Originate Labs

Rob stands by the principle that the most important element for success in any venture is finding smart, self-driven talent and trusting them to succeed. This has led to bringing together some of the best talent from various industries to implement the vision of a better venture model.

Prior to Originate, Rob co-founded Lumitrend, Inc., a mobile software company. Lumitrend developed a mobile content management platform that wirelessly synchronized contacts, photos, music, and videos between mobile devices and an online data-store. Lumitrend was acquired by Asurion Insurance Services in 2006. Rob subsequently served as Director of Products at Asurion after the acquisition to ensure a smooth transition of the technology and team.

Previous ventures included Meadows Consulting, a technology consulting firm that provided software development for companies such as Qualcomm, Amadeus, and Amazon, and THRIVE Los Angeles, a high-end fashion line. Rob began his career as a software engineer at IBM and a software architect at Slam Dunk Networks, and still enjoys writing code.

Jeff has served on the board of Originate since inception and now runs the day-to-day operations of the strategy group after merging his financial consulting firm, Scheinrock Advisory Group, with Originate Labs in early 2010. Jeff is a CPA with extensive experience in international financial markets, corporate finance, capital structure, acquisitions, and strategic investment; additionally, he teaches entrepreneurship at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Jeff was previously the Chief Investment Officer of GKM Newport Generation Funds from 2003 to 2007, a fund of funds managing $1 billion for investments into venture capital and private equity buyout funds. Jeff also served as Vice Chairman/CFO of Kistler Aerospace Corporation and formulated the capital raising plan for a successful raise of $350 million in equity in 1997.

From 1989 to 1996, he served as Vice Chairman of Finance and Strategic Planning for Packard Bell NEC Electronics, Inc. While at Packard Bell, Jeff negotiated equity investments, set up operations throughout Europe and Asia, and was responsible for all administrative functions including personnel, real estate, accounting, finance, MIS, planning, and budgeting. Jeff negotiated in excess of $1 billion in bank debt and $3 billion in trade credit from companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Panasonic. Jeff also handled the negotiation and structuring of all acquisitions including Zenith Data Systems and Ark Interface Software.

Doug Mandell is the founder and managing partner of the Mandell Law Group, PC, a boutique law firm specializing in employment law, technology transactions and providing general counsel services to technology companies. Last year, Doug served as the General Counsel of LinkedIn Corporation, a company he has represented since its inception. Doug is a recognized expert in the consumer internet space and has also served as the general counsel of ememories, one of the first online photo-sharing websites and the general counsel of Tornado Development, a venture backed unified-messaging software company. Doug was also an attorney with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in the Intellectual Property and Employment Law Groups and Littler Mendelson, P.C.

Doug has been recognized as a Northern California Super Lawyer for the past three years, an honor reserved for the top 5% of attorneys in the Bay Area. Doug is on the Board of the Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) for San Francisco and serves as the chair of the Governance Committee for EO Global.

A serial entrepreneur, Brent has been doing new technology creation for more than 20 years. He brings strong technical leadership and solid development experience to Originate, having established expertise in service scalability, mobile computing and information security – all technologies that make the cloud go. A strong advocate for the agile concept that ideas are best expressed in working code, Brent’s main focus at Originate is to empower the team and create real technology value at a very quick pace.

Brent's previous successes include a very successful tenure building and leading the Enterprise Management Server team at MokaFive Corporation. Their product utilizes web services to manage thousands of corporate endpoint devices for their customers. He also served as Chief Architect for Tumbleweed Communications (now Axway), an information security company.

Brent has founded several venture-backed software and networking companies, including Motegrity; a trusted Internet agent vendor, Andalay; an aggregate consumer shopping portal, Reality Wireless; one of the nation's first high-speed wireless internet providers, and Harvest Technologies, an investment portfolio trading platform.

Brent was raised in Wisconsin and is a proud University of Wisconsin Badger with a graduate degree from the Stout school of Applied Mathematics.

