Investing in emerging platforms at Shasta Ventures

Jacob Mullins
2 min readDec 12, 2016

I’m ecstatic to share that I’ve joined the investing team at Shasta Ventures as Principal focused on emerging platforms — with an initial focus in Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality.

The technological advances of the past 20 years have created the opportunities for the next 100. The ubiquity of broadband, convenience of mobile and the power of the cloud have created accessible and inexpensive infrastructure that nearly anyone can tap into to create disruptive companies that will affect the way we live.

Virtual reality & augmented reality (VR/AR), robotics, autonomous vehicles, space, quantum computing, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence and the immense amount of data they create are all near-term opportunities where entrepreneurs are creating lasting change.

At Shasta, I join a practiced team, nimble and super smart, investing in breakout companies including Airware, Dollar Shave Club, Eero, Nest, Nextdoor, Smule, Stance and many more in the consumer and connected hardware spaces, as well as Anaplan, Apptio, Lithium, Steelbrick, and Zuora, among others in enterprise software.

I was lucky enough to work with the Shasta team over the past half decade, as a colleague and a portfolio CEO, and I couldn’t be more excited to (re)join the investment team bringing my experience, insight, and entrepreneurial energy to explore many of the emerging platforms we see today.

Over the past year I dove headfirst into virtual and augmented reality. I launched VR Tuesday, the business-focused VR meet up in San Francisco — and it’s off to a roaring start. The interest in VR/AR from entrepreneurs, creators, developers, designers, filmmakers, storytellers, brands, advertisers and investors is immense — and yet, the industry is still tiny. To me, it feels like the early days of Mobile. Opportunity abounds. Join us at the next VR Tuesday and see for yourself.

Shasta’s interest in VR began early — in Spring 2014, my colleague Rob Coneybeer led the Series A in Survios, the creators of Raw Data, which is now famously the first VR app to gross $1M in a month (Aug 2016). We host the Shasta VR Lab on South Park, San Francisco, where we constantly bring many dozens of “VR newbies” through different virtual experiences to glean insight into applications and consumer adoption. We’re always looking for folks interested in immersing themselves in VR experiences so shoot me a tweet if you’re interested in giving it a try.

At Shasta, we’re thrilled to work with passionate entrepreneurs who are maniacally focused on building great products and amazing experiences. If you’re an imaginative founder looking to change the world for consumers or businesses through software, connected hardware, VR/AR, or any of the nascent platforms of the future, we’d love to meet you.

Drop me a line! jacob at shastaventures dot com

@jacob on Twitter

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Jacob Mullins

Partner at Shasta Ventures investing in Smart Software: Applied AI, Computer Vision, Blockchain, and Financial Services.