Recently I attended the west coast premiere of General Magic.  It’s a documentary movie about the rise and fall of a startup building one of the first PDAs in the early 1990′s.  Similar to Apple’s Newton and predating the PalmPilot, General Magic incorporated all of the key ideas of today’s modern smartphone into a single product long before the technologies (for both the device and the networks) were ready to support a great user experience.

Unfortunately, General Magic’s product failed - the price was way too high, wireless networks were in their relative infancy, and the device was slow.  It took about 13 years for the underlying technologies to mature enough for Apple to release their first iPhone.  And (not coincidentally) many of the same engineers at General Magic played key roles in bringing the iPhone and Android smartphones to market.

I think consumer robotics is roughly 10-15 years away from a major iPhone-like moment.  That moment is when robotics platforms can provide useful functionality in typical homes.  There are some great efforts underway right now, like Misty Robotics, which by analogy is probably closer to the original PalmPilot than the Apple II.  However, the truly breakthrough products will need to be able to climb stairs, open doors, have great battery life, and grab the proverbial “beer from the refrigerator” for consumers.

On individual technology dimensions, amazing progress is being made.  You’ve probably seen the infamous Boston Dynamics videos showing robots climbing stairs and opening doors.  Perception and grasping technologies are advancing quickly, as shown recently by demos like this one from OpenAI.  But each still has limitations that keep them from being incorporated into a consumer-friendly general purpose robot.  Cost, size and power need to improve dramatically - which 15 years of Moore’s Law advances in semiconductor technology should solve - in order to advance to the level of consumer robotics functionality, price and usability that consumers will want in their lives.  But when they come together, a huge new platform wave for applications, similar to the iPhone’s, will emerge.

Recently we announced a search for three new investment associates at Shasta Ventures.  One of the key hires we’re looking for is someone who would like to help us find the most exciting new opportunities in Emerging Platforms: robotics, space, AR/VR, and the connected home.  Shasta Ventures has built a strong portfolio in emerging technologies with early investments in companies like Fetch Robotics, Accion Systems, Survios, Nest Labs, and Vector Launch Systems.  We’re looking for someone who is equally passionate about finding and helping to build the next great technology platforms after mobile.

Ideally, this person would have a relevant technical background and product experience - such as a mechanical engineering degree and 3-6 years working in robotics, space, or the connected home.  If you’re interested, or know someone who would be a good fit, reach out to anyone you know on the Shasta Ventures team, or find someone we know in common for a warm introduction.  We’re eager to hear from you!

Earlier today, Noon Home came out of stealth mode and launched the best, most capable home lighting switch available anywhere in the world at any price.

First and foremost, Noon works as a switch - to turn on the lights, you press it, and to turn off the lights, you do the same thing.  Everyone in the world has been trained to toggle light switches on and off since the moments we each grew tall enough to reach a switch.  Touching a switch will be something billions of people continue to do every day for decades and decades to come.  It’s an overlooked, daily ritual baked into our psyches.

Now, for the first time, there’s magic available inside a switch.  The Noon switch has an OLED display, incorporates capacitive touch, has a powerful processor, and includes WiFi and Bluetooth.  As you might imagine, the capabilities announced today (bulb detection, eliminating buzzing and popping on dimmed bulbs, room occupancy detection, other AI features) are only a fraction of what’s coming through powerful software updates, web services, and natural partnerships with other devices.

If you read about the product elsewhere, did you notice that it’s modular and can be easily popped in and out of its base?  Did you notice that it doesn’t need special house wiring or an external controller?

We’ve been fortunate to work with this company since their earliest days.  Annie Cheung and Will Lark, two of the co-founders, are particularly talented and well on their way to becoming future Silicon Valley superstars.  Their creativity and attention to detail in product design laid the groundwork for an exciting company.  It’s also been a distinct pleasure to work with Phil Liang on the board, as well as with many of the people I loved working with in the earliest days of Nest Labs.

When it comes to unloved, overlooked home electronics, we think there are only a handful of interesting categories.  Noon is about to turn the home lighting category upside down the same way Nest did with thermostats, and Eero did with WiFi.

My first full-time job was in the space business.  In 1992, I had just earned my master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia to work at the Astro Space division of General Electric (now part of Lockheed Martin).

I worked on two satellites – Echostar, and AsiaSat-2.  Both were direct broadcast satellites, meaning that they were designed for broadcasting digital television signals from geostationary orbit.  Geostationary orbit is a circular path around the earth about 22,000 miles high where a spacecraft appears to stay in the same spot in the sky because it revolves around the earth once every 24 hours.

