Company Info for automatic.com | IcebreakerMembers
Steve invests at the intersection of technology, design, and business: at the sweet spot where a product meets a real user need, is built atop a unique insight or technological breakthrough, and has the potential to be a massive business.
He is drawn to founders with two predilections: first, having spent the initial five years of his career designing products at IDEO, Steve gravitates towards product-first founders, who understand how to build technology that delights and improves the lives of its users. Second, he is drawn to founders who want to solve consequential problems. Steve is excited by entrepreneurs who are trying to use technology as a lever to better the world and create something of deep and lasting impact.
Steve invests across all of Foundation Capital’s practice areas and he co-leads the firm’s crypto practice. His companies span the gamut from enterprise and fintech to frontier tech and design. Steve led Foundation’s investments in Anomalo, Cerebras Systems, Control4 [CTRL], Designer Fund, Framer, Helius, KeeperTax, Loft Orbital, Mantle, Mode, Northstar, Pocket (acquired by Mozilla), Portals, PrivateCore (acquired by Facebook), Sleep Reset, Stripe, Sunrun [RUN], and Threads. And he co-led the firm’s investments in Brave, Fennel, ForUsAll, MotherDuck, Outerbounds, Solana [SOL], and Tabular.
Steve came to Foundation Capital in 2007 from Ning, a social platform he helped launch in 2004 and where he served as vice president of product and engineering. Before Ning, Steve was director of engineering at Immersion [IMMR], which pioneered tactile feedback and human-touch technology. Previously, Steve was a project leader and design engineer at IDEO, where he developed more than a dozen successful products for companies including Cisco, Nike, BMW, McDonalds, and Caterpillar.
During Steve’s product design career, his innovations won him over 77 patents and several design awards, including the Business Week Design of the Decade Award, Red Dot Award 2009, IDEA99 Gold and Bronze Awards, NeoCon Gold, and Most Innovative New Product Awards.
Steve is the author of The Way to Design, a guidebook for designer founders. He also writes a regular column for Forbes about product, tech, startups, and “Missionary Misfits.” And he is the convener and host of Product Minds, a dinner series of conversations with industry leaders about the art, science, and drive that go into building great products.
Steve holds a B.S. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford GSB. 
