The Amp Hour

An Interview with Avidan Ross

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Welcome, Avidan Ross of Root ventures!

  • Root is a seed stage fund concentrating on hardware in 3 categories:
    • Low cost robotics
    • picks and shovels
    • Supplychain mfg / logistics
    • Some of the portfolio companies our audience might recognize:
      • Particle
      • Shaper (nee Taktia) - Former guest Jeremy Blum now works there and former guest Nadya Peek talked about her friend founding the company.
      • Instrumental - consumer electronics / yield tools. Wrote last week about the Note 7 fires.
      • The stages of funding
        • Seed - build initial product, find product fit
        • Series A - Trying to scale and grow (might have sold $1M, want to sell $10M)
        • Other series - > proven, VCs trying to get a piece of the lower risk pie
        • Series B is almost always done with an excel spreadsheet
        • Hardware is the "Triple black diamond" of the startup world
        • Avidan's background:
          • Start building modems
          • Was the CTO at a energy/hardware investment company
          • "Capital efficient hardware" was the trigger and he started the fund about 6 years ago
          • Avidan gave a talk at the Hackaday Supercon about food hacking
          • The Root Venture fund raised $31,415,926.53 fund.
          • Avidan weighs in on the June oven and Juicero. Dave talks about Paul Reynolds blog about it.
          • Avidan studied glassblowing at the Sydney college of the arts. Later traveled to Instanbul, Sweden to study.
          • Patents are good for the defensive case, but the open source model isn't necessarily a great solution.
          • Particle example - open source hardware, fleet management web software is
          • Steven Levy interviewed Eric from Pebble.
          • 1/3 of companies in Root are consumer, rest are B2B / industrial
          • Arcam, bought by GE
          • 3 ways for Root to exit
            • Company goes public
            • Company gets bought
            • Root.vc can sell part of their share (sold on the secondary market)
            • HAX, Bolt, Lemnos, Highway 1
            • Reach them on Twitter! @RootVC, @AvidanRoss, @Kane
            • Also check out Kane's account @MachinePix for awesome animated GIFs.
              • ...more
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