RoughDraft.vc

Announcing Rough Draft Ventures’ investment in Technical Machine and Tessel.

This is an Arduino.

It’s a powerful little device, a sort of programmable and customizable mini-computer in the palm of your hand.

What can you do with it? Only make a mini Segway, build a Keytar,create your own Daft Punk helmet, and fly your own UAV drone.

So what’s the problem? For all the talk of the Internet of Things, it’s not particularly easy to make these things talk to the Internet. You can purchase a WiFi add-on for your Arduino, but it costs $85 in addition tothe $30 for the base Arduino board—and then you still have to set the whole thing up.

The Arduino community is fairly vibrant, and there’s lots of open source code available to build upon. Yet the ecosystem wasn’t built for collaboration—for taking modules of code from one developer and using it in another context. It’s time for the next generation of Arduino, built for the web.

When I was first introduced to Jon, Jia, and Tim back in March, we spoke on the phone for an hour about RFID readers. At the time, they were working on a product called Entrance that used RFID readers to control music playlists. We had several phone calls to discuss their vision for the hardware, software, and design.

Over time, however, the team realized that the problems they were solving—with embedded controllers and wireless connectivity—applied to so many other startups. So when they emailed me a few weeks later with an idea for a wireless-first Arduino with built-in Node.js support, I knew we had something that the hardware community would love.

This little device has the potential to transform the Maker community. You no longer need to program in a low level language. You don’t have to plug your device into your computer to get code onto it. Imagine the possibilities.

I couldn’t be more honored to announce Rough Draft Ventures’ investment in the Technical Machine team and their first product,Tessel. After dominating the front page of Hacker News and getting a bunch of inbound interest, their crowdfunding campaign launched today! At the time this post was published, they’ve already raised $41,485 and counting.

This isn’t your average investment announcement in so many ways.

On April 15th—exactly three months ago to the day—the city of Boston stood together against one of the most gruesome attacks in the city’s history.

It’s hard to imagine an entire city on lockdown. It’s hard to imagine a citywide manhunt that ends in a shootout with police on a normally quiet residential street. And yet the Boston community dealt with all of this with valor and poise.

When I first saw the photo above, I stared at it for minutes. In the seconds after the attack, with smoke in the air and runners on the ground, Boston police went into crisis mode. They ran towards the noise and shrapnel to help rescue hundreds of people. It’s a terrifying thought, overruling human instinct. And yet every day, thousands of police officers run towards gunshots to keep communities safe.

It is those same police officers that Mark43 helps each day.

I first met Scott Crouch in my freshman summer. He was heading up mobile development for Rover and I was working on my own startup, so we shared an office space. From the first time we played Mario Kart together late at night, it was clear Scott was going places. He was one of the most helpful mentors I had as I tried to navigate the Harvard engineering scene, telling me what classes would be helpful and giving me career advice. But he was even more helpful when I showed him what I was working on—it was clear he had foresight and product vision that was uniquely advanced for a college student.

Over time, Scott and I saw more of each other. I was placed into Leverett House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate houses, which Scott also lived in. We both helped the Harvard Innovation Lab in its early days, helping to build its website and a lot of its technical infrastructure.

Fast forward to this year, when Scott and his co-founders Matt Polega and Florian Mayr were prominently featured in a 60 Minutes special for their work in a Harvard design seminar. (Go ahead, watch it now—it’s a far better primer on Scott’s company than I could ever give. Scott’s part goes from about 07:30 to 09:30.)

Mark43 makes mobile software for police officers that helps departments communicate and spot trends in criminal activity, especially gangs.Their systems organizes disparate data sources to help law enforcement officers reduce gang violence and other violent crime. When it was used by the Special Projects Team of the Massachusetts State Police in Springfield, it reduced the time spent on paperwork by 90%.

Seeing the 60 Minutes special on the company had to be one of the proudest moments I had for Harvard engineering. College campuses are inundated with clones of small ideas—new social networks or blogs that are fun side projects but can’t really scale to the point of impact.

Scott was working on something with huge impact. Police officers were thanking him for the code he was writing.

That’s impact.

A few months ago I ran into Scott on the way back to my dorm. When I asked him how his work was going, he mentioned the three-person team would be expanding quickly over the summer to multiple cities. I asked if he was raising money and he mentioned he would need to soon. He wasn’t out on the street looking for money, but he realized that to create the company he wanted and to expand to as many cities over the summer as he wanted, he would need further funding.

