🏳️🌈 Pronouns: he/him
I'm a Partner at Root Ventures (GitHub) in San Francisco focused on investing in Seed-stage companies working on what I call hard software - tools and services for developers, data scientists & engineers, other technical roles, and tools to give non-technical folks those superpowers; as well as startups where AI & machine learning are the core technology. I love working with software engineers of all kinds. If your founding team are great engineers, and that's a good thing, because you're going to need it for what you're building - we'd love to talk to you.
I built our fun little website: here
- We invest in hard tech (What does that mean?)
- ...at the seed stage (or pre-seed, or post-seed.)
- I often ask these questions before investing.
- This is how I think about the developer tools and gamedev tools industries.
🤖 unannounced AI-related workflow automation company
📊 unannounced awesome collaborative tool for analysts
📈 unannounced awesome SaaS product for software creators company
⚙️ unannounced awesome tool for data scientists and machine learning engineers
🧠 Adept is building useful general intelligence. Founded by alumni executives from Open AI and Google Brain, as prolific researchers and authors of the most important papers in transformers and other areas of deep learning, Adept will take a customer-first rather than research-first approach to general intelligence.
📷 Aperture Data manages images and videos with a database purpose-built for data science and machine learning. The way that graph databses treat graph data, by creating higher level abstractions for storage and queries. Aperture stores your images and videos alongside metadata like labels and allows for custom models to be used in queries. This allows developers and data scientists to ask the database for e.g. all the images with cats, or other questions that exist in the conceptual domain of visual data.
🔐 SuperTokens (Docs) is the extensible and fully-customizable Open Source user authentication solution that is cross-method, cross-platform, cross-framework, and cross-language. SuperTokens offers both a hosted and self-hosted solution and supports every major language and framework on both the backend and frontend and supports passwords, passwordless, and most major OAuth 2.0 providers. Unlike many alternatives, SuperTokens is deeply integrated with your code, making the look, feel, and behavior native and fully customizable.
👤 Privacy Dynamics (Docs, Memo)gives developers best-in-class data privacy practices by default. Today, it integrates seemlessly with your data warehouse. Using cutting edge data privacy techniques combined with your input and specified requirements, Privacy Dynamics creates safe versions of sensitive tables for everyday use, as well as comprehensive privacy reports that can be used to guarantee compliance with the large number of disparate data privacy regulations around the world that now cover more than 3/4 of the world's population.
📝 Zed is the real-time multiplayer collaborative text editor, written in Rust, so it's multi-threaded, blazing fast, and desktop-native. The team comes from GitHub (Atom and Electron,) and authored the best Rust desktop UI framework (released soon,) and the tree-sitter parsing library. Coming soon!
👨🚀 IaSql (GitHub, Docs, Blog, Community) is a next-generation way to configure and deploy software that builds and improves on the concept of infrastructure as code with stateful infrastructure configuration. IaSQL creates tables for available cloud infrastructure types and allows team to provision them with SQL. This brings a lot of advantages along with it. Powerful permissions that can be broad or very granular, the ability for analyze and audit infrastructure use, and the ability to script not only the provisioning of infrastructure, but querying its state programmtically.
🐙 Okteto (GitHub, Docs, Memo) is Heroku review apps for every cloud, every language, every architecture. Okteto is Kubernetes-native, but your app doesn't have to be. It creates ephemeral, high fidelity replicas of production for your development workflow, pull request, QA deploy, or sales environment.
🌊 Meroxa (GitHub, Docs, Memo) is the easy button for data engineering. The first suite of products builds real-time data streams between data sources like relational databases and data sinks like enterprise data warehouses. Meroxa's user experience is heavily inspired by Heroku, where Co-Founder/CEO DeVaris Brown was Director of Developer Experience (DX).
⚡ Great Expectations (GitHub, Docs, Memo) maintains the popular Open Source project Great Expectations, which provides a suite of unit test-like expectations and a test runner to help data teams build robust data ecosystems and pay down pipeline debt.
#️⃣ HASH (GitHub, Docs) is a web-based service for building models and simulations, particularly agent-based models and simulations that draws some inspiration from Glitch (HASH's Chairman is Glitch founder Joel Spolsky). Some great examples here: COVID-19.
👾 Esper (GitHub, Docs, Memo) provides a suite of tools to help build and maintain enterprise Android devices at the edge with a modern devops approach. The Esper platform includes an Android Studio plugin, command line tools, API client libraries, and an enterprise-focused Android-based operating system, cloud services such as logging, deployment, update, device provisioning, APM, abd remote login.
📅 Daily (GitHub, Docs) is the only single-line API to robust video chat, using the Open Source WebRTC protocol for P2P E2E encypted live video chat. It's used by companies like Tandem, Screen, and Focusmate, and Standuply. I have two side projects using Daily, Meet and Roulette.
- Privacy Dynamics (2021)
- Okteto (2020)
- Meroxa (2020)
- Daily (2019)
- Superconductive (2019)
- Esper (2018)
A few highlights
- Breaking orthodoxies in venture capital - Sar Haribhakti
- My contrarian opinions about devtools
- Building our own video conferencing solution with daily.co
- Floors and ceilings
- What is hard software
- If you learn these 3 things, you can make anything
- Developer tools are enterprise software
- Developer tools are consumer software
- Hard tech
A pretty good way to get to know how I think about the world of software.
- Seeding Bold Engineers - Software Engineering Daily
- Data Nerd Herd - Investing in Hard Tech Startups
- #thisisnotadvice Day 211
- CTO Connection - How to pick the right startup [video, podcast]
- VC Hunting - My First Year at Root
- Corecursive - Investing in Open Source
- Sand Hill Road - Financing Hard Tech
- Disruptive Innovation - Hard Tech Startups
- Village Global - Hard Tech w/ Trae Vasallo
- Neoliberal Podcast - What is Venture Capital?
I still code for fun. A lot of my projects are kind of silly and maybe a bit overly contrived. I'll often choose a technology just to try to learn it, but I still love coding and always do a company's Hello World before investing.
- our video conferencing software at Root Ventures, which I called Meet, I think before Google (or at least before I'd heard of Google Meet). Built with the Daily.co API, written about here.
- a Chat Roulette clone built with the Daily.co API.
- we have a mobile web app that lets us manage our Root Ventures office party drink list called rebar. It uses Dark on the backend.
- I built my blog, lee.af backend on self-hosted headless Ghost, hosted on Heroku (Code), and front-end as a React single-page app using create-react-app (Code) with a modified ghostium theme (Code).
- I used to be a competitive Star Wars CCG player and I used the concept of a two-player card table to test out just about every client-to-client sync library out there. That's Asteroid, Skyhopper, Twin-Ion