We at Mayfield are proud to announce we’ve led a $9M Series A round in Projector, and are excited to work with Trevor O’Brien, Jeremy Gordon, and their team on reimagining how meaningful ideas are communicated, visually.
I met Trevor and Jeremy in 2014 when I joined Twitter to run Corporate Development, and I was immediately impressed with their product and engineering talent, leadership, and humility. They’re consumer product experts, having helped build YouTube, Vine, and Twitter, and they have deep roots in the video game industry. As an investor I would have been thrilled to back either of them as founders, so when they started a company together, we didn’t hesitate to lead their Series A and support them as a board member.
They chose a particularly challenging and meaningful category to attack. Visual communication has never been more important. People and teams are building presentations, social media posts, reports, posters and graphics every day to express meaningful ideas.
But the tools and workflows we depend on continue to be fragmented and uncollaborative, with cumbersome design and lack of consideration for storytelling. This is not surprising given that many of today’s most pervasive products were released decades ago. Meanwhile, a new generation of mobile media consumer products are making self-expression and communication accessible and enjoyable, but this lightness has yet to make its way into the tools we use in the workplace.
That’s rich fodder for an ambitiously simple and powerful reimagining, one that can meaningfully impact the 1 billion users who today create visual communications with legacy tools. This is precisely the task to which Trevor, Jeremy and the Projector team have set themselves. Over the next few months, the product will move from the hands of expert advisors like Nancy Duarte to our early access customers and ultimately to a broader release, and we’re thrilled to welcome the Projector team to the Mayfield family and support them along this journey!
Originally published on Medium.