Scott Hartley's Blog, page 3
February 23, 2016
Palantir Acquires Kimono Labs
Excited to announce that Palantir Technologies acquired Kimono Labs on February 15th. Palantir is a data analytics platform that is widely used across the business and intelligence community. It is backed by over $2.5 billion in venture capital at a 2016 valuation of over $20 billion. For more information on the acquisition and next steps for the Kimono Labs team:
The full investor list, including Founders Fund, Cowboy Ventures, Facebook co-founder Adam D'Angelo, Y C...
January 7, 2016
Time: The Original "Quantified Self"
In Nicholas Carr's Pulitzer Prize-finalist book "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains," he refers to another book by David Landes called "Revolution in Time." Landes talks about how the history of timekeeping began to influence human behavior. Bells sounded to wake us up, to start work days, to open and close gates and markets, and many other things. As the costs of keeping time came down, the clock went personal. Everyone had one. This became, as Landes wrote, an "ever-visi...
December 11, 2015
WY "SAY" IWYG... What you say is what you get
Steve Jobs famously created the "What you see is what you get" interface, taking users from command lines and black terminal screens to visual interfaces with fonts, colors, and the ability to manipulate programming by point-and-click mice. It was a radical departure from the then-status quo, and it changed the face of human computer interaction.
Today we are on the cusp of the next version of human computer interaction. Today, however, it's not the point-and-click visual interface, it's the s...
July 1, 2015
Spire Raises $40 million Series B
This weekSpire Global announced that it has raised a $40 million Series B investment, bringing the total raised by the three-year old startup to ~$80million. Spire will now begin to more aggressively commercialize its nano-satellite constellation, putting 100 nano-sats into Low-Earth Orbit by 2017. These remote sensing satellites will power a big data company that seeks to revolutionize how commercial weather data is collected using GPS-RO, the frequency with which ships and assets are tracke...
May 31, 2015
Metamorphic Ventures
I'm excited to announce that over the coming months I will be working closely with the Metamorphic Ventures team, and their amazing set of portfolio companies. I'll be focused on supporting new investments and diligence, and as an Operator-in-Residence, I'll also be working closely with a number of the portfolio companies around the world. Metamorphic is a $70 millionseed and early stage venture capital firm based in New York City focused on great entrepreneurs, big ideas predicated on techno...
May 21, 2015
Event-Driven PR & Narrative Capital
Last August I spent an evening at the Supreme Court at an event honoring Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Between suits and small talk amongst other Presidential Innovation Fellows from the White House, I approached the bar and a contributor to Fast Company, and before finishing a glass of Sauvignon Blanc I placed three articles about companies I worked with.
Narrative is a form of capital, and I knew the stories of the founders I invest in and work with. Story isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a must have...
February 18, 2015
The Rise of Pretailing
In 2012 I wrote a Forbes article entitled "Pre-Tail, E-Tail, to Retail: The New Commerce Pipeline," in which I highlighted trends around online platforms allowing merchants to test consumer demand prior to large-scale manufacturing. Companies like Quirky, Kickstarter, ModaOperandi, and others allowmanufacturers, big-box and long-tail, to pre-test demand through pre-sales. I called this part of the commerce pipeline the "Pre-Tailing" that came before online retailing, knownas "E-Tailing," and...
February 4, 2015
Klink Acquired by ThinkingPhones
Today we are incredibly excited to announce that Klink has been acquired by ThinkingPhones, one of the fastest growing companies in Boston, and backed by nearly $90 million in venture capital from Bessemer Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). Although we have smart phones in our pockets, our desktop enterprise phone systems remain largely disconnected from our needs and our workflows. When we receive a call we don't know who it is. When we need information, we have to go hunt for...
