Jordan Schwartz
Hi, I’m a climatetech investor, software entrepreneur, tinkerer, and father.
Welcome to my collected projects and passions.
Back in 1995, while studying social psychology as a graduate student at the U. of Washington, I came across an article by Kevin Kelly describing the concept of the “hive mind”: just like your consciousness emerges from the interactions your neurons, other types of colonies, like those of bees and ants, can create a sort of “mind” as well. I thought that was such a cool idea that I wanted to see it in action, so I set up a couple of bee hives in my backyard and have been keeping bees, on and off, ever since. Over that time, I’ve gathered quite a bit of honey and also discovered I could collaborate with them on art projects.
Around about that time, I left the UW to join Microsoft, where I worked on a variety of products, including the Windows Shell, Windows Live Photos and a few skunkworks projects that never saw the light of day. When you’ve been at Microsoft for a decade, they give this weird crystal trophy that creeped me out, so I gave my notice just a month shy of ten years, and my wife and I left to backpack around Europe for the rest of the year. We’ve blogged our travels ever since.
When I returned, I started a neighborhood blog, noodled on software ideas (like Swaggle), but ultimately joined a couple of friends in founding Pathable, a platform that produced mobile apps and websites for tradeshows and conferences. I led that company as CEO until 2020, when the pandemic hit and nearly wiped us out. Instead, though, we made a hard pivot into virtual events, beat all our competition off the blocks, and, after 12 years of hard work, we became an overnight success. Pathable was acquired by Community Brands in September 2020, and, about a month later, the first vaccine was introduced, cratering the virtual events business.
Since then, I’ve focused my time on climatetech investing. Climate change is the preeminent existential threat to human civilization, so I’m trying to support companies that are on front lines of carbon reduction however I can. Since mid-2023, I’ve served as the co-chair of the Screening Committee for E8, an cleantech-focused angel investing group. And then, most recently, I joined Sekr, an app for vanlifers and like-minded adventurers, as Chief Product Officer.
I live in Seattle with my wife Michelle, our son and an exuberant dog.
PROJECTS
A Chronicle of Personal Pursuits
As a member and Screening Committee co-chair of E8, a cleantech-focused angel investors group, I invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies that are on the front lines of fighting climate change.
I’m on temporary hiatus from beekeeping at the moment, but I’ve had a couple of hives going on and off since 1996. I’ve experimented with different hive types and along the way discovered that I could collaborate with the bees on art.
OLDER PROJECTS
Pathable
Pathable began as a social networking platform for conference and event attendees, but over time morphed into a mobile event app platform and, when the pandemic hit, into a virtual event platform. In 2020, we sold to Community Brands. I’m immensely proud of both the product and service we built, and the community of people we built around it.
Swaggle was a group text messaging service I built in 2008, the same year Apple’s app store launched. At the time, carrying on conversations via SMS with groups of people was hard, this made it easy. My SMS “server” was a hacked Android phone with an unlimited text messaging plan tethered to a PC under my desk. I ran it until 2017 and made a lot of people happy.
I used to co-host a Halloween party. It began in our living room, but gradually grew until we had to start holding it in larger and larger spaces, with local Burning Man arts groups collaborating. We ended up with about 1,400 people at the last of the series, and raised over $100,000 for Room to Read over the years. Somewhere in the mountains of Nepal, there’s a rural library with a plaque thanking ‘Hive Mind Halloween” for construction funds.
In 2008, I founded Wallyhood, a blog for Wallingford, my Seattle neighborhood. My goal was to tell over-the-back-fence stories and to connect neighbors in a warmer, more tightly knit community. Over the 12 years I ran it, I wrote over 2,800 articles for over 20,000 subscribers. Now that I’ve moved, Wallyhood continues in the hands of local writers I collaborated with along the way.
When I felt like the American consumer marketing machine was trying to turn Chanukah into the “Jewish Christmas”, I decided to invent a new holiday, an actual Jewish Christmas, so they’d leave Chanukah alone.
