I’m fascinated with drones. I’ve never been a model airplane guy and my model rocket phase lasted about a month when I was 10. But drones feel like something different, since I can program them to do what I want them to go do, rather than have to control them with a controller. My current goal is to program a Taco Drone to go from the 2nd floor balcony outside of my office to T/ACO , hover for a few minutes while they attach lunch to it, and return to my balcony. ...
If you think Amazon Prime Air is neat, you’ll love the new Amazon Prime Ground. Spheros and Quadcopters are available with shipping still in time for Christmas.
Yesterday Amy and I contributed $10,000 to the MakerBot Academy campaign which is on a mission to put a MakerBot 3D printer in every school in the United States. We did it via a contribution on Donors Choose , one of our favorite non-profit contribution sites. We specifically finished out the funding for five MakerBots for the following teachers in their classrooms: Mr. Hendry – Yorba Linda High School, Yorba Linda, CA Mrs. Bragdon – Brownsboro Elementary School, Brownsboro, TX Mr. Eiland – Woodlawn High School, Baton Rouge, LA Mr. Condon – Decorah High School, Decorah, IA Mr. Colling – Coronado High School, Scottsdale, AZ Amy and I are planning to give a lot more to this campaign, but we decided to do something tangible right now by finishing off several of the campaigns on Donors Choose. ...
Jackson Pollock is one of my favorite abstract expressionists. So, when Sphero decided to dance around in NY City and do an art project, he immediately came to mind. If you wonder how kids describe a Sphero, this short video will make you smile. And then laugh. And then smile some more. One of these kids needs to be on The Voice. Sphero says, “buy me, buy me, buy me.”
We recently invested in littleBits . It’s another of our investments that traces its roots to the MIT Media Lab. It’s also another investment we are making with our friends from True Ventures . It’s another one that mixes hardware and software in a delightful way that is part of our human computer interaction theme . And yet another investment in New York. But it’s the first company we’ve invested in that did a promotional video for their product (the Synth Kit ) with Reggie Watts. ...
I’m a seed investor in MobileDay , a Boulder-based company that has helped its users make over two million mobile-based conference calls in the past few months. Its popularity comes from One-Touch Dialing where users press a big green button that shows up on their phone just before a conference call and they’re in. I use it every day – for every call – and am no longer in conference call hell on my iPhone as I go from my calendar to my dialer back to my calendar back to my dialer as I try to remember what the next number in the conference call sequence is. But – this is a show vs. tell type app – just go try it on MobileDay iPhone or MobileDay Android. ...
One of the companies I’m an investor in, Modular Robotics, just launched a Kickstarter campaign around its new product MOSS. It’s amazing. Definitely a “show not tell” so I encourage you to watch the five minute video and then back the MOSS Kickstarter campaign if you, your kids, or your loved ones dig building things.
We had a fascinating week trying to get everything figured out on our FG Angels initiative with AngelList. Our syndicate, which we are going to max out at $450,000, is currently right at $300,000 after one week. We are humbled by all the support and interest. Geir Freysson, founder of Five Hundred Plus , did a super cool visualization of some of the top syndicates and how the participants in the syndicate relate to each other. ...
Two of the themes we love to invest in are Protocol and Glue . We’ve especially been interested in companies that make software developers and DevOps lives better. Some examples include SendGrid, Urban Airship, VictorOps, Pantheon, MongoLab, and Cloudability. To that end, Raj Bhargava and I created a company called JumpCloud late last year (our eighth venture together). After being involved in hundreds of technology companies, we know that young and fast growing technology companies have little time to devote to the details of managing their server infrastructure. Often, there is a perception that things are fine, until they aren’t. And then much pain ensues. ...
I’m a big fan of Jason Calacanis’ show This Week In Startups . I usually run naked (no headphones) but when I listen to something it’s usually an interview or a book. Amy and I had dinner last night with Paul Berberian and his wife Renee and Paul mentioned Jason had interviewed him at Techstars FounderCon in Chicago a few weeks ago. So – I grabbed my iPhone, downloaded the interview, and listened to it. Dynamite stuff. ...