The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#327 – 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.

Comments

  1. These silver spoon stories make my hard earned self education worth while. I will never have the satisfaction of developing such a comfortable ego or a fraction of the guest’s success but please let my comment remain for all those girls and boys out there who learn things the hard way, get no high fives, are disgusted by the older culture who ignores the amazing accomplishments that their peers accomplished while feeling like the gal on compass after having it handed to her on a gold plated bench. To my sisters and brothers out there who fight to earn your knowledge and experience, let this world destroy itself and continue to create out of passion. Our time will come.