THIS & THAT

I am very happy to announce our investment in Owl Labs.

If you were in our Boston conference room a few years ago, you would have seen at least  six cameras around the round the room, cables hanging all over the place and a matrix switcher towards the end of the table. Our receptionist would have set you down at a very specific seat and made sure you had your laptop down just so.

I worked the matrix switch. Our meetings in theory looked like “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” - a bunch of talking heads, the active camera is on the active speaker. I would zoom in and out to the room when it made sense, mix in 2 or 3 people to the frame during a discussion. I am surprised that I did not get kicked out of the building for my little experiment that went on for too long.

Video conferencing has been a central part of our daily work at Spark. It became an acute problem, when we added a third office and remote workers. This is the same problem most companies experience every day. I have been on a quest to make it better for us and went to extremes.

Setup and tear down of meetings, connecting laptops to presentations, inviting external users was always a problem. Fortunately Zoom came along just in time.

The much harder problem is to make your co-workers thousands of miles away feel as if they are in the same room with you having a productive conversation. That is the holy grail. 

Owl Labs is a dream come true. It is an awesome product that provides an amazing experience across the your choice of video conferencing system and so much more. I am looking forward to working with a team of people who felt the same pain I did so much so that they started a company, built an amazing product and already brought much joy to many.

The Meeting Owl

I looked for a photo of the room, instead I found a drawing that I had emailed to our IT person before we bought all the equipment.

I  re-read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow over the break.

Early stage venture is an unusual business as we are often wrong. We loose money in most of our investments but every now and then, when the stars align, we might have a monstrous outcome that makes up for all the loses and more. I can not imagine any company in any industry that could survive with our kind of error rates.

I have always wondered how much of our decision making as an investment team is “System 1” - the fast, intuitive aspect of the mind, versus  “System 2” - the slower, logical and reasoning part of the mind.

Although we usually have enough time to make considered decisions, gut always seeps in - mostly through our interactions collectively or individually with founders.

We are delighted to announce our seed investment in Nift. The company is innovating on how local businesses advertise and acquire customers. The team is building and empowering networks of local businesses that refer each other customers. 

We have met the founder, Elery Pfeffer, many years back when he had just moved to Boston. Elery, at 6′9″ stands out in any crowd. You’d think he’d big on basketball but swims instead. He rides his bike everywhere year round. His MacBook Pro travels in his backpack in a hard shell case, because the last one did not survive a fall last winter. He is a data junkie and complains about not having enough time to do all the analysis himself anymore. He is very passionate about small businesses and his need to help them. If you have the time, he will tell you many stories of countless merchants and their experience with Nift (rhymes with gift). This passion and his attention to detail has helped him build a great team, and this is also what attracted us to invest in what possibly could be a very disruptive idea.

Here is more on the company from the Boston Globe

I look forward to meeting Lior, the founder and CEO of Cybereason every week. He always has a good story from a customer they just engaged. It reads like a Tom Clancy novel. This week is was yet again an organization at the mercy of Chinese hackers. They were basically owned - customer databases, employee information, everything. Cybereason was up and running in no time and they not only stopped the attacks, they tracked down the hackers - all the way to name of the person and office address (yes hackers do have offices). One of the hackers apparently left debug code in one of the routines and it was all over for him. Now the authorities are involved.

Cybereason is doing really well. The just raised a bunch of money and they are well sought after because of stories like this. The security market is really crowded - everybody claims to do everything. These guys are special and the easiest sales call for them is a corporation under attack. You suspect something, you call them. They provide incident response unlike anything out there. The contract is pretty simple - they charge per seat. Do you have remote management tools? Install their thin client through a web service right away - it takes a couple of hours for 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 seats. They start collecting data and within a few hours the system learns what is going on. Your dedicated web portal shows you everything. Cleanup is easy.  They then start to protect you, monitor your virtual boarders against any future intrusions because it just does not end with incident response.

10H to 12H of your time for peace of mind?

Compare this to the kingpins of "Incident Response" - FireEye / Mandiant. If they do return your call, you spend a few weeks on contracts, then a month or more and an army of people for installation. They physically have to install their equipment on your premises, before they can begin tell you what may be going on.

This a new way of doing security. It is the power of machine learning, expert systems, pattern recognition, cloud, massively parallel computing - and a bunch of other buzzwords - all finally put to good use.

It has been 10 years since we started Spark. As Bijan eloquently wrote yesterday, we are all very proud to have been part of it. We have great memories of all the amazing people we work with, of all the good times and bad, the endless travel and the moments of pure joy. 

Yet some memories stand out, like Goat Boy - one of us who shall remain nameless that has an uncanny ability to become Goat Boy at will - who still shows up regularly.

Or the sign at the door of our first ever office - somewhere in Cambridge, a sublease from Boston Private Bank - which surprisingly was effective in turning back some shady characters that would show up. 

Here is to many more years of “Goat Boy” and “no cash transactions”.

We are delighted to announce our investment in Cybereason with our friends at CRV and Lockheed Martin. Cybereason is developing a beautiful product that I believe will define how organizations deal with security. The product is a combination of a very light weight probe that lives on user desktops, attached to a sophisticated cloud service. The cloud service collects millions of data points from user computers which are then exposed to a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence and expert systems to uncover known or unknown cyber attacks - all in real time. The data is then presented in an elegant UI, so intuitive that a layman - like myself - can effectively become a Level 3 security expert, analyze the problem and implement countermeasures.

We have been running the product in our shop for a while now. Fortunately, we did not find any North Korean hackers on our network but we did discover a bunch of anomalies and malware none of our other security software had detected.

