The History of Pointy
I first got introduced to Mark in 2012 by his college friend Lucinda, whom I worked with at the time.
We kept in touch and in 2014, Mark told me about his plans for Pointy. The vision at the time was to make all products in physical stores searchable.
Indexing the worlds physical products was an ambitious task. It was also a known problem that many had tried to solve, and failed.
I had done due diligence on a number of those companies during 2010–2013 which usually took the same approach — integrate with hundreds of point of sales systems. ie: play a game of whack-a-mole.
One of the things that defines the Pointy team is their first principles thinking. They took a completely different approach to collecting the data and didn’t accept anything that would prevent them getting to being able to collect *all* the data.
"He's on a boat?!"
Great founders hunt great co-founders.
When we first met Mark, he was busy convincing Charles (on his sailboat in the Atlantic) to turn around and join him to set up Pointy. Two weeks later Charles did just that. Charles had some of the equipment onboard to start working on the initial hardware prototypes as he sailed to Ireland. At that point Frontline invested $100k, the first check into the company. We subsequently led the Series A in 2017.
Along the journey it felt like Mark and Charles thought 100x more than other founders about the following:
- Scale: We always felt that Pointy MVPs were always more than that. They took the extra time not to make the perfect product before releasing it but to make sure it could be scaled
- Automation: the DNA of the team was always to hire exceptional people who could automate most tasks. As a result for the initial years Pointy was a very small high performing team (<20 until relatively recently)
And they thought 100x less than many about near term revenue — and did that very consciously. Below was the opening board slide for one of the 2018 meetings — which definitely set the tone!
