Saket Vora

(This news broke earlier, but I wanted to pass along my personal congratulations to the Omnisio team for their successful exit)

Omnisio is a web startup that was aided early on by the tech incubator Y-Combinator. All Y-Combinator teams are given gray t-shirts that simply state “Make something people want” when they are selected. Startups that successfully exit are given black t-shirts that say “I made something people want.” Needless to say, these coveted black shirts aren’t easy to come by. I give you the following:

Ryan Junee, Simon Ratner, Julian Frumar at the GooglePlex.

As readers of this blog know, I was extremely fortunate to have Simon Ratner, one of Omnisio’s three co-founders, be my apartment mate for the past year at Stanford. He and his friends (they hail from Australia) conceived the idea for Omnisio and worked over several months to build up the entire site. They were just recently acquired by Google/YouTube for a princely sum.

 Simon is hands down one of the smartest people I’ve ever met — he’s one of those rare people who is technically brilliant but can still talk about practically anything with confidence and insight. He can span the entire spectrum — hardware, firmware, software, web, video, etc. Despite Omnisio nearing launch and being his last semester at Stanford, he took Convex Optimization (widely considered to be one of the hardest classes in the EE department. And he was certaintly the most accomplished chef in the apartment. I had a lot of great times just hanging out with him and talking about…anything. I met Ryan and Julian a few times and they’re great. Maybe its just his Aussie sensibility, but Julian has a way of making you smile and laugh within 10 seconds of him walking into a room. They make a terrific and capable team.

Congratulations again to Simon and the Omnisio team. Can’t wait to see what you guys will do next.