James Proud

An article that Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry published when he was 24 states that he started GigLocator in 2009, at 18, as a site that tracks when users’ favorite bands and artists play nearby and lets them buy tickets; ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’s 2017 profile says he started the concert-ticket aggregation site at 17. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2012 that he launched GigLocator at 18 and recorded his account of how it began: “I was trying to find tickets to a concert, and I thought there must be an easier way to do that.”⁠[1][2][3]

TechCrunch wrote on August 12, 2009 that GigLocator opened its public beta that day. The site gathered worldwide gig listings from major ticket providers and independent venues; users could track favorite artists and venues, enter their Last.fmLast.fmLast.fm is a music website founded in London in 2002, known for “scrobbling” (automatically recording every song a user plays across music players and streaming services), which it uses to generate listening statistics, charts, and personalized recommendations. It was acquired by the American media group CBS Corporation for $280 million in 2007 and became an independent company again in May 2026.Open the full entry, Pandora or iLike usernames to get alerts about those artists’ tour dates, and share them on social networks. Its recommendation engine learned from the gigs users attended and the music they listened to, including scrobbled tracks pulled from Last.fm, and the site connected nearby users with similar tastes. It earned commission from ticket vendors on sales, and the founders said they had negotiated above-average commission rates; the project was fully bootstrapped and ran at low cost.⁠[4]

The same article states that he had only just turned 18, that he had pitched GigLocator to London’s great and good at the Europas and won the Tomorrow’s Web competition (the author was one of its judges), and calls him one to watch; the team also included Miles Noble, 21.⁠[4]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that he persuaded his parents to let him take a gap year to work on GigLocator, getting by in part by faking loyalty-card punches at the British chicken chain Nando’s to get free meals and by networking with venture capitalists over lunch; it was during this period that SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry founder Daniel EkDaniel EkDaniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a co-founder of Spotify, and has served as Spotify’s executive chairman since January 2026. He also co-founded Neko Health with Hjalmar Nilsonne and helped found the investment firm Prima Materia.Open the full entry met him playing Ping-Pong, and Daniel Ek recalled: “Already back then, James had this laser-sharp focus about what he was going to do for the next ten years.”⁠[2]

He said in the Business Insider article that he was never “super in love” with GigLocator as a long-term strategy, describing it as a side project that “turned into a thing.”⁠[1]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that at 1 a.m. one night in September 2010, while watching a live stream of TechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch Disrupt is a technology and startup conference organized by TechCrunch, combining interviews, product demonstrations, startup competitions and industry networking for founders and investors.Open the full entry, he learned that Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry would give $100,000 each to 20 teenagers who skipped college, and applied at once; when Thiel flew the finalists to San Francisco, he was surrounded by American teenagers with acceptances to Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry that they wanted to turn down, and he returned to London sure he would not make the cut. He recalled: “I wished I didn’t even come,” since having seen it he would have to go back and “hate my life.” The article states that until then he had been an unknown programmer living with his parents.⁠[2]

The Business Insider article gives a different timeline: it states that six months after starting GigLocator he qualified for the inaugural Thiel Fellowship, accepted, and moved to San Francisco in 2010.⁠[1]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that he received the call telling him he had been accepted in April 2011, with instructions to wait until July; he emptied his savings to buy a plane ticket and asked for the first check to be sent early so that he would not end up sleeping on the street, and the foundation agreed.⁠[2]

On May 25, 2011, TechCrunch published the list of Peter Thiel’s first “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellows, with him in the “Information Technology” group. Digital Trends’ profile the same day gave his age as 20 and described him as a programmer with about 11 years of experience who had put much of his effort into GigLocator, a startup that builds a social network around the artists users love and the shows they play; it also wrote that he appeared to have a healthy respect for Sean Parker and was a QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry user and had described Peter Thiel there in March as a forward-thinking venture capitalist.⁠[5][6]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that for most of the following year he crashed on air mattresses and couches while using connections from the Thiel network in Silicon Valley, and that for a time he worked out of the incubator of PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry co-founder Max LevchinMax LevchinMax Levchin is an entrepreneur and computer scientist, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the founder and chief executive officer of the consumer payments and credit company Affirm.Open the full entry. The Next Web wrote in 2014 that he had worked with Max Levchin on Levchin’s data-focused HVF project; TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that he had worked on a few projects with mentorship from Levchin.⁠[2][7][3]

TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that, by his account, when he first moved to San Francisco through the fellowship he had already decided that GigLocator would be “put on the back foot,” and that he said the fellowship had supported him for the past year and would let him keep going for a while.⁠[3]

TechCrunch wrote on June 20, 2012 that GigLocator had been sold to Peter Shapiro, the owner of Williamsburg’s Brooklyn Bowl, for an undisclosed price, in what he called an “asset” sale; the deal took six months and came about through a mutual friend in the music industry. The article called it the first exit for a Thiel Fellow, a week after the foundation announced its second class; he said he was “very happy” with the deal and that his next company was being built, without disclosing details.⁠[3]

On the sale price, Forbes’s 2014 and 2017 articles both give a six-figure sum; Fierce Biotech wrote in 2015 that he sold the company for around $1 million in 2012 and used the money to start Hello. Business Insider wrote in 2014 that GigLocator was bought shortly after he completed the program in 2012.⁠[8][2][9][10]

Two Forbes articles from 2016 both state that he started Hello in 2012, the June one adding that he did so not long after graduating, at 19, as an inaugural member of the Thiel Fellowship. Forbes wrote in 2017 that soon after selling GigLocator to the concert promoter Peter Shapiro in June 2012 he began raising money for a stealth startup that became Hello, and that early investor Shakil Khan said he committed before the product was defined; the original plan was a better activity-tracker wristband to compete with Fitbit and Jawbone. A Forbes article of July 2014 states that he had founded the company about 18 months earlier and seeded it with earnings from selling his first startup.⁠[11][12][2][8]

Forbes wrote in 2014 that SECU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry documents show Hello raised $10.5 million in January 2014 after registering about $18.2 million in shares for sale; StrictlyVCStrictlyVCStrictlyVC is a venture-capital news brand founded by Connie Loizos in 2013, combining newsletters, live interviews and podcasting. It became a TechCrunch sub-brand in 2023.Open the full entry wrote that the Form D showed at least $10.5 million from 44 investors as part of an $18 million round. Business Insider, drawing on The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry, wrote in 2014 that the $10.5 million came from angel investors and brought Hello’s total funding to nearly $13 million, with investors including former PayPal head David Marcus, Facebook executive Dan Rose and Hugo Barra, a Xiaomi executive who had led Android product at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry.⁠[8][13][10]

Forbes’s 2017 profile instead describes a $7 million Series A that investors had backed a few months before March 2014.⁠[2]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that Hello recruited young hardware engineers and spent 18 months on a wristband prototype; in March 2014, on a trip to New York City for a birthday party, he decided to abandon it for sleep tracking, having noticed that no one on his team wore any existing wrist product for more than a few weeks and that people liked the sleep feature on wristbands but hated wearing them overnight. The pivot scrapped about a year and a half of work and angered investors who had just backed the Series A; he granted extra shares to those in the round, including Shakil Khan, David Marcus and Hugo Barra. Hello’s first industrial designer, Rob Shook, recalled wearing the wristband prototypes for a good two weeks afterwards, holding on to the work done; Hello’s only board member besides Proud was Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships.⁠[2]

The Business Insider article states that Hello’s early concept was a wearable similar to the Apple Watch or a Fitbit, for which investors including Facebook Messenger head David Marcus and Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra put in just over $10 million; he concluded that wearables are abandoned soon after purchase, and after a difficult meeting with investors the company restarted with a new design and a Kickstarter campaign. The Next Web wrote in 2014 that he had found sleep tracking was the main thing people wanted from wearables, and that some users wore fitness bands only at night.⁠[1][7]

On July 23, 2014, Hello launched the bedside sleep monitor Sense on Kickstarter. It had three parts: a spherical bedside sensor that measures temperature, humidity, ambient light, noise and airborne particulates (able to detect allergens such as pollen); a clip-on “Sleep Pill” for the pillow with a six-axis accelerometer and gyroscope that records movement through the night and connects to the sphere over Bluetooth Low Energy and ANT with no pairing; and a mobile app that gives a sleep score out of 100. It also had a smart alarm that wakes the user at a suitable point in the sleep cycle, a proximity sensor for stopping the alarm with a wave of the hand, and a ring of LEDs at the base that lights up at a wave of the hand to give feedback on the bedroom environment. It cost $99 during the campaign, with pre-orders afterwards at $129.⁠[14][7]