If you think "beautiful security product" is an oxymoron, I strongly suggest you get a demo from the Cybereason team. This is a very sophisticated expert system wrapped in a great consumer package. It brings the simplicity of dropbox to an extremely difficult to visualize problem.

The team is great. The founders - Lior, Yonatan, Yossi and most of the rest of the team are graduates of the IDF. They really can’t really tell you what they did but I get the sense I don’t want to know either unless I want the NSA or some other government agency to show up at my house.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to work with Lior and his team and my friend Izhar. This is going to be fun.

Here is more on the company from Tech Crunch

I have a Mid 2011 iMac at my home office that I use mainly to organize my photos and to do video conferencing on Thursdays. It is a good machine but way too slow for my taste. 4 years is not the same dog years it used to be in processor land. The 3.4 GHz Core i7 is plenty fast but Mac OS is now just like Windows - too many disk read/writes which slows everything down. The big bottle neck is the spinning disk hard drive and replacing it with a SSD is very cumbersome. 

So I decided to use an external thunderbolt setup. The Mid 2011 iMac does not have USB 3.0. Thunderbolt - even version 1.0 - is a way faster bus (capable of up to 10Gbps per channel). My external drive is a combo of Akitio Neutrino Thunder Duo and 2 SSD drives of your pleasure - I chose a pair 1TB Samsung SSDs.

I used the OSX disk utility to setup the 2 disks in software RAID 0 (performance) and disk recovery to transfer everything and make it into a boot drive. The performance increase is absolutely dramatic. Here is a screen shot of disk performance before the tweak:

And here is the performance after:

The Akitio box has a 770 MBps limit (because it is also not Thuderbolt 2.0) and I am easily hitting that limit. The second SSD is clearly an overkill. 

My rejuvenated iMac is lightning fast - 10X to 20X. Programs load very quickly, and it is dead quiet. It is by far the fastest computer I have.  

The old disk is still there and bootable. I sync everything with Dropbox so if my SSDs die I am back up and running in no time.  

My setup a bit too much but if you don’t need 2TB of storage, you can give a huge boot to your old Mac (of any kind) just for about a hundred bucks.

When my kids needed a computer, I dutifully got an iMac which now proudly sits in our kitchen. What I did not consider is how my kids would use it. The $2,000 iMac is simply a glorified web browser. My younger one uses Photo Booth for fun occasionally, the older likes Garage Band but 99% of their use is Chrome. 

So I decided to look into the Chrome Box - like this one from Asus - pretty powerful and very cheap. HP, Acer, Dell and others make similar ones all around $175. I like the Asus because it comes with a VESA mount (and has no CPU fan).  All run Chrome OS, which is a proprietary Linux distro that is basically a browser and nothing else. 

There is also a new genre of Win 8 machines like the HP Stream Mini a not so powerful windows computer. It runs Win 8.1.

I have been using the Asus Chrome Box as my desktop  now for almost a month. I rigged my iMac to just be the screen. In the beginning I was switching back and forth between ChromeOS and iOS but it is happening less and less. I have been weaned out anything Microsoft a while back so there is nothing much I miss anymore. Considering my previous PC purchase, this is interesting! 

Next in my program, is to hack this thing and see what else I can do with it.

We are proud to announce that our portfolio company Pixie has just released their first product - Pixie Points - to showcase their new tech platform they call "Location of Things". Pixie Points are super duper, location aware, self organizing tags. The product is the culmination of a lot of hard engineering work, many PhD's, experts in communication theory and algorithms, battery technology and manufacturing... The Pixie Points are sold in kits of 4 and come with a companion application for your iPhone or Android device.

It is also a product just for me! These tags are really small and you can attach them to anything: your wallet, your cell phone, your passport, a pair of pliers, your cat, your kids... It comes with a nifty augmented reality application that then shows you where everything is - exactly. So no more "..where are my keys?", or "...have you seen my cell phone?", or your kid crying because she can't find her iPad before you all get in the car for a long trip (as was the case last weekend).

These are the Pixie Points. They are about the size of a quarter and come in different colors. The process of associating a Pixie Point with a specific color to a "thing", is very cool.

We are delighted to announce our seed investment in Colu with our friends at Aleph in Tel Aviv. Colu is building software to use bitcoin as rails for digital and physical transactions.

This is the first time we are dipping our toes into the bitcoin universe. We are believers in the power of a decentralized digital currency, as well as its potential to disrupt the transaction and settlement networks currently in place.

More importantly, we are delighted to have the chance to work with Dudu and Amos again. Although, I am looking forward to being part of their new adventure, they will sure be missed at eToro.

Here is more on the company from the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday we announced our new venture growth fund and Jeremy Phillips as our newest member to lead our growth team. We are ecstatic to have Jeremy on board. We had known him for many years, first as a colleague then as a friend. We tried to recruit him unsuccessfully a number of times – that is until very recently - when we finally had to resort to threats. We stand to gain a lot from his experience and we all look forward to working with him for many years to come. We have been quite reflective over the last few months as we approach our tenth anniversary. We started with a small team of 5, and grew to a team of 17 in multiple locations. We witnessed 4 weddings, 14 babies and fortunately no funerals. We have had colleagues turn COE's and hedge fund managers. But most importantly, we have had the honor of meeting countless amazing entrepreneurs with big dreams and the good fortune of investing in over 100 companies. This growth fund is a huge step for all of us at Spark. It is a new strategic direction that we believe will help us evolve with the ever-changing landscape in venture investing as we brace for the next 10 years.