It was kind of fresh, novel, and raw to just flip on a mic in those early days of podcasting and talk about what we were seeing in the world of founders and startups. It also happened to be the dawn of the mobile era, and the beginning of my venture journey at Spark. So Bijan and I started a podcast called Hallway Chat, and sat down to spontaneously record the journey we saw our founders going through in those crazy, dynamic, hard-to-navigate times.

With AI it feels like that is happening even more profoundly. And I feel lucky enough to have a new colleague, Fraser, who is navigating it all with fresh eyes. So we’re recording again, just an unscripted view into our conversations with the founders we work with. Plus, we’ll explore the wonderful new products, new markets, and new experiences as they evolve quickly.

Fraser is an investor at Spark Capital, a former founder, and was head of product at OpenAI where he led the teams that shipped ChatGPT and DALL-E. Nabeel is a fellow investor at Spark, a former founder and operator, and has served on the boards of Discord, Postmates, Cruise, Descript, and Adept.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast player.

‎Hallway Chat on Apple Podcasts

Hallway Chat was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since day one at Spark, we’ve been obsessed with magical products — believing products can create markets, not just find market fit. There is perhaps no better example of this over the last decade than the creation of ChatGPT and DALLE.

Fraser has the unique experience leading the product development teams on both of those seminal projects as Head of Product at OpenAI. We expect that will be an invaluable resource to founders trying to navigate the idea maze of AI we find ourselves in.

He also brings the empathy of a founder. Before joining OpenAI, Fraser co-founded and served as CEO of Koko, an AI startup which was acquired by Airbnb. In talking to his colleagues and fellow entrepreneurs, it became clear that this empathy with the startup journey and the opportunity to partner with a new generation of founders utilizing AI was what motivates him.

Working with Fraser, we’ve seen someone who has strong product intuition, advocates for the end user, and is a true partner along the way. We like to say that an outstanding technologist has the soul of an artist, and we also found those values in Fraser.

So join us in welcoming Fraser to Spark!

Welcoming Fraser to Spark was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is a software product going to be delightful but simple in functionality, or a power tool that is hard to learn? Software interfaces have always had to navigate the power vs simplicity curve, that desire to be joyful to use but also add that one more button for a niche use case. The first time we sat down with David Luan and his team at Adept, got their demo and heard about where the product was headed, it was a realization that they may have just changed the power vs simplicity paradigm of software completely.

Today we are excited to share the new investment round in Adept, with Spark Capital co-leading a $350m round with our friends at General Catalyst, and participation from existing investors including Greylock and Addition.

Adept is an AI company building a new foundational transformer model. Instead of predicting the next word like we have seen in transformer models like GPT, Adept’s Action Transformer predicts the next action a human would take in software. Depending on the task, the model is capable of complicated interactions hundreds of steps deep, across multiple applications. With Adept, you can get your work done faster and more efficiently by delegating tasks instead of navigating menus.

It’s an extremely difficult task to do this reliably, in a way that performs not just as a fun demo but with the everyday accuracy and speed we expect from our computers. Thankfully, this is one of the few all-star teams in machine learning that has the chops to pull it off.

And just as importantly, it’s a team that is not just in love with the tech, but is centered on the human relationship with computers. Technology is at its best when it is an enabler, the proverbial “bicycle for the mind” that helps us do the wonderful things we are inclined to do. With Adept on deck as our AI co-pilot for computers we’ll soon be able to create faster than ever before without sacrificing quality or accuracy; transforming mundane tasks into creative endeavors all powered by intelligent automation.

At Spark, we have always looked at the world through a product lens. We look for those seminal moments when our relationships with computers are shifting, from Oculus and Twitter, to Cruise and Descript. Adept will be a new companion for our computing, enabling our creativity and productivity in new ways, and we are incredibly excited to be along for the journey.

Adept, the AI Co-Pilot for Your Computer was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Spark we invest in technologists with the heart of an artist, but in the case of Sarah Meyohas we are happy to reverse the script. Sarah is truly an artist with the heart of a technologist. Her conceptual art was the first tokenization of art on the blockchain: Bitchcoin, which predated the launch of Ethereum.

