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After I left strongDM, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The best piece of advice I received was from another founder, Matt, who learned it from his coach, Chris. “Beware of slaying dragons.” He (correctly) meant that I’d reach to do anything instead of nothing.
I ignored Matt. :) I tried being an investor, a consultant, a Rent-A-Exec. None of it was for me. After four months of discovering what I don’t like to do, I finally took the advice and spent the next 2.5 years “taking a break”.
I wrote Founder vs. Investor with Jerry. I went to the Hoffman Process, a life-changing week, thanks to Roy. I traveled. I learned to make neon signs and work wood. I took two semesters of Japanese. I adopted a dog and fell in love with a boy and the dog too. I moved to LA—and quickly moved back. I bought a condo, a car. I played more tennis than is probably healthy. I became an aunt.
About a year ago, I also began brainstorming new company ideas with a few folks I had worked with previously: Britt, Sebastian, Marty. It was clear that there wasn’t something fundamentally different that I wanted to do (like plumbing or being a mountain guide or running a coffee shop), so why not another startup? We explored everything, including fun things like a store that sold goth baby clothes and drone arrays.
One day, Britt showed up to the call and said, “I’ve been developing with AI and it’s really hard and why isn’t there something like WP Engine for LLMs?”. And every week, it was the same thing: he kept trying vendors and he kept saying, “I need LLMEngine”. Nine months later, there was no change in the market, even with the explosion of tooling claiming to do just that.
Sandgarden was born.
What is Sandgarden, exactly? First, yes, it is indeed a company named after one of the best bands of all time (and no, it is not named after, as one investor said, no joke, “Savage Garden”).
Enterprises want to seamlessly transition from AI experimentation to production. They want to drastically reduce the time and complexity involved in deploying and scaling AI solutions. They want to ensure that AI initiatives generate tangible business value fast. They want to be able to use the latest components without lock-in. Sandgarden is the platform that actually delivers on those desires: a modular way to rapidly prototype, iterate, and deploy AI.
Our $4.5M round was led by Mike Hirshland at Resolute and Krishna Visvanathan of Crane! Panache, RMS, and Locke Mountain followed, along with a number of investors who were either prior customers or investors of mine, including Hearstlab, Jake Stein, Bob Moore, Nico Grasset, James Turnbull, and Yoni Goldberg. And finally, we are Jerry Neumann’s last investment as he resigns from professional investing, which brought tears to my eyes.
The Sandgarden co-founders fell in love with how Resolute thought as a team, how quickly they moved, and how they just got it. Resolute understood that Sandgarden was an infrastructure play that happened to touch AI, and not an AI company. And Crane’s support has been second-to-none over the past few years, and they showed that commitment yet again by being the first to say yes to the deal.
The Sandgarden team is a delightful combination of past lives and new friends, as teams tend to be:
And last but not least, my two co-founders:
Just don’t call us Sandgardeners :)
The question I get most is “why are you doing this again?”. One investor insisted on meeting me in person to “personally witness the fire in my eyes”. [You have permission to roll your eyes right to the back of your head and back again.]
I decided to start Sandgarden because I missed being part of a team. I missed working with people who build for a living. I missed selling, like really missed it. I missed figuring out how to make something work. I missed winning. I love the idea of Sandgarden and the space we’re playing in. There’s so much to learn in this AI-inflecting world.
I’ll spend more time explaining how Sandgarden came to be in future posts. But in the meantime, I’m Audi 5000.
[title credit to Soundgarden - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Songs_from_the_Superunknown]