As an integration and test engineer, I learned everything about the satellites:  how they work, how they were designed, how they were built, how they were launched, and how they were operated in-orbit.  The technology was fascinating, and I learned everything I could, including taking graduate-level classes in space mission design and orbital mechanics.

But after a few years, I realized that the industry was stagnant.  Space technologies were stuck in the 60′s and 70′s, largely developed during the glory days of the Apollo moon program.  Engineers and the large defense contractors weren’t ready to try anything new.  The prospect of spending most of the next 20 years of my life working my way up through a bureaucracy and filing Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) terrified me - so I pivoted my career trajectory to Silicon Valley, where in the mid-90′s it was clear the Internet was about to change everything.  So I left Martin Marietta, and came out to San Francisco in 1996 to surf the Internet wave.

About five years ago I started to look at the space industry again.  To my delight, 20 years of semiconductor advances due to Moore’s Law changed everything.  Missions that used to require school-bus-sized satellites, could now be performed with toaster-sized satellites.  Companies like Planet Labs, which takes pictures of the earth with shoebox-sized spacecraft, were newly possible by leveraging the latest smartphone technologies.  A whole series of space-based communications platforms finally make financial sense, when delivered with modern networking silicon.

Oddly, the missing link became launch capacity.  Even SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a huge rocket, and doesn’t make commercial sense for launching these new, micro-sized satellites, unless you piggyback with a bigger payload or bundle together a bunch of microsats.  But the problem is, every small satellite maker has different needs.  The market for individually launching these “toaster-sized” spacecraft had been overlooked - hence Shasta’s enthusiasm for Vector.  As you can read about in this Bloomberg article from earlier today, Vector is building small launch vehicles, that can fit into a standard shipping container, and can launch a microsat into Low Earth Orbit for about $1.5 million per launch.  That’s a revolutionary capability and price point.

Vector’s CEO, Jim Cantrell, had heard about my space background and asked a mutual friend, Jana Messerschmidt, for an introduction.  I’m glad Jana made that connection!  Over the next few months, I met more of Vector’s core team, including John Garvey, Shaun Coleman, and Ken Sunshine.  This team is built of a special combination of maverick space industry veterans and young talent.  Together with my colleagues at Shasta, we became extremely enthusiastic about the team, and their mission to revolutionize access to space for microsats - and we wanted to be a part of it.

Today, Vector represents Shasta’s third investment in the emerging space industry.  We were seed investors in Spire, which is building a constellation of satellites for tracking ships, jets, and weather.  Last year, we invested in Accion, a Boston-based company building ultra-high efficiency rockets for in-space propulsion.  Vector is the perfect complement to Spire and Accion, and we’re on the lookout for more interesting startups in this category as part of our focus on emerging platforms.

Often people ask me about what I drive.  I have a bunch of cars, which include two Subarus, a BMW M3, an 18-year old Land Cruiser, and a Miata that I race in the SCCA.  But probably my favorite vehicle of all arrived several weeks ago - a 1994 Ford F-250 pickup truck.

What do I like about it?  It’s one of the best products Detroit has ever built.

It doesn’t have cupholders.  It has a single cloth bench seat with three seatbelts on it - for the driver, and two passengers.  There is no crew cab.  The windows roll up and down.  The steering wheel is fixed and doesn’t have an airbag.  It has an enormous 7.3l turbo-diesel engine and a manual stick-shift transmission, as well as four wheel drive.  The pickup bed is a full eight feet long.  You can see a hitch receiver at the back - this drivetrain enables massive towing capacity.  It only has 210 horsepower but generates 425 lb-ft of torque at just 2,000 rpm.  Overall, it achieves around 20 mpg (yes, it’s probably not that great for the environment, but this was designed over two decades ago).  Together with a dual fuel tank (you can see two fuel filler doors, one on either side of the back left wheel), it has a range of 500 miles or more.

So given all of that, why do I think it’s one of the best products ever built by Detroit?

Great products serve their purpose well.  The purpose of this truck is to haul stuff.  And it can do it for a long time.  This truck has 180,000 miles on it, and this powertrain/chassis combination regularly lasts to 400,000 miles or more.

1994 was the launch year for a line of turbocharged truck engines - the Power Stroke engines - that has been hugely successful for Ford Motor Company.  This line of engines has grown for over 20 years due to it’s combination of power, fuel economy, and durability, while also meeting increasingly strict emission regulations.  This truck was the first manifestation of that line of engines, in a remarkably pure form.

