Datum Launch

Sometime in 2017, Reid came to me with a pitch for a company called Packet. I loved the name, but when he said it was a bare-metal hosting business, I replied with the obvious: they compete with AWS. He shot back, "Yes, that's the point. And the guys are amazing." I went to the meeting, and that's where my relationship with Zac and Jacob Smith began.

As an investor in Packet, it became immediately clear that beyond building a great team and being outstanding operators, Zac and Jacob are exceptional at building community and ecosystems. Everyone in their orbit is a good human, and their reach spans technology and the arts thanks to their diverse backgrounds as technologists, marketers, and classically trained musicians. IFX 2018 - the Anti-re:Invent - still stands out. The rebel alliance of infra geeks gathered in a converted parking lot to connect and do business, complete with a hardware petting zoo.

When I started thinking about leaving Battery, and seeing if people would be there to catch me if I jumped, they were the first people I called. You might even say they pushed me off the roof.

After Packet's successful exit to Equinix, we stayed close. They helped me ideate and plan Encoded. As a first-time founder, they held me accountable for actually getting things done - or, in Smith terms, the "Rocks."

When they left Equinix, I returned the favor and helped them think through what was originally called Patch and is now Datum. We were in Slack together before the company existed, with countless calls and trips to NY, Vermont, and the West Coast to hone in on the technical and business problems that shaped the opportunity for Datum. We took a lot of pictures of manhole covers and other telecom ephemera. It started as almost a joke, but it became our thing. These pictures came to symbolize both the physical infrastructure of the internet and our tribe who build and operate it, but also the dirty reality we are aiming to abstract for everyone else.

We all love infrastructure, hardware, and geeking out about how the internet really works. But the layers of abstraction keep piling up. Today's vibe-coding app developers don't want to, and shouldn't have to, understand the details of interconnection, routing, DNS, tunnels, and everything underneath. Even large-scale SaaS companies, with deep domain expertise in their specific verticals, don't want to hire the teams required to run a global cloud. Datum is coming to solve this. Enable any builder to do in two minutes what currently takes teams of experts years to accomplish.

When it was time to pull the seed round together, of course I called Sunil at Amplify. He's been a friend, colleague, and mentor for 25 years. A meeting with him in Harvard Square on a snowy winter day in 1999 kicked off a chain of events that changed the course of my life. His experience at Fastly is also tremendously relevant. Rounding out the Voltron formation were my old friend Daniel Karp at Cervin, new friends Dan and Eric at Vine Ventures, and my fellow Boston-based infra partner-in-crime, William Lehman at StepFunction.

And now, with a $10M Series A led by Reid Christian at CRV, along with participation from Zoe Weinberg at ex/ante, everything comes full circle. Reid and I are reunited with Zac and Jacob, and excited to build the next chapter of core internet infrastructure.