Edoome Rolls Out To All Chilean Public Schools

Edoome (AngelList profile), a social learning management platform that turns classrooms into an online community so teachers, students and parents can communicate and collaborate easily and securely, just signed an agreement to launch Edoome in all of Chile’s public school system. In the next few months, 200k+ teachers and 3M+ students at 12,000+ Chilean public schools will start to use Edoome, making students’ and teachers’ lives easier and better. The majority of teachers who use Edoome save more than two hours of planning and preparation time per week, letting them focus on what they do best: teaching students.

This agreement is a big step forward for Edoome, as it brings an entire country’s education system into the Edoome platform. In addition to this agreement, Edoome has been growing quickly in Mexico, Spain, the US, Ecuador and Colombia over the past 6-12 months and now has more than 75k teachers and 150k students using the platform. Edoome just recently did a soft launch in the US and is growing at 20+% monthly. (more…)

AI, Becoming Multiplanetary, the Fermi Paradox, SpaceX Tesla and Elon Musk on Wait But Why

Every once in awhile I read something that leaves me thinking, wow! Something that completely changes my perspective or opens a door that was previously blocked off, or that I didn’t even know existed. Tim Urban’s Wait But Why blog is incredible, but his posts on Artificial Intelligence and Elon Musk’s drive to make us a multi planetary species are on another level. I read these posts about 3-4 months ago, but haven’t stopped thinking about them, and they’ve influenced my thinking on a variety of subjects.

The posts are long, but if you take the time to read them, they’re completely worth it. Urban’s descriptions and analogies are amazing and really help explain what’s going on to someone who didn’t know anything about the subject before hand. Here’s some notes (and highlights) from the AI posts. (more…)

Introducing Ttanti: Patagonian Wood Watches

ttanti wood watch

I’m really excited to introduce Ttanti’s Travelers Collection, wood watches direct from Chile’s Patagonia. Max and Angel, have been working on Ttanti for 2+ years to make it a reality. Although its outside of our primarily tech focus at Magma, we loved the project and the team and decided to help out.

We’ve been working with Max and Angel for the better part of 18 months, helping them go from a 100% Chilean made prototype, to a Patagonian designed watch with a Swiss made body, all expertly finished off by hand by Chilean artisans. Ttanti is one of our portfolio companies that I’m most proud of because of how far they’ve come. (more…)

Magma At Two Years

Two years ago my friend Diego introduced me to Francisco the head of one of Chile’s family offices. Francisco told us that he wanted to invest in startups and high growth small businesses not only because he thought Chile needed a fully private early stage startup fund to help entrepreneurs be successful, but also to potentially change how Chilean investors look at startups by showing them the way forward.

After working together for about six months, Francisco, Diego and I announced our first two investments, officially launching Magma Partners, a US$5M early stage investment fund powered 100% by capital from the three of us.

Our original plan was to invest in 4-6 companies per year, but we were inundated with qualified companies that needed capital, monitorship, connections and feedback from people who’d done it before. We received over 150 applications (more…)