Tyler's mission at Originate is to continuously enhance the operational strategy by driving the full lifecycle of each product and service for which Originate is vested in. Tyler's focus on operational effectiveness and project management ensures that Originate's development environment sustains its agile edge. Tyler also plays a key role in supporting the recruiting, partner, and incubation programs at Originate.

Prior to Originate, Tyler held a management role at ProNet Solutions, a leading provider of technology management solutions for community banks. While at ProNet, Tyler interfaced with the banking community to implement business solutions using technologies to improve operating efficiency and effectiveness. Tyler's background also includes work for Arizona Oncology Associates/Us Oncology, and Singer, Bach and Associates, an asset recovery company.

Tyler received his Bachelors Degree from the University of Arizona and earned his Masters of Business Administration from Webster University.

Ali's role at Originate is to manage the full life-cycle of software production from story creation to partner interaction to product transition. Prior to Originate, Ali lead a group at UBMatrix, an XBRL consulting firm where he was the lead contact for major clients like the FDIC, Unisys and KPMG. Ali's past experience also includes time at Cisco Systems in the streaming video department and Slam Dunk Networks in secure enterprise messaging.

Ali earned his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. While an undergrad, Ali spent three years working in the Scientific Visualization department where he focused heavily on computer graphics. During graduate school, Ali joined the faculty and taught Computer Architecture in the Computer Science department.

Craig brings a combination of entrepreneurial, strategic and financial expertise to a given venture. He has developed and executed strategic plans for high growth technology companies, supported over $100mm of M&A and capital raising efforts and consulted to manufacturing turn-around situations. He previously worked at an international development organization in Washington, DC where his projects included the 2005 election cycles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Craig holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and bachelor's degrees in economics and finance from the University of Arizona.

Matt has an extensive background with technology and entrepreneurship. After graduating from Tulane University with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Political Science, he joined the United States Air Force. While in the Air Force, he ultimately supervised a team of 23 individuals, responsible for the core IT services at Edwards Air Force Base.

Leveraging this background, Matt moved to Qualcomm and built web applications and IT infrastructure. Since Qualcomm he has been actively consulting for entrepreneurs or involved with his own startups. Matt earned a Masters in Business Administration in Entrepreneurship from UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2010.

Lloyd Taylor specializes in helping companies scale successfully. His professional work has included scaling LinkedIn's infrastructure to support it's rapid growth; developing, implementing and operating an infinitely scalable global physical infrastructure for Google's server farms; building out a worldwide performance measurement infrastructure for Keynote Systems; and developing one of the first managed hosting architectures while at Digex.

Lloyd's pro bono work includes funding and advising a select group of non-profits working on zero-dependency methods for ending poverty throughout the world.

Brendon Grunewald is founder and CEO of IceVista, a company that provides operational improvement strategy development and implementation, financial restructuring and merger and acquisition services toward investors, shareholders, their portfolio companies and organizations of all sizes.

He has served as CEO and board member of Sinfilo, where he took the company from incorporation to one of the best known WLAN operators in Europe with a successful exit in October 2003. Prior to that he held various executive positions at several companies including Siemens in Germany. Mr. Grunewald is founder of 70South, a recognize leader in Antarctic news and educational information, is active in Antarctic and polar conservation and education and continues to travel extensively. Mr Grunewald has and continues to serve on company boards or act as an executive or board advisor. Mr Grunewald speaks English, Dutch and German.

Founder of NeuAer, Dave Mathews is a consumer-focused inventor specializing in mobile, convergence and digital entertainment. He has worked at the startup stages of projects like boxee, Slingbox and is an inventor of the CueCat consumer bar code reader. In addition to holding over 60 U.S. patents, Dave has appeared as a technology expert or host on some 300 television shows, written for PC Mag, and is a founding contributor of O'Reilly's MAKE Magazine.

After the dot-com bubble burst, he was tapped by the Chairman of RadioShack to help re-kindle the spirit of innovation within the retail giant. Through his efforts, several products made it to market and many technologies were created with the help of his Asian and US based teams.

