Snippets Special: December 15, 2018
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This Special Issue: what we’ve been doing for the past 3 years.
This December marks my three-year anniversary working at Social Capital, and from the very beginning of my time here I’ve been very lucky to have worked on a small and special internal team called Discover. For its first few years, we kept quiet about what we were up to. But in the past few months, several of the companies that we’ve worked with — Urban Footprint, Swarm, Aclima, Droneseed, Datacoral, and Journal to name some of them — have been making waves that we’ve shared with you in Snippets and elsewhere. You may also have seen a list of 40 Hard Problems that Jay and I have shared on Twitter and elsewhere that hints at what Discover is about. Today, we’re excited to finally be able to share with all of you what it is we’ve been doing for the past few years.
A few days ago on Monday the 10th, a mix of people came together at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos for an event: our second annual Discover Day. Some people there have been close followers and supporters of our Discover team since it began three years ago; other guests were there to learn about it for the first time. These two groups came away with one thing in common: an urgent sense that there’s something truly special happening here, distinct from anything else in tech quite like it.
What is Discover? Who are we, what is our mission, and what do we do? Discover was started three years ago inside Social Capital by Jay Zaveri, and currently has a core team of three: Jay, Nicole Engelhardt, and me. The idea behind Discover is straightforward: if we are serious about wanting to use our available financial and technological capital available to us for the collective benefit of everyone, then we need to be very deliberate about how we put that capital to work.
The venture capital business model has traditionally hinged on building a good inbound “survey” of investment opportunities: build a brand; see many different companies as they come through your door and pick the select few you think will win; then establish a portfolio that casts a wide variety of bets in all shapes and sizes. This model has worked well for many people for quite some time, but we believe that there are certain kinds of problems, and certain types of startups, that are difficult to fund with this model. It can be hard to invest in companies tackling deep, long-term technological risk, or into companies that solve problems for governments and other “hard-to-sell” civic entities, when they’re competing for funding with fast-growing, hot companies with their pick of term sheets. Some of these companies require investment commitment long before product-market fit can be established, or don’t otherwise conform to the oft-used formulas and rules of thumb that work for many consumer or enterprise-facing businesses. So what can we do about it?
On Discover, we invert the problem. Rather than seeing what companies are out there and trying to pick the best, we start with a distinct number of very hard problems we’d like to solve in the world, and go from there. We quite literally have a list of 40 hard problems, which you can read here; our mission on the Discover team is to help solve as many of these as we can by 2045. How would we like to see these problems solved? We have some opinions. These problems are hard, and they require a major wave of change, one way or another, for real progress to happen. Although certainly not an exhaustive list, there are three major technological thrusts forward that we care about and want to put to work towards solving our hard problems: programmable infrastructure (the physical bricks and atoms of the world getting arranged in a similar way to computing infrastructure), programmable intelligence (the ever-advancing frontier of what kind of “thinking challenges” go from being expensive to being cheap), and programmable biology (the advancing overlap and eventual merge between the software community and the biology community, and our emerging ability to treat genomes, cells and tissues as programmable platforms). If you have ideas around how these three major trends are helping to reshape the nature of our 40 hard problems, please let us know.
To date, we’ve worked to help start and grow twelve Discover companies in total. Six of them we can fully share with you (and you can read about below); six of them we can’t quite yet aside from in general terms about what kinds of problems they’re tackling. Overall, the missions they’ve taken up and the steps they’ve taken to help tackle those problems are something we’re really proud of. They’re working on problems facing cities, problems facing our forests, our clean air and water; problems around our critical underlying computational, data and telecommunications infrastructure; problems of earth, air, water, fire, land and space.
One year ago, at our first annual Discover Day, we were presenting what was clearly an initial foot in the door: we had an idea of what it is Discover ought to be doing, and how we can be helpful in starting and growing these companies. But it was just that: a start, and a hope. This year, at our second annual Discover Day, there was a new tone among both presenters and guests: this is starting to work. We now have multiple data points that can start to make a line, and that line is heading in the right direction. When the idea for Discover was still in its infancy, people called it foolish. Some people saw it as philanthropy; other people saw it as unrealistic. But Jay saw it for what it was: a genuine opportunity to help solve some of the world’s hardest problems, and build some incredibly important businesses while doing so. The three of us on the Discover Team, and all of the Social Capital family at large, are very lucky to get to do what we do.
So who are the Discover companies? What problems are they tackling, and how?
