CRV

And thank you.

Yeah, our major investors are Amplify, CRV, and Heavybit, which are investors I've known for many years and stepped up quickly and enthusiastically to get around together.

They

were with you on the task, although you at least come across them prior or?

Amplify weren't, but I've known them for many years.

But CRV and Heavybit were both with us for Tailscale and wanted to get in again, which I'm very grateful for.

No, I

mean, you're becoming a serial entrepreneur.

Like, you know, I had, you know, basically it was the two of us for the first year issue of the business.

And then when we did our seed round, I remember having a pretty frank conversation with my kind of partner there and Caitlin at CRV and was like hey look like I think I got a it's a different team that's required now to like go from a handful of sensors that we're building ourselves like actually scaling and build a real business here and so I need a different caliber of folks and you know we have more money now so we can go get them and so reset basically went back to like just me.

and then went out and like you know got my kind of cto and got uh you know an r&d engineer that ended up becoming kind of our head of research and um got like our kind of all these people that uh they have quote titles now they were just engineers or like members of technical staff back then um but like all just maybe four or five people that would become kind of the founding team and all of it was really network driven and really uh people that i kind of met along the way that it was a hey not right now but like maybe later kind of thing um and so again same i'll say this like 20 times but like life's a very long game and so even the hires are rejecting me i was like cool you know what that's totally fine well you know why don't we just catch up every couple months and we'll figure it out and yeah long-winded answer of saying you know i think that i think that your friend is right i think that there is like really awesomeness that happens when they feel like hey we're joining something and we have like direct line to like the founder and like we're familial in that way of like we can tell them how we feel and what we want and like it's going right to the decision maker and i think there is like an issue sometimes where there's always ego because there is a fundamental difference between the ceo co-founder and everybody all the other co-founders and i think that that can like spark some weirdness where uh you know and cause barriers to hire good people sometimes or friction in the company

Now you've raised a whole bunch of money over a couple of rounds now.

You have sort of strategic investors, you have more traditional sort of VC investors like CRV.

I'd love it if you could just share a little bit about sort of One, how you've thought about fundraising.

I know that things have changed pretty significantly in terms of how people fundraise over the last couple of years.

One was a group called Y Combinator that was just getting started in the Bay Area that was doing sort of early-stage checks in very early companies and sort of trying to mentor them.

And another was Charles River Ventures that was doing a program called Quick Start that I had seen.

They were writing $100,000 checks after a 20-minute meeting.

That's it.

They raised $144 million total.

Their backers include CRV, First Round, NVIDIA, and Amazon and others.

It seems like they are currently trying to raise at a 600 billion valuation.

But what's interesting about them is that this week they released a new foundation model with a pretty bold claim, which is that they trained it on 1 million hours of human video data.