The Story Behind My Investment In OneConcern

I am very proud the announce the first investment of Haystack III: OneConcern.

I met the founders through another friend at a fund, he was looking at the company and knew that I liked software plays that sold to national, state, and municipal governments. Most investors don’t like those sales channels, but I do. Why? Because I believe over time the budgets for certain things (health, emergency, climate) will balloon to meet societal needs while many others will fade and erode because we simply won’t have the money in the tax base to get it done. Those essential tasks then will have to be left to technology and software, and in my investing, I’ve found that once an entrepreneur figures out how to sell into governments and builds the right stuff, it is one of the best channels out there because words spread through different networks and it’s harder for a new entrant to cut in.

Anyway, I met the CEO at the request of my other investor friend, and I was immediately captivated by his personal story and academic background. The CEO, a structural engineer from Asia who came to Stanford to study the science behind earthquakes and other natural disasters. This is a tangent, but I enjoy studying the history of earthquakes and learning about how societies have dealt with them. I troll Wikipedia to give my brain a break and read up on these things, so when I met the CEO, I was actually excited to talk about big earthquakes and data, etc. What I came to understand from that meeting, however, was even deeper.

A few years ago, during the major floods in Pakistan, Ahmad (the CEO) was home visiting his family and was caught in the floods. He escaped to the attic of his family’s house and lived on or near the roof for over a week until he was rescued by authorities. I always ask a founder about how past experiences may shape future activities, but I never expected a machine learning engineer focused on building software to help states mitigate disaster response systems say that he himself was caught in a major natural disaster.

If you want to learn more about the company, OneConcern, you can read about them here on New Scientist and here on their website.

While I always try to spend time “in diligence” and vetting a company, I realize now in retrospect I probably spent too much time doing that with OneConcern. The beauty of investing at the seed stage is that I can work with tons of other investors to support companies who start out and have ambitions to grow bigger. Yet, much of the early stages — myself included — have become professionalized, often to the point of placing unrealistic expectations on new companies, new technologies, and new founders, when in fact it should just be about the identification of earnest talent and the relentless support of that talent. I may have conducted my proper diligence, but some things don’t need diligence; a product like OneConcern and an entrepreneurial story like Ahmad’s must be supported — it must be willed into the world, and just like I am trying to do with the creation of Haystack and my own family funds, it will be willed into world no matter what. The solution must exist, and the network of other investors will support it to see it through with their own sweat and passion. That is inspiring to watch unfold and be a part of, indeed.