An Interview with Avidan Ross

Welcome, Avidan Ross of Root ventures!

• Root is a seed stage fund concentrating on hardware in 3 categories:
  • Low cost robotics
  • picks and shovels
  • Supplychain mfg / logistics
• Some of the portfolio companies our audience might recognize:
  • Particle
  • Shaper (nee Taktia) - Former guest Jeremy Blum now works there and former guest Nadya Peek talked about her friend founding the company.
  • Instrumental - consumer electronics / yield tools. Wrote last week about the Note 7 fires.
• The stages of funding
  • Seed - build initial product, find product fit
  • Series A - Trying to scale and grow (might have sold $1M, want to sell $10M)
  • Other series - > proven, VCs trying to get a piece of the lower risk pie
  • Series B is almost always done with an excel spreadsheet
• Hardware is the "Triple black diamond" of the startup world
• Avidan's background:
  • Start building modems
  • Was the CTO at a energy/hardware investment company
  • "Capital efficient hardware" was the trigger and he started the fund about 6 years ago
• Avidan gave a talk at the Hackaday Supercon about food hacking
• The Root Venture fund raised $31,415,926.53 fund.
• Avidan weighs in on the June oven and Juicero. Dave talks about Paul Reynolds blog about it.
• Avidan studied glassblowing at the Sydney college of the arts. Later traveled to Instanbul, Sweden to study.
• Patents are good for the defensive case, but the open source model isn't necessarily a great solution.
• Particle example - open source hardware, fleet management web software is
• Steven Levy interviewed Eric from Pebble.
• 1/3 of companies in Root are consumer, rest are B2B / industrial
• Arcam, bought by GE
• 3 ways for Root to exit
  • Company goes public
  • Company gets bought
  • Root.vc can sell part of their share (sold on the secondary market)
• HAX, Bolt, Lemnos, Highway 1
• Reach them on Twitter! @RootVC, @AvidanRoss, @Kane
• Also check out Kane's account @MachinePix for awesome animated GIFs.