Blog

We’ve all seen the data. 40% of Americans can’t pay for a $400 emergency expense. Student debt levels surpassed $1.5 trillion last year. Consumers paid a record $34 billion in bank overdraft fees in 2017. For all of these reasons and many more, Chris Britt and Ryan King founded Chime. From the beginning, Chime’s goal was to be the bank that works for its customers, helping them save, invest and borrow money with confidence and without the burden of excessive fees and obstacles. When we first invested in 2013, this was a simple but powerful idea. Six years later, the company has 3 million customers and recently raised $200 million to continue building a better consumer bank. We couldn’t be more proud to be part of Chime’s journey in building a business and company that has both value and merit in today’s financial services market. Congratulations to the entire Chime team on an important milestone towards building the bank of the future for the customers who need their money to work for them the most. If you believe in the mission of making banking simpler, more powerful and less expensive for everyone, Chime is hiring in nearly all departments.

It’s been an acquisitive last few weeks for a few of our portfolio companies where we’re supporting investors:

Anchor, the best way to make your podcast, was acquired by Spotify. We’ve been incredibly impressed by the product quality and iteration speed of the Anchor team. A very savvy, strategic pickup by Spotify.

eero, the best home WiFi system, was acquired by Amazon. This team was incredibly prescient on what future of home networking could look like, and built a superior product. We’re proud to see Amazon recognize this as well!

Nuzzel, our favorite news aggregation app, was acquired by Scroll. We use Nuzzel daily and are glad to see the product find a good home.

And another supporting investment shared a bit more about what it's up to: Elroy Air has raised $9.2m for its large scale, autonomous cargo drone that can carry up to 500 pounds. If this sounds awesome to you (it should!), they’re hiring Engineer and Designer roles in SF.

A venture firm, like the startups it backs, is only as strong as the people doing the work. At Homebrew, we’ve optimized for a small, focused team with deep operating experience and unreserved passion for supporting founders. We’ve chosen to expand only when there’s someone we truly believe can make us better investors and partners, not just someone who helps us shift workload. We set out to find just the right team member through an open call of sorts last year. While we were fortunate to meet many qualified people through that process, there was one individual who made us take notice (all the way from New York City!). We’re absolutely thrilled to welcome Kate Coughlin Stern to Homebrew.

There are a number of things about Kate that are special. Her history of results and analytical rigor during years at Goldman Sachs and Uber are remarkable. The confidence of her teammates, who continually rave about her direct but supportive style and “no project too big or small” attitude, is extraordinary. Her deeply competitive spirit, combined with heartfelt optimism and sharp wit, are inspiring. Kate is a culture add, not just a culture fit, and we’re thrilled for you to meet her.

There were a few unusual aspects to our application process, including asking candidates to select their own job title. Kate selected Principal, so that’s how you’ll see her titled on our team page. But we don’t think about roles as boxes. We think of them as platforms. So expect Kate to be a true extension of Homebrew, involved in all aspects of our work - from executing our investment strategy to servicing the founders we’ve backed. Unsurprisingly, our founders are already lining up to benefit from Kate’s lessons learned as an early Uber Eats team member.

Thank you Kate for trusting us to create a great experience for you as you enter the world of venture capital. We’re thrilled to welcome you to our team and to get started in building Homebrew together.

It started with a cold email to Homebrew in 2013, progressed to us co-leading their seed round in early 2014 with our friends at Freestyle, and now in late 2018, a $275 million acquisition by Autodesk. A thrilling (and quite meaningful) outcome for a startup that exemplifies many of the qualities we love seeing in an investment: mission-driven founders who understand their market, a disruptive product that becomes a system of record platform for its customers, and a huge industry that pre-dates the PC, but is ready to be transformed by software.

Thank you Dustin and Jesse for the partnership along the way!

“Proud to have supported this company since their earliest days” is how VCs coyly signal that they were in early before the rocketship company was off the launch pad. Well, three startups that we’re proud to have supported since their earliest days announced substantial financings recently. Yeah, we had conviction years ago. And yeah, they’re all looking like great, savvy picks. But the congrats goes to these teams, not us. From the CEOs on down, these teams have been working incredibly hard to build companies they’re proud of. Durable companies delivering real value to customers. And eventually, outcomes that will change the lives of their teams, not just their investors. Congrats to the teams at Bowery, Plaid and Weave!

