After Openwave, John would go on to start Sonos, the wireless speaker company.
At Openwave, Kevin worked closely with Thomas Reardon. Things came full circle when Reardon started Ctrl Labs in 2017, and Kevin became his first investor. In 2019, Ctrl Labs sold to Facebook.
During his six years at Twitter, Kevin saw the service evolve from a social networking toy to changing the future of media.
“To me, there’s a simple formula for venture capital: be curious, hustle, be a good human, and invest in great companies. If you invest in great companies, you’ll get to invest in more great companies. There’s no other secret.”
Kevin knew he had to invest in Mirror after the first time he tried the product. “I remember running out of the pitch meeting to catch Brynn before she got on the elevator. I couldn’t let her leave without making an offer.”

Natalie Vais

General Partner, Early

Natalie has always loved deeply technical products — first as an engineer, later as a product leader, and now as an investor. She believes the best founders find ways to hide technical complexity with the right layers of abstraction, creating products that are both powerful and delightful to use.

Natalie spent her early career working on distributed systems and gained an appreciation for what it takes to build and sell platforms to developers. She served as Director of Product at an analytics startup (later acquired by Twitter) and eventually became a Product Lead at Google. There, she worked on the Core Infrastructure team (Search and Ads) and eventually helped launch Google Cloud Firestore. Her venture career began at Amplify Partners, where she invested in technical projects at their inception, including companies like MotherDuck, TigerBeetle, and PostgresML.

Now, as a General Partner at Spark Capital, Natalie focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise software companies, particularly those that serve developers. She says, “I love thinking about backend technology and infrastructure—especially databases and data platforms—that enable powerful software experiences. Nothing great gets built without a great foundation.”

Beyond the technical aspects, Natalie is drawn to founders who take unconventional paths, convinced that seeing the same problem through different lenses can lead to the most valuable insights.

Companies
Aura Frames
Brud
CTRL-labs
Cameo
Feather
Framework
LOLA
Lumi
Medium
Mirror
ReMarkable