Furthermore, despite the lack of power windows, cupholders, and airbags, it does have one major safety feature:  anti-lock brakes (ABS).  In an unloaded pickup truck, the rear wheels can lock up easily under heavy braking - it’s a lot more important to avoid hitting stuff, than to have an airbag protecting a driver who decided not to wear his seat belt.

Just like a sports car, this is a single-purpose machine.  It’s just that the single purpose is about moving stuff, not speed and handling.

United’s recent handling of the forced disembarkation of a passenger in Chicago will go down in history as a textbook example of the power of social media.

The only company I’ve ever publicly complained about on a regular basis is United.  I fly over 100,000 miles per year on United, and I have traveled well over one million lifetime miles on the airline.  I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of crews.  It’s great set of individuals, but I’m convinced that United’s senior management has led to a customer culture at United that is far inferior to competitors such as Alaska, Southwest, and the soon-to-disappear Virgin America brand.

How so?  Look at refund policies.  Look at how they handle canceled flights.  Look at whether their on-board WiFi actually works.  I’ve never had a Southwest, Alaska or Virgin flight delayed on arrival by a moveable gate without an operator – but I remember dozens and dozens of United flights where the gate agent was nowhere to be found.  Rainy day on the west coast?  Somehow the other airlines handle “weather delays” better than United.  And I never check baggage with United unless I have no choice.  At SFO, waiting for United luggage easily adds an hour to your trip.  Or how about flights that have been canceled because the crew “went illegal” and couldn’t crew a flight due to too many hours worked, because United’s scheduling algorithms called things a bit too close?

Earlier tonight I was on a flight back to SFO from Houston with two of my kids.  Before we left the gate, the captain invited them into the cockpit for pictures.  My children were thrilled to sit in the pilot and co-pilot seats!  I took a picture and posted it on Instagram and Facebook.  The flight crew was picture-perfect on every dimension.  Friendly, thoughtful and engaging.  I felt like I was on Virgin America, Alaska, or Southwest.  Nice work, I thought.  Impressive.

Within minutes, I received my first comment from a friend on Facebook:  “… before they were dragged kicking and screaming, from the cockpit.”  That was the first response; not one congratulating the airline.  Not one saying “wow, that’s awesome!”  That reflects a lot of frustration that’s been building up for years.  I can’t quantify it, but it’s real and it’s got to be affecting United’s bottom line.

I almost felt sorry for United at that moment.  A culture of treating passengers badly on balance – relative to their key competiiors – has created a tinderbox enabling a huge groundswell of negative emotion to ignite a raging firestorm of anger.  Just search “@United” on Twitter to see for yourself.  The social media reaction is off the charts.

United management should look at this to understand the difference between a strong social media team, and a weak one.  Or at least the difference between a social media team that’s empowered, and one that’s hobbled.

Using NPS, this was quite predictable.  I actually talked about this about two years ago, as you can see here.  As a manager, you’re missing critically important items when your NPS trails your competitors by 40-50 points.  Just look at Southwest’s NPS of 62 versus United’s 10.  Do you think United’s forced disembarkation have been news if it happened on Southwest?  Or better yet, would it have happened at all?  In a customer service organization, a terrible Net Promoter Score is a disaster waiting to happen.

United’s behavior finally tapped into a deep well of repressed emotion that management needs to answer for.  This isn’t a matter of “unions versus management.”  It’s just poor senior management.  They’ve let things fester for years, in terms of how they treat their customers, and finally they’re paying the price.

Earlier today, Starship Technologies announced Shasta’s investment as part of a $17 million round.  It’s the first time I’ve led a Shasta investment outside of the U.S., and all of us at Shasta are thrilled to be working with the Starship team.

I’ve been interested in robotics for years and previously led Shasta’s seed investments in Fetch Robotics and Airware.  Quadrotor drones are perfect for surveying and gathering data, but I’m skeptical that flying robots will work well for delivering physical goods.  On the other hand, I’m convinced that ground-based autonomous transport - both for passengers, as well as for freight - are the mass-market answer.  Energy requirements are far lower, and the technologies are much easier to implement - especially from an operational point of view (not even considering onerous FAA regulations of the skies).

Why use a Honda Civic to deliver a pizza, when you could use something a lot smaller, cheaper, and with far lower energy requirements?

I started actively looking around for entrepreneurs solving the local delivery problem.  Several friends suggested Starship to me, one of whom introduced me to Allan Martinson, their COO (in the picture below, at Shasta’s San Francisco offices).

