While I was in Seattle last week, I had a chance to stop by the Glowforge office and talk to the team during one of their biggest weeks since their historic 30-day crowdfunding campaign . An electric energy buzzed in the air along with the familiar low hum of anticipation in advance of a big product launch. Glowforge was about to launch their 3D laser printers to the world – their entire product line – for delivery in 10 days. ...
I’m in Seattle for the next few days. I’ve built this trip around Techstars Seattle Demo, a bunch of time at PSL, and a Moz board meeting. Oh – and time with several of our portfolio companies as well as some nice social stuff with long time friends. Today, PSL announced their new $80 million venture fund . We are significant LPs in the fund and my partner Lindel is joining the PSL advisory board. In addition to being LPs in PSL Ventures , we are major investors in PSL Studio and I’m on the board. While we don’t have an office in Seattle, I’m confident we have a comfortable place to hang out when we are in town. ...
Regardless of those childhood aspirations of Batcaves and Tony Stark’s high tech compounds, not every VC has an office (or a company portfolio) full of lasers. But I’m one of the lucky ones. A little history: Foundy made our first investment in Glowforge, the Seattle-based 3D laser printer, back in June of 2015 after seeing the incredible product the team was building. A few months later, they launched with the biggest 30-day crowdfunding campaign in history, during which I spent more time than I’d like to admit refreshing their homepage and watching the numbers climb in astonishment. And before I knew it, we were leading a second investment round to help the team deliver to tens of thousands of customers. ...
Less than a year after releasing its first product, Nima announced its highly anticipated peanut sensor is now available for pre-order, adding an allergen to its connected food sensor platform. If you have a peanut allergy, Nima is a must have. Pre-order before March 8 to get the product for $229 ($60 off the retail price). More here about the science behind the peanut sensor. Nima launched on the market a year ago with the Nima gluten sensor, the first company on the market to create a connected food sensor for consumers. Nima has enabled thousands of gluten-avoiding folks to test food for gluten at restaurants and packaged foods. The device takes an eight-step lab process and shrinks it to a little device that fits in your pocket. ...
JumpCloud , one of the fastest growing companies in Colorado, is looking for awesome Developers, QA engineers, DevOps admins, and Customer Success Engineers . Over the next year, they are planning to hire 50 people for the engineering team and about 70 across the entire company. JumpCloud is focused on delivering cloud-based directory services via a SaaS model. They are trying to solve some very difficult problems around identity, authentication, security, and cloud scaling. ...
Use of HTTPS (which stands for HTTP Secure) has grown from 13% of the top one million websites to 19% in the past year . With major media sites such as NYTimes.com joining the movement, now over half of all web requests are served securely to the browser. Two years after the launch of Let’s Encrypt, this is fantastic progress. In this new era of state sponsored hacking and fully professionalized cybercrime, it is heartening to see engineers get seriously organized and tackle something on the scale of securing the entire web. ...
Looking Glass , a Brooklyn-based company we recently led the Series A investment in, just released HoloPlayer One, the world’s first interactive lightfield development kit. This is a new interface that lets groups of people see and interact with floating 3D scenes without VR or AR headgear. While it’s an early release dev kit, it’s still as close to achieving the dream of the hologram shown in Blade Runner 2049 as I’ve seen. ...
The CEO of our portfolio company JumpCloud , Raj Bhargava, reached out to me after my rant on digital security earlier this week . Since JumpCloud plays in the world of digital authentication, they are well versed in security issues and are helping organizations with securely connecting their users to their IT resources (systems, app, storage, WiFi, servers, etc.). He pointed me to a five-step video they put up about how IT organizations can step-up their WiFi security – not only from KRACK, but from man-in-the-middle attacks and from having poor WiFi security hygiene.
The physical world will be the reference coordinates for the fleets of robot cars of our imagination . We’re living through the transformation from digital to virtual, and Softbank leading today’s investment of $164 million in Mapbox accelerates this even faster. I’ve posted about the massive founder crush my partners and I have on Eric Gundersen, the CEO of Mapbox . When we led Eric’s first financing — a $10 million round and the first capital into the bootstrapped team — we believed mobile location and mapping would be big. Four years later to the week, our vision is dwarfed by the reality that location is at the heart of everything from ride-sharing and autonomous driving, to IoT and AR/VR. We are excited to again participate in this round. ...
Last week Rover launched on-demand dog walking in Denver. They’re enhancing their existing marketplace experience by adding an assignment option, similar to Uber and Lyft, and bringing it to Colorado. It’s another exciting move by the company, and their Denver announcement caused me to me reflect on my five years as an investor and board member at Rover. https://youtu.be/UsL3kJrpMSw Three thoughts came to mind. Rover executes. I can’t believe that Rover has rolled out an entirely new way to purchase dog walking in three cities, with their fourth on the way, and we’re not yet three months on the other side of the DogVacay integration. That integration – a result of Rover acquiring DogVacay, both started and ended in Q2, and surpassed the best-case-scenario metrics that the team presented to the board. While we talk about the power of “just executing” in the startup world, Rover is a case study of execution in action. ...