In a world that’s becoming more urban ever year, cities, their citizenry and their governments are some of the most important areas where we should be paying attention. Cities and municipal governments are critically important for how our society works, but until recently they’ve been relatively ignored by the software industry — until technology like mobile phones and ridesharing suddenly put the next decade of disruption into clear focus, but without clear solutions. Fortunately, the deep, institutional knowledge and perspective required for cities to evolve harmoniously with software and 21st century urban development already exists. It exists in the minds and collective experiences of civil servants, urban planners, developers, and stakeholders in every part of the urban fabric.
UrbanFootprint is building the last missing piece we need to find revealed consensus and paths forward for cities around the world. Their mission is to inspire and empower cities to be more sustainable, resilient, and equitable. They build planning software and simulation tools that help all kinds of city building stakeholders — developers, planners, municipal employees, regulators, and more — find common consensus for how to create urban fabric in the 21st century. UrbanFootprint was founded by Peter Calthorpe, a world-famous urbanist and city building visionary, along with his co-founder Joe DiStefano. They launched in April 2018 along with a major partnership with the State of California, who has made UrbanFootprint available to urban planners in all 440 of its municipalities.
Read more:
Reviving our original social networks: cities | Jay Zaveri
UrbanFootprint in Snippets: April 15, 2018 | Social Capital
Peter Calthorpe of UrbanFootprint on driverless cars and congestion | John Markoff, New York Times
One persistent challenge we care deeply about on the Discover team is air quality, particularly in cities. Emerging megacities around the world are becoming home to the majority of the world’s population over the coming decades, are seeing air quality progressively degrade as they densify. Even here in the United States, air quality varies significantly block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, in ways that exacerbate inequality and social injustice. Air quality is not just a health and environmental issue; it is a social and urban development issue as well.
When we met Davida and her team at Aclima, we knew we’d found something special: an environmental intelligence platform for the planet. They’ve built low-cost, high precision sensors that measure all kinds of air pollutants for both local and global air quality challenges. These sensors are mounted on fleets of vehicles, and they have a major partnership with the team at Google Street View through which they’re busy mapping the largest urban areas around the United States, and soon, the planet. (They’ve also been kept very busy filling demand after recent California wildfires.) Aclima recently raised a $24 million Series A round of financing, and “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” will soon be a thing of the past for local and global air quality.
Read more:
The environmental intelligence platform for people and the planet | Jay Zaveri
Aclima in Snippets: July 1, 2018 | Social Capital
Our modern world depends on ubiquitous network connectivity, yet two thirds of the globe remains cut off from high-speed wireless internet access. Satellite telecommunications has been suggested for decades as a global solution to the problem, but they’ve been held back by the economics of launching an object that weighs hundreds or thousands of pounds into low earth orbit. Shrinking satellites into ever-smaller form-factors — you may have heard about “CubeSats” in this effort — is one way we’ve tried to bring down launch costs and connectivity costs. But at some point, we run into a critical obstacle: beyond a certain size threshold, satellites become too small to stabilize and course-correct themselves as they fly in orbit, and also too small to be effectively tracked by government monitoring agencies like NORAD’s Space Surveillance Network. From the outside, it looked like the industry had reached a global minimum for how small we could build and fly satellites in space; as a result, we’ve projected our rockets, payloads, and anticipated connectivity costs with that minimum in mind. But that was before Swarm.
Swarm has built and successfully launched the world’s smallest satellites, with a mission to provide global, affordable connectivity for devices and people anywhere in the world. Following their second successful launch last week onboard a SpaceX rocket, Swarm has now deployed seven satellites into low earth orbit, and are online for radio frequency communications testing approval from the FCC. (You can track their satellites yourself via LeoLabs here).
Read more:
Swarm in Snippets: September 4, 2018 | Social Capital
Introducing Swarm: the world’s lowest-cost global communications network | Sara Spangelo
Swarm grows constellation to seven satellites with recent launch | Sara Spangelo
Data infrastructure may not have the same cultural visibility as some of the other hard problems on our list, but it’s a crucial challenge for the world to manage over the coming decades. Our ability to create data, compute data, and critically depend on data is multiplying every year, and it’s growing at a faster rate than we’re able to build architectures that can actually handle its growing volume and complexity. Data we can’t store correctly isn’t just harder to use, it’s also a long-term vulnerability that gets worse the more we have to stretch and bend our existing data infrastructure to handle loads for which it was never designed. When everything becomes made of data, that means that everything is vulnerable.