Dave is a frequent public speaker, technology expert for broadcast media outlets and sits on the advisory board of several early stage companies.

Richard Morganstern is the former President of Tech Coast Los Angeles Network, one of the leading sources of funding for early-stage startups in Southern California, and he currently serves on their Executive Committee. His experience and expertise is broad, ranging from law, to business and finance. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Bars of California and New York, and various Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Richard was the Managing Partner of a Beverly Hills based intellectual property and business litigation and counseling law firm; following his time there, he became the Chairman of a NASD-licensed investment banking firm, which focused on arranging funding for early-stage tech companies. Richard is a key mentor and Senior Advisor at Originate.

Lottay

Online gifting made easy

Lottay makes giving gift cards far more personalized, flexible, and secure. Rather than being limited to certain dollar amounts or vendor types, Lottay allows users to send cash via their PayPal account for any type of gift or experience imaginable. By logging on to Lottay.com, you can pick an e-card from the designs provided, or exercise your creativity and design a personalized e-card of your own; then, you simply add a message or even attach photos directly from your Facebook account, indicate how much cash you want to send through PayPal, and your e-card is delivered as a surprise through email, Facebook, and a unique gift page that you also create. Now your friends can know you’re thinking about them with an unexpected gesture for a $3 Latte through Lottay, or you can be creative with gift suggestions like movie tickets, songs for their MP3 player, or a schedule of fun events for a night out on the town. Lottay brings the thoughtful back to gift-giving.

Best of All Worlds

A Trusted Community for Social Discovery

Best of All Worlds empowers global social discovery within an intimate and trusted community. Not endless online noise. Discover people, common passions, and compelling information for tomorrow, not yesterday, in worlds of shared interests and friends.

Best of All Worlds was founded by Erik and Louise Wachtmeister to return relevance, trust, and usefulness to the online world. Best of All Worlds is based in Stockholm.

The Little Seed

Love your children AND the planet.

The Little Seed is a leading lifestyle brand among eco-friendly parents.

Supermoms Paige Goldberg and Soleil Moon Frye founded their LA boutique in 2008 and it has blossomed into the dominant brand in the world of safe, organic clothing for infants and children.

Originate worked hand in hand with the Little Seed team to completely redesign the online store to capture the unique spirit of their brick and mortar roots.

Bringing innovation to eco-conscious shopping is one small way Originate supports Tree Hugging with Style.

Ardica

What if your laptop battery could last 10 days without a charge?

Ardica Technologies is developing the world’s best compact, fuel cell technologies. Micro fuel cells open the door to true mobility in terms of personal electronics.

The team is working with leading companies and the US military to apply their unique and patented technologies to dozens of innovative products from long-lasting personal computing batteries to self-heating winter wear.

Ardica was founded in 2004 by an outstanding collection of Stanford Engineers and is based in SF.

NeuAer

Winner of the 2011 LAUNCH Best Technology Award

NeuAer's ProxPlatform enables any smartphone to automate behaviors based on who or what is detected in its physical space.

ToothTag, the showcase app, demos the power of the platform and is now available on Android. The platform was just recently opened to select developers to build their own plug-ins and apps that leverage NeuAer's proximity data.

NeuAer was founded in 2010 and is based in Los Angeles.

Bet Tracker

Get Into Your Game

Bet Tracker is poised to be an extremely valuable service to both brick-and-mortar and online casinos around the world. Sports gamers want to know what's going on with their action at all times. Bet Tracker gives constant, real-time updates and win/loss probabilities for football, basketball, baseball, hockey, and more.

Bet Tracker is the only mobile solution that allows sports gamblers instant access to all of their bets and provides unsurpassed end-game prediction models that are constantly updated with live feeds from every game.

Founded in 2009 and based in Los Angeles, the team has forged partnerships with several key players in the online gaming industry.

Bet Tracker is the only solution of its kind on all major platforms of smartphone (Android, iPhone, and Blackberry) as well as a robust web interface. Users have immediate access anywhere and everywhere.

