Our Investment in Attic Labs
Changing how data is shared and distributed on the internet
Data Is Everywhere
The world is made of data; from the DNA that defines us, to our photos on Facebook, from the US Census to last night’s baseball scores. Data defines our past, shows us who we are, and soon will drive our cars. However there are two big problems with data: sharing and enabling everyone to build apps with all this distributed knowledge.
Let’s look at the first problem: sharing data. Data is all around us but today it’s stuck in silos, stuck in databases, in spreadsheets, in CSV files, or on web pages. As users of data, we find ourselves fumbling with all these different formats, sources, and versions making it impossible to take full advantage of the information on the internet.
The second problem of enabling applications to use all this data is even more significant. We are entering a new generation of application development from cloud/mobile to a decentralized internet where every thing, every person, every device is connected. The apps of tomorrow will be powered by AI, communicate via bots, and be connected to our phones, watches, glasses, and cars. In the past a single database and a monolithic stack was enough to build an application. In this new world we need a decentralized way of publishing and consuming data for these new applications.
The People
The greatest entrepreneurs see the world as it should be and are driven to remake the world in their vision. Aaron Boodman, Rafael Weinstein and the entire team at Attic Labs have a history of building technologies that are elegant, useful, and delightful to developers. They helped build Google Chrome and the Chrome extensions platform, Chrome OS, ECMAScript, and Greasemonkey. They have thought more about moving data around the internet than almost any other people in the world. They have written multiple generations of sync code; from AvantGo to Google Gears to offline Gmail to apps for wearables. They have been thinking about this problem for a long time.
The Solution
Attic Labs is building Noms, an open source, fully decentralized database that will change how developers and data users share and distribute information on the internet. It borrows lots of ideas from Git but instead of source code, Noms is for publishing and consuming data. Noms allows you to diff, branch and sync any data, accurately and efficiently. It easily ingests any data from photos to stock prices. It’s a database built for a world built of data.
Attic Labs is going to build the future of data on the internet. We are thrilled to announce that Greylock is leading the Series A investment in the company and I will be joining the board. When we visited the team in Aaron’s attic (literally his attic and later his basement), we knew they were building something special and profound. There’s a ton of more good stuff coming so get involved with Noms and read more from the Attic Lab team here.
