GPS was invented by the Department of Defense nearly fifty years ago. In the pursuing five decades, it’s found its way into nearly every facet of life, from the directions you follow and the plane on which you fly to the food you order and the groceries you purchase.

Yet in those fifty years, the technology has failed to advance to a place where it can be used for the interconnected and autonomous age. GPS in cars and phones is accurate only to a few meters (or worse, if supporting systems like cellular, bluetooth, and wifi are unavailable) and autonomous vehicles need positioning service that works to the foot or inches in busy conditions. Enter in any kind of environmental factor that might limit LiDAR or computer vision and positioning services become even more important.

That’s the kind of problem Brian Manning, Tyler Reid, and their fellow cofounders set out to solve in building Xona Space Systems, a cubesat technology company developing precision and navigation for the autonomous age. Brian and Tyler both grew up in regions with blinding blizzards and quickly realized at SpaceX and Ford (respectively) that if we want to enter an era of autonomous vehicles, somebody must develop a better, more accurate technology than GPS.

Since setting out to launch Xona last year, the team has grown to 10 rocket scientists from Blue Origin, Loral Space Systems, SpaceX, and Pumpkin Space Systems. Xona is already working on commercial applications of their Xona Pulsar technology and is preparing for orbital tests in coming years.

At 1517 Fund, we’re always looking to partner with teams that are working on big leaps in technological progress and the Xona Team is doing exactly that. Some thinkers, like economist Mariana Mazzucato, point to government agencies as being the driving forces behind innovation, with GPS being the prime example. The Department of Defense did make a huge leap in developing GPS for the modern world — but it’s time to build something better.

We’re excited to support Xona in doing exactly that.

Announcing 1517 Fund Investment: Xona Space Systems was originally published in Subversion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every now and then, we get questions about how to get a job working in tech investing and venture capital. Instead of just ignoring the person or telling them that we’re not currently hiring, we want to give constructive feedback on their job search.

We’ve generally found that very few students know how to effectively ask for a job that other people want. This is a skill best learned through trial-and-error and candid feedback.

Here’s what Zak, who wrote the response, said:

— — — — — —

…

Cold inquiries are a great way to go about searching for a job when they’re done right. I spent years teaching people how to do this, so don’t take this the wrong way — it can take some time to learn.

First, you don’t need to follow up on every medium immediately. Generally speaking, I encourage people to follow up via email or LinkedIn (if email is unavailable), 72 business hours later if you’ve received no reply. I cover in my email course what a lack of a reply on a first message can mean and how you can craft an appropriate follow up.

I also encourage people to be cautious about texting people directly if they’ve never had previous contact with them. Generally speaking, texting is a good way of getting in touch with somebody if they include their mobile number in their email signatures (or openly say elsewhere that somebody can text them). But if they don’t do that, then it can cross some social norms that people can be iffy about.

And if you’re going to hit up multiple team members, don’t use the same message for each one. That looks spammy. Tell people where you got their info, why you’re reaching out, give them reason or evidence to reply, and then make it ridiculously easy for them to reply.

Second, and this goes more towards the content of a good outreach pitch for landing a job, you’ll want to craft your pitch in a way that it is 1) compelling to the recipient firm and 2) unique to that firm. If your pitch can be sent to 10 firms with you just changing the name of the firm every time, it’s going to look like spam and generally get a lower response rate. A better approach would be to craft a specific why this firm in your outreach.

An even better approach would be to tell them exactly why them and what you could do for them. Put together a proposal and run them through how you can be helpful. I have an alum of my email course who did this quite well and landed a number of job interviews along the way.

Telling somebody, “I want to work for you” is only as good as the reasons you give them. If you show them that you can identify value that they need created and can create it, you take a lot of that work off of their plate. Loom is a good tool for walking people through what you can create.

Third and finally, do a lot of research on every firm you reach out to. That should be wrapped into point #2 as you put together value propositions, but you’ll want to know the team’s thesis, their fund size, their stage of investment, their last fund raised, etc. The fund size and number of funds determines how many people they can hire and how quickly they can hire. The thesis will tell you more about what they consider interesting.

For example, we have a very specific thesis that we can always tell when somebody has read over it and understood it before they reached out. We’re also a pre-seed fund, so experience in business school financial modeling classes just isn’t particularly relevant to us. There just isn’t that much data when we make investments.

So, for example, if you want to specialize in doing luxury investments and use your undergrad classes, find firms that do investments in the luxury space at or after the series A.

You can do this through research on Crunchbase. Find a few companies that are venture funded at the growth stage in the luxury sector, look at their investors, and find similar investors. Research all of those investors, put together value propositions, and cold email the partners and principals at those companies. Even better, find funds in this category that you know recently closed a new fund. That means that they have new management fees to hire folks.

I hope that’s helpful for your job hunt and you can use it to land a position at the right kind of firm!

Cheers,

Zak

How to Stand Out When Asking for a Job was originally published in Subversion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lisette’s tips were incredibly helpful, very thoughtful, and novel. Working from home and remote video meetings need to be treated as their own art form. You can’t just take a regular meeting, put it online, and expect in-person results.