Future growth is explosive for Bet Tracker and new laws allowing additional freedoms in actually placing mobile bets will accelerate that growth.

Refollow

Twitter Relationship Management

“Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle - the best out there. And setting up parameters to eliminate unwanted noise - THE best I've used so far.”
--oneforty.com

Refollow is one of the most popular account management tools on Twitter, once having over 500,000 active users. In late 2010, Twitter forced Refollow to reduce its number of api calls, thus becoming a paid service for those features. Thanks for the revenue boost!

jQuery Mobile

Why not develop your mobile application only once?

jQuery Mobile is an open-sourced, touch-optimized web framework for smartphones and tablets.

The jQuery Mobile framework is a good solution to problem of writing unique apps for different mobile devices, eliminating the need to hire separate Android, iOS, BlackBerry, WinMo, PalmOS, Symbian, bada and Meego developers.

Built on top of jQuery and jQuery UI, it has a flexible, and easily themeable design. The code is lightweight and performs well on nearly any mobile device or platform.

Mobile development has always been a minefield of different operating systems and devices. Until now, it’s never been possible for developers to write it just once and forget it.

The aim of jQuery Mobile’s community of dedicated contributors is to provide tools to build dynamic touch interfaces that will adapt gracefully to a range of device form factors. The system will ultimately include both layouts (lists, detail panes, overlays) and a rich set of form controls and UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs).

Originate is an active investor and contributor (cash and development time) to the jQuery Mobile project and continues to support this new and innovative technology.

Ploom

The Modern Alternative to Smoking

Ploom has reinvented smoking. Instead of burning carcinogens, the patented Ploom system vaporizes tiny pods of flavored tobacco.

Founded by a team of Stanford superstars, Ploom is the answer to what smoking should be in the 21st Century.

Ploom is based in the historic Dogpatch area of San Francisco and has some very exciting next-generation technology in the works.

PanoLab

The #1 Most Downloaded iPhone Panorama App

PanoLab is an elegant, free tool that enables photographers to assemble panoramas directly on the iPhone. You simply align photos that you pull from your photo library or capture on the fly. Once you've finished building your panorama, save it back to your photo library for viewing and sharing.

PanoLab applies perspective correction and linear projection to make many photos from one viewpoint align into a cohesive wide-angle view. PanoLab joins up to 30 images both vertically and horizontally into a full sphere view.

GlanceGuide

How many people are watching on the web? Nielsen found the answer…

GlanceGuide was designed to be the easiest to use and most powerful online video analytics engine on the Web.

The solution has the ability to integrate into a variety of browser based media players, collect and analyze video analytics information, and allow the user to produce detailed reports.

Neilsen (The Nielsen Ratings) acquired GlanceGuide in a cash deal in 2010. The purchase successfully accomplished the need to improve Neilsen’s online video analytics and provide increased visibility for online advertisers.

CSRware

How do you improve your company’s green activities?

CSRware is an industry pioneer in the delivery of sustainability management software, helping your company go green while still maintaining ROI.

The CSRware platform takes advantage of Web 2.0 technologies, delivering a highly interactive and intuitive user experience. The hosted model provides security, scalability, and data protection, and assures that the most up-to-date regulations, metrics, and formulas are applied to the analytics.

CSRware was Originate's first portfolio company, founded in 2006.

Pix Remix

Play Photo DJ With Your Digital Pics

Pix Remix allows iPhone users to turn their photos into creative, shareable shows with just a few playful gestures. Want to publish it to Facebook? It’s just a finger flick away, and the same goes for emailing to friends or sharing on Twitter.

Make a clever collage or sassy slideshow right from your iPhone without any need for extra photo-manipulation software.

Pix Remix was created in partnership with Jump Associates.

Zoodles

A Kid Mode for Every Device

Should you let your six-year-old play with your iPhone? With Zoodles, the answer is yes.

Zoodles allows your child easy access to age-appropriate games and content while providing security features that keep your phone’s settings from being altered by little, roaming fingers.