(In case you’re reading this and still question the need for student-run VCs, I hope the above convinces you that other students can be huge assets for student founders.)

I immediately emailed Peter Boyce and Nitesh Banta, also at Rough Draft, and told them if there were any startup we needed to fund this year, it was Scott’s. Even before they were on 60 Minutes or won the Harvard President’s Challenge, Peter and I knew how hard Scott worked and how much of a leader he is. The following week, we brought Scott in to pitch to Rough Draft.

Today, I’m proud to announce Rough Draft’s investment in Mark43. We invested back in May to help support Scott and his team as they moved to 3 new cities this summer to roll out their software in police precincts and on the field.

But I’m not just announcing Rough Draft’s investment. I’m also announcing Mark43's hugely successful seed round, co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Lowercase Capital, SV Angel, Launchpad LA, and a handful of angels from the Boston community.

Mark43 was founded in a Harvard design seminar. It was a class project. Harvard engineering is on par with all the conventional “engineering schools.” Three students created a company that hundreds of police officers now use every day.

And they’re just getting started. Scott, congrats bud. You’re making a real difference, and I can’t see what you do next.

The Myth of the Costless Startup

Early capital matters to student startups as much as any other

Why are students looking for money? They have free housing, free food, and no job. So maybe they run an ad or two. How could they possibly need money?

I hear similar refrains all too often from young graduates frustrated at how “easy” it is for current students to raise seed money. The emergence of student-run venture funds has certainly made the process more accessible and in turn ignited debate over which resources (namely mentoring, network, talent, and capital) are most valuable to a student-founded company. I’ll readily admit that most student-founders overemphasize capital needs. After all, as the Social Network reminds us, a million dollars is barely even cool anymore. In the absence of customer validation, stringing together a little VC validation seems a lot easier (it’s not). But dismissing the value of early stage capital for these companies is equally naive. Student companies’ funding needs may be modest, but even a small amount of cash helps student founders do what matters most: move fast.

According to Sean Parker / Aaron Sorkin / Justin Timberlake, “A million dollars isn’t cool.”

With next to no living or opportunity costs, we should see plenty of students starting companies. And we do. But that’s about as far as most get. A domain name, a generic “coming soon” page, and perhaps a LinkedIn profile update are all that become of most students’ big ideas. Campuses are a breeding ground for zombie startups—companies that hover in limbo between life and death out of either neglect or unwillingness to admit defeat. I’ve been guilty of letting projects zombify at least a handful of times. It gives you enough busy work to justify calling yourself a startup founder, but you have no startup to show for your efforts.

“Startup = Growth”

—Paul Graham

Students never experience the relentless pressure to succeed or survive that shaped so many successful companies in their early days. Ideas are cheap, but execution is hard. Anyone who can build a company out of pure passion and sweat has proven himself as a founder and can go out and raise a true seed round. But what about earlier in the company’s lifecycle? Can five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars make a difference in the six month sprint to discover customers for a product?

I say it can. And more importantly some of the top venture capital firms do too. Where does the money go? To eliminating distractions. At Valet.io, our bills for non-mission-critical web services (i.e. everything but AWS and Heroku) totals nearly $200 a month. These services help us manage and track everything from accounting to projects to emails. If we can reroute just a few hours a month from anything that’s not building the product or working with customers, that’s worth paying for. And Rough Draft Ventures, one of our investors, helps us do that.

A small amount of seed money, for a software startup, lets you move fast. It lets you spend more time experimenting and building, which in turn helps you discover your business model sooner. Tales of caffeine-fueled coding marathons stretching late into the night are exciting, but in reality people only have a finite amount of mental and physical energy. Putting a little bit of cash in the hands of someone passionate enough to build until their eyes can barely stay open is an incredibly powerful investment. Even if their current company fails, they’ll have learned more and pivoted faster, just because they had a few thousand dollars on hand.

One of the benefits of providing such a small amount of money is that the fundraising process can be drastically shortened. Rough Draft makes most of its investment decisions within 24 hours—contrast that with six weeks for traditional rounds of venture financing. Investments can be made in the form of a convertible note, with no discount or cap, and a one page term sheet.

By Zachary Hamed (@zhamed)

Every day, 10.7 million Americans go to work in the non-profit sector. The non-profit workforce is the third largest of all U.S. industries behind retail trade and manufacturing. From health to education, from the urban poor to rural farmers, non-profits work day-in and day-out for some of the greatest causes in the world.