A pioneer in crypto-art, she has also quietly been a formidable investor. She was a special partner with Pascal Capital, and was also an angel in dozens of companies including Talos, Rainbow, Built Robotics, and Robinhood. Welcoming Sarah continues Spark’s long tradition of being motivated by creators — from Tumblr to Cameo. Sarah will be leading investments for Spark as she continues her artistic career, and we believe that a combination of creativity and investing will only make her a better partner.

Ben Simon joins us from Mechanism Capital, where he was Partner and Head of Research. Ben will be continuing to work on his DeFi startups (still in stealth mode), while helping Spark founders navigate the crypto landscape. His investment portfolio includes Offchain Labs, Synapse Protocol, PleasrDAO, and Frax Finance, and he has quickly built a reputation as one of crypto’s deepest thinkers and most prolific writers. Previously, Ben studied philosophy, religion, and computer science as an undergraduate at Stanford and then at Harvard, where he was a John Harvard Scholar.

Adding a new team member is a significant event for us at Spark, as Sarah and Ben will become part of just seven members of our early-stage team. It is a tight group by design, allowing us to focus on partnering and helping founders over everything. Like everyone at Spark, Ben and Sarah will have the freedom to invest across any market, but their primary focus will be web3-related companies.

At the heart of venture capital, there needs to be a passion for enabling entrepreneurs to enter uncharted territory and guide them through the inevitable ups-and-downs. We believe that a product can create a whole new market, not just find market fit. And that an outstanding technologist has the soul of an artist. We find those values in Ben and Sarah, and are excited to have them.

Welcome to the team!

Welcoming Sarah and Ben to Spark was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bijan and I recorded our first podcast of 2021 this week. And this time we were joined by our new Spark colleague, Brian Watson.

In todays show we discussed:

• Apple and service-based software releasing
• the PS5 and why we play games
• creating a middle class Creator Economy
• blogging in 2021 and finding your voice on the internet
• being a VC only in up times.

As always, thanks for listening and send us feedback on Twitter (@nabeel, @bijan, @bwats)

‎Hallway Chat: Hallway Chat, Episode 1 - Season 8 on Apple Podcasts

Hallway Chat: Apple & Software, Creator Economy, why we play was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are delighted to announce that Brian Watson has joined us on the early-stage investing team at Spark Capital. He’ll be based out of our San Francisco office — though, for the moment, that means online video, of course.

Brian comes to Spark from Apple, where he rose the ranks quickly and was referred to as one of the brightest lights inside the company. But we actually first met Brian almost a decade ago when he was an associate at Union Square Ventures, a firm we have a long shared history with. We watched as he went on to lead product at VSCO and then to Apple. There, Brian worked on product for many of the most used applications in the world, from Apple’s Camera app, Photos, iMessage and Memoji.

As we’ve spent the last few months digging in deeper with him, Brian has especially impressed us with the speed and quality of his thinking around disruptive innovation, enabling creativity through software, and what it takes to make products for the masses. We expect founders will find the same thing when they meet him.

More than anything, from our earliest interactions, Brian showed a mindset that just felt, well, Spark. Since day one at Spark we’ve been product obsessed, long believing products can create markets, not just find market fit. That takes a certain personal conviction and judgement. Brian not only shares this same belief, but he also brings years of showing that judgement in scaling some of the most used products in the world. So we’re thrilled the stars aligned for Brian to join us.

As part of our early-stage team, Brian will lead investments in Seed and Series A stage startups. Like all of us at Spark, he’ll have the freedom to invest across all areas, including many we probably can’t see right now, but he’s currently most excited about the creator economy, new media formats, the intersection of technology and the arts, and supporting founders from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.

A big welcome to the Spark family, Brian!

Welcoming Brian Watson to Spark was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nabeel: Hey everybody, this is Nabeel and Bijan from Spark. Normally this would be a fundraising blog post, which basically I started to write a couple of days ago to announce our investment in Descript, but it felt not native to the medium. Here we are announcing a new investment in a company that we believe in strongly and then not using that tool felt wrong. So I messaged a Bijan. We gathered together on a Sunday, and we’re here to chat Descript.

What makes Descript magical

Bijan: Do you want to just take a minute and describe what it is? Cause I don’t know if folks know what it actually does.