Bowery - The Modern Farming Company
Raised $90m Series B
They’re Hiring (NYC/NJ)

Plaid - The Technology Layer for Financial Services
Raised $250m Series C
They’re Hiring (SF, Salt Lake City and Remote)

Weave - Patient Communication Software
Raised $37.5m Series C
They’re Hiring (Salt Lake City)

With all of the innovation happening in financial services (see Homebrew portfolio companies like Chime, Even, Gusto, Plaid and TrueAccord as examples) it’s no surprise that regulatory compliance is becoming a front and center issue. But dealing with these issues isn’t for the faint of heart and requires the experience and knowledge to handle them correctly. That’s where Hummingbird comes in. Hummingbird brings simplicity, flexibility and intelligence to the anti-money laundering (AML) efforts of financial institutions of all types. We’re delighted to announce we’ve led a $3 million seed financing for the company, in partnership with Omidyar Network, TTV and Designer Fund.

WHO: Joe Robinson, Matt Van Buskirk and Jo Ann Barefoot, co-founders of Hummingbird, bring a unique mix of regulatory and technology expertise to the company. Joe solved risk and compliance challenges in product roles at Circle and Square. Matt and Jo Ann are former regulators and recognized compliance experts. Collectively, the team has lived the problem, worked to solve it and knows how to leverage technology to address it in a scalable and repeatable way.

WHAT: Hummingbird uses machine learning and seamless workflows to provide superpowers to financial crime fighters. Financial institutions struggle to keep up with increasing complexity in AML, and investigators are swamped with cumbersome workflows, strict timelines, and scattered data. Hummingbird’s software-as-a-service and data-driven algorithms assist AML experts with complex investigations and help these institutions stay on top of new money laundering methods.

HOW: Hummingbird’s software combines easy deployment that requires no integration with an intelligent platform that generates insights about investigation subjects and provides capabilities like interactive pattern visualization, automatic location intelligence, time-sequence narratives of customer behaviors, and relationship mapping between investigation subjects. Built-in collaboration tools help share case files securely both inside and outside the financial institution. Ultimately, Hummingbird delivers easier, smarter and more collaborative AML compliance at at time when the financial services industry needs it most.

WHY: Adding intelligence to the compliance process and making it easier for investigators and law enforcement to follow the money is at the heart of Hummingbird’s vision – one that can have a real impact in curbing financing of terrorism, human trafficking, and making the financial system safe for all of us. $2 trillion is laundered every year and less than 1% is caught. Profits from political corruption, bribery, organized crime, human trafficking, and illegal trading all end up being laundered through the financial system. Crimes that rely on money laundering are on the rise. Hummingbird’s mission is to safeguard everyday citizens from the impact of money laundering, as we couldn’t be more excited to support the team’s efforts.

If you interested in enabling financial innovation but protecting all of us from bad actors, join the Hummingbird team. You’ll be joining a team with the strongest collections of skills and experience in the industry.

All companies have unexpected things happen to them that dramatically impact their businesses. And often times the dashboards and reports that are reviewed each day and week don’t have any answers for what happened or why. Outlier is designed to collect and monitor enterprise data in real-time, and notify people of important moments of unexpected or dramatic change. It’s this opportunity to automate business analysis and turn traditional business intelligence on its head that got Ridge Ventures excited enough to lead a $6.2 million Series A for Outlier.

We’ve known that we have a stellar team, an innovative product and an enormous market opportunity at Outlier. And the early customers have seen the power of Outlier’s daily updates, identifying 4-5 important changes in the data that they can take action on. This fresh capital will enable Outlier to deliver the same outstanding insights to even more customers. We’re excited to see the company continue to build a culture and business that we are proud to have supported since the seed stage. Check out the openings at Outlier and join a team that is playing to win big!

Earlier this morning Expedia announced the acquisition of Pillow, a startup we’ve had good fortune to work with since leading its seed round in 2014. Sean Conway, Pillow’s CEO and cofounder, shared the news in his own blog post, but we thought it was appropriate to add two things.

First, the outcome. While every startup builds to be a profitable, independent company, the reality is that the best path for many of them will be an acquisition. Credit to Sean and team for building a company that was sought after by the industry and a set of relationships within the hospitality/travel community that turned into an offer to join forces. Sean will be helping to lead a very important initiative within the Expedia family of companies and in the process he also made money for his investors, which we thank him for.

Second, the journey. When we first backed Pillow it was operating in a slightly adjacent space, helping average people rent out their apartments or homes on Airbnb with a combination of software tools and on-the-ground operations (cleaning, maintenance, etc). This business was growing quite nicely but about 24 months in, Sean saw that there was a bigger strategic opportunity to help bring new supply to the short-term rental market. Namely, to work with large multi-unit apartment owners and create a product that let their tenants rent their apartments out for short-term stays, while also giving property managers the necessary visibility into rental activity within their buildings. The aligned incentives clicked right away and Pillow was able to sign up a large number of partners, bring differentiated rental inventory to the platforms in exchange for a cut of the revenue.

