Hal, this one’s for you…

It’s pretty ironic that for every company I work with I encourage an active, insightful and humorous blog. So Andrea, “Where’s the Lontra Ventures blog with tech insights, commentary and trends?” Apparently I’ve had a multi-year writers block until this week when I had the most fun dinner Hal Stern, who emailed me after dinner and mentioned that my blog hadn’t been updated in 4 years! I was embarrassed to let him know, those previous blogs were written by Walter, not me! The good news is, I’ve been busy…some business, some funny business.

I will begin sharing what I have learned as an angel investor. Why do I invest in Big Data, Analytics, High-Performance Computing, Audio and Video and Web Optimization start-ups? I will shed light on my observations, but today let’s start with my motivation.

This week was particularly fun in start-up land. No, I was not physically in San Francisco at TechCrunch Disrupt; instead I was shuffling Hudson and Sabrina, my 6th and 7th graders, between school and games. But, BlazingDB was there and demonstrated our “Kick Butt Factor” to the world.

Three years ago, Atlas Wearables made it to the finals in the CES Hardware Battlefield, and we launched one of the top Indiegogo campaigns with nearly $650K in orders. In 2015 Bitfusion progressed to the finals showing the world the power of GPU accelerated technology; this year BlazingDB made it to the finals showcasing a modern data warehouse and announcing our free community-version. Wow, three years in a row to the finals! All 3 years, Hudson, Sabrina and I were in the kitchen streaming the event cheering for our team while making dinner!

In later blogs, I will discuss serious topics like market opportunity, product/market fit, and financing rounds but today’s topic is what motivates me. The answer is selfish. What could be more fun, exciting, and motivating than doing something new, first and/or better? What could be more rewarding after the grit and grind of hard work than 5K hits to a website?

So, Hal my blog is now active; hold me accountable. Next week’s topic will be why most of our portfolio companies for either advisory work or investments come from accelerators such as Techstars and Capital Factory. Until then, enjoy the weekend.