She tells us how to make online meetings engaging, fun, and how to set the right tone and mood. Check out her super kit to get started with some actionable tools.

Lead a happy, healthy, and productive work from home life. Watch her presentation and Q/A in this Zoom link. We learned a lot and feel reinvigorated that online meetings could maybe even become better than in person with the right mindset and tools.

On Monday, March 16th, we announced 1517 would be offering our $1k grants to teams working on ideas to mitigate the effects of the current crisis. We’ve received over sixty submissions through our website form, plus a number of direct emails, all with the help of groups such as the Covid Accelerator. If you’re a startup that needs more funding, checkout what our friends at SOSV are doing, Emergent Ventures are offering $1M in prizes for COVID projects, MarsBio has a call out for proposals, as does the Gates Foundation. To give a sense of what we have supported, here are some of the new grantees since our announcement:

Critical Technologies is innovating on mask technologies. Recently it was reported that over 2,000 healthcare workers were infected with the virus in Italy, many of whom were wearing N95 face masks. We’ve assembled a team of the nations top aerosol researchers, mask design patent holders and executives of venture-scale technology companies to solve this problem. We have designed a face mask seal that has been scientifically tested and proven 5X more effective than traditional N95 masks in stopping viral particles. This face mask seal when added to a traditional face mask will help save countless lives. Join our mission to protect healthcare workers during this epidemic!

Corona CareCard is making a way for people to support local businesses during the Coronavirus outbreak by buying gift cards and sending cash gifts. Corona CareCard allows any local business to easily sell gift cards to and accept cash gifts from its loyal customers.

C19.DK (English language available as well)is building an open source SMS-based self-reporting tool for the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. We text a daily self-assessment to users both with and without symptoms, and ask for their status. We use the data to predict local ICU needs, 5–10 days in advance. We have >25,000 signups, and are putting a pilot live in Denmark, pending gov approval. We have teams rolling the tool out in South Africa and Guinea-Bissau as well.

Mask Match is a peer-to-peer platform helping people with spare N95 masks send them directly to healthcare workers on the front lines who need them. Many hospitals have had to limit the number of masks healthcare workers can use because there isn’t enough. Many are forced to go without due to lack of supply. While factories are rushing to produce more, getting masks to people will take too much time that many healthcare workers don’t have. Support Mask Match through Go Fund Me here.

Indie Lab is a community research lab looking to receive support for COVID-19 data collection and testing. We have organized a team of fifteen in Richmond, Virginia to begin building ventilators and oxygen generators, to collect and test for COVID-19, and to organize educational materials about the virus and current statuses of regional testing.

COVID-19 Risk is a team building an open-source app to combat COVID-19. They will use crowdsourced GPS and Bluetooth data to give people individualized notifications about their risk by developing a heatmap and making a contact-tracing record. Their goal is to do this in a privacy-preserving, anonymous way.

COVID-19 API is a free API that allows organizations, individuals, and companies to access up-to-date information and data on the spread of the coronavirus.

Verbier Task Force is a grassroots initiative to coordinate healthy villagers in Verbier, Switzerland to get supplies, pharmaceuticals, and groceries to older and infirm villagers.

Spira is a telemedicine AI diagnostic tool built by two 16-year-old University of Washington students. They plan on adding diagnostic data for the coronavirus over the coming weeks to help medical professionals triage patients with respiratory conditions.

QualTime is building a platform that enables simultaneous game playing and video chat to help mitigate the effects of isolation and help families stay connected during this time.

Joy Buchanan and Lenny Bogdonoff are creating an easy way for people to self-report fever and cough symptoms on a daily basis. The data collected will be open source and could help identify what regions or cities are experiencing an uptick in symptoms among their populous to help them better prepare.

Sofiane Larbi created Tracery is an app to help track the spread of coronavirus and mitigate its spread. Tracery uses a QR code handshake system to record interactions such as going into a supermarket or taking public transportation. This way, when someone is confirmed coronavirus positive, places they’ve been and people around them are immediately notified and told to sanitize. This will decrease the time it takes to isolate a breakout from hours to seconds. Tracery is developed with flutter and will launch on iOS, Android, and web. (this grantee pivoted from what we gave him a grant for a month ago to do this)

Flowly is a mobile app for pain and anxiety management, cofounded by Celine Tien. Flowly immerses you in 360 degrees and virtual reality worlds that train you to relax and regulate your nervous system to better manage pain, stress, and anxiety. The company is proud to partner with GlobalGiving to provide critical relief efforts for COVID-19. Flowly will allocate $0.50 for every and any session completed towards COVID-19 relief funds, helping send doctors and nurses to affected communities, supply masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies to hospitals, and deliver essential items to families and children in need.

CoronaSupport Canada is helping Canadians navigate government relief programs and get the financial aid they need during the COVID-19 pandemic. Simply answer a few quick questions, and CoronaSupport.ca (website up soon!) will match you with the right support programs. Giving you the confidence to get through this difficult time.

To mitigate the effects of COVID-19, Usit, On-demand University sitters, is prioritizing on-demand in-person child care for healthcare workers during school closures and launching virtual child care for work from home parents. This allows their vetted student workers to continue making an income while allowing parents to continue working without the issue of child care and school closures.

