Ed's 80+ columns published on the Accelerators & the Experts pages of The Wall Street Journal. Ed serves on The Wall Street Journal’s Panel of Experts.

Ed’s 35+ columns in Forbes.

Ed co-founded and runs VentureCrush.

Ed represents growth companies and startups as well as the venture capital, growth, and private equity funds that invest in them. He joined Lowenstein Sandler as a summer associate in 1991 and co-founded the firm’s Tech Group in 1998; it has become one of the nation’s leading practices, with Dow Jones ranking Lowenstein among the five most active law firms in America for venture capital and private equity deals (2013).

Chambers USA ranked Ed among the 22 best lawyers in Startups & Emerging Companies–USA–Nationwide; of those, Ed is the only lawyer based in New York (2018 edition). Similarly, Best Lawyers in America (2017 edition) named Ed the New York City Venture Capital Lawyer of the Year. Chambers USA also ranked Ed among the best lawyers in Corporate/M&A–New York and in Investment Funds: Venture Capital–USA–Nationwide. Chambers states, “‘One of the best venture capital lawyers in the country–period’ is how clients describe Edward Zimmerman; with a practice covering the East and the West Coasts, Zimmerman enjoys a superb reputation across America, and [he] has also worked on deals abroad.” 

Since 2005, Ed has been an Adjunct Professor of Venture Capital at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. From 1994 through 2004, Ed served as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School. He has also guest-lectured at Harvard Business School, Sciences Po (Paris), MIT, Wharton, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and the London School of Business, and he has published case studies through Columbia's Graduate School of Business.

Ed has spoken at venture fund annual meetings in Stockholm, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Copenhagen, and he works extensively with European and Israeli startups and venture/growth funds. Ed has angel-invested in 100+ startups (with more than 25 exits) and 50+ venture funds.

Ed has published more than 80 columns on tech startups and growth companies (and sometimes wine) on The Wall Street Journal’s Accelerators page and Experts page. Ed currently serves as a Wall Street Journal Expert Panelist. Ed has also authored over 35 additional articles in Forbes, the National Law Journal, New York Law Journal, and Wine & Spirits, among other publications. He served as an editor for an M&A chapter in an American Bar Association book and chaired a committee in the National Venture Capital Association’s Model Legal Documents Project (the group which created the model legal documents for venture capital transactions).

Ed co-founded and runs VentureCrush, which includes the accelerator VentureCrushFG (formerly named FirstGrowthVC, which Pando Daily called "New York's best Accelerator") as well as a series of gatherings for founders, senior executives, angels, venture capitalists, musicians, and winemakers (VentureCrushAV, VentureCrushNY, VentureCrushSF, and VentureCrushParis).

Ed was appointed to the Conseil Stratégique de l'Attractivité of France, where he served as part of a 30-member group of international business leaders advising the government and President of France. He has similarly been invited to the White House and the Élysée Palace to meet with senior officials to discuss how America and, separately, France, can enhance their communities of startups and tech investors. Ed has made numerous appearances on television and radio (in the United States and Europe) to comment on startups and venture markets.

Ed cares deeply about and advocates on issues concerning race, women, and the LGBTQ community. In February 2014, Ed co-organized (with the Obama White House’s Liaison for LGBT 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 the spring of 2014 at VentureCrushNY, Ed announced a pledge against gender bias in tech, which he later published on The Wall Street Journal's Accelerators page and which was subsequently covered in Fortune magazine. Ed was profiled for his advocacy for gender equality in several books, notably 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).

A passionate wine enthusiast, Ed has written about wine and wine tech and was the host of Radio Uncorked, a wine radio show produced by Infinity Broadcasting and aired on KYOU Radio in San Francisco, Napa, Sonoma and the surrounding area. Ed was inducted as a chevalier in the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin at the Château du Clos de Vougeot in France and was named an official ambassador to the appellation of Chateauneuf- du-Pape at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. Ed has worked harvest (briefly) in France and California, where he was involved in vinifying a wine granted a perfect 100-point score by Robert Parker. Ed's vinous adventures are the subject of the opening pages of In Search of Bacchus (by James Beard Award Foundation finalist George Taber). He has also been profiled in Wine & Spirits (March 2017) for his obsession with Burgundy.

Ed presently serves on the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College. He was a board member of and, for 25 years, 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 and his wife, Betsy, co-founded and ran for nearly a decade the HAPI Foundation, a children's charity, which raised and granted several million dollars.

Ed graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law (1992) (comment editor, Journal of International Business Law) and Haverford College (1989) (Phi Beta Kappa).