Brendan
Kohler
Co-Founder & CTO
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Druker
Computers today come with apps, beautiful graphics, and — most importantly — the internet, but it wasn’t always so. I got my first computer when I was 7, but it didn’t do much. It was thanks to mentors like my grandfather, an electrical engineer, and a family friend who worked at Digital Equipment Corp, that I quickly learned that if I wanted it to cool things, I had to build it myself. From hacking game binaries to modding and building my own, computer games were the start of my obsession with creating new things.
At 15, I got my first taste of entrepreneurship by starting my first online business to build and sell custom gaming PCs. By the time I was a student at Georgia Tech, I was researching distributed database technologies and working on supercomputer applications. But I wouldn’t be where I am today without the opportunity to conduct research at Yale and work at a Yale-spinout startup called Seldera (acquired by Ameresco Inc. in 2014), a groundbreaking predictive maintenance company.
These early experiences shaped my understanding of the difficult path entrepreneurs face and the role new technologies can play in transforming mature industries.
When I met Vivjan and John, my co-founders at Hyperplane, we were all separately trying to help early-stage entrepreneurs. Vivjan was angel investing, John was working at a venture firm investing in seed-stage deals, and I was offering technical mentorship to companies at Harvard Innovation Labs, TechStars, and Mass Challenge. When Vivjan proposed we start a venture firm together, I realized it was the opportunity of a lifetime! We’d be able to help hundreds of entrepreneurs trying to solve hard problems and get better access to investors who not only understood how to grow a company but also how to build complex technology.
“The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
-William Gibson
My role at Hyperplane is focused on identifying new technologies and areas of investment. It’s no surprise, given my background, that I’m heavily focused on AI, ML, and distributed systems technologies.
Whenever I review the latest lab papers, I’m struck by the limited number of good ideas that make it outside of the lab, even in the most obvious industries. I firmly believe we need to make entrepreneurship easier for highly technical teams — from research labs or industry experiences — to start new companies and bring new technologies to market. This requires a combination of a deep network, patient capital, and go-to-market expertise, all of which we provide at Hyperplane. I’m proud of what we’ve built and excited for the success of all the entrepreneurs we’ve helped along their journey.