Michael Chapiro is building CopperCoater to commercialize spray-on copper coating. Copper has an anti-viral property that makes it hard for viruses to stay active on copper surfaces as long as they would on other surfaces. Spray-on provides a solution that is less costly and far faster to deploy than replacing high-touch surfaces with solid copper alloys.

Caleb Kumar has developed a software-based coronavirus screening tool. The algorithm for screening is described by Caleb’s patent, “Apparatus and Method for Automated Cell Analysis” that can be viewed here. The goal of this screening tool is to quickly and accurately identify coronavirus cases before the disease progresses. Faster screening leads to faster treatment, which saves lives.

ACOMERPR is providing at-risk geriatric communities & earthquake victim camps throughout PR with access to food & medical resources that they would otherwise have no way of acquiring in the wake of the COVID-19 Crisis. They are coordinating with able-bodied volunteers & existing supply chains to provide critical goods to these isolated & in-need communities.

Open Source Medical Supplies is driven by the mission of accurately documenting COVID-19 and its treatment; provide transparent, accurate, layman-accessible, medically-reviewed requirements for supply design; and provide open-source designs for supplies that meet those requirements, in order to allow local manufacturers and makers to provide vetted supplies directly to their hospitals.

HandyVent is a ventilator that can be built with off the shelf parts anywhere in the world. No special tools are needed, so no one needs to be left behind if a big manufacturer can’t prioritize them.

We are still accepting submissions and you can apply here.

1517 Companies

In addition to our grants, some of our portfolio companies are helping as they can by offering discounts and free versions of their services. Here are the deals below:

Get Aura, a meditation and coaching app, for free for 3 months by using the code: “FINDPEACE2020” at aurahealth.io/redeem. No credit card required.

Loom, an asynchronous video tool, is offering free accounts to students and teachers. A Berkeley professor is teaching 2500 students using Loom.

Grow fresh greens at home using Hamama. They are offering 3 grow trays for free (so you can grow multiple greens) with 36 seed quits for $150.

Our team at Spira is working on creating a contained environment in Los Angeles for dispensing, confirmation, and disposal of used test kits.

One of the biggest takeaways is to view this time as a way to reset how you want your family to interact. You’re a team, going through a tough and unusual time. Be more focused on staying calm and happy at home as the foundation that learning will take place in over time.

You can view a replay of our hour workshop below, as well as access the chat log with some great resources:

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

Our panelists:

Danielle has worked in education for 20 years. In 2003, she started working with homeschoolers and started a charter school based on those concepts. She started the Thiel Fellowship and 1517 Fund. “We homeschool CEOs.”

Danielle Strachman

Lisa has two children (21 and 15), both were independently educated. Cofounder of a Bay Area group that supports kids outside of brick-and-mortar schools. She also started the “Learning at Home in Crisis” facebook group for parents and families homeschooling and co-learning during the COVID19 crisis.

Lisa Betts-LaCroix

Pavhi is a homeschooler with two older siblings. She is 12 years old.

Michael started as a classroom teacher in Houston, TX. He got involved in the education technology space in 2008. He’s founded and advised several companies involved in helping families get through self-education. He’s now the founder of Colearn Club.

Michael Staton

Tiersa is a homeschool parent who has 4 children, ages 4–12. They are unschoolers. She thinks parents should relax and use this time to get to know their children.

Mother Bae I

Pavhi is a 12 year old who has homeschooled her entire life. She is a top-selling Girl Scout Cookie entrepreneur, and expert slime maker who enjoys chatting with friends, taking her stuffed goat on adventures, and exploring new ways to be creative.

Q: Give us a sense of a day in the life of your family. How do you think about homeschooling? How much structure is there?

Tiersa: what unschooling looks like differs based on which child you ask. Her oldest child has a very structured day that he’s put together. For her 12 year old, the days depend on what she’s interested in at that time. For her younger twins, it waxes and wanes. “Our learning just looks like regular life.”

Pavhi: wake up and get out first. Some days include school work, other days involve pursuing curiosities based on what she wants to learn that day, mostly out of books. When she isn’t doing that or pursuing her curiosities, she’s selling girl scout cookies.

Michael (what he’s seen since he hasn’t homeschooled himself): Generally speaking, one of the 21st century skills is to follow your passions and your ideas, to build on them, and build unique contributions to the world. A lot of independent learners or unschoolers are actually working on projects that do have a big impact on the world. Parents may face coordination challenges on getting children to hang out together, but they can coordinate with other parents in order to get that to happen. What he has seen is that unschoolers and homeschoolers have a better social life than children in compulsory schools. These relationships are often more organic and driven by intrinsic interests.

Lisa: hard to talk about “a day in the life” because it is different based on ages and she also just considers it “regular life.” In times of crisis, the biggest concern is how to balance structure and non-structure. Lisa uses a lot of startup team mentality and tools when it comes to her family and education. Some ideas to help impose structure: 1) start your day with a short family meeting (if children are theright age) to give everybody a chance to look over what you want to do for the day; a lot of the skills you learn at work can apply at home. 2) come back later in the day and do pomodoro sessions.

