Silicon Valley Funding, Washington, DC Roots
Washington, DC seems an unlikely place for database innovation; The city is filled with archaic government and nonprofit databases, each written in a slightly different language, each requiring enough training that when anyone exits an organization everyone goes – “Whose going to run reports??”
Maybe its that need creates opportunity, because DC is now home to FoundationDB, one of only two DC startups funded by Ron Conway’s angel fund. This January Startup Grind DC hosted cofounder and COO, Nick Lavezzo. Nick is no stranger to DC’s government and technology space, having worked in finance and operations for Visual Sciences, Product Lab, LLC and Arimor, LLC.
Nick is as homegrown in DC and FoundationDB, having spent most of his childhood between Baltimore and Washington. His background was more traditional, and he followed his father to Ernst and Young. His cofounder, Dave Scherer, was also his first grade best friend and partner in crime for such early entrepreneurial adventures as selling jars of surplus sugar-infused soda.
First Successful Exit in Data
Nick’s first successful venture was also with Dave Scherer and Dave Rosenthal, who started Visual Sciences. Visual Sciences was a data visualization software platform, catering to the same customers as FoundationDB: government departments, Fortune 500 companies and technology consulting firms. Visual Sciences was able to take huge databases of records and allow users to create real-time, ad hoc reports, with a focus on web analytics.
After selling the company, the team actually stayed onto rebrand the new company as Visual Sciences. Like Russian dolls, Visual Sciences was sold to Omniture, which was acquired by Adobe. The team’s original system continues to remain the top-rated analytics platform. A year after leaving though, the guys were ready to work on the next big thing.
Does the World Need Another ‘Cute Application’?
“Doing a startup in the earlier 2000 was a lot harder,” Nick explained, as the team got back together in 2009. Clearly the finance guy of the three, Nick said, “There were a lot less tools to get your NPV up. We were looking around and we see Twitter was like this thing, 140 characters, it’s a website, and somehow its worth a billion dollars. We had this idea to do all these applications, and when something sticks, just kick it out there.”
Dave Scherer went to CMU and Dave Rosenthal got his bachelors in computer sciences from MIT. By going through each product now out there from Amazon cloud storage to database layers, they found an opportunity. Where MySQL, Oracle and the other mob bosses Silicon Valley data querying used relational tables which were very consistent, or cloud databases with millions of users accessing data, and constant room for errors.
“Our ‘aha moment’ was looking that and realizing, maybe the world doesn’t need us to build some cute applications, maybe the world needs us to build a database that’s going to provide perfect data consistency, combined with the highly fault tolerant cloud capabilities of these modern databases.”
Working Capital: How Ron Conway Became Involved
“Howard Lerman, up in New York, is a CEO and cofounder of a company called Yext, went to high school with [my cofounders], Thomas Jefferson High School, a really good school for technology,” Nick explained. “He had seen Visual Sciences and he knew how good of engineers they were, and he was just like ‘Yeah, we’re in. How much can we be in for?’”
Brian asked if that was the pivotal moment for FoundationDB in the fundraising process. “Our network around here was not highly networked to the West”, admitted Nick. “My cofounder Rosenthal, went to MIT with a guy named Sean, who actually made the introduction to SV Angel, Ron Conway’s fund, and basically got us the lunch,” Nick elaborated. “We knew Howard, and Howard was in New York, and was very networked to the West.
So Howard invested, he made an introduction to Michael Walwrath, who is a tech luminary out in New York, and who’s also connected out there. They also knew Howard, and were invested in Yext, so we had that social proof.” What advice would they give others? “Talk to people who know [SV Angel],” said Nick. “But its not SV Angel necessarily. We love SV Angel, they’ve been really super helpful, but there’s a ton of good seed/angel funds out there that are also going to be very helpful, and you can’t be many degrees of separation away from them, if you’re going to any startup events or anything like that.”