Upverter
Technical co-founder (one of three) of 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 about six and a half years, built by a team in Toronto, and sold to Altium.
The problem
In 2010, designing a printed circuit board meant installing heavy desktop software, dealing with arcane file formats, and emailing zip files back and forth for collaboration. 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. I was the technical co-founder, one of three, and built the technology with one of my co-founders. We built the company over about six and a half years with a team in Toronto and grew the platform to more than 30,000 users. In 2017, we sold to Altium, and I stayed on as VP of Product for the Upverter line.
What I learned
Running Upverter for about six and a half years taught me most of what I know about building companies, not just products. Fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, building a 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.