I've started many companies and sold a few. My first was in college; I sold it my junior year and dropped out. My "first love" was
Inventables.
It opened many doors like
speaking at TED, meeting amazing people, and it had a modest outcome. My biggest success was
Mystery Science (YC S17).
I co-founded this with
Mystery Doug, and it became the most widely used science curriculum in American schools (and outside of school, kids have viewed videos
hundreds of millions of times on YouTube).
This business had a great
sale to Discovery Education in 2021. As part of this deal, I spun off a side project to continue working on it as a new company:
The Explanation Company. We were building an app for kids to get great explanations to all their questions.
We had a great founding team, and raised $10M from great investors led by a16z, but I failed to turn this product into a success. Product-market fit is hard, even after achieving it multiple times before.
These days I'm back in exploring mode. I've been investigating the capabilities of AI while building a personal Jarvis and offering this
open-source alternative to ChatGPT.
I've also been very excited by the growth of the private space industry over the last decade. I've made a few strategic investments in the industry (SpaceX, Care Weather, Alba Orbital, and Albedo), and I'm exploring a few startup ideas.