Dropcam co-founder Aamir Virani, who left Nest in 2015, joins early-stage venture firm Felicis Ventures
Context & Ripple Effects
Aamir Virani's move to Felicis closes out a two-year diaspora of Dropcam's founding team since Dropcam's CEO left Nest and its founding VP of technology went to Twitter in early 2015. The other half of the picture landed just days ago: Apple reportedly hired Greg Duffy, who sold Dropcam to Nest for $555M, for a special project.
First-order effects
- Felicis Ventures adds an operator-investor with direct experience building consumer hardware and exiting it, deepening its bench for evaluating early-stage startups.
- Nest is now fully without any of Dropcam's original founders, two years after the leadership exodus began.
Second-order effects
- With Duffy at Apple and Virani sourcing deals at Felicis, the smart-home startup ecosystem gains two well-placed alumni of the category's biggest exit — one potentially building a competing product, one deciding which founders get funded.
- Felicis competes for deal flow against other early-stage firms by offering founder-operators; Virani's track record strengthens that pitch against rivals courting similar talent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-tech acquisitions like Nest-Dropcam increasingly end not with founders running divisions but with them dispersing into venture capital and rival labs, spreading the acquired company's know-how across the industry rather than concentrating it inside the acquirer.
The trend: Founders of acquired hardware companies are leaving their acquirers within a few years and recycling their expertise into venture firms and competitor projects.