HelloSign’s API-driven platform approach to its product suite means the company fits squarely in our Glue and Protocolthemes. Today, eSignatures and the additional data capture surrounding them are a vital part of many high-value (and high-stakes) workflows: for example, Instacart uses HelloWorks to streamline the on-boarding process for thousands of shoppers.
We have been long-time users and fans of HelloSign. Michael Neril at Spider Capital, one of our Foundry Group Next GPs, along with multiple entrepreneurs we work with reconnected us with the HelloSign co-founders Joseph Walla and Neal O’Mara, who were contemplating raising a new round.
We dug in for a deep look at the company, and were immediately impressed not only with the business but also with the culture that the company had developed over years of bootstrapping the business. We believe the market for eSignature is in its infancy (something perhaps not readily apparent in the tech business with so many of us already switching over to electronic vs. “wet” signings) and are excited about an even more digital, mobile and fluid future powered by HelloSign products.
They’ve built a great suite of products and a fast-growing and cashflow-positive business on a modest amount of funding – exactly the kind of business we get excited about. We’re looking forward to working with the team at HelloSign to build the future of modern document workflows.
Oh, and if you request a signature from any of us at Foundry Group, be sure to do it via HelloSign! (Seriously, we’re only signing via HelloSign from now on.)
Introducing Our New Partner – Chris Moody
We are excited to announce that Chris Moody is joining Foundry Group as a partner.
When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we were very clear that we were not going to build a legacy venture capital firm; one meant to outlive its founders. There would be no generational planning, no transitions to younger partners, and no senior partner hold-outs who would hang onto economics well after they had stopped working. Simply put, when we are done investing, we will drop the mic and shut off the lights.
The conversation that we started in 2014 has continued on a regular basis, both formally at our quarterly off-sites but also pretty much every time the four of us were together. As part of this, we started an exercise of explicitly looking forward a decade and talking about what Foundry Group looked like from each of our perspectives at that time. With each new fund we raise, we are making at least a ten year forward commitment to each other, our investors, and the founders whose companies in which we invest. For the first seven years, this was easy, since we each had a 20-year view of Foundry Group when we started it in 2006. But as time passed, we realized we needed to start to think more deeply about the future of Foundry Group and how we evolve our investment activities.
The venture business is an inherently challenging one to scale. Leverage – of time, capacity, and capabilities – is hard to achieve. As Foundry Group raised more funds, we realized that our ability to continue to manage our business effectively was becoming limited by our individual time and capacity. Recognizing this, we started to make a list of people we would consider adding as partners, as one of our deeply held beliefs was never to have associates, venture partners, or EIRs as part of our firm.
For a while, the only name on the list was Lindel’s. It took us several years to get our mind around adding someone, but once we did, we added a few more names to the list. It probably won’t be a surprise to anyone reading this that it is a very short list.
Back to Chris Moody. Chris was most recently VP & GM of Data & Solutions at Twitter, running a multi-hundred million dollar enterprise business unit. In addition to running one of Twitter’s fastest-growing business unit, Chris was responsible for leading Twitter’s developer platform and ecosystem involving hundreds of enterprise partners and one of the world’s largest active developer communities. We’ve known Chris since 2007 and worked extremely closely with him when he was the CEO of Gnip and well as a leader in the Boulder Startup Community. Over the years, we also became very close friends with Chris.
After we had raised the first Foundry Group Next fund last September, we started having a serious conversation about having Chris join us at Foundry Group. This was driven by our reflection on our current workload, how we were adjusting what we were doing based on the addition of Lindel to the team – which had re-energized us a lot, and how we were thinking about the next ten years of Foundry Group.
In addition to working closely with Chris as a CEO (Brad was on the board of Gnip), we all worked with Chris through Techstars (he was one of the original mentors in the 2007 program). After Twitter acquired Gnip in 2014, Chris joined the boards of two of our portfolio companies (Pantheon and mLab) and worked closely with Ryan on these boards as an outside director.
We knew Chris was an extraordinary board member as well as an extremely seasoned CEO. We had a great affinity for each other, and he shared our value system. When the five of us sat around talking about Chris, after each conversation we got more excited about having him join us, especially as we learned about his personal view for the next decade of his life.
For those of you who don’t know Chris, we encourage you to watch this short video of Chris’ commencement address at Auburn University last spring. We think you’ll get a small glimpse of what he is about and why we’re so excited to have him as our partner.
Chris has been burning the candle at both ends for 27 years without ever taking a meaningful break. We insisted that he take the summer off to recharge his batteries and spend focused time with his awesome wife Sarah and his three delightful kids. He’ll officially join us at the end of the summer.
