Fifty-seven startups, and a name.
Our core team has worked together for more than twenty years, across five companies and two acquisitions. We built Horizon Software, which was acquired by Symbio. At Symbio we ran engineering for pre-seed startups, fifty-seven of them. We watched most fail and a few succeed spectacularly, and more than once a founder offered us equity instead of cash. We took the cash. We should have taken the equity.
We later joined TubeMogul, which Adobe acquired, and ran engineering inside Adobe Advertising Cloud. When Adobe consolidated our org in 2018, we had three months to decide what came next. We chose blockchain, not as a strategic pivot but because we were already living inside the 2018 ICO boom and saw a real problem worth solving in how people tracked and invested in it. Fifty-seven startups, building in blocks. That is the name.
The lesson from those fifty-seven startups stayed with us: startups and services firms have opposite incentives. A founder wants the best team, the lowest cost, the fastest launch. A services firm is built to grow revenue and headcount. So from 2020 to 2022 we tested three ways to close that gap. Co-creating with founders gave us UpMarket, which grew from a small brokerage into a platform company. Incubating our own conviction gave us CapStack, our on-chain yield operation, which still runs our own capital today. And taking equity in exchange for engineering became 57Blocks Capital, our venture arm. The lesson had been right. We had just needed to act on it.
That conviction is still what moves us. Frontier technology was blockchain in 2018. Today it is AI-native engineering, the same harness and the same equity-aligned thinking, applied to the next frontier.