Yet it’s an area virtually untouched by technology—“Non-profit? How will they pay for my product?” Nonprofits in the U.S. currently spend $60 billion annually to raise $300 billion. Every dime counts, and it’s not easy to market a product to customers in an industry where one of the main objectives is to maximize social output per dollar input.

The main fundraising vehicle for non-profits is the annual gala. Most organizations will have such an event, bringing in big donors and updating the community on the work done thus far. While donations trickle in throughout the year, the annual gala is structured to touch each large donor and maximize their donation. Large events are difficult to organize in and of themselves, but ensuring a personal connection to each guest is even more difficult.

Given the immense opportunity in this space, I’m proud to announce Rough Draft Ventures’ investment in Valet.io. The team—Ben Donald, Ben Drucker, and Jake Silberg—are committed to helping non-profits use technology to more effectively fundraise. Their unique solution helps non-profits organize silent auctions and increase engagement with donors during and after an event. It’s an exciting space with stuffy and antiquated competitors, and they’ve already made huge strides.

Cory Booker, now mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is running for U.S. Senate. After beta testing at several other venues earlier this month, Valet.io rolled out its product at one of his fundraisers. How’d they do?

Valet.io raised $5000 in the 30 seconds after Mayor Booker spoke. 

What have you done in the last 30 seconds?

At Rough Draft Ventures, our goal is to help find and support student entrepreneurs in the Boston area. With that mission in mind, I’m excited to announce our investment in RequestNow.

Matt Auerbach and Guy Aridor, both rising seniors at Boston University, created RequestNow to simplify requesting music. Their initial product, combined with their dedication to this idea, made this a clear investment for us. Both Guy and Matt have been working on this project for the past year and we’re excited to help them continue to grow.

With our investment, the RequestNow team will work on over the summer months, adding new features and extending their network. We’re excited to have a new team join our portfolio family. Below, Guy has shared a few words on their story so far. RequestNow was also covered in Boston.com's tech section today. Onwards and upwards!

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“Without music, life would be a mistake.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

RequestNow originated from the days when Matt DJed. As partygoers continually bombarded him with song requests, he realized that a better system could remedy the problems he and other DJs faced. A few years later, after meeting in an Intro to Computer Science class we began discussing the idea of a text-based request system. As we built the bare bones and launched a beta, we realized that what at first we thought was a simple idea had so many potential avenues of growth. We became extremely excited that our product could be used to help DJs make themselves more well-known and that better music could be played at events all around the world.

Matt and I both love music and providing DJs the tool to easily discover what their audience not only wants to listen to but to be able to predict what their audience might want to listen to excites us. This, and many other tools we’re hoping to provide for DJs, is the foundation for the idea behind RequestNow: to make the music better.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’ve received our first investment from Rough Draft Ventures. This commitment allows us to continue working throughout the summer and provides us with the capital we need to get our product to DJs and venues. Thanks to the support from Rough Draft we’ve been able to commit our time this summer thus far to rebuilding our product from scratch and we’re excited to announce that we’ll be leaving beta today.

We’ve added new features that allow DJs to better interact with the audience that our beta users were eager for us to build including the ability to respond directly to users that have sent in requests, custom messaging, and the ability to send a text after to all the people who attended the event. Without Rough Draft we wouldn’t have been able to be at this point this soon. We’re excited for the future of RequestNow and we’re excited to have Rough Draft along for the ride.

I’m a computer science major—I entered Harvard knowing I wanted to focus on computer science, and I’ve loved my experience in the CS department. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized I loved designing things as much or more than building them.

A few weeks ago I was asked whether I’ve found my experience in programming influences how I think about design. It definitely does.

The Coding Process

Let’s say I need to create a login/registration portal. I start programming by taking a 50,000 foot view of a problem. What am I trying to solve? What tools will I need to solve it? What are the concrete chunks I need to achieve to get there? I’ll also give thought to some of the high-level design decisions before I start coding. Who is my target user? What are they trying to do, and how can I best design around those goals?

While coding, I frequently go back to the 50,000 foot view. Does everything work properly? Am I doing the right error-checking? Is my code properly commented and unit tested? Only then will I move on to the next task.

The Design Process

At this point I have the rough outline of a site that requires registration and login, and now turn to the design. What do I want the site to look like? Who is my target user? What should the signup flow be? What’s my color scheme? What fonts should I use?

