What is this blog?

The name The Grain refers to the "grain of the web," or more specifically, how certain products & services can be aligned with the attributes that make the web wonderful: openness, deep interlinking, and most of all, an unbounded naiveté towards creative experimentation and personal expression. I've benefited from that every day of my professional career and have been writing about it for the last six of them.

But who is this clown?

I am a General Partner at Matrix, an early stage venture capital fund that has invested in some great companies. I live in Boston and focus on east coast mobile technology and Internet software startups.

I got to know Matrix in 2005 when they funded the last of my four startups, Tabblo, which I founded in their offices and sold to Hewlett Packard where I then became the CTO of their consumer printing business. Tabblo was an absolute blast and based on the simple insight that people wanted to do a lot more with their digital photos than just mimic the analog contact sheet both online and in print. And then while at HP I got a good taste for what a monster technology business needs in order to grow at billions of dollars per quarter. I was also bitten by the mobile bug having led and worked on projects like Apple's AirPrint and Cloudprint initiative to kill the dreaded print driver.

Before HP I ran engineering at another photo company, MyPublisher, that was for a long time the largest photo book manufacturer in the world. I also co-founded a personal server company in 2000 called Memora (didn't make it) and worked in product at abuzz (Q&A site sold to the New York Times in 1999).

Other than helping entrepreneurs in the areas I am passionate about, I have a few side projects that mostly relate to connecting bits to atoms and open source software and am a fan of great science fiction and meaningful biographies. I also really enjoy Lego and Minecraft with my two young sons.