Since they’re based in Estonia and I’m based in San Francisco, we had a video call to e-meet each other last summer.  The technology was interesting, but what impressed me was their focus on go-to-market strategy.  They’ve built hundreds of prototypes and have been testing their units, at scale, in the field, with relevant operational pilots on a financial shoestring.

I was sufficiently impressed to fly to Talinn, Estonia, to meet the technical team and see their robots in action.  We also learned about their operational secret sauce, which I can’t talk about.  Suffice it to say that their system is oriented around making the unit economics work as soon as possible.  This focus on unit economics - backed up by a scrappy, results-focused engineering team - is why we invested in Starship.

One last note.  Allan and I didn’t decide to wear matching clothes for this picture.  It just happened.

I was taken by a recent VR article titled “30 Days of Raw Data Fitness Challenge” - the author created her own fitness challenge for her husband, where he had to play Survios’ Raw Data on an HTC Vive system every day for 20 minutes for 30 days, and wear a fitness tracker while he played.  The result?  He lost five pounds.

As part of our VR lab at Shasta, we’ve introduced over 100 people to the HTC Vive VR system for the first time.  We’ve found that we have to regularly replace the headset foam.  Why?  Because people become so active, moving around in the VR experiences, that they start to sweat.  Over and over and over again.  It will be interesting to see where developers take this.

I wonder if they’ve started to write business school case studies on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.  I can’t think of another consumer device, short of cigarettes, that’s received so much public notoriety as something that could kill you or the people around you.  Like cigarettes, a significant minority of Galaxy Note 7 owners is still holding on (about 7% of the devices still haven’t been turned in).

Have you seen the YouTube footage of a Grand Theft Auto mod where you can use Galaxy Note 7′s as grenades?  If you’ve flown anywhere in the world over the last three months, you’ve heard the announcements.  It was shocking enough to hear a mainstream Samsung product called out by name - but then it became a federal crime to even bring one onto a plane.  It’s an utter disaster, to say the least, for Samsung’s brand.

I’m particularly intrigued by the implications for connected hardware going forward.  To enforce this ban, T-Mobile recently sent remote kill codes to the remaining Galaxy Note 7′s on their network, in the form of updated code that prevents the devices from charging.  As announced recently, all of the major carriers plan to follow suit in the next few weeks, following deactivation updates in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.  Verizon was initially a holdout, but decided to join in as well.

This an interesting milestone for connected devices - clearly Samsung and the carriers are justified in killing the devices over the network.  But where does it stop?  What will happen when refrigerators, that use outdated CFC’s are connected to the network, and new government standards mandate their deactivation?  Or if they’re now longer up to current energy efficiency standards?  Should they be deactivated remotely?

What about any other appliance?  What about cars?  What about absolutely anything in our lives that uses electricity?  Your thermostat?  Your door locks?

Who decides how to set these enforcement policies for devices?  Forget about hacking, and forget about privacy considerations for a moment.  Think about what happens when future governments decide what’s appropriate use for the physical devices in our lives.  That’s going to be the real social battlefield for connected consumer hardware.

Where were you on March 27, 2014?

I was in San Francisco, on a very steep street, walking into a nondescript blue apartment building.

Arriving in a basement studio apartment high in the hills south of downtown San Francisco, at 492 Clipper Street, I donned a backpack and a 3-D printed, ill-fitting head-mounted display.  I looked like a leading character out of the original Ghostbusters movie.

Nathan Burba and James Iliff shared a wireless demo of “Zombies on the Holodeck”, an early VR first-person shooter where you fight off a zombie onslaught.  I was blown away by their early demo, and called my partners to insist that they drop everything to meet these founders and try their demo later that day.  I’m glad they did.

Less than two weeks later, I met with Nate and James at Lupa, a restaurant not far from our demo location in Noe.  On behalf of Shasta Ventures, I presented them with a term sheet to lead a Series A investment in their company, Survios.  To celebrate, we ordered a bottle of wine.  The waiter’s response?  He carded Nate and James.  (…are you guys even 21?)  Their response?  Yes … and yes, we’d love to work with Shasta.

I had done a lot of diligence before that meeting, but I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure if they were 21.

Since then, I’ve loved working with this team.  They were the earliest pioneers of “room-scale” VR … long before anyone had heard of HTC’s Vive.  There was also a major pivot, and many technical challenges.  To the team’s credit, they’ve thrived despite these challenges.  Just a few months ago, they had the first “million-dollar-gross” revenue month in VR.  And they have some big news to report tomorrow.