This guest post was written by Sara Thomas, Principal at Maven Ventures. Follow Sara on Twitter @saraannet.
Why are printers such a pain? When I moved into a new apartment in San Francisco and set up my home office, I bought a new wireless printer. My internet connection didn’t boost through the 1960s concrete slabs in my building, so I added a wifi extender. Between my laptop, the wifi extender, and the new printer, I was soon in a frustrating tech mess and couldn’t get it all working in sync. The same thing started happening at the Maven Ventures office. We had to uninstall and reinstall the printer driver on a regular basis to get it working, and just learned to live with the inconvenience.
Our homes and offices are only becoming more technical. With new streaming technology, more wifi-enabled devices, and increasingly mobile and fast-growing teams, printers aren’t the only devices causing tech frustrations and anxieties in our lives. Enter
Eden, on-demand support for all tech and office needs.
A Place Where Everything Just Works
The Vision Worth Fighting For
Eden’s mission is to create a place “where everything just works.” After experiencing these tech frustrations on our own, we found a shared passion with the Eden team in the early days. We knew a company that could build a reliable, trusted brand that eliminated the stress of technology in everyday life had a clear opportunity for a billion dollar business. If you read my colleague
Jim Scheinman’s recent post on Einstein’s ability to “visualize the unseen,” we were working alongside the Eden team to do just that.
The Team
Our history with Eden started months before our March 2015 investment. Joe Du Bey, Eden’s co-founder and CEO, was an intern at Maven during his 2014 summer break before returning to his second year at Stanford Business School. He launched Eden that winter, and we quickly jumped in to help articulate the vision and support his efforts to recruit two incredible co-founders he already knew well. With a strong tech, product, and business team in place, we knew Eden was well-poised for success.
The Market Opportunity
Each time we discussed the new business with potential co-investors, there was a clear resounding need for Eden’s services. The closest competitor was Geeksquad, boasting a one- or two-star Yelp rating across the board, while bringing in an estimated $2B+ in revenue each year. We saw a huge opportunity for a better solution.
Since Our Investment
Eden struck a nerve early-on with the first in-home customers they served. Then, they noticed an incredible opportunity: consumers were bringing Eden to work with them. There was a massive unmet need in small and medium businesses to provide great tech services, then more ongoing support such as tasks and handywork, to make the office a place “where everything just works”. Now, Eden serves some incredible business customers such as Luxe, Zesty, and Tilt. Given this massive opportunity, they have honed their focus on
providing B2B services exclusively. They still fix those pesky office printers– and now, a ton of other painful office frustrations. We have been continually impressed by the vision, execution, and pure hustle of the Eden team and are proud to be part of this amazing company solving a true, meaningful problem. If you’re in the Bay Area and in need of tech and other handy work around the office, sign up for the
waitlist here — we’d love to hear about your experience.