Without this insight and the willingness to take one step backwards to take two steps forward during the transition, I don’t believe Pillow would have been as valuable in this acquisition. It’s a nice example of a team and their VCs collaboratively supporting a change in strategy and I give a lot of credit to Sean, his exec team and our fellow Board member, Tim Chang of Mayfield, for seeing it through.

Congrats to both Pillow and Expedia!

Homebrew was founded in 2013 to resurrect the original model of small-batch venture capital investing in early stage companies: we make a handful of investments each year and concentrate our capital, sweat and reputation behind those founders. We’re two partners (Satya and Hunter), a Head of Talent and an Operations Manager, based in SF’s South Park neighborhood. Our interests are varied, as you can tell from our portfolio - spanning consumer and enterprise, hardware and software, transforming legacy industries and building new ones. But our approach is focused, as Satya outlines about our “how” and Hunter writes about our “why”.

As we approach our six year anniversary, we want to add another team member with the two points below in mind.

• Our goal is to be very inclusive in this search, truly welcoming people from different backgrounds and perspectives into the process. We do have a notion of the experience set we want this team member to bring to the firm, and understand that this itself is narrowing, but we’re open to hearing from folks who don’t “pattern match” for VC.

• We don’t have a job title for this role because we believe, especially as an early stage fund with a close-knit team, this would be limiting in how candidates perceive the opportunity, which we regard as having very few boundaries. Analyst? Principal? Director of Platform? Head of Network? You’ll see that part of the application is telling us what you think the position should be called. We also want you to care more about the impact you’re going to have here and our commitment to you than screening first by title. We care deeply about the ethics and values of anyone we add to our team.

Responsibilities and Opportunities

• You’ll be working with Hunter and Satya in and around the investment process. This will include assisting on market research, company diligence and special projects to identify founders we’d love to support. You won’t be a pre-partner meeting filter (i.e., we’re not tossing you into the haystack to look for needles).
• Post-investment we’ll ask you to participate or lead a variety of activities in helping us support the founders we’ve backed. This includes facilitating introductions, completing data analyses, community building and so on. You’ll develop direct relationships with the founders we’ve backed.
• You’ll also get involved in a host of activities related to the operations of Homebrew and our funds. You’ll learn the ins and outs of not just investing, but also managing a fund.
• Assume these responsibilities represent the floor, not the ceiling. We’re interested in your ideas once you’re on board.

Compared to the “Average Venture Capital Job,” you’ll generally get more of some things and less of others:

More

• Seat at the Table: You’ll participate in our twice-weekly Partner meetings. Not just for portions or when “your deal” is being discussed. You’ll meet and interact with our Limited Partners, the institutions that provide us with capital to invest.
• Skin in the Game: You’ll earn carry in Homebrew III as part of your compensation. We believe that a sense of ownership is essential and all employees at Homebrew directly share in the upside of the work we do.
• Prep for the Future: We believe in open conversations about career development. As this role isn’t meant to be longer than three years, we’ll honestly engage you in professional development over time to ensure that you’re using your time with us to develop skills, experiences and a network relevant to what you might want to do next. We’ve managed organizations of hundreds of people during our operating careers. Many of those people have gone on to be founders, technology executives and venture capitalists.

Less

We want to give you the freedom to develop and run your own playbook to succeed in this role. But we also feel it’s important to make our standard practices clear enough to help you decide if Homebrew is the right firm for you.

• Conferences and Events: We tend to focus on smaller gatherings that serve a specific purpose, such as sharing lessons, talking honestly about the entrepreneurial journey or fostering community and mentorship amongst the companies we back. We don’t attend many of the large conferences but will support your participation in what we’d call “nook and cranny” events - places where different groups of thinkers, explorers, underrepresented segments and so on, collaborate together.
• Check Writing: This isn’t explicitly a sourcing and investing role. While you’ll be involved in all aspects of the investment lifecycle, this isn’t a Partner track role where we give you a small amount of money to invest and then reward you with more investment authority over time.
• International Exposure: While we believe there’s lots to learn from the way international communities are creating and adopting technology, this isn’t a role where you’ll be abroad substantially. If you want to propose a project which requires this sort of travel, we’re happy to consider it, but if you’re really looking for in-depth exposure to non-US/Canada territories, our firm likely isn’t the right one for you.

