malay
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
283
Submissions
42
Member since
Oct 24
Ensemble Labs, malay@ensemblelabs
Former CEO/Managing Director of Rock Health
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
GOOG split in early April to create a third class of shares (Class C) that allows the founders to maintain control the company through their shares (Class B) for the foreseeable future. They had issued so many Class A shares, their 10:1 voting rights were becoming diminished.
Neither company cares about the comparison.
Comment · 12 years ago
Visit rockhealth.com/startups/submit/ and let us know if you have any questions. We host office hours every week or I'm happy to walk you through it via e-mail.
Comment · 12 years ago
We're a full-service seed fund. Our roots were as an accelerator, but over time, we have realized that we continue to support our portfolio companies long after they "finish" at Rock Health.
Our equity investment model is very similar to the YC/Start Fund relationship. KPCB, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Mayo Clinic fund the companies we select with a $100,000 convertible note, at the same terms of an existing/pending seed round, or on flexible terms up to an uncapped note. We're different from YC in the sense that Rock Health itself takes no equity in the companies. We try to be extremely entrepreneur-friendly, and ultimately, the convertible note is entirely optional. For companies that don't want the note, we write non-dilutive grants up to $20,000.
In terms of whether we help our companies get funding (or not), our companies have raised more than $100M[1] from investors including Collaborative Fund, Felicis, First Round, Floodgate, Founders Collective, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, The Social+Capital Partnership, SV Angel, True Ventures, and USVP, just to name a few (for context, our first cohort of companies finished at Rock Health in November 2011).
Comment · 12 years ago
We would love to hear more about it. We don't have any sequencing companies, but have multiple hardware and medical device companies in our portfolio. We don't shy from capital-intensive businesses.
Comment · 12 years ago
Malay here from Rock Health—you're absolutely right. We have two close partners in the area (UnitedHealthcare and Mayo both) and come out once or twice a year.
I'd love to connect with the community next time I'm in the Twin Cities. Send me an e-mail (in profile or malay@rockhealth).
Comment · 13 years ago
I was almost positive I had read the idea of Twitter as a protocol before (or something very similar), even though on Twitter[1] pg notes he never published this specific piece despite having written it in 2009. I really appreciated the simplicity of thinking of Twitter that way, and the definition has stuck with me.
In case anyone else wanted to know where they read it, it's under Request for Startups, #3[2].
Comment · 13 years ago
For medical devices that are based on modern mobile platforms, the average FDA clearance time is down to 67 days. It's not nearly as capital-intensive as it used to be and there are going to be plenty of predicate devices to base your filings on.
The ubiquitous computing plus sensor environment is making healthcare hardware startups the norm—we're seeing more and more applicants in this space at Rock Health. We don't think the FDA process is that onerous, and just published a report outlining the process for entrepreneurs who are new to the space.
Comment · 13 years ago
If you want to dig into the million SNP raw data from 23andMe any further than what is presented on the website, Jeff Hammerbacher and Konrad Karczewsk taught a Skillshare on doing your own personal genome analysis with Python and various other tools.
Slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/jhammerb/20130206skillshare
Github repo here: https://github.com/hammer/personal-genome-analysis