A Grand welcome to the First Round Community for Grand St.

It is very cool to be a part of the Grand St. team and I am really glad to be an investor.

Today, Grand St. is the best place on the web to buy creative technology products. But, while I love eCommerce and think it is very smart to generate revenue if you are a consumer facing company today, to call Grand St. eCommerce misses the broader marketplace vision and the massive trend that the team at Grand St is going after.

The company will compress the innovation stack and bring the vision holder closer to the market — in hardware.

Over the past 10 years we have seen massive enterprise value created by companies that made it easier for independent software developers to build, distribute and sell their products. This was done through the standards of production embodied in modern programing languages and access to industrial scale on an as needed basis via cloud hosting. It was also done through community and knowledge sharing via open source elements and platforms like Github.

The result has been technology makers can focus on crafting experiences and utilize platforms to dramatically reduce the friction in their businesses. This means more craft and less commodity activity for the maker and it means more choice and way more creativity reaches the consumer.

I believe we will see a similar pattern over the next 5–10 years in the hardware space. I am really excited to see the team at Grand St build a platform that empowers independent hardware makers to focus on imagining the next amazing product.

When the dust clears on the hardware revolution, and everything is made by an independent maker, Grand St could be the best way for hardware makers to manufacture, distribute, market and sell their creations — it is already one of the best ways for us non-makers to buy them…you should sign up…