This is the Right Opportunity For:

• Someone with 3-6 years of relevant work experiences/exposure to tech startups or high-performing companies of any industry (we believe in cross-pollination). We’re open to folks who started their careers in management consulting or investment banking, but it’s important to us that you have a demonstrated love for technology and entrepreneurship that has been expressed in ways outside of your day job.
• Someone who thrives in an independent working environment, using your best judgment, high ethical standards, strong communication skills, passion and adeptness with technology (with or without formal training) to execute the Homebrew model.
• Someone who wants exposure to venture capital (or at least our style of it) through an apprenticeship-type role but isn’t necessarily committed to the industry long term.
• Someone who colors outside of the lines drawn above but still has a deep desire to learn the venture capital business.

How to Apply

Please complete the application found here by November 10, 2018. We may invite candidates to interview on a rolling basis but all applications submitted by November 10th will be considered. The start date for the position is no later than January 7, 2019.

In Closing

We want to meeting a broad set of candidates and run an inclusive process. If something here prompts a question or concern for you, please contact us at jobs@homebrew.co to share your feedback. Thanks for your interest in joining the Homebrew team!

In a relatively short period of time, data.world has made great strides towards its vision of making it easy for anyone to upload, exchange and catalog data and then collaborate on analysis and understanding. Strong early adoption amongst enterprise customers recently led a fantastic group of new investors, including Workday Ventures and The Associated Press, and existing investors to fund the company with another $12 million. Homebrew is proud to play a small role in supporting data.world’s mission. If you believe that all data should be collaborative, consider joining the stellar data.world team in Austin.

At Homebrew, when we invest our goal is to back founders who we’re proud to put not only capital but also sweat and reputation behind. So it’s incredible when two of our high quality teams come together to fulfill a shared vision. Last month, Chime acquired Pinch, a startup working to democratize access to lower cost, higher quality financial products by first improving credit scores. Homebrew led Pinch’s seed round over two years ago and co-led Chime’s seed round almost five years ago. We couldn’t be more pleased to have two incredible teams who we’ve worked with so closely decide to work even more closely with each other.

The now even stronger Chime team is building a truly special business. Already the leading challenger bank in the U.S., Chime is poised to make it possible for anyone to live a healthier financial life without being burdened by the pain and expense historically associated with doing so. If you’re interested in making top notch financial services available to everyone, join the Chime team!

Sometimes the tech world moves faster than our blog does, and that’s why we’re just getting around to congratulating Homebrew portfolio founder Adam Ludwin on the forming of Interstellar, a combination of his company, Chain, with Lightyear, a Stellar-focused development company.

Chain was one of the original “the blockchain is more than just Bitcoin” companies and its API/developer platform supported the efforts of several large financial services institutions in building atop the blockchain. Along the way, Adam also became a strong, clear voice in the industry for building software and value, not just hype. When he shared that Chain and Stellar were combining forces, it made total sense to us given where the industry is headed and what infrastructure it needs to unlock new opportunities for developers and end users. We’re thrilled with the outcome for the team and for the early investors (of which we were a small supporting piece).

Thanks to Adam and the entire Chain team!

This week Homebrew portfolio company Abacus announced its acquisition by Certify. We first met New York-based Abacus while the product was still formative but it was clear the founding team clearly had the combination of vision, mission and grit that sets great startups apart. Homebrew became a supporting investor in their seed round and got a front row seat to watching them develop a truly well-designed product. We won’t go so far as to suggest they made expense reporting fun, but how about 99% less painful for everyone involved? Congratulations to the Abacus team!

We’re believers that the benefits of a technology-driven economy don’t just have to accrue to the largest corporations and wealthiest consumers. We’ve put investment capital behind that belief throughout the Homebrew portfolio. Today one of those companies, Even, announced a $40 million Series B to continue expanding its budgeting and instant payday tools. Even delivers its product through large employers - such as the extensive partnership they have with Walmart - or directly to consumers. Either way, the customer gets a suite of tools to help them avoid payday loans and make strides towards financial security. Congrats Team Even!

With 1 million users in over 10k markets, Winnie is doing it. As we’ve have the chance to observe since the earliest days, the team members at Winnie are doers. Creating and scaling a product for millennial parents and caregivers who are amazingly underserved by a market where the incumbent brands started as magazines with outdated, gendered stereotypes of parenting and family. The Winnie team is building the new hub for parents, one which mixes data and community in ways that similar startups have struggled to implement at scale. TechCrunch has some more details on how it’s all coming together.