Raghu Murthy, who helped scale Facebook’s data infrastructure as they grew from fifty million to one billion users, is the founder we needed to help solve this problem. Raghu joined us as the very first entrepreneur to work with the Discover program at Social Capital, and now two years later, Datacoral is up and running, offering an end-to-end data infrastructure stack that’s ready in minutes. Datacoral reimagines the data infrastructure stack as being organized into new primitives called “slices”: engineers can stack and rearrange these slices like Lego blocks that work seamlessly together and let companies grow their data infrastructure from small beginnings to nearly unlimited scale. They raised their Series A last month, bringing Madrona Venture Group into the fold along with the Discover team at Social Capital.
Read more:
Datacoral in Snippets: November 11, 2018 | Social Capital
The age of insight | Jay Zaveri
Datacoral raises $10M Series A for its data infrastructure service | Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch
Our forests matter. The world’s forests are our lungs: they’re where our air gets cleaned, and where much of the world’s ecological diversity makes home. Although we’ve made some progress at slowing the rate at which we’re deforesting the planet (compared to past decades and centuries), we still consume a huge amount of forestry products, and we’re not likely to stop. Today, the way we plant trees is very old-school: humans plant them. I’ve done it myself, back when I was younger; and I promise you: humans do not scale. Can tech come to the rescue here? Silicon Valley is full of people who love to assert, “Oh, such and such industry isn’t scalable? We’ll just fix it with technology”, as people who actually work in that field roll their eyes in exasperation at how much complexity is being overlooked. But Droneseed is the real thing.
Droneseed’s mission is to make reforestation scalable. They’ve pulled off a number of impressive technical, logistical, and regulatory accomplishments on their way to doing so: the’ve built and operate large, battle-tested drones that can plant and spray trees in harsh environments, and have secured the FAA’s only ever issued license to operate multiple 55+ pound drones in a single-operator swarm. CEO Grant Canary and his team are well on their way to transforming the way we plant trees and manage forests, and the’ve secured reforestation contracts with 3 out of the 5 largest American timber REITs with more on the way.
Read more:
Droneseed in Snippets: December 2, 2018 | Social Capital
That night, a forest flew: Droneseed is planting trees from the air | Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch
Have you ever wondered why the built-in Search function on your Mac is so bad at finding anything you’re actually looking for? Or why there aren’t any good integrations to tie together your work life across all of your open tabs, from Google Docs to Slack to Evernote to Dropbox and more? Or as a general question: why isn’t there a Google-like search and organize product for all of our personal stuff that we actually care about? Well, one reason is that hyperlinks, which help give the web structure and organization, don’t exist for all our personal files and projects: the link between, say, four related items — an email about a meeting, a calendar invite to that meeting, a Slack thread preparing for that meeting, and the Dropbox-ed slide deck prepared for the meeting — is a conceptual link. They’re all about the same thing, and any user can understand that. But a computer doesn’t understand that. Not without us manually labeling every email, thread, file and folder by topic, date and subtext, which we’re obviously not going to do. At least, not until now — because now there’s Journal.
Journal’s product speaks for itself: it simply, magically, just works. It helps you be more focused and creative, once you’re empowered to harness your own information rather than be burdened by it. You can try it, to see for yourself. There’s really no better way to tell you about it for you to try it personally. Because once you have Journal, you’ll never go back to living without it.
Read more:
In addition to these six companies, there are several more experiments, incubations and initiatives that we can’t quite talk about yet, but look forward to sharing with you soon. They include:
Engineering plants and soil bacteria as biosensors to sense lead, arsenic, organic compounds, and other harmful compounds in our drinking water and our environment;
The future of computing and the “Ultravisor”: a radically new way to develop and deploy software for a new world of distributed, heterogeneous computing;
Wireless communication: the future of 5G connectivity and beyond;
Wastewater treatment: a new approach to transforming solid waste into clean energy with no pollution or negative externalities;
Ammonia synthesis: a new, environmentally friendly way to chemically synthesize one of the most crucial chemicals on which the world’s fertilizer and food supply chain depends.
Our request for you: we’d love your help to find the next group of great Discover companies. Please read through our list of 40 hard problems; please let us know who is solving them in interesting new ways, especially through the lens of our three technology trends: programmable infrastructure, programmable intelligence, and programmable biology. Discover is working. We’d love to talk with you about what to build next.
- Alex, Nicole & Jay
