🏳️🌈 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?)
- leading or co-leading seed rounds (or pre-seed, or post-seed.)
- This is how I think about the developer tools and gamedev tools industries.
📷 unannounced awesome computer vision developer tools company
🔐 unannounced awesome developer API company
👤 unannounced awesome data privacy company
📝 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!
👨🚀 Alan Technologies (GitHub, Docs, Blog, Community) makes the Open Source programming language Alan, the first language designed from the ground up to support distributed systems programming effortlessly. Due to its unique language design, the Alan runtime is able to estimate each instruction's execution time from the DAG, and whether a given operation will run more efficiently locally or seamlessly across its distributed backend. Like Rust does for threads, the Alan language enforces distributed systems safety at the language design and compiler level. I did the first week of Advent of Code 2020 with Alan, which you can see here. (And I helped with two issues in the compiler!)
🐙 Okteto (GitHub, Docs) 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).
⚡ Superconductive (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.
I write investment memos for the companies I work with. Here are a few highlights: You can find the rest in the Root Ventures GitHub org and my personal GitHub
A few highlights
- 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.
- 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. But the backend was built on a now-defunct startup. So. It's just the front end now...
- I built my blog, ledwards.com 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).
- But then I abandonded it and just use Jekyll with GitHub Pages (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