At this point I’ll flip through sites I’ve saved for inspiration. These sites are divided into two groups though—designs I know how to implement, like this…

…and designs I couldn’t emulate perfectly, like this (the gradients and patterns make it a little more challenging):

At this point in my engineering career, I don’t know how to do everything. But there are very few unknown-unknowns—there are just known-knowns (things I know I know) and known-unknowns (things I know I don’t know). Your job in getting proficient in anything is to move skills from the unknown-unknowns to the known-unknowns. As long as you know your blindspots, you can fix them. I can think of new features and very quickly brainstorm a few ways of implementing them.

Design, however, is different for me. There are still tons of unknown-unknowns—effects I’ve never applied in Photoshop, tools I’ve never used in Illustrator, and best practices I’ve never been exposed to. I can’t choose to emulate or incorporate certain design elements because I fundamentally don’t know how they were made.

The solution? Stretch your limits. If you’re a student trying to learn design, pick something you could never imagine designing. Then try to create a carbon copy from scratch. It probably won’t look exactly the same at the end, but then figure out why your design looks different. It’s probably a missing shadow or a color that’s a bit off, and you’ll learn a few hidden software tricks along the way. That last critical step will come in handy next time you want to create something similar.

Figure out your unknown-unknowns and your designs will improve.

By John Brennan

Partner, Rough Draft Ventures

I'm thrilled to announce that Rough Draft Ventures is investing $20,000 in Balbus, Inc.

This is exciting for us not only because it is our first investment but because the founder, Jack McDermott, is exactly the kind of ambitious student-entrepreneur we set out to support when we launched Rough Draft Ventures last December. Despite his full course load as a junior at Tufts University and his commitment as an athlete on the varsity men's lacrosse team, Jack has built the foundation of what we believe will be a successful, high impact technology company in the field of special education.

As someone who's had a stutter for his entire life, you'd be hard pressed to find a founder more entrenched in his product and target market than Jack. While Balbus is growing into its broader vision as a next generation special education platform, it started out to alleviate Jacks specific frustration with his own speech therapy experience. He saw the increasing popularity of smartphones and the emergence of the app economy as an opportunity to put his own speech therapy in his pocket, and he did just that. Since he started Balbus in the fall of 2011, his two iOS apps, Speech4Good and Fluently, have been purchased by thousands of customers trying to find their voice just like him.

Moving forward, we couldn't be more excited to work closely with Jack and introduce him to the advisors and mentors in our network who can be helpful to him and his company. The $20,000 we're investing in Balbus will allow Jack to build out his team and run the company full-time when he's not in class or on the lacrosse field. This is something he's been unable to do in the past--especially during the summer--as he's always had to take internships to bootstrap his company on nights and weekends.

Jack has shown a tremendous commitment to solving a very real problem and we're eager to support his venture as well as other student founders who share an equally relentless passion for their product here in Boston.

Read more about Balbus and what this investment means to Jack on his personal blog.

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Contact Info:

A guest post by Spencer Bramson. Follow him on Twitter at @ssbramson.

I dropped out of Bentley University at 19 to become an entrepreneur and have been fortunate enough to have started two successful startups at 23. While I don’t regret it, the point is: I shouldn’t have had to drop out at all. Colleges and universities are supposed to support students in pursuing their dreams and passions, and while some do support individual entrepreneurship, there is no over-arching support system in the Boston startup ecosystem for student entrepreneurs to get their idea to the next level.

At least, there wasn’t, until now.

I wish there were something like this when I was starting up. RoughDraft.vc is an incredible new initiative to support student entrepreneurs. Schools, however well-meaning, are singular entities; RoughDraft.vc is a student partnership made up of the biggest names in higher education--Tufts, MIT, Harvard, to name a few--as well as advisors from the biggest names all across Greater Boston right now: Hubspot, Facebook, iRobot, Yahoo, Warby Parker, and more.

Bilal Zuberi (of General Catalyst Partners, funder of RoughDraft.vc) says that “for student entrepreneurs, especially in Boston, finding the first few thousand dollars is even more challenging than raising the next $500k - $1 million,” which is something I completely agree with from firsthand experience. Let’s be honest: Boston needs something like this more than anywhere else. With over 60+ colleges and universities and over 300,000+ students, Boston being called a ‘college town’ is an understatement.

