ashecitism
Member
trailer for their product, Joule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPjm5E5-HOk
he's briefly in the vid at 1:30
https://www.chefsteps.com/joule
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/24/v...p-will-make-you-ravenous-before-thanksgiving/
http://www.eater.com/2015/11/24/9788798/chefsteps-sous-vide-gabe-newell-immersion-circulator
I'm sure I read about his investment months ago, but that wasn't picked up by many sites and the product wasn't revealed.
he's briefly in the vid at 1:30
https://www.chefsteps.com/joule
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/24/v...p-will-make-you-ravenous-before-thanksgiving/
A Seattle startup, ChefSteps, has announced a piece of hardware, Joule, that functions as an “immersion circulator,” making it easier to create sous vide meals. Cooking and eating awesome food may be on your mind ahead of Thanksgiving. But the Joule won’t begin shipping until early next year.
Newell supplied money for the high-tech cooking startup that Chris Young and Grant Crilly started. Both previously worked with Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, on his Modernist Cuisine cookbook. Myhrvold is a big fan of sous vide as well. This company’s goal is to invite people to cook with passion.
“They came over and it was easily the best food I’d ever had,” Newell said. “Spectacular in its design and execution.”
Of his son, Newell said, “It was his bedside reading for six months. Even though, up until then, he’d never been interested in cooking at all, he suddenly decided he wanted to be a chef. And when I talked to him, he was talking about it like an engineer talks about it; he was talking about tradeoffs and fundamental principles and thermodynamics.”
So Newell started talking more with Young and Crilly, who were then just launching ChefSteps. They teamed up, and Newell supplied the funding in the form of a loan, but he did not take any ownership in the company. (Valve is not involved).
http://www.eater.com/2015/11/24/9788798/chefsteps-sous-vide-gabe-newell-immersion-circulator
Newell's son's enthusiasm inspired him to start a dialogue with Young and Crilly, who were then just launching ChefSteps. The three men talked the same language, Newell notes. "They talked to me like a scientist, like an engineer, and this isn't how I thought people in the cooking world talked. These guys are cooking nerds. And the science is super interesting. Their understanding of what's going on in the experience of cooking resonated with my experiences in the world of creating entertainment. In the end, your target is the subjective experience of the consumer. You have to know all this hard stuff, but at the end of the day you have to have a really good connection with the inside of someone's head to be good at it. This intrigued me. Every time I talked to them I felt like I learned something new."
Formally, Valve is not affiliated with ChefSteps. ChefSteps is a privately funded company that launched with the founders' capital and eventually took on Newell as a community member who supports the culinary incubator in the form of a low-interest loan. "He gave us a small loan to keep going," Young says, a bit quietly, "He never told us how to run the company. Every six months he'd say, 'What problems are you having, what are you trying to solve?' Gabe is known as a guy who believes you will be successful if you focus on solving problems for a real community of people."
I'm sure I read about his investment months ago, but that wasn't picked up by many sites and the product wasn't revealed.