Nabeel: Yeah. Descript is an entirely new way to edit audio & video. Audio and video editing tools today from the high-end of After Effects that are being used to edit a feature length film all the way down to an internal podcast being recorded for a mid-level marketing manager, they are still basically the same set of tools and user interfaces. And it has been for 25 plus years up until Descript.

Audio and video editing today is a lesson in abstraction. Traditionally, you hit the record button and what you get back is a set of wave forms or key frames in an editing suite like Adobe Audition, or iMovie that are not really directly the thing you’re trying to edit. What you’re really trying to edit are the words that a person said.

That’s a design concept called direct manipulation. The feeling that you’re working directly on the task versus trying to learn another language of engineering and design in order to get what you want out of your creative tool.

What Descript does fundamentally, is it takes that audio or video that you recorded and gives you back a transcript. It gives you back the words that you actually said.

And then when you delete or edit a word inside of that script, it will remove that piece of audio or video from the thing that you’re editing.

Then more recently, they launched the ability using artificial intelligence, akin to deep fake technology to actually be able to insert your words into that script as well. So you can type in a word the way you might type into Google docs and then have it actually show up in your voice.

All of this is really to the central vision of creating an audio video editing suite that decreases the amount of time that a professional editor would use by 10 X, but also increasing by 10 X, the people that can do this kind of editing.

Bijan: Yeah, I don’t know if you would agree with this and if you don’t, you can always nuke it in Descript. The first time, Apple put FireWire and iMovie on their Macs, it was a game changer. It was desktop software and it just gave this level of creativity and power to the user.

And then I feel like all of that just got stuck. Like the way you edit, video and audio has been living in that paradigm all of this time. And Descript, just has magically created something brand new.

Nabeel: Dylan Field at Figma likes to say that at IBM the engineer to designer ratio went from one in 500 twenty years ago to one in 10 designer ratio today. Everybody is a designer and a creator now, everybody’s streaming on Twitch or trying to create an internal video for their team to teach them some new intranet tool. We are all in the mass communications, design and creative business, and I’m not sure our tools have really come along with that.

I was just going through this with my son last night. My son is doing what lots of kids that are 12 years old do, starting a YouTube channel.

He’s streaming his Minecraft. The kids got an hour and 30 minutes of content and the typical pathway would be that he would then spend an hour and 30 minutes trying to edit that content and get it down to something like 20 minutes. And at its root I think of Descript as taking that hour and a half of time and turning it into 10 or 15 minutes and that 10 or 15 minutes being spent more in flow in creative flow of how do I want this to feel and look, and edit versus, wrestling with the menu system.

Ultimately there’s an entirely new UI or UX paradigm that needs to be invented.

Fundamentally the UI of looking at the script of the things that you’ve said, and then building an whole new set of AI and machine learning tools, starting from that new starting point. That’s what feels so fundamentally differentiated.

How we found Descript

Bijan: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been investing in creative tools for a long time and Descript really got us all super excited, it’d be great, Nabeel, you led this investment for us, kinda of how did you meet Andrew and how did this all happen?

Nabeel: I reached out cold to Andrew. As you know because it’s just a phenomenal product.

I’ve been working in non-linear video and audio editing back to art school and beforehand back when you had to fill out a time sheet in college to get an hour to try and edit your video.

Bijan: Now you are really dating yourself.

Nabeel: Sorry to date myself so badly. The first wave of software was moving all of that digital to the desktop, the Avids of the world going away, and the Adobes being created.

Then the last big step function change was moving things into the cloud. In the cloud we get browser based, and newly collaborative, but they’re still fundamentally the same tools. I don’t know how old is Google docs now, maybe 15 years old or something like that. Google Sheets is still basically as hard to use as Excel. It’s more accessible because it’s in the cloud and it’s more collaborative because everybody can, real-time edit, but it’s still fundamentally just as difficult to author in.

And editing audio is still as hard as it’s ever been. I’m still staring at a waveform. And Descript felt like seminal moment along that arc.

Bijan: So it, wasn’t our world famous podcast, Hallway Chat that led you to Descript.

Nabeel: It certainly helps to be using these tools to really feel when there’s a real step function change. [laughter] Sure, it was really my personal frustration with editing our podcast, which led me down this path.

