Thirty years building Seattle's startups.

I'm Andy Sack. I've spent about thirty years starting, funding, and occasionally fumbling technology companies — nearly all of them in Seattle. I studied at Brown University (BA, 1990) and MIT Sloan (MBA), then spent the next three decades in and around the earliest stage of company-building. Today I'm co-founder of Forum3 and co-author of two books on becoming AI-first.

I started out building for the early consumer internet, back when personalization was a novel idea rather than an assumption. I co-founded Firefly Network, a pioneer of internet personalization that was acquired by Microsoft. Then came Abuzz, an enterprise knowledge-management company that Red Herring named the #1 internet-software company of its year — acquired by The New York Times Digital in 1999 — and Kefta, a real-time customer-interaction company acquired by Acxiom in 2007. Along the way I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at SOFTBANK Venture Capital (now Mobius).

I kept founding. In 2004 I started and ran Judy's Book, a local-search social network, and raised $10.5M from Mobius Ventures and Ignition Partners. Then I co-founded Lighter Capital, the pioneer of RevenueLoan — revenue-based financing, a then-new asset class that lends against a company's revenue instead of taking equity. It was an early bet that not every good company should have to sell a chunk of itself to grow.

In 2008 I co-founded Founders' Co-op with Chris DeVore and Rudy Gadre — one of Seattle's first seed funds. It grew to a $25M fund (its largest, by 2019) and backed 90+ startups. For roughly a decade I was also Managing Director of Techstars Seattle; the 2011 class turned out to be the highest-performing in the program's history. Between the fund and the accelerator, we were seed investors in four companies that became unicorns — among them Remitly, Outreach, and Auth0. From 2015 to 2021 I also advised Satya Nadella and Microsoft on product innovation and digital transformation.

In 2021 I co-founded Forum3 with Adam Brotman, Starbucks' former Chief Digital Officer. We started in web3 — architecting Starbucks Odyssey, the NFT loyalty program, and raising $10M — and today Forum3 is an embedded AI and agent strategy partner for consumer brands. Adam and I wrote AI First (Harvard Business Review Press) and Agents, Inc., and we host the AI First podcast. I'm also Managing Partner of Keen Capital, a fund of blockchain-native venture funds.

I live in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle with my wife and two kids. I try to operate by the Techstars ethos of "Give First," I answer my own email, and I still think the best conversations in tech happen over coffee in this city. The blog is called A Sack of Seattle — the name is a joke; the archive is not.