Pomodoro Technique - Wikipedia

Michael: kids going through school have often lost track of the ability to intrinsically focus on something. A pomodoro session helps re-develop the focus that a lot of children have had destroyed by the extrinsic motivations of the school system.

Tiersa: I had to tell my children, “I am not your manager. I am your consultant.” Tiersa isn’t here to micromanage her four children, she’s there as a support and guide.

Pavhi: I see my mom more as a peer than as a manager.

Resources discussed:

Instructional Design for Parents, Michael Stanton:

Instructional Design for Parents in the time of #COVID19

Colearn Club

Deep Work, by Cal Newport

A Mind for Numbers, by Barbara Oakley

Tools:

Resources for Educators During the Coronavirus Pandemic | Common Sense Education

Our panelists shared some of their favorite resources for learning at home:

• YouTube
• Pavhi likes Mom Hacks videos from Whats Up Moms channel
• DuoLingo — Language learning
• Wikipedia
• Google Developers
• Montikids — Montessori based play materials babies through three years old for the home.
• Outschool — online live classes for students 8–12 years old.

Michael: Screen-time and game time is not necessarily an automatic negative if children are equipped with the cognitive tools to monitor their own screen-time.

Q: How do you deal with the de-schooling period a lot of young adults and children have to go through after leaving school?

• Tiersa: a lot of kids when they get out of school spend the time doing things they didn’t get a chance to do before. Kids have this false dichotomy in their minds between “academic” and “fun.” Kids eventually get bored of goofing off — but deschooling takes a long time. For our family, that’s taken a few years. Even for parents! This can take at least a month for every year you’ve been in school. But it can take longer, too, especially if the parents schooled.
• Lisa: part of the challenge now is that we don’t know how long we’ll be out of school. But this can also be an opportunity. This will be either 3–4 weeks or 5 months. It’s looking more like 5 months. Parents and children should take advantage of this time to explore their own interests. Drop the concern about screen time, drop concerns about doing “school” work in the next few weeks.
• Kyle (a participant on the call who is a teacher who wants to provide students with an opportunity to explore their interests during the crisis): Students show up to school, go to classes, and are bored (in high school). They can and should use this opportunity learn what they want to learn! Not what they have to learn.
• Michael: the teacher’s job should be to energize. The teacher can play a role as “teacher as DJ” that allows them to get students energized and interested in what they have to learn. Teachers should take that upon themselves.

How do you feel about college and letting your children go to college?

• Lisa: Told kids they are not allowed to go to college unless they know why they are going. She got involved in UnCollege. She expected the system to collapse 8 years ago (but it may be going down now). One of her kids decided at 17 to go to school. The thing with the higher education bubble is that content doesn’t matter as much as community, curation, learning style, etc. People will begin to see that more over the next few month as they continue to get the content but miss out on any other elements that are normally delivered on the campus.
• Danielle: we’re seeing a lot of changes right now. COVID may be the impetus to actually really push that decoupling.

Why? Because hearing the sound and tone of your voice may save their life or the lives of those around them. Your family members who are 60+ and especially those without good health (this includes people who are overweight, which is a lot of Americans) or who are immune compromised are most at risk of death from coronavirus.

Ezra Klein on Twitter

Call your parents. Call older friends. Send long emails to people you love. Join an online book group. Be kind. We need to develop new pro-social behaviors in an age of social distancing, and to take responsibility for reaching out to the isolated. https://t.co/uo3X5PG8TY

I called my mom yesterday asking her about if she had at least two weeks worth of food. She assured me that she did, but when she went to the grocery store to get some extras, she was alarmed by the empty shelves and decided that she might do well to buy extra canned goods for her and her neighbors. She thanked me for calling her to check in last night and told me that it was the phone call that made her even make the trip to the store.

Zak had to stress to his family that people may be contagious even if they don’t show symptoms and that the numbers in the United States only reflect people who have been tested. Which isn’t that many. That’s why “wait until you’re sick to work from home” is bad advice right now.

Today during our Zoom standup, we talked about how our families and relatives are doing. Some have not been released to work from home, some are traveling, and some have gotten prepping done only in the last 48 hours.

If you need support talking to your parents or grandparents, these are great:

Erica Hauver on Twitter

LoveInTheTimeOfCoronavirus THREAD 1/ As I drove to my parents' home yesterday - trunk full of disinfectant, hand sanitizer, thermometer, nutritious meals for their freezer - I couldn't stop thinking about how our definition of "acts of love" needs to change during this crisis.

BuzzFeed News on Twitter

A lot of our parents and grandparents are convinced that, despite their age or health condition, they're not vulnerable to the risks of the coronavirus. Why are so many not listening - and how can we convince them to? https://t.co/t9YkDuvsKa

As a child of the 80s, I was brought up on the slogan “reach out and touch someone” — chuckle if you like, but now is the time to pick up the phone.

Please take the time to call your loved ones today. I’m off to call my uncle in his 80s.

Best,

Danielle

Here is a quantitative overview, scientific webinar (first 15 minutes are an overview), and video on how exponential growth and epidemics work, about the coronavirus crisis and the health effects on the world and global businesses.

