Year One Labs

We’ve just completed our fifth and final investment in a startup called Assemblio. The company is founded by Jon Abrams and Elan Dubrofsky. Both of them hail from Ottawa.

Assemblio is in the event planning space. We don’t have much more to share at this point, except that we’re extremely excited to have Jon and Elan on board.

We first met them when they pitched a different idea to us. We encouraged them to come and meet us at the Google Hackathon. They came to the Hackathon and worked on something else entirely. During the hackathon we could see their enthusiasm and tenacity, but also their thoughtful approach to tackling a manageable and interesting problem in a 1-day event.

Discussions and brainstorming ensued, and we landed on Assemblio as the project worth pursuing. It’s particularly interesting to us because of Alistair’s deep insight, network and experience in the event / conference space. He was recently co-chair of Strata and is currently in Silicon Valley running Cloud Connect. Alistair has been running things at Interop for 10 years and is the founder of Bitnorth, which is now in its fourth year.

Jon and Elan showed an ability to throw a bunch of ideas around, dig into the interesting ones, stay flexible, dump the stuff that didn’t make sense and stay open minded, while remaining opportunistic and passionate. That gave us the confidence to make the investment in them and Assemblio.