale to T-Mobile, completed despite a lawsuit in which plaintiffs claimed convertible securities entitled them to more than 15% of Vistar’s equity. The Delaware Chancery Court ruled in Vistar’s favor, which the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed (2025).

Ed co-founded First Close Partners (see Wall Street Journal coverage) (2020), which has invested in 100+ venture funds owned and run by underrepresented managers across the world and received the NVCA’s 2024 DEI Impact Award. He also co-founded The Historic Fund (a nonprofit supporting Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) by donating fully-funded LP interests in a portfolio of VC funds into the endowments of ten HBCUs); Bloomberg Law named the Lowenstein team Ed co-led a 2023 Pro Bono Innovator for pro bono work on launching that fund. Outside First Close, Ed has personally invested in 100+ VC funds and 170+ startups, predominantly in the US, Europe, and Africa. Ed also serves on the boards and/or LPACs of venture capital funds (each with an impact mandate), including 2050 (Paris), The Historic Fund, and Ingressive Capital (Lagos, Nigeria), and has been an advisory board member of Ada Ventures (UK) since its inception. Ed has advised the President of France on retaining tech talent and attracting venture capital to France (see related WSJ column), and has moderated panels of venture investors and astronauts in the U.S. and for the French government.

Ed has taught venture capital as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School since 2005, and previously served as an adjunct professor of law at Rutgers Law School for eight years, where his courses included startup and Internet law. Ed has guest-lectured on venture and startups at Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT, Chicago Booth, London Business School, Sciences Po (Paris) and WHU (Germany), and spoke at “Good Governance in Venture Capital,” a program co-hosted by Stanford and Brown University. He has presented at numerous venture fund annual meetings across seven countries, including Northzone, Lakestar, 2050, Ada Ventures, and Magma. For years, Ed served on the selection panel for the Forbes/TrueBridge Midas List of the world’s top venture capital investors. He has served on the Wall Street Journal’s Panel of Experts (80 columns published), has written about forty columns on venture capital and startups for Forbes, and has been founder/Chair of VentureCrush since March 2000.

Ed serves on the Boards of Fisk University (an HBCU in Nashville, TN), where he chairs the Investment Committee, and The Orchid Foundation. He previously served as Vice Chair, then Interim Chair of the Board of the Center for Policing Equity (headquartered at Yale University), where he also chaired the Investment Committee, and on the boards of Harvey Mudd College (where he chaired the Audit Committee) and Black Women Talk Tech. Ed has led Lowenstein Sandler’s engagement as pro bono counsel to the Howard University Law AI Initiative (2025–present). 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 a New York Women’s Foundation 2022 honoree.

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, and wrote about that topic in Forbes. 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, as well as in a number of books. 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).

In her book, Fearless Freedom (Storehouse Voices 2026), Fearless Fund co-founder Arian Simone describes Ed as a prominent startup lawyer and angel investor who had invested in Fearless Fund’s first fund, and quotes his public statement standing with Fearless Fund against the 2023 lawsuit challenging its grant program. Other books have profiled Ed for his advocacy on gender and racial equity, notably Erika Brodnock, Ph.D. and Johannes Lenhard, PhD (Professor at Cambridge University), Better Venture: Improving Diversity, Innovation, and Profitability in Venture Capital and Startups (2023), Pulitzer Prize winner Joann S. Lublin’s Earning It (Harper Business 2016), and Julia Pimsleur’s Million Dollar Women (Simon & Schuster 2016). TechCrunch also quoted Ed in “The Civil Rights Movement Comes to Venture Capital” (2023). Ed’s (non-musical) contribution to the musical (political) collaboration “Put a Woman In Charge” between multi-Grammy winning musicians Keb’ Mo’ and Rosanne Cash was reported in Billboard Magazine (2018). He and his wife Betsy have written about music in Forbes (on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, 2016), published a case study about the Blues (Columbia Business School, 2018), and profiled Nigeria-based VC Maya Horgan Famodu (Forbes 2020). Ed’s enthusiasm for wine has led him to work harvests (including in Châteauneuf-du-Pape), and to participating in the crush and vinification of a 100-point wine. Ed has been inducted into wine societies at the Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy and the Palais des Papes in Avignon. Award-winning wine writer George Taber profiled Ed and Betsy in the opening pages of In Search of Bacchus (Scribner 2013), and by Wine & Spirits Editor, Joshua Greene (2017). Ed has published on wine in Forbes and elsewhere.