People turn to leadership in times of crisis, if that means being a leader by taking your team remote, or helping your neighbors, or building resources for others to navigate this online, now is the time to step up.

What 1517 is doing differently for the time being:

We think limiting exposure is the right thing to do so all of us are taking work from home (WFH) meetings and have paused our activity in person on campuses. As a remote team this has not been a big change for us in procedure, but it means an increase in the frequency of WFH protocol. Coinbase has put out good guidelines if you need them for your company and the CDC has put out guidelines for your home. If it’s possible to work from home we recommend doing so and also recommend that individuals and families limit social contact if possible. We have been stepping up our phone, Zoom, and Loom calls and are accessible even while not on campus, so feel free to reach out to us as you normally would.

Since 1517 has historically traveled a lot as an organization, we are recommending that people stay put for the time being because international and domestic travel will likely be affected in ways that we can’t foresee right now. As of right now, it appears most travel, occupancy, and work restrictions are being delegated to the state, county, and local level. If you plan on doing any domestic travel over the next few weeks, please bookmark the proper local authorities’ announcement pages. This would include state and county health departments. Interstate travel is regulated by the federal government, but several governors have already requested the federal government limit domestic travel.

It may be that you are quarantined wherever you travel to, so be careful and prepare to stay if you must.

A dear friend has been working from home for over a decade and has some great resources here.

For co-learning check out this list of resources. Outschool has some great live online classes for children ages three to eighteen:

Outschool: Take small-group classes, from anywhere.

For children who are infants to three years old, you may want to check out:

Montessori Toys for Baby Learning & Development | Monti Kids

For remote work resources, Notion has released a wiki here:

Remote work wiki

We also recommend having essentials stocked at home and to be prepared to self-quarantine if need be or mandated for a few weeks at a time (we have heard one rumor through the grapevine that there could be a lockdown in US cities starting around March 23rd [and as early as March 16th in San Francisco] but announced up to a week early — you will not want to be in or near grocery stores in that week). In addition if you run events of more than a handful of people, we would recommend postponing them as we did for our social and math seminar at the end of the month in March.

And though we can’t medically recommend any protocols, some of us have upped our immune and viral boosters and of course wash your hands well (check out this how to) and get a good night’s sleep.

Some of the best updates are on Twitter. Balaji Srinivasan, Trevor Bedford, Nicholas Christakis, and a former head of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, have been posting insightful analysis and commentary, worth following.

1517 has a wide community of makers across the globe and we have been hearing from them about supply chain disruptions, fundraising delays, school closings, precautionary steps, and much more. We are very thankful to them for their on the ground information and tips. We have drafted this memo with their support and guidance.

Take Action:

Current Numbers: Avi Schiffmann, a 17-year-old in Seattle keeps up to date information at https://ncov2019.live/data. We reached out to him this week and gave him a 1517 grant and AWS credits to help him with his work.

We are accepting pitches for $1k grants on ideas related to the crisis.

Through Emergent Ventures, the economist Tyler Cowen is offering $1M in prizes for coverage of the crisis, for novel treatments, and other measures.

The LA-based fund MarsBio has put out a call for proposals to combat the virus. The Gates Foundation has announced a COVID19 Accelerator to fund and help teams working on vaccines and diagnostics.

Singularity University is having a two day online COVID19 event. We don’t know what their take is on the virus or recommendations, but it’s likely worth tuning in.

Want to contribute to potentially expanding testing? Check out this open source project.

Potential Trends:

It is still early, so the following thoughts will be speculative, but the crisis appears to be an accelerant along a few dimensions. One open question is which new behavioral patterns will stick once the threat of infection abates. For example, as schools close and parents homeschool their kids, will they choose to keep homeschooling after the crisis? Or will their children return to their schools? Will virtual Zoom meetings replace business travel more frequently?

The first great shift could turn into a solid push to decentralize in work, in education, in health care, in governance. US Federal bureaucracies have been caught flatfooted, bizarrely constraining the number of diagnostic tests and putting a brake on innovation in point of care testing. In a form of civil disobedience, some notable institutions — Stanford, the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and the Seattle Flu Study — invented new ways of testing on their own and have begun testing without permission from Federal authorities. We expect private teams and other institutions to continue to act around government hurdles as things get worse.

Remote work was already on its way to becoming more prevalent. The high costs of living and working in the Bay Area have pushed nascent companies to locate whole wings of their business in other states. Similarly, parents already have concerns about the quality and content of their children’s education. Perhaps a push to remote learning will hold and more families will take direction over their education into the further future. Most US universities, following Harvard and Princeton, have suspended in person lectures and seminars. All classes until the end of the semester are being held virtually. Might this too loosen up the gravitational pull of learning on campus? When we started the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, none of us could have predicted a pandemic potentially being the thing to take down higher education.

Beyond decentralization, the next big change could very well be a reversal of globalization. With the US trade war against China and the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, we saw a narrowing of economic and political channels over the last four years. This crisis may narrow them further. It would not be surprising to see more constraints on immigration and the movement of goods across borders. The bans on travel to the US from Asia and Europe might last longer than we think. 9/11 can serve as an analogy of sorts: the tragedy led to the creation of the TSA and the Iraq War. Will the US government overreact similarly now? Perhaps state-wide or whole city quarantines will lead to a permanent agency regulating commerce and movement across state lines, creating more friction where once things flowed freely.

