The Smart Portfolio of Rob Coneybeer

An aerospace engineer by background and race car enthusiast, veteran venture capitalist Rob Coneybeer has an affinity for anything that moves, and his portfolio of investments in autonomous vehicles, drones, robots and rockets reflects that.

In 2004, Coneybeer co-founded Shasta Ventures with his partners, Ravi Mohan and Tod Francis, to fund disruptive enterprise and consumer tech startups. Together they have backed some of the world's most recognizable consumer brands including Nest, (acquired by Google in 2014 for $3.2 billion) and Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever in 2016 for $1 billion). Today, Shasta Ventures has more than $1 billion under management, and a brand new $325 million fund to give life to the next big thing.

Since everything he touches leverages data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, I had a chance to chat with him about his current portfolio, his philosophy on success and failure, and his thoughts on how new founders can get it right. What follows is an edited transcript of our discussion:

Coneybeer: We focus on early stage investments. Our portfolio is two thirds enterprise, one third consumer and within each of those areas we have specific themes. We do a lot of software. My particular focus areas are robotics and the future of transportation. Some of our investments include:

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• Turo, a peer to peer car sharing platform that's like an Airbnb for cars. It was founded by Shelby Clark in 2009 as RelayRides and rebranded more recently. It's now in multiple countries and 49 states, and growing rapidly with a partnership with Mercedes Benz. Stage: Series E unicorn
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• Starsky Robotics, an autonomous trucking company operating in Florida and some other states. With their platform, you can add an autonomy kit to a standard 18 wheeler and turn it into an autonomous vehicle. They have a tightly incorporated tele-operation so the vehicles don't have to be fully autonomous all the time. Human operators can control trucks remotely from an operation center like when moving from a distribution center to the highway or sitting on the highway and pulling into a gas station. The great thing is they don't have to have autonomy that's good for 99.9999999% of the time. With supervised autonomy, they get all the benefits of labor savings but don't have to do the extraordinarily expensive autonomy required with LIDAR and tons of different sensors, They can operate with just visible wavelength cameras and radar. We find the use of tele-operation a really interesting opportunity in our future of transportation investing and like this company very much. They're serious and young, founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco. Stage: Series A $20.3 million
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• Starship Technologies, a network of low-cost autonomous sidewalk delivery robots that are tightly coupled with tele-operation. They're based in Estonia and operate on college campuses across the United States, a model which a big business could be built upon. If you were at George Mason University you would see close to 40 robots providing services to students, bringing meals to dorms and classrooms. It's a very clever startup that integrates supervised autonomy. You might have one operator for every 10 robots so you could bring your labor costs way down rapidly and provide a service that's cost effective where unit economics are working. The robotsrun at about three to four miles an hour which is why they're sidewalk delivery robots, not meant for the street. Stage: Series A $82.2 million
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• Fetch robotics, autonomous mobile robots (AMR) used to pull carts around warehouses. They've been doing production deployments for over a year now, have mapped millions of square feet, and are scaling well. Founded in 2014, they're a young company with a phenomenal CEO, Melonee Wise, who is a world-renowned expert in robotics. We're very excited about them. Stage: Series C $94 million

Coneybeer: We've invested in these four companies:

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• Spire Global, builds small launch vehicles for small payloads to low Earth orbit. Stage: Series D, $198.7 million
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• SpeQtral (formerly known as S15 Space Systems), deploys small satellites directly to people that want unbreakable keys. Stage: Seed, $1.9 million
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• Accion Systems, a proprietary ionic beam technology that helps satellites and spacecraft stay in orbit with highly efficient space propulsion. Natalia Bailey is the CEO and she's awesome. They're based in Boston. Stage: Series A $15.5 million
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• Analytical Space, a very early stage communications backhaul constellation company that distributes satellites with unbreakable keys. Stage: Seed, $4 million

Coneybeer: No. Within a few feet on the ground up I'm happy but if I was it about 10 feet above the ground I'm not a very happy camper.

Coneybeer: We have the Shasta Camera Fund for AR, VR and computer vision investments and personally, I'm very excited about Oculus Quest.

Coneybeer: I'd tell them to start with a great idea, then build a strong team. Understand their customer and the product that they're building. Then find advisors who come from the industry they're in who want to help them out. Build advocates for what they're doing, refine the business plan and understand the market. That's how you raise money.

Forget the conference sessions and just get to know people there. Whether you move to San Francisco or Boston or New York or you hang out at Carnegie Mellon - get to know people even if you're not a student - go where there's interesting stuff going on in tech, go to the local meetups and network your way in. It's also a good idea to first work at a tech company and get to know the industry before trying to start your own business.

It's a roadmap for success but you need to fail right. Mini failures are best. You can't succeed unless you succeed over and over.