Sifteo is a pretty young company, but we’ve certainly got a history. It’s our anniversary, and a lot has happened in the last 3 years—not to mention in the many years leading up to the founding of Sifteo, Inc. Since people often ask where we came from and how we got where we are today, we thought we’d share the totally uncut Sifteo story, including all the digressions, hyperlinks, and bumps along the way. It goes something like this:

College: the early years

A few years ago in sunny Palo Alto, California, two guys named Dave and Jeevan rolled up for class at Stanford University. Dave was a surfer; Jeevan was into art and design. They had a few things in common, like their major (Symbolic Systems) and a serious enthusiasm for classic NES video games. Dave and Jeevan became friends.

They’re both pretty creative guys, and together they started a band called Wheels. Dave played guitar, Jeevan played bass, and the vision was simple—to be the kind of band that would open for Huey Lewis at the State Fair.

Wheels was pop-meets-classic rock and more than 50% ironic, but also super intense: it’s rumored that Jeevan played until his fingers bled at Battle of the Bands, and they also stole a car—Dave’s—to haul their gear around. It was a ’77 orange Volkswagen Beetle, which was exactly as retro as the Atari 2600 they played in their dorm rooms in their spare time.

College was fun.

The Media Lab

Later, after completing an MS degree in computer science (Dave) and a brief yet successful career as an actor in television commercials (Jeevan), the two friends both decided to go back to school at the MIT Media Lab. The creative duo was reunited—this time playing with circuit boards more often than guitars and Atari. They went to lectures and hung out with designers, engineers, artists, and scientists.

The Media Lab was really fun, and somewhere along the way Dave and Jeevan came up with the idea of Siftables, the Sifteo cube prototype. At his best, Dave-the-graduate-student could solder all the components on an entire Siftable circuit board in 4 hours (!!!).

The excellent TED adventure

One day, Dave’s advisor, Pattie Maes, was invited to give a TED talk about the various projects she was involved with at the Media Lab. TED curator Chris Anderson was especially curious about Siftables, and when Dave heard about the interest in his project, he volunteered to deliver that part of the talk himself.

It was a pretty bold move to say the least, and the next morning it resulted in an email from Anderson. The gist of it was, “you want to give the talk yourself? Prove it.”

In typical grad student fashion, Dave and Jeevan stayed awake for 24 hours drinking coffee and feverishly outlining the talk.

To their own amazement, it worked out: TED was happy to have Dave come to talk about Siftables…

…and not long afterward the talk went viral! It was definitely a galvanizing experience. Four months later, Dave and Jeevan found themselves back on the West Coast, where along with their friend Brent Fitzgerald they established Taco Lab in the dark weird basement of Electric Works, an art gallery in SOMA, San Francisco.

Starting up (AKA dark weird basement)

Taco Lab was the ultimate expression of entrepreneurial leanness. Humble brag? Maybe. It had one tiny frosted window and was located directly beneath an art gallery that doubled as a dance studio after hours, so meetings with corporate execs and venture capitalists often took place to the sound of 30 people prancing on wooden floors overhead:

Nevertheless, Dave and Jeevan founded Sifteo, Inc., raised some funding, and with a growing team of smart collaborators refined the Siftables concept into the current Sifteo cubes.

Then they moved the headquarters as soon as possible:

Other miscellaneous historical Sifteo facts:

• The Wheels 1977 Volkswagen Beetle was narrow enough to drive between the bollards strategically placed to keep cars out of certain parts of the university campus where the band often performed.
• The original Siftables prototypes used the same microcontrollers as game-console-on-chip Uzebox, and they cost about $200 (each!) to make
• A lot of the components of the early ”Siftables” prototypes came from Sparkfun.
• In early 2009, Dave and Jeevan went to China with Nathan Seidle, Eric Schweikardt, and a group of other Makers—led by Bunnie Huang—who were interested to learn how stuff gets made.
• Dave’s college Atari 2600 was played on an old-school, black and white, 10-inch TV with 2 knobs and rabbit ear antenna.
  • Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva, was a worthy (and daily) opponent in the game Joust.