We’ve been impressed, but not surprised, by how Sara and Anne, Winnie’s founders, approach building their company as a product - deliberately and with a strong point of view. They’ve created a welcoming, inclusive environment that has brought together a group of people who are mission-driven while maintaining operational excellence. And as early stage investors, that’s a combination which earns not just our support but also our respect. We’re very proud to be part of Winnie’s mission and journey with this latest financing.

When we started Homebrew in 2013 we had the feeling retail and logistics were going to be transformed by technology. Every company was becoming a “technology company” and entrepreneurs with insights into both enterprise and consumer needs had a chance to build something special. Jaron Waldman, CEO of Curbside, struck us as one of those founders and we were thrilled he let us sneak a supporting check into a near-closed financing.

Last week Jaron announced that Rakuten was acquiring his company, with the intent to keep Curbside operating as an independent - and turbo-charged - entity. Jaron sold his previous company to Apple, so he’s no stranger to these relationships and now has successfully landed two startups impressively. But even more exciting to us is his skill as a leader - Rakuten has in their hands a great team, a solid product footprint and a CEO who knows how to scale. Congrats to everyone involved.

The intersection of technology and financial services is a theme that Homebrew has focused on since the beginning. In 2013, we invested in Chime because of its mission to democratize access to banking through less expensive and more customer-centric offerings. Five years later, the company is now the leading challenger bank in the US. With the announcement of its $70 million Series C financing, Chime is continuing to change the relationship between consumers and their bank. We’re thrilled to have been along for the journey and couldn’t be more excited for the future of banking being defined by Chime. If you think banks can do better, join the growing team at Chime and help build a bank that saves consumers money.

At Homebrew, we talk about investing in companies with both value and merit. Companies that have the potential to generate tremendous economic wealth for their stakeholders while also contributing positively to the greater world. When we met Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli at Biobot Analytics, we were struck with how much the business resonated with our goals. Biobot works with city governments to collect wastewater for analysis of population health. Its first product is helping tackle one of the most significant problems facing our country - the opioid epidemic. By analyzing metabolites in wastewater, cities can better understand opioid use in their geographies, allowing public sector and non-profit organizations to better allocate resources and evaluate the impact of their interventions over time.

We’re incredibly proud to be supporters of Biobot and participants in its $2.5 million seed financing. The company is already working with Cary, NC and will be launching efforts with additional cities later this year. If you’re interested in joining the company on its mission or want to learn more about how Biobot can help your city, you can reach the company here.

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of activity in the blockchain and cryptocurrency markets. It’s been fascinating to watch how quickly the space has evolved since our investment in Chain back in 2014. Over the long term, we believe in the power of the underlying technologies and potential applications. But in the short term, we’ve tried to focus our investing on the building blocks needed to allow for mainstream use and adoption of the tech and apps. In addition to security, stability and scalability, one of those building blocks is identity. So when we met Preethi Kasireddy we couldn’t help but be taken by her perspectives on identity on the blockchain and her vision for how TruStory could help build it. TruStory is starting by creating a platform that leverages social and economic incentives to validate and curate a more trusted reality, initially in the blockchain space itself.

We’re excited about the impact that TruStory can have on the world and thrilled to support Preethi and the team as they get started on their journey. With a fresh round of seed capital TruStory is off and running. Stay tuned to learn about opportunities at this LA-based company.

Now that CEO Laszlo Bock and team are sharing a bit more about what they’re up to at Humu, we’re able to post about our own involvement with the startup as supporting investors. We were both fortunate enough to overlap with Laszlo at Google, where he ran People Ops for over a decade. What we observed was a strong, opinionated, data-driven leader - not unique for the “Googler” makeup - but also one who was especially interested in challenging and evolving the assumptions we’d baked into our hiring processes and talent strategies. That Google’s best contributors weren’t necessarily the ones with the highest SAT scores and fanciest degrees. That our recruiting processes were screening out all types of intelligence and diversity that we absolutely needed to continue thriving and innovating. That people and the development, compensation and retention infrastructure that supported them were as vital as the code and servers upon which our products ran.

So when Laszlo shared he was building a new company along with Wayne Crosby and Jessie Wisdom, we wanted to make sure Homebrew could participate. Since that time they’ve raised over $40m from leading investors such as Index Ventures and IVP and deployed their product with companies ranging from 150 to 65,000 people. We’re thrilled to be a small part of the Humu journey and know their people-first approach is the way work is done best.

Oh, and they’re hiring.