Welcoming Transpose to the Founders’ Co-op Family

I’m thrilled to announce the addition of another fantastic new founder to the FC family, as well as an exciting new role for one of the first (and most successful) founders we’ve ever backed as a fund.

First, please meet Hussein Ahmed, CEO of Transpose. Hussein is a first-generation American immigrant, PhD Computer Scientist and Amazon.com alumnus who left Amazon last year to found Transpose. Hussein’s vision for Transpose is to allow anyone to set up, populate and generate actionable intelligence from powerful cloud-based databases… without ever having to even know what a database is (much less master a technical query language or understand the first thing about database design).

We were excited about Hussein and his vision the first time we met, but our enthusiasm deepened to conviction after we asked Simply Measured co-founder Aviel Ginzburg to help out with technical and product due diligence. We’ve worked with Aviel since the earliest days of Simply Measured and, as seed investors in that company, have watched he and his partners (Damon Cortesi and Adam Schoenfeld) build a juggernaut of an enterprise SaaS business by tightly integrating sustained product excellence with constant innovation in their go-to-market strategy.

Aviel is a unicorn in the truest sense of the word, a deeply technical product builder with design chops, user empathy and a sharp business mind. His own experience as a founder — combined with years of active involvement in Techstars Seattle and his own direct angel investing — have helped him to develop a uniquely well-informed perspective on what it takes to build a great company.

Despite the rough edges typical to early-stage software companies, Aviel saw what we did in Hussein and his v1 product, and supported our growing determination to help build the company as seed investors. In his own words:

“As someone building a company around empowering marketers with data, I immediately connected with Hussein and his vision of making the power and value of structured data accessible to everyone, including people like my own mother who even today runs a multi-million dollar business on a 1990s era filemaker pro setup. I see a huge opportunity here to change the lives of millions of people with data.”

Aviel’s conviction about the business, and our deep trust in him as both a product and business leader, led us to the other exciting piece of news in this announcement: coinciding with our investment, Aviel will be joining the Transpose board of directors as the board representative for Founders’ Co-op.

This is the first time we’ve invited a member of our founder community to serve in this capacity, and we and Aviel agreed that it was a fantastic way for us to extend our reach as a firm while also deepening our relationships with our most trusted community members: the extraordinary men and women we’ve backed as investors.

We couldn’t be more excited to simultaneously welcome Hussein Ahmed and the Transpose team to the Founders’ Co-op family, and to welcome Aviel Ginzburg as a board partner to the fund (in addition to his ongoing contributions at Simply Measured and Techstars Seattle). Thanks to you both for allowing Founders’ Co-op to be a part of your entrepreneurial journey and looking forward to working with you on Transpose!

Note: the Creative Commons image at top is “DATABASE” by Michael Mandiberg