Upverter
Co-founded a cloud-based EDA platform for hardware engineers. PCB design and circuit schematics in the browser, before that was normal. Y Combinator Winter 2011. Operated for 7+ years, built by a distributed team, and sold to Altium.
The problem
In 2010, designing a printed circuit board meant installing 8GB of desktop software, dealing with arcane file formats, and emailing zip files back and forth for collaboration. The tools hadn’t fundamentally changed in decades. There was no cloud option, no version control, no real-time collaboration.
What we built
Upverter was a cloud-based EDA platform. PCB design and circuit schematics, entirely in the browser. We made it possible for hardware engineers to design boards without installing anything, collaborate in real-time, and use a shared component library instead of re-drawing the same resistor for the ten-thousandth time.
This was before “everything in the browser” was normal. Google Docs existed, but the idea of doing serious engineering work in a web app was still controversial.
The company
We went through Y Combinator in Winter 2011. Built the company over seven years with a distributed team. Grew the platform to tens of thousands of hardware engineers. In 2017, we sold to Altium, the global standard in PCB design software.
What I learned
Running Upverter for seven years taught me most of what I know about building companies, not just products. Fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, managing a distributed team, navigating an acquisition. The technical work was hard, but the company-building was harder and more important.
It also gave me a deep understanding of hardware engineering workflows, which turned out to be directly useful when I later ended up on a factory floor at Sheertex.