Zoodles is also available for Android phones and via the web, giving you multiple methods for finding safe Internet content and fun games for kids age eight and under.

Open Applicant

How do you test the best software engineers and save interviewing time?

Open Applicant is one of the most successful open source applicant tracking systems in the market today. It’s free, easy to use, and extremely powerful. The OA system was designed to allow for maximum vetting of potential software engineers before reaching the interview stage while still being quick and efficient for the candidates taking the test.

Originate uses OA successfully to pre-screen all of our eventual new hires. It is a valuable tool in our recruiting arsenal to hire and retain the best engineers.

Genomera

What do you get if you cross Facebook with genomic data?

Genomera is leading the charge in the personal genome and crowd-sourced genetics arenas. Some have coined it the “Facebook of genetics.”

In the not-too-distant future, everyone will have easy access to their own personal genomic data. The question then becomes, "What do you do with it?” Genomera answers this question through powerful social and technical analytics. The ultimate goal is to help people improve their health and live longer, fuller lives by understanding and utilizing their individual DNA architecture.

Genomera was founded in 2010 and is headquarted in Mountain View, CA.

Thrive

Technology Meets Fashion

Thrive is a fashion design house that leverages technology in everything from design, prototyping, and production to inspiration, presentation, and the creative process.

Thrive is based in Downtown Los Angeles and promotes multiple brands that creatively blend technology and fashion. Lines such as Mia Via and Gianetta can be found at Nordstrom and other large retailers, and the flagship line, THRIVE Los Angeles, can be found in top boutiques around the world.

BuyNowTV

A Better Way to Buy

From the creators of Tibco and Glanceguide, BuyNowTV is on a mission to revolutionize the TV shopping experience.

PlayNetwork

Creators of Original Vibes

PlayNetwork is a provider of in-store entertainment for retail, restaurant, and hospitality environments, having created peerless media experiences for some of the world's top brands.

Originate worked with Channel M, which was acquired by PlayNetwork in 2010. Channel M developed award-winning, highly targeted content for retail in-store television networks, making it perfectly aligned with PlayNetwork's overall direction.

CloudPrime

Secure Cloud-Based Messaging

CloudPrime is the glue between a company’s existing hard-wired and cloud-based infrastructures.

CloudPrime provides the best, most secure cloud-based messaging service on the market and it also allows enterprises to build secure, scalable, and easily deployable application interfaces without modifying existing network infrastructure.

Global businesses trust CloudPrime to integrate offices, connect groups, and build interfaces between cloud-based and data-center-based apps.

ONStor

What’s sexy about NAS? Ask LSI…

Before cloud computing became the rage, ONStor was the answer to storage scalability.

ONStor delivered the only fully scalable clustered NAS solution for the enterprise.

Built for large-scale server and storage consolidation, ONStor's hardware let enterprises start with an affordable entry configuration and then scale seamlessly as requirements grew.

ONStor was acquired by LSI Storage on July 22, 2009.

GeoSemble

Military-Grade Geo-Interface

Geosemble’s technology has been adopted and funded by several prominent government and military organizations, including DARPA and the US Army.

GeoXray, the core product, uses advanced AI and business intelligence techniques to filter disparate information specific to a geographic area and presents the combined data into a single UI that allows organizations to make better decisions faster.

GeoSemble is a spin out of USC.

nScaled

Do you have sensitive data? We’ll help you put it in the cloud.

nScaled was originally developed under the name “LegalCloud,” but the cloud-based data center service was so popular within the legal industry that it had to be offered to other industries and services. nScaled is changing the way highly sensitive data is stored, backed-up, and retrieved by hundreds of small and medium sized offices throughout the world.

nScaled demanded a unique solution in order to alleviate security concerns of potential customers while still allowing for the flexibility and instant scalability that cloud-based services offer. The nScaled cloud is a highly distributed architecture throughout nScaled’s world-class data centers and within each client's LAN environment on micropod devices.

nScaled’s Cloud Console (SaaS) application reaches into the LAN to control distributed infrastructure around the globe, recovering workloads and managing backups, archive, and other infrastructure functions. Benefits include reduced capital outlays, less overall cost, service type billing, lower complexity, and improved performance.