Some sectors of the economy will struggle, such as air travel, live entertainment, and professional sports. The airline industry already expects this to be a bigger disruption than 9/11 — and 9/11 resulted in several bankruptcies and consolidations in the years following. (Although one contrarian 1517 community member is bullish on United and Delta Airlines’ stock, seeing a great bargain in the historically low price because the companies have the cash reserves to weather the storm plus an implicit government bailout.) At any rate, other sectors, such as health care and remote work tools, will see stronger demand in the months ahead. On the consumer side, expect the virtual world to boom. Less time out in the physical world means more time for streaming tv, playing video games, scrolling newsfeeds, attending digital conferences, and shopping on e-commerce.

To Raise or Not to Raise?

It is our mindset right now to continue the work we do supporting makers and hackers off the traditional educational path. We’ve made a number of investments in Fund I and new investments in Fund II that may actually be quite a help given the current state of the world.

Talking our own book, we recommend getting your nutrients from Hamama’s microgreens and using Loom to communicate with your friends, family, and colleagues.

• Free screen recorder for Mac and PC | Loom
• Start eating more greens today!

That said we also have some companies that will need to learn to weather the storm. We had reviews with all of our companies this past week and feel confident in them taking care of themselves, their employees, and their companies.

Many founders have asked us our current thinking on fundraising and to be honest, we don’t have a definitive answer yet. When we started 1517 in 2015 we learned that following the market is very important. We aren’t in a harbor sheltered from the waves as a small fund, it feels more like being in a rowboat out to sea to be very raw about it. We can’t say what this moment in history will mean for smaller sub $100M funds. The Series A funds and higher may be well-capitalized for the storm ahead. Pre-Series A capital, on the other hand, might have less institutional backing and therefore be more prone to the volatility in global markets. Early on, especially now, it’s time to do more with less.

Our sense is that venture groups up the stack will continue to deploy capital into good companies hitting their milestones. And in fact, venture may be a more worthwhile asset class given the volatility of the stock market.

Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2008 that may be quite pertinent now, but it’s also worth noting that individuals are in more debt now than in 2008 so consumer focused companies may be at extra risk.

One of our community members, Rachal Aliana, wrote a creative piece to respond to Sequoia’s briefing. We will reach out to Series A investors in the coming weeks to gauge their temperature on deals and pacing — such as Geoff Lewis at Bedrock. (Honestly, I can say that I never thought I’d see the day when Geoff would literally take his temperature on video on social media and encourage others to do it for the common good. Geoff has always been a great guy. Thank you!) It will be worth checking in to see if Series A investors keep their thresholds and benchmarks on KPIs the same.

We intend to keep deploying capital at our regular cadence of about one new portfolio company per month and continued grants to makers and hackers. While we will not be able to be on campus through this crisis, we are actively taking phone calls and video meetings.

Stay safe, healthy, and sane everyone! And please reach out to us if you need support. We are very proud of the community that we have built and are ready to call on each other for help, creative ideas, and ways to get through this together.

Danielle, Michael, Nick, and Zak

Last week Michael and I returned from a roadshow in Oklahoma visiting investors and founders in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We were last in OKC five years ago, and by all accounts it was a ghost town. I remember crossing a major street to a restaurant with zero other humans in sight — it was eerie. Last week it was vibrant with a lot more energy. When we first got to Tulsa, Michael immediately picked up on the hipster vibes and quirky nature of the city (for example, meet the Cashnip Kitty who has collected $7K for the homeless). Tulsa is rightly being compared to Austin from twenty years ago but what people are missing is that I think its entrepreneurial trajectory has the potential to take off much more quickly than outsiders suspect because of their community of founders, GPs, and LPs that strongly work together — we’re looking forward to collaborating more with this city. If you want to learn more about Tulsa, check out Tulsa Remote — they will pay you $10K to relocate there.

I’ve found that after traveling to other cities, the glow of the Bay gets dimmer and dimmer. Though Oklahoma was cold on certain days, its emotional texture was warmer and safer than the city that I call home. When I’m walking to meetings in San Francisco, I have to increase my situational awareness and rarely take out my phone. I’m only going three blocks to my next meeting, but my alert is on high.

When I turn into a building on 2nd street, I can drop my vigilance. Loom’s headquarters are located here. We backed the team four years ago when they were OpenTest and living and operating the company out of an apartment in San Mateo. They raised their Series B recently with Sequoia and we hadn’t yet seen the new and growing office.

As we exited the elevator, a medium sized black dog came to greet us, wagging his tail expectantly. I was happy to oblige with pets and took a seat on the sofa. Their office has character, plants everywhere, some brick inlays, lots of light and windows. But it’s the smaller touches that make more of an impact on me. In the waiting area “On Writing Well” stands out to me on their coffee table (an excellent read that everyone should review every few years) and a book on the psychological nature of founding a company.