The Next Web and TechCrunch both likened Sense’s shape to a miniature of Beijing’s Olympic “Bird’s Nest” stadium; it glows briefly when the user walks by or waves a hand over it, green meaning the bedroom suits sleep and yellow or orange prompting the user to check the app for advice. The Next Web wrote that it could tell whether the user or a partner snores or sleeptalks and that Hello expected to begin shipping at the end of 2014. BuzzFeed News wrote that Hello used the campaign to gather early feedback before mass production and planned to ship in the fourth quarter.⁠[7][14][15]

Forbes wrote on launch day that the campaign aimed to raise at least $100,000, or 1,010 pre-orders at $99 each; Hello had 16 employees and an office in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, with advisers including former PayPal head David Marcus and former AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry iPhone senior engineer Andy Grignon; it gave his age as 22 and noted that he had been 20 when Forbes last profiled him. TechCrunch wrote that the team he recruited came from companies such as Garmin and Foxconn and was almost entirely focused on Sense, and that the campaign raised $120,000 within a few hours. BuzzFeed News wrote that the team, which included electrical engineers, industrial designers, software experts and systems architects, worked out of a small hardware shop in Potrero Hill.⁠[8][14][15]

Hello did not disclose its earlier fundraising at launch. StrictlyVC wrote that Forbes at first described the company as bootstrapped and updated its story to disclose the funding after StrictlyVC contacted the reporter; on Twitter he would say to StrictlyVC only that “we’re not talking about it right now,” while acknowledging that the company had raised money. Kickstarter said that neither venture-backed nor publicly traded companies are required to disclose financial information to backers.⁠[13]

Introducing the product, he called the bedroom “the most important room of our lives,” where people spend “literally a third of our lives,” and said: “It seems like an oxymoron to put on a piece of electronics when you’re taking everything else off.” He also said that doing hardware and software together was “pretty insane,” and that “the magic of this stuff is when it disappears.”⁠[7][14][15]

Business Insider wrote on August 22, 2014 that Sense’s Kickstarter campaign had ended, raising $2.4 million, and described him as the 23-year-old chief executive of Hello Inc. Fierce Biotech wrote in 2015 that the campaign had 19,349 backers by August 2014; Forbes wrote in 2017 that it raised $1 million in four days and $2.4 million after a month.⁠[10][9][2]

In that article he explained that the inspiration was that everyone needs sleep and most people want to sleep better: “Your day is purely influenced by how you slept the previous night.” On product design he said: “Technology is most valuable when you don’t have to think about it.”⁠[10]

TechCrunch wrote on September 16, 2014 that Hello had hired Scott Bartlett, the technical lead of Google’s Nexus phone program, as director of hardware; Proud, Hello’s chief executive, had begun talking with Bartlett about a year and a half earlier, and the talks picked up again during the Kickstarter campaign. The article states that the Kickstarter campaign sold 35,000 units to about 20,000 individuals. Bartlett had worked on Google’s Nexus Q media player, which inspired Sense’s design. Proud said in the article: “This isn’t something that just a tech guy in San Francisco would want.”⁠[16]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that Sense, promised for delivery in November 2014, was delayed by production problems and first shipped in February 2015. Fierce Biotech wrote that by May 2015 Hello had finished shipping to all U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry backers and begun shipping to international backers. TechCrunch wrote in 2016 that Sense started shipping in 2015 and had been sold on AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry since November 2015.⁠[2][9][17]

TechCrunch wrote on June 15, 2015, drawing on the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry, that Hello had raised $40 million in a round led by Temasek Holdings, and that sources put its valuation between $250 million and $300 million. Fierce Biotech wrote on June 17 that Temasek Holdings was leading an ongoing $40 million round that valued Hello at $250 million, in the company’s third year; Temasek did not usually back such early-stage companies, and other investors included leaders of technology companies such as Google, PayPal, Spotify, Facebook and Xiaomi.⁠[18][9]

Other sources describe the round differently: Forbes wrote in 2017 that Hello raised $30 million in June 2015 at a $250 million valuation; Business Insider wrote of a $30 million round led by Temasek Holdings in late 2015, bringing total funding including the Kickstarter campaign to over $40 million; TechCrunch wrote in 2016 that the 2015 round led by Temasek Holdings was $30 million at a valuation of $250 million to $300 million and that Hello had raised $40 million in total. A Forbes article of June 17, 2016 states instead that earlier in June 2016 Hello raised $30 million from Temasek Holdings and Forward Partners at a valuation of roughly $255 million.⁠[2][1][17][11]