The hybrid cloud architecture allows workloads to migrate between the LAN and the cloud over secure encrypted connections. The fully featured VMware environment, 10Gb network, and all Dell data centers provide enterprise-class performance, security, and reliability.

nScaled is supported by the world's leader in hosted services, Rackspace. Their strong partnership is one of the reasons for nScaled's tremendous growth and adoption.

nScaled was founded in 2008.

Bar Karma

Crowd-Sourced TV

Bar Karma is the first-ever completely crowd-sourced television show, from the mind of game designer Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Spore. The show is produced in collaboration with Current TV and Albie Hecht, founder of Spike TV and former head of Nickelodeon Entertainment.

The concept is simple: harness the creative juices of a large community of people to make a great television program. The implementation is the trick. The process starts with ideas being storyboarded and developed by the thousands of collaborators within the Bar Karma community and then voting on the winning story-lines. The winning story-lines are then written, produced, and filmed by Current TV. All of this collaboration takes place using online or mobile StoryMaker tools for users to upload and generate content, vote on ideas, and churn out the winning show.

Originate has conceptualized and developed all of the mobile tools (iPhone, iPad and Android) for this exciting experiment/show and is proud to partner with such visionaries in the entertainment industry.

The future is bright for social entertainment and Originate feels that Bar Karma will be viewed in several years as a groundbreaking turning point in television and entertainment.

Bar Karma currently airs Friday nights at 10:00 pm on Current TV.

Soar BioDynamics

Advanced Bio-Marker Trend Analysis

Soar BioDynamics was developed in partnership with Dr. Thomas Neville and is a powerful personal health analytics company that helps physicians determine whether their patients have prostate cancer without performing unnecessary tests and biopsies.

The development of Soar’s Dynamic Screening algorithms has allowed doctors and their patients to compare data utilizing thousands of similar people around the world.

Vagrant

Put Your Production Environment in an Easy-to-Deploy Virtual Development Environment

Vagrant provides easy-to-configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual development environments to maximize a developer's productivity.

Web developers use virtual environments every day, from EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku. Virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant puts those principles to work using Oracle’s VirtualBox to create its virtual machines, and Chef or Puppet to provision them.

For solo developers, maintaining consistent development environments over multiple projects is a daunting task. Each project depends on its own libraries, message queue systems, databases, framework, and more, each with their own versions. Vagrant gives the tools to build unique environments for each project once, then easily tear them down and rebuild them only when they’re needed.

For teams, each member of a team ideally has identical development environments: the same dependencies, versions, and configurations. This is simply not true today. Vagrant gives teams the ability to enforce a consistent and portable virtual development environment that is easy to create and quick to set up.

For companies, if you’ve ever maintained a large web application, one of the hardest parts is onboarding new resources. Vagrant gives you the tools to build a development environment once, then easily distribute it to new members of your development team, thus saving time, money, and frustration.

SnapSpot

Snap and Seek

SnapSpot allows users to share photos through location based albums anywhere on earth. There are thousands of albums waiting to be found on every continent, and new albums created every minute.

SnapSpot uses GPS to track locations as users hunt for albums. When an album is found, users can see photos from everyone else who's been there, and leave their own photos for future visitors to see. They can even choose a photo to keep as a memento in their own collection.

Mobile Hostess

How do restaurants replace their antiquated paging systems and jump into the 21st century?

Mobile Hostess is a service that allows restaurant patrons to stroll the surrounding areas without fear of getting out of range when their table is ready.

Mobile Hostess seamlessly integrates the web, mobile devices and marketing tools to bring a rich and enjoyable experience to restaurants and their guests. Mobile Hostess leverages these technologies to deliver streaming wait time, mobile paging and new marketing/sales channels to restaurants and guests.