How does AI impact Creative Tools

Bijan: Hey, so one thing that happens with VCs when they announce a new investment, obviously they’re super excited and that’s true for us as well. But I thought if this is, a big infomercial for Descript it may not be as revealing. One thing we often talk about and debate about is, how does AI impact creative tools and is there a slippery slope there and what are the trade offs?

We’ve obviously invested in things like Grammarly where the machine starts getting smarter and assisting the user, but in, in the world of creative tools, you can imagine people either being super excited or concerned about, the machine taking over.

Nabeel: Look, one way to think about it is, is the software trying to be a force multiplier to the number of people that can be truly creative in the world, or is it trying to be creative for them.

We like AI when it’s taking away a hundred hours of tedium and we don’t like AI when it’s taken away a hundred jobs. 1997 was when Big Blue first beat the greatest grand master of chess in the world. And and so we’ve been dealing with AI for a while.

But despite that the best chess player in the world is not an AI. It is an AI and a human working together.

I’m firmly in the world where I don’t want artificial intelligence as the “automagically” button. Michael Cook is working on this thing called games by Angelina, which is an AI that creates games. That’s really not that interesting to me. I want an AI that helps everybody make the game that’s in their brain.

Bijan: I do think the magic of Descript is that it allows the creator to do things they would be doing. And if would just take them 10, 20 times longer, or maybe they wouldn’t do it at all, because it’s so hard.

Nabeel: As we intro introduce artificial intelligence, computational photography, deep fakes, its a new era, and we do need to have a separate conversation about where we draw the line about whether those things are true or not.

But I think the first thing we have to ask is whether it’s in the hands of the creator to even make that decision. And if the NPR audio producer can remove all the Uhs and Ums, because they’re willing to spend, 10 extra hours doing that work that creates a separation between what that NPR producer can do and what an average Joe can do.

And what I love about a product like Descript, is it just collapses that. It’s so easy.

Bijan: Yeah. And, I think the thing you said earlier is exactly right. Google Docs by moving to the cloud and making collaborative was a big change, but this is a whole new way of creating and collaborating. When you’re working in kind of single-player mode on Google Docs you can imagine other desktop software having a similar kind of thing that the change happens when you start collaborating. But Descript, when you’re in kind of single-player mode right away, it’s different. You can’t do those things.

Nabeel: We’re in a world where millions of people every single week are streaming things to Twitch or recording something inside of a corporation and are now having to wrestle with a new world of editing tools. There’s 10 X, more people trying to do that work.

We’ll see over the next five years, but with a tool like this, how many more people suddenly feel like it is accessible. I think my son would have taken his Minecraft YouTube video previously and maybe spent 15 minutes in iMovie, cut a little off at the beginning and the end. But he probably just uploads an hour of relatively boring footage because he’s not going to spend half a Saturday video editing.

Bijan: Right, right, right.

Nabeel: But with this, he was really excited yesterday. He immediately got it in script form, and we literally cut out an hour of UHS and ums in 10 seconds. And, and then he cut the whole thing down to 20 minutes, which is ideally that much more interesting. That means that many more people watch it.

And that’s the creative feedback loop. He creates better content. He gets better feedback. Ideally he keeps doing it, because it’s that much more interesting and fun to do the work. Now, I don’t know that Descript will capture all the net effect of that new creativity out in the world. But a really good platform never captures anywhere near the amount of value it creates in the world.

Bijan: Yeah.

The Power of the Pivot

I wonder if there’s another thing we didn’t mention that we should bring up?

I don’t know if it’s too much inside baseball, but like his last company was a pivot. Groupon was a pivot and this company, was it technically a pivot?

Nabeel: Oh yeah it was a pivot.

Bijan: I find this the founder story interesting, this isn’t something that just fell out of the sky and it was like, boom, overnight success.This is tough.

Nabeel: I think it’s worth touching on.

Bijan: Talk about that because I don’t know if people everybody who listens to this will know the backstory.

Nabeel: The company was started by Andrew Mason as he was working on an audio podcasting travel company, this platform where you could walk around the city of San Francisco and have somebody in your ear, who’s telling you a story about that neighborhood.

But what they found is that the amount of time spent editing that audio was really cost prohibitive. Artificial intelligence at the same time had just finally gotten to the point where you could reliably and cheaply create a non-human intervened transcript.