Forbes’s 2016 30 Under 30 Europe list in Technology included him, describing him as 24, founder of Hello, with United Kingdom as his country; Hello was a hardware startup that had raised $44 million, whose first product, Sense, was a white orb that tracks sleep patterns and measures how a room’s environment affects sleep, and which the entry says began shipping earlier that year.⁠[19]

Forbes wrote on June 17, 2016 that Hello had begun shipping directly from its website to 11 markets outside the United States: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden; in the U.K. it sold through Amazon UK at £150 and was in talks with local retailers, and in the U.S. Sense sold for $129 on Amazon and in a few Target and Macy’s stores. Hello had raised close to $43 million including the crowdfunding, and had hired Kyrk Jordan, an early Nest employee, to lead sales and business development.⁠[11]

The article states that early reviews of Sense were mixed, with customers saying that light and noise tracking was unreliable and the app’s sleep data not very useful, while a Hello spokesman said recent updates had brought five-star reviews; software and firmware updates about a year after launch added soothing sleep sounds and improved the smart alarm. He would not say how many units had sold, and acknowledged that Hello had published no quantified evidence of how well Sense improves sleep: “there’s nothing like that we’re putting out there right now.” A device on the bedside, he said, “should look like a piece of art.”⁠[11]

The Business Insider article published when he was 24 states that Sense could play white noise at night and wake the user in the morning, and gave a daily sleep score from 1 to 100 with suggestions for improvement; he said Hello used neural networks: “We’ve taught the computer what sleep looks like.” He claimed that 70% of customers used Sense nightly 15 months after launch, against what he said was 99% of wearable users quitting within a few months.⁠[1]

TechCrunch wrote on August 30, 2016 that Sense would go on sale that fall at Best Buy and Target CorporationTarget CorporationTarget Corporation is an American retailer incorporated in Minnesota and headquartered in Minneapolis, with common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry stores, with in-store demo displays, in all major metro areas and many local ones, while WalmartWalmartWalmart is an American retailer founded by Sam Walton in 1962, with businesses spanning physical retail, membership warehouse clubs, e-commerce and related services. Its businesses include Walmart and Sam’s Club, and it has expanded into other markets through international investments; its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WMT.Open the full entry was not part of the plan for now; he called the two “two of the strongest, largest, and most relevant retailers for our target market.” An earlier firmware update had turned the bedside ball into a noise generator. TechCrunch wrote in 2017 that Hello hired a chief marketing officer from DoorDashDoorDashDoorDash is a local commerce platform co-founded in 2013 by Tony Xu and others that connects consumers, merchants, and delivery couriers, with its business expanding from restaurant delivery to groceries, retail goods, merchant software, and on-demand logistics. The company went public in 2020, and its businesses include Wolt, Deliveroo, and SevenRooms.Open the full entry in September 2016.⁠[17][20]

Forbes wrote on November 1, 2016 that Hello was releasing that day a voice-responsive version of Sense to be sold in Target and Best Buy stores nationwide; it added an Amazon Echo-style voice interface and new sensors for UV light, carbon monoxide and organic compounds, and could work with third-party devices such as Nest thermostats and Philips Hue bulbs, with the aim of bridging health tracking and the smart home. Until then Sense had been sold through Kickstarter, direct sales and Amazon. He said 93% of customers were actively using the current device three months after purchase, and that Target had called this “the biggest roll-out ever” it had done for a brand-new electronics product; Hello had raised more than $40 million from Temasek Holdings, Allen & Co. and technology executives including David Marcus, Hugo Barra and Shakil Khan.⁠[12]

At the launch he said: “We’re the only start-up that is building devices you can talk to and it talks back,” and “Smart home stuff today is so impersonal.” TechCrunch wrote in 2017 that the voice version launched in late 2016 at $149. Forbes wrote in 2017 that Hello had displays in nearly 700 Target stores; he claimed this was the largest holiday rollout Target had done for a startup, which Target said was incorrect.⁠[12][20][2]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that Peter Thiel invested $2 million directly in Hello late in 2016, his first personal investment in one of his fellows, and that Hello was then raising bridge financing at a higher valuation.⁠[2]

On January 3, 2017, Forbes published a long profile of him, giving his age as 25. Over four years Hello had raised roughly $40 million, mostly at a $250 million valuation, and he still owned about half of the company, which the article said put him in centimillionaire territory. Hello had about 50 employees and worked from a converted bakery in San Francisco’s Mission District; its chief scientist was Matthew WalkerMatt WalkerMatt Walker (Matthew Walker) is a British-born sleep scientist who was a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, where he founded the Center for Human Sleep Science, and since 2026 has directed the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at UT Dallas; his bestselling book Why We Sleep made him widely known, and some of its claims have been criticized.Open the full entry, director of the Sleep & Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, and the company claimed that after a year 71% of users slept longer and 57% had more regular wake-up times. A source close to the company said Hello’s internal 2017 sales projection of 250,000 units implied net revenue of roughly $20 million. Fortune later wrote that he had been on the cover of Forbes in 2016.⁠[2][21]

