It's Time to Transform Physical Industries: Eclipse Venture Equity

It was early June 2016, and I was a one woman band running operations for a very early-stage version of Samsara. I hadn’t slept in days as I hopscotched across borders in Asia to hand procure a few unique parts on an impossibly tight deadline. We badly needed these parts in order to build, ship, and recognize revenue in our very first quarter of sales, so failure was not an option. 

At that exact moment, not only were my suppliers playing hardball, I’d also just received a string of pings from Support alerting me that we were having field failures from one of our last production batches that had shipped into hundreds of free trials. As someone responsible for quality, supply chain, operations, manufacturing and support, our revenue recognition and cash balance were extremely sensitive to my mistakes. That afternoon, alone and exhausted, I felt my world caving in on me.  

This is early-stage life. You take things day by day. You fix the endless stream of issues that present themselves, you sleep poorly and your list of urgent tasks is endless. There is little, if any, positive feedback. Eventually you design, hire, scrape and claw your way out of walking through a daily minefield. You’re building.  

As undesirable as this experience sounds, when company building is in your blood, you can’t resist the pull to start and scale things from the ground up. The process has incredible highs alongside incredible lows. And since starting or joining an early-stage company is often an extreme experience, it is pivotal to partner with people who’ve shared in the unique, often unrelenting, experience of building a company from its earliest days.

The Eclipse team has been there. We know the aggravation of seeking product-market fit and the thrill of finding a 100x solution that matches its market. We know the challenge of navigating tough talent markets, while balancing the need to fill a role yesterday. We’ve extended runway through recessions, navigated pandemics, hired through Great Resignations, acquired competitors, raised billions from great investors, brought companies public and grown them into industry leaders.

We know that despite our collective experiences, what really matters is the talent and commitment of the founders who take the helm of the businesses we choose to build together. Our strength lies in partnering with these exceptional founders to accelerate the inception and launch of generational businesses together. 

Our world really needs solutions now

Our supply chains, energy resources, manufacturing and healthcare infrastructure, workforce, climate, and food sources are facing unprecedented challenges. To complicate matters even more, re-inventing physical industries is exceptionally hard: Success requires domain expertise, uncommon talent, great execution, and relevant operating experience. 

The time is now for talented and courageous entrepreneurs to focus on solving some of these major underlying issues facing these industries. As a firm, we want to work with these founders, leveraging Eclipse’s background, networks, and operating expertise in these physical industries to help create effective solutions. 

A systematic approach 

The Eclipse team has formalized our approach to company building with the launch of Eclipse Venture Equity. Through this platform, we’ve aligned our collective operating experiences founding, launching and scaling new products and organizations. We’ve developed a playbook on how to rapidly validate, refine, and build new ventures with world-class founding talent to solve some of the biggest problems facing physical industries.

Eclipse’s Venture Equity approach is not an accelerator or venture studio. We are not cohort-based, nor is there any volume analysis around this program. We validate ideas born from theses and pair founders with extraordinary operators in our network to help these ideas take flight.

We’ve got major skin in the game

To amplify and accelerate the work it takes to research, validate and launch new businesses, we’ve brought on two of the best co-founders anyone could hope for as full-time VE Venture Partners to pair with our founders on a daily basis as they research, validate and prepare to launch their businesses.

Diana Zhou, an executive from Virgin Hyperloop, a major infrastructure tech company, and Ryan Gibson, founder and CTO of the successful construction tech company Agora, are fully dedicated to working with our founders to help launch new companies from day zero.

Both Ryan and Diana come from diverse backgrounds and are fully equipped when it comes to the kinds of skill sets, knowledge, and muscle memory it takes to go from zero to one. They also understand how to tackle some of the hardest aspects of building a business, such as regulatory or procurement processes or financing major capital investments in government sales.

Our Founders

We are looking for seasoned leaders with exceptional backgrounds in business or engineering who want to change the way physical industries work and aren’t afraid of how daunting that may sound. We’re looking for people who have outsized vision, who have the grit and talent to see things through, and who are going to dig in for the long run to help build the solutions our world so badly needs.

If this sounds like you, get in touch. It’s time to transform physical industries. Build the future with us.