SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Last week, Dropcam co-founder Aamir Virani joined Felicis Ventures while the company’s other co-founder got hired at Apple.
Virani, who left Nest in 2015 after its acquisition of Dropcam, explained his departure by saying, “I wasn’t really a big company person. I just don’t think that mentality is right for me. I like trying to figure out how to make something useful for customers, then figuring out how to create a business that will ensure it survives.”
Google and Nest acquired Dropcam in 2014 for $555 million, and unlike Virani, who referred to Google as one of the world’s greatest companies, Duffy went public with his regrets over the sale of the company he fostered.
That attitude largely explains why Virani, for the last year or so, has chosen to do a limited number of angel investing and to advise a small group of startups, many of them from his personal network of contacts he made while attending Rice and Stanford University.
He’s been focused on companies such as Luma, an Atlanta-based company that makes slick-looking WiFi routers; Petasense, a San Jose-based company whose sensors help facilitate predictive maintenance on machinery; and Loop, a San Francisco-based company whose tablet-like device helps families organize their media, as well as communicate.
When it comes to his collaborations with Felicis, Virani says he’s most interested in “data centric products and services, hardware, software, cloud services — most of it seems like it’s focused on the connected home and workplace.”