And probably there are dozens of audio engineers that have been saying for 25 years, “Why am I staring at a waveform, and why can’t I just look at the script?” But the tools weren’t there, the technology wasn’t there until now. So they built it.

Bijan: Well, what I love about these stories, where the founder pivots, whether it’s what Andrew did it at Detour to Descript or what he did it at The Point going to Groupon or what Stewart did at Tiny Co to Slack.

There’s a myth that people think that these founders just there’s this moment of an epiphany. And then they launch and they get a whole bunch of venture capital, and then everything works out. Or this fail fast notion where it doesn’t work out. And, I feel like the entrepreneurs that have this desire to build, and they’re passionate, but at the same time they’re open, it’s a very interesting balance. I think it’s rarefied air, frankly, of people that can have an idea, but are still open-minded about where they want to build and create and innovate and, they can Zig and zag and it’s super hard, super challenging.

But when it works, it’s amazing.

Nabeel: I like the phrase you used, passionate, but open. That strong opinions loosely held view of the world. There are very few people that can hold on to that. And it becomes way, way harder once you have a set of employees or you’ve taken investor money, you spent all the time to go talk to Techcrunch or been on a stage.

All of those CEOs before they pivoted, it’s not just that they were in their dorm room. They had recruited employees on that vision. They had gone and raised money on that vision. This was the next big thing, right. They told themselves their wives, their husbands.

Jason, before he pivoted into Discord, had raised venture capital, he’d already spoken to people at the Game Developers Conference about why this was going to be an important game. It’s not a napkin sketch that then pivoted, there really is having to admit some level of failure personally and get excited about a new thing.

And then more importantly gather the rest of the troops. Hey everybody, I know I told you about the other thing.

Bijan: You may convince yourself with the new thing, but it doesn’t always happen with the rest of the team.

I mean when Odeo pivoted to Twitter, not everybody came along for the ride either from an investor standpoint or an employee standpoint. It’s a really tricky one and I just have so much respect for our founders that have this level of conviction to make the pivot.

It’s super impressive.

Nabeel: Back to Descript, almost all of those pivots that we talked about, started out building something that was fundamentally creative and it ended up that the tool that you needed to build the creative thing, led to the new broader thing. That was Slack and Discord as a communications tool to build this creative product in a game. And with Descript, it’s the same.

It is, “I was trying to make audio and, making audio is just too hard today. Somebody, should fix that. Ah, it looks like that’s going to be that’s somebody who’s going to be me.”

Bijan: Yeah. It’s amazing. Really amazing.

Nabeel: Okay, well, thanks for hopping on today and chatting with me about it.

Bijan: It also feels like we can talk and record in a way that feels more relaxed knowing that we can edit away. I find it’s a different level of comfort when you’re recording a podcast knowing that you’ve got Descript in your back pocket. I really, I believe that I, feel the difference.

Nabeel: Yeah. You feel the difference that you feel like you can, run a little bit more naturally and authentic cause you know, if you mess up, you’re going to edit it later. And in this case, you are going to edit it later because I’m going to send you the link to Descript and you are going to be in charge of editing this for us.

I’ll contribute.

Bijan: Thanks.

Nabeel: Thanks. Have a good rest of your Sunday. All right, bye.

Welcome, Descript was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Spark, we seek to keep those we work with close, whether they’re part of our internal team or the founders we back. When John Melas-Kyriazi, a friend and long-time investor on our early-stage team, said he was ready to take the founder journey with Quaestor, we knew we wanted to be involved.

Quaestor seeks to bring more transparency and enable easier collaboration between CEOs, their board, and their investors.

Today the burden to report certain metrics like cash burn, P&L, and revenue growth with the board falls back on the company. While the operational side of a startup has evolved into real-time dashboards over the last decade, the financial side is still often manual, tedious spreadsheets that make reporting a pain.

By automating this financial reporting process Quaestor can transform a report from a chore into what it should be, knowledge sharing, and strategic discussion about the company.

John’s background as CFO at Stanford’s Start-X accelerator and then an investor at Spark make him perfectly suited for building Quaestor. In addition to John, they’ve brought together a strong team with Kevin Hsu and Deny Khoung, that have been closely tied to the problem for years.