As I look around, I see many more unfamiliar faces than familiar ones. And since they have a distributed team, they have a wall with Loom videos of their employees across the country. Sitting with Joe and Vinay, I’m particularly struck that this is a company now and not a founding team with a name. The character of Loom is more than the sum of its parts and if any one part were to walk away, the company would still exist. It’s an engine that has gained momentum. Loom exists independent of the founders now.

Loom is their mission to enhance workplace communication, it’s yearly company off-sites for goal setting, it’s the dog that greeted us in the foyer, it’s Andy who communicates the company’s investor updates, and Sharon who keeps the schedule moving smoothly.

The most awe-inspiring thing to me was talking to Vinay, cofounder and Head of Engineering for Loom. He has yet to take on the title of CTO because he understands that he is growing into the position and he wants to honor that. We’ve written before about how CEO and CTO are roles that founders grow into over time. Yes, you can call yourselves those things at the start, but you become those things by serving and becoming a leader to others. Vinay spoke about his one-on-ones that span from professional development to his team’s personal lives and how his most impactful day was when a team member shared a personal triumph that would have a lasting impact on their life. In a day and age when there is far too much bravado and not enough substance from leaders, I truly admire Vinay’s position.

I left Loom, ready to step out onto the streets of San Francisco, knowing that I caught a glimpse of the maturation process of something that few people get to witness — the birth of a company.

If you’re interested in the stories of our founders, we’re excited to announce Founders First, our new podcast featuring conversations with founders from our portfolio companies. Over the years, many in our community have asked for tips on getting started and for know-how on going zero to one-hundred real quick. We know our founders have great stories to tell, so we created Founders First as the place where you can hear from them directly for yourselves. I’ve learned so much and been inspired by our founder’s — have a listen!

Danielle

We spend a lot of time on campuses across North America building relationships with students and student entrepreneurship programs. One of the most frequent questions we are asked is about what young entrepreneurs need that differs from their more senior peers.

There are definitely differences, but the place I see the most differences are in teams that have been guided through university programs (this includes professors taking IP out of universities, so it’s not just about age) versus through other startup processes and hence through the market (customer feedback, good accelerators, angel investors, etc.).

We have been working with a university that is focused on bettering their programming for students and offered the following feedback. Upon writing it, I realized that it’s highly applicable to student entrepreneurs in general or those breaking tech out of universities.

~~

I thought it might be helpful to offer some high level general feedback, since we see these kinds of issues a lot with student teams and first time founders. Most everything below are critiques that we give to students quite regularly, so this isn’t specific to them so much as it’s a common trend.

Re: NDAs

I asked the founder about where they were at with building their product and he went into a spiel about needing to sign an NDA. I reminded him that I wasn’t asking him to share any special sauce, just where they are in developing their product (do they have a prototype?).

Generally early investors don’t sign NDAs since it just doesn’t make a ton of sense. I always tell students that it’s up to them to figure out how much they want to disclose and if someone is surfing into the deeper scientific discoveries in deep diligence than maybe it makes sense at that point to talk about NDAs but not typically before then.

Re: Customer Discovery

We’ve seen this with a lot of science/engineering heavy teams where they love to geek out on what they are building before they know who or what they are building it for. Sometimes burning a lot of precious time or money building something that it turns out that no one wants.

I urged the founder to set goals for his team to go into X number of facilities a week to talk about their product to get a better sense for if it would be of use. I told the founder that I would love for them to focus on this over the next few weeks and get back to me with their results/learnings and talk to the whole team. Often this is the area that teams avoid the most because it’s the most uncomfortable to do or they have a false notion that a sales team member will do this later on after the product is built.

Even at that stage, we find that sales team members might help to find leads but for the first couple of years, it’s the founder closing the deals (in part because having both passion and expertise for the product makes for a great sale).

Re: Student Competitions vs the Market

The founder mentioned being in a lot of student competitions. This is great for some early funding but can also skew the direction of the team because they are getting positive signals from a competition and therefore think that those signals will also be replicated in the market (we’ve also seen teams get lots of positive traction in competitions only to be let down when customers or investors don’t see a place for the product in the market, no matter how important or potentially impactful it could be, inevitably leading the company to shut down).

I told him to think about student competitions as a way to bring in resources but to know that it is vastly different than if he’s out there talking to customers which should be their number one focus — and after talking to customers and building toward a pilot with them, to then start talking to investors. Thinking that going through a student competition is the same as going to the market would be a bit like thinking that my time doing speech and debate in college made me ready for the court room. There are definite building blocks but they are just different playing fields.

Side note: I think speech and debate (LD all the way!) is one of the most useful skills out there and is one of the few things I use on a nearly daily basis as an investor.

Re: Patents

The founder mentioned working on their first provisional patent. One way we like to think about IP is that it’s for defending one’s territory once the territory has been defined. I’d hate for them to spend the money on a patent, and then figure out that they aren’t going to go to market with that piece.

Again, more customer discovery is really needed here. In our view, a patent is great for Series A and beyond to show ones novel IP, but as Michael on our team says “you’re not rich enough for justice.” If someone infringes on something when you’re a company getting off the ground.