Welcome, Chris!
Our Investment in Founder Collective
We recently shared our thinking on fund investing with our post, “What does a Foundry Group Next fund investment look like?” We noted that we are largely driven by people and ecosystem. We want to continue laying out our thinking by talking about each of our fund investments. We’ll start with our most recent fund investment, Founder Collective, and walk backwards to catch up on what was a very active first year of investing for Foundry Group Next.
Our recent investment in Founder Collective III, L.P. is a good example of our ecosystem thesis at work. We previously worked with the Founder Collective (“FC”) partners, David Frankel, Eric Paley, and Micah Rosenbloom through shared company and fund investments. We co-invested with them in MakerBot, Pantheon, and Formlabs, with many other shared opportunities along the way. It was easy for us to get excited about FC’s prior portfolio and fund performance. They have a number of high-profile company investments and, importantly, they are one of the few seed funds to have shipped home large boxes of cash in addition to strong valuation mark-ups in their portfolio. We also got excited about their fund discipline and investor alignment, choosing to stay the same size and take more of the fund themselves. I have to think that most LPs are ready to invest at that point!
It’s FC’s partnership dynamics, however, that get us really excited. They have strong internal dynamics that limit the noise and encourage debate to reach thoughtful decisions. Their history together as founders and investors makes it clear that they deeply care about each other. It is those deep bonds and relationships that allow for the space needed to make good decisions across the portfolio. Brad’s post, Kindred Spirits – Our Investment In Founder Collective, does a nice job of laying out our shared values and goes into detail as to why we felt such a strong motivation to partner with them. These are clearly our kind of people.
The FC strategy also shows that they deeply align themselves with, and identify internally, as founders. The personal feedback we got from their portfolio founders was strong and their local ecosystem players noted support for their involvement as preferred investors.
We also knew FC had a great investor base and we would be lucky to get a chance to join that group in this new fund. It was only because of shared relationships (and some embarrassing cajoling) that we were able to become the only new LP in their new fund. We are excited to formally partner with the FC team and look forward to finding more great entrepreneurs to back alongside them.
Our Investment in Looking Glass
We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Looking Glass as part of a $10 million financing. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Looking Glass has created the world’s first personal 3D volumetric display.
While the idea of a 3D volumetric display was envisioned over 100 years ago and Louis Lumière invented stereoscopic (3D) films in 1935, the physical instantiation of such a product has been elusive. Extensive research at MIT in the early 1990s, which included John Underkoffler (now CEO of Oblong) made progress but stalled in the mid-1990s.
In 2013, Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein became obsessed with the idea of a 3D volumetric display and started Looking Glass. In 2015, they came out with a product called L3D Cubes which was an early precursor to their current product, Volume.
We were introduced to Shawn by Jeff Clavier at SoftTech VC. Jeff insisted that Brad sit down with Shawn and, after a 30-minute meeting at Jeff’s office in San Francisco, Brad called John Underkoffler and said, “John, I finally saw what you were trying to create with your holographic camera.”
Looking Glass adds another dimension to a long list of 3D related product companies we’ve invested in over the years, including MakerBot, Glowforge, Formlabs, and Occipital. We are excited to welcome Shawn, Alex, and their team to the gang. And, thanks, Jeff!
Our Investment in Chowbotics
We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Chowbotics. Based in Silicon Valley, Chowbotics has developed robots that make food in restaurants and cafeterias.
At Foundry, we are always on the look-out for interesting Human Computer Interaction (HCI) companies. This investment theme has led to our investments in companies such as Glowforge, Formlabs, Makerbot, Fitbit, Occipital and Sphero. These companies have each grown quickly and defined their markets. We believe that Chowbotics will do the same in the emerging robotic food preparation category.
Restaurant owners throughout the United States are struggling to find labor. In a big city like San Francisco, for example, the median rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is $3500 – out of reach for most restaurant workers. Additionally, robots also provide enhanced food safety, consistency in food quality and 24/7 availability.
Furthermore, office cafeterias and event spaces lack the ability to provide labor intensive food items in many cases. Chowbotics first product, Sally, is a robotic salad maker that can be a part of any restaurant, cafeteria, event space, stadium, etc. where a freshly-made salad would normally be hard or impossible to provide.
We met Chowbotics as a part of the Austin, Texas Techstars program and have followed their success for the last year. Their robots are low in complexity and take up minimal space as well. The amount of progress they’ve made with a small team and budget has been impressive. The company was founded by Deepak Sekar and we are stoked to work with him and his team.