The profile records that in December 2014, as Sense’s first manufacturing firmware was being finalized, he suddenly insisted that Sense should light up and play a sound when first plugged in, while his chief technology officer, Tim Bart, argued that changing the code so late was insane; he later said: “Well, I was right.” Another Forbes article states that in a series of Forbes interviews months before Hello’s shutdown he showed a confidence that “bordered on arrogance” in Sense and its eventual evolution into a technology hub for the home, and that when asked the previous December about competition from Google, Apple and Amazon he responded with a double-middle-finger salute.⁠[2][22]

On June 12, 2017, Hello published “Goodbye, Hello.” on Medium, announcing that the company would soon shut down and was still looking for a new home for Sense; it said that instructions for exporting data and deleting accounts would go to all users that week, that purchases made directly from Hello would not be refunded, and that purchases from third-party retailers would follow those retailers’ return policies. Forbes, Engadget and Fortune all name him as the post’s author. He wrote: “The past few months have been incredibly tough, especially on the team of Hello,” and “For that I’m incredibly sorry”; he also wrote that when Sense launched sleep was one of the most neglected parts of life, and that it had since become recognized as a major pillar of health.⁠[23][22][24][21]

Fortune and TechCrunch wrote that AxiosAxiosAxios is a US digital news media company founded in 2016 by former Politico executives Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz and launched in January 2017. It is known for short news items and industry newsletters in the “Smart Brevity” style, especially for its Washington political coverage, and publishes local news newsletters in cities across the United States through Axios Local. Since 2022 it has been owned by Cox Enterprises.Open the full entry first revealed that Hello had laid off most of its staff and was looking for a buyer for its assets; Hello had held talks to sell its assets to Fitbit, which one source quoted by Fortune called “a firesale,” but the talks came to nothing. TechCrunch wrote that some of Hello’s engineers were expected to join Casper SleepCasper SleepCasper Sleep is an American mattress and sleep-products company founded in 2014 by five co-founders including Philip Krim and based in New York. It began by selling a single mattress online, shipped folded in a box, and later added pillows, bedding and furniture, its own stores and retail partners such as Target. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2020, was taken private by Durational Capital Management in January 2022 and was acquired by the foam maker Carpenter Co. in October 2024, becoming its subsidiary.Open the full entry’s research and development team in San Francisco. In his post he said the effort continued: “The past few weeks we have been working hard to find the right home for Sense and we are still focused on that.”⁠[21][20]

UKTN wrote on June 15, 2017 that the UK startup had raised $40.51 million in total from investors including Temasek Holdings, David Marcus, Cherubic Ventures, Shakil Khan, Acequia Capital, Hugo Barra and Bart Swanson; a source close to the company had said to the BBCBBCThe BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster. Its predecessor was the British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922, and since 1927 it has been established under a Royal Charter. It provides television, radio, and online services in the UK, is funded mainly by the television licence fee, and broadcasts worldwide in multiple languages through BBC World Service.Open the full entry that Hello had struggled to find additional backers in recent months, and growing competition from more established brands was thought to have contributed. He said that Hello had been his whole life for five years. Engadget wrote that Sense drew strong early interest but was criticized for not tracking sleep well, and that its only major update was voice control; Fortune wrote that other reporters had found the product did not work well.⁠[25][24][21]

TechCrunch wrote in 2023 that he founded Config in 2019 as a platform for managing the full development lifecycle of a hardware product, drawing on his experience of scaling Hello’s hardware and software teams. He said that Hello’s software team collaborated efficiently with tools such as GitHub, while “the complexity grew at an even faster pace” on the hardware side, where “you constantly fight to avoid death by a thousand cuts,” and that “Config would have been a lifesaver for us at Hello.”⁠[26]

TechCrunch wrote on June 6, 2023 that Config had raised $5 million in seed funding, all from angel investors: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone; Dan Rose, chairman of Coatue and a former Facebook vice president; Future Positive founder Fred Blackford; Lachy Groom, an early Stripe employee and investor; early Spotify investor Shakil Khan; Shishir Mehrotra, founder of Coda and a former YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry vice president; and Soleio Cuervo, Facebook’s second product designer and former head of design at Dropbox. The company had kept a small team through the 2021–2022 fundraising boom and remained focused on revenue.⁠[26]