Spark is proud to partner with Quaestor on their $5.8 million seed round alongside 8VC, who helped found the company, and Abstract Ventures, Riot Ventures, Fathom Ventures, and GFC. We love that John is out there on the founder path himself. We are thrilled to continue to work alongside him, and the rest of the Quaestor team as they build the automated data platform for the venture capital industry.

Partnering with Quaestor was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But in that first meeting he was electric, and deeply passionate about enabling local businesses to survive in an Amazon world.

The company was only a few months into launching Get It Now (what would be renamed Postmates) and was doing only $100k or so a month in revenue. But we fell in love with the product at Spark. It was magical. I started using it every week, sending notes to Bastian and getting to know him better.

A few months later he took a chance on me as an early investor, and we led the next round. For that, I’ll be forever grateful. I wrote this post back in 2014 about our investment, and it’s fun to read it now and remember that time.

The years since have been an absolute rollercoaster, to say the least. I don’t have the writing skills do it justice, but I hope someone does at some point.

I watched Bastian grow into the CEO job, constantly learning and challenging himself and others. As one of my earliest board seats, Postmates was also in a way where I grew up as a VC. I learned a lot about how to be a board member vs. a founder at a fast-growing startup, and got thrown just about every curveball you can imagine along the way.

I learned a ton from Bastian and the team. About balancing the need to compete every week with the need to innovate long term. How to fight as the underdog against better-funded competitors, while always staying true to what they believed made them special. And I saw first-hand that it’s possible to lead with humility, earnestness, and even a little humor when things got hard.

Postmates has built a product millions love, that hundreds of thousands of drivers and small businesses rely on. They built a company that has become a verb for so many.

Today it was announced Uber will be acquiring Postmates for $2.65 billion. It’s bittersweet to be stepping off the board, but I will remember the experience for the rest of my life. I know they will continue to do amazing things.

A deep heartfelt thank you to Bastian, Sean, Kristin, James, Vivek, and the rest of the Postmates team for these last years. I admire you all so much for sticking together, pushing through so much, and building a wonderful thing. See you soon.

Thank you, Postmates was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like so many enduring companies we have partnered with over the years at Spark, AllStripes (formerly known as RDMD) did not start out of some top-down market analysis. It began with a personal need that developed into a mission. Specifically, when entrepreneur Onno Faber was diagnosed with the rare genetic disease, NF2, that thrust him into navigating a new world where data was sparse and online communities were critical. That journey led him and CEO/co-founder Nancy Yu to discover a massive unmet need in an industry undergoing rapid transformation.

Rare diseases are not so rare. Today in the US, 1 in 10 people suffer from a rare disease, and half of these are children. Perhaps “long tail diseases” is a more appropriate term given that although common, they often afflict only hundreds or even dozens of people for each disease. These long tail diseases have undergone a massive shift in the last five years that is easy to miss if you haven’t been watching closely.

Rare diseases used to be a space where treatments were hard to create, hard to get approved and often felt fruitless when only addressing a handful of people no matter how transformative they are to those lives. Since then, two major things have happened.

First, since most rare diseases are genetic, the 100x drop in the cost of DNA sequencing has meant creating treatments has become more cost-effective even if they are addressing relatively small communities. Second, the FDA has been working to smooth the way for rare disease drugs to be approved quickly, which has led to almost half of all new drugs approved in the last few years being for rare diseases.

But there are still a couple of significant hurdles. Unlike cancer research, where there is a huge body of data at large cancer centers and plenty of people to conduct clinical trials, in rare diseases finding people and finding real longitude data is hard. It’s not a big data problem. It’s a long tail, small data problem.

Thankfully through a community-sourced, digital-first approach, AllStripes has begun to solve this. Nancy and her team have built a platform that gives power and a voice to rare disease patients. Through AllStripes, patients can rally each other to get their data out of the hospitals, create their own body of longitudinal data, and get the data into the hands of researchers to accelerate drug development. AllStripes allows patients to become active participants in their health journey, not passive consumers.

Spark Capital is proud to be leading AllStripes’s $14 million Series A, and excited to work with current investors Lux Capital, Village Global, and new investor, Maveron. Nancy and the team are on a mission that gives agency to people in an ecosystem where that often feels sorely lacking. We are thrilled about the promise AllStripes’s platform holds for millions of patients.

Welcome, RDMD was originally published in Spark Capital Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.