Either way, I’d love to see them focus more on figuring out what they should build by talking to who would be a potential user/buyer.

Danielle

Student Entrepreneurship vs Entrepreneurship was originally published in Subversion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Founders go through lots of “firsts” and we’re starting a new series based on those learnings — this one is about office space. Our founders had a lot to say and we’ve distilled their write ups into some key areas.

What is your top one or two tips on picking/setting up an office space?

Don’t Overlook Layout

An office is more than just a place to meet and do some work. How your offices is set up influences who meets whom in the company, how people spend their time, and what visitors think.

Scott at Deepgram points out that you may want to put sales and engineering in different parts of the office, but if you do, they may never interact:

Consider growth (as much as 3x, after that, don’t plan for this office, find a _new_ one). Consider sales calls needing sound separation. If your office is long and skinny, you can put sales on one end and eng on the other, but then will they ever interact? Figure out if people want to have fun in the space/feel cozy or just line up as many desks as possible.

Gaetano at Cabin echoes this:

The seating chart is vital… but don’t over-optimize for people who naturally HAVE to work together being seated together. Those folks will find a way. Sometimes the people who SHOULD be talking and are not should be seated together. Sitting you head of eng next to your head of sales rather than each one in their respective kingdoms could lead to some fruitful trust building.

Who is visiting your office? You’ll want space set up so that different types of visitors can feel welcome without having to interrupt work (Scott at Deepgram, again):

Figure out if you would want investors to hang out at your office, they are _different_. Figure out if you want customers to hang out at your office, they are _different_ in other ways. Once you are over 3–4 people, you need a meeting room.

Alexander at Fluity suggests making it easy to change your office setup, especially if you have to run mock presentations or make room for plenty of people to meet in one place:

Mental and physical flexibility is key to a conductive office environment. We frequently rearrange our space to make room for staging trade-show setups, adapt to changes in space requirements for new R/D equipment, and most often just to get a change of scenery. To pull this off, we install heavy-duty (locking) castors on EVERYTHING in our office. It makes it a breeze to rearrange our thoughts and furniture.

Get Set Up Quickly

Once you’re in an office, it’s easy to trick yourself into easing into the space and setting up over the course of a few weeks. Don’t do this. Try to get as set up as you can when you have the energy.

Camille at Hamama:

My advice is to buy and assemble furniture right away while you still have adrenaline from the move. Otherwise you might sit on the floor for 6 weeks and your back will kill you!

Gaetano at Cabin agrees:

Get the furniture in and organize over the weekend before first day of work or else you’ll wake up 6 months later with a meeting room full of boxes. Have a zero moving box rule for staff by day 0 and a one week rule for employees for personal stuff.

Or hire somebody, as Shastri at Union Crate recommends:

Hire someone to set everything up. Your time is more valuable.

Parking Matters

A pretty common theme throughout all of our founders’ answers was that convenience around parking really matters and is easy to overlook.

Scott at Deepgram:

Our first office was in South Beach SF, right near the Giants baseball stadium. Seems pretty good. Not too far from BART, really close to CalTrain, but did you know parking on a gameday can be as high as $90 and traffic is really bad and you can’t eat at any local restaurants without there being a line those days? You know baseball goes on for 9 months right? Choose wisely.

Consider parking (maybe pay for a single spot or a couple? maybe reimburse for those days you just need someone to drive in?).

James at Amina agrees:

Factor in parking when you price out different places, this can add up as you grow your team.

If your team doesn’t have to commute in with a car, make sure you know where the closest parking is nearby for any visitors who may drive in. You can usually find a parking garage in the neighborhood and your building may even have discounted parking for visitors if it has its own parking garage.

Take Your Comfort Seriously

It’s easy to get focused on cost or location and overlook details like how you feel in the space, aesthetics, and comfort. But you’re going to spend most of your time in your office — and visitors will get an impression of your company based on the space. Don’t skimp on comfort.

Make sure to think about what you’ll need in different seasons and with different weather. Just because your office feels cool and comfortable in the spring doesn’t mean it will feel comfortable in the middle of the summer.

Scott at Deepgram led with this point:

Consider all seasons when choosing an office. Weather (especially in SF) can be tricky. SF has great weather right? Well, yeah, but if you are on the top floor of a century-old building, you probably don’t have AC/heat. So the weeks where it is off the charts in one direction, the whole office feels it. Nothing crushes souls quite like inescapable heat, or annoys quite like never shake-able cold.

Gaetano at Cabin emphasized that you’ll want your office to actually be comfortable when you move in and not after renovations finish or a project concludes:

Don’t move in until any additions or renovations are complete and make sure the internet, printers bathroom, key cards, etc. are working properly before any employees arrive. There is nothing more demoralizing than not being able to work during you first day in a new office. All the excitement quickly evaporates.

Liam at Nelumbo, Peter at Spira, Cameron at Storii, Shayanne at LEFT, and Arjun at Woofy all emphasized the importance of natural light and plants to lift the mood and to reduce psychological clutter in the office.

What have you found helpful when moving into a new office? Tweet at us @1517fund on Twitter or leave a reply here and let us know.

Founder Firsts: Moving Into New Office Space was originally published in Subversion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.