I’m excited to report that we just closed a new investment with some old friends. Smore is based in Tel Aviv, but two years ago they came to Seattle for the summer to participate in TechStars. Gilad and Shlomi had never built a company before, but they were two of the most talented makers we’d continue…
I’m happy to announce that we just closed $10 million in fresh capital for a new Founders’ Co-op fund to help build the next generation of world-changing software companies here in the Pacific Northwest. This is our third fund and, while our values and approach will remain the same, we’ve upped the ante in a continue…
Today one of our earliest Founders’ Co-op investments — Simply Measured — announced a $20M Series C led by Karan Mehandru of Trinity Ventures. Last year the company raised an $8M Series B, led by Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners. Not long after that round closed, we also participated in the first-ever raise for continue…
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it… he who doesn’t… pays it.” — Albert Einstein Interest isn’t the only thing that compounds. In startups — and in life — every decision you make changes your trajectory and sets up the conditions for your next decision. Each new continue…
Last week I spoke on a panel at a World Financial Symposium event in Seattle. I arrived a little early and was rewarded with a great talk by Brian David Johnson, a “futurist” at Intel. Johnson had interesting things to say about both the process of “futurecasting” and a few of his specific predictions, but the continue…
I love marketplaces as an investment theme: technology is fantastic at bringing transparency and liquidity to previously opaque and sticky markets, making life better for both buyers and sellers. But as e-commerce becomes the default for an ever-greater share of consumer purchases, our expectations for what a “satisfying” purchase experience looks like have fundamentally changed. continue…
I’ve been reflecting lately on the cultural differences between the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Valley. I grew up in Seattle and have deep family ties here, but lived in the Bay Area both before and during the tech bubble of the 1990’s, so I feel like I have a decent grasp of the values that continue…
In my Defrag talk this week I tried to make the case that the accelerating pace of technology change has reached a point where most large companies can no longer keep up. Technology risk now presents the single biggest existential threat to established companies + brands, and nowhere is this more true than in the continue…
Note: This post is the text of a talk I gave today at Defrag 2013. Thanks again to Eric Norlin for the opportunity to speak and hope this fulltext fills in the gaps left by my onstage free association. tl;dr The technology industry has changed sides. After decades as an ally of the multinational corporation continue…
I officially broke this news when I introduced Avi at last Thursday’s TechStars Seattle Demo Day, but I wanted to follow up with a blog post for those who weren’t able to be there in person. Shippable is an enterprise-grade, hosted continuous integration (CI) service for software development teams that need to increase agility + throughput while continue…