And college kids are broke. There’s a weird contradiction in the entrepreneurship world between what we’d like to believe about business, and what we know to be true about it. We always preach to follow your dreams--that hard work, conviction, and grit are what it takes to get ahead and really make your business stand out. But we all also know how getting the money to make those dreams happen is worse than pulling teeth.

Boston student entrepreneurs are no less brilliant today than the rest of us were when we were working on our first startups. They’re no less spunky or perceptive--so what’s the problem?

It’s still money. But it’s also the mountains of other things that we didn’t expect when we were all starting out: managing teams and personalities; sorting through legalese; or even finding the right paperwork to get the job done. It’s late-night emails and phone-calls and pushing hard to build relationships to expand that rolodex even on our least-energetic days.

Those were the things that I had to do--the things that I had to drop out of college to put all of my time and energy into making my startup work. But, my point again is that students shouldn’t have to put their ideas on the backburner to get an internship or part-time job to make ends meet. RDvc really wants to help students and encourage them to follow what they love doing.

Which isn’t to say that building totally from the ground up isn’t fun. It’s the rush of being an entrepreneur--some things you learn through scrambling and struggle. But with RoughDraft.vc I can see student entrepreneurs getting that jumpstart they need, so that they can stop worrying about saving up for rent over the summer break, or that iPad for development, and start getting to the real fun of entrepreneurship: watching their vision unfold.

By Bilal Zuberi

General Catalyst Partners

Boston is a very special place with approximately 60+ colleges and universities, 300,000+ students, and a long history of significant companies started by students or student drop-outs from Boston area universities. If there is one thing everyone agrees on is the sheer wealth of student talent that comes from across the country to reside in this short few square mile radius region. Boston is proud of its students founding Microsoft, Facebook, Hubspot, Stripe, iRobot and so many others.

Over the last few years, Boston has seen a renaissance in startup activity, thanks to the efforts of players in the local startup ecosystem: entrepreneurs, angels, VCs, incubators, accelerators etc. But given how many universities and colleges we have in Boston, we should be seeing even more amazing student startups form and prosper than we have seen. We asked students from MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, Tufts, BC, Babson etc, what would be most beneficial to students who were thinking about startups.  And we consistently heard that in addition to continued mentorship, what student community here was really needing was a way to secure early initial investment to get their ideas launched into real world products. At General Catalyst, we were a bit surprised that in spite of the increase in the number of investors, students were having a hard time finding early support. But it is clear to us now that for student entrepreneurs, especially in Boston, finding the first few thousand dollars is even more challenging than raising the next $500k - $1 million seed round, and while students hackers are able to turn their ideas into rough product drafts while still enrolled in school, most of them run out of the steam (read: dollars) needed to implement them in a form where they can be tested in the real world. Even the scrappiest of students need money to buy some iPads for development, running design competitions, hiring part-time expert help, and paying rent during vacation periods. Seemingly trivial barriers can sometimes seem overwhelming for students with a full class load and attractive internship & job offers from other companies.

I can also personally empathize with that need. My first startup business plan (ed-tech for global higher education) died inside a power-point presentation because as a student I did not have the initial $10k it would have taken to develop a pilot to test in a university I had been working with. But my second startup (materials science) was able to get off the ground because I was able to secure $20k to pay back to my management consulting employer that had given me a signing bonus to tie me up. A small investment changed my life. Given that history I really wanted to help bring to students what they were so clearly asking us to provide.

I am proud to announce today that my firm General Catalyst Partners has decided to fund and support RoughDraft.vc, a student partnership from across the Greater Boston area colleges, that will fund student startups at the earliest stages to turn students’ rough projects into products and companies. The investment committee is composed of dynamic students from several local colleges and universities, and these are highly networked, passionate and driven individuals that have already demonstrated an ability to catalyze startup ecosystems in their own college environments. This partnership will identify student entrepreneurs they would like to fund and will make the investment decisions. The investment will be made on simplest possible terms, and there will be no follow-on funding from RoughDraft.vc. This team has already enlisted an amazing set of Advisors and a group of experienced engineering, design, business, sales/marketing, legal & other mentors to provide support to student entrepreneurs. I really believe that this group can catalyze the next generation of great Boston student startups to build products and grow their businesses regardless of their eventual geographical location. While I am proud to also serve on the investment committee, my primary role will be to guide, advise, and mentor these young investors, rather than influence the investment decisions.