The article states that Config brings CAD files, supply-chain documents such as bills of materials, and procurement tracking onto one platform, with desktop tools that work alongside existing CAD programs; it supported SolidWorks and Siemens NX for mechanical design and Altium for electrical design, with Autodesk and KiCad integrations planned. Its customers ranged from consumer hardware companies to large industrial machinery makers, and those named publicly were the kitchen equipment maker Mill and Humane, which was developing an AI hardware and software platform. He said: “Building a physical product at scale is one of the most complex coordination challenges possible,” and “With software, there is close to zero cost of experimentation.”⁠[26]

As of November 2026, Config’s website describes it as a platform for hardware teams that brings together engineering, operations and manufacturing, with mechanical and electrical design management, firmware management, design version control and reviews, CAD-driven bills of materials, and build and procurement tracking with vendor collaboration; its footer reads “Designed in the United States.”⁠[27]

UKTN gives London as his birthplace, and the Forbes 30 Under 30 entry describes him as “Born and bred in South London.” TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that he grew up in Sutton, a not-very-posh part of South London, his mother working in human resources and his father retired; Forbes wrote in 2016 that he grew up in Sutton, Surrey, and Wimbledon in southwest London. Forbes wrote in 2017 that he grew up less than an hour from Richard BransonRichard BransonRichard Branson is a British entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group. Beginning with a youth magazine and mail-order records, he expanded into aviation, leisure, telecommunications, finance and commercial spaceflight. He also founded Virgin Unite and is known for ballooning expeditions and his 2021 suborbital flight.Open the full entry’s childhood home, south of London, and that his father worked for the British civil service while his mother was a secretary who later stocked grocery-store shelves at night. Business Insider describes him as growing up in a particularly rough part of South London.⁠[25][19][3][11][2][1]

Business Insider wrote in 2014 that he taught himself HTML at 9 after seeing a book called Your Own Website, and was building professional websites by 12; TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that he taught himself programming at 9, the Forbes 30 Under 30 entry that he was teaching himself HTML at 9, and BuzzFeed News that he began programming at 9 and freelanced building websites at 12. Forbes wrote in 2017 that as a child he preferred the computer lab to the playground, and that at 12 he earned his first internet income building a website for a shady operator he met on an online forum, paid with a Sony Ericsson phone and a Creative Labs MP3 player, later earning hundreds of dollars per job; his PayPal account was frozen because he was underage, so payments came by mail and prompted questions from his parents. Business Insider writes that his mother thought he was a drug dealer; he answered that drug dealers probably don’t get their checks in the mail, and she replied, “I don’t want to know.”⁠[10][15][2][1][3][19]

Sources differ on university. Business Insider writes that he did well enough at school to be the first in his family to go to university, but by graduation was more interested in entrepreneurship and chose a career in technology, and that his parents “went insane”; Forbes wrote in 2017 that he refused to enroll despite his parents’ pleas; Business Insider wrote in 2014 that he had planned to attend college but changed his mind after high school; UKTN writes that he put his university plans on hold and moved to CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry after receiving a grant from Peter Thiel; Fierce Biotech writes that he skipped college in the U.K.; and the Forbes 30 Under 30 entry says he skipped university in Britain to join the Thiel Fellowship in 2011.⁠[1][2][10][25][9][19]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that he typically wears a sweatshirt and sweatpants, or a black T-shirt when dressing up, and that his diet excludes vegetables and fish. Business Insider writes that he likes living and working in San Francisco and walking to work, describes himself as “pretty basic in my life and needs,” and at the time did not plan to sell the company.⁠[2][1]

Forbes wrote in 2017 that he dismisses tech-industry talk of “changing the world” as empty, and sees sleep as the next major health shift, comparing it to exercise in the 1980s and organic food in the 1990s and 2000s; he believes only “nonengagement” devices like Sense should cover a person’s 24 hours, and disparages devices that must be worn, such as the Apple Watch, or that require direct interaction, such as the home assistants from Amazon and Google. Business Insider writes that he sees Sense as part of ambient computing alongside the Amazon Echo, the Nest thermostat and Google Home; Forbes wrote in 2016 that he describes his goal as building for a post-smartphone world in which phones are not the only output device.⁠[2][1][11]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

Config: Official website: https://config.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[27]