The Archive · Company · 2012–2016

Sproutling

Co-founder & CEO

Founded: 2012 · San Francisco
Raised: ~$6.5M
Patents: US9277870B2 · USD749005S1
Exit: Acquired by Mattel, Jan 2016

Sproutling was a soft ankle-worn monitor that tracked heart rate, skin temperature, and movement, learned each baby’s patterns, and told parents something no camera could: your daughter will likely wake in forty minutes. We shipped machine learning in a nursery product in 2013.

This was the consumer hardware bubble, the Fitbit and Nest years, when ‘wearables for X’ could open any door on Sand Hill Road. I co-founded the company in 2012 as CEO, with Mathew Spolin as CTO. We came out of the Lemnos Labs hardware incubator, raised about $6.5 million from First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, FirstMark, and angels including Shawn Fanning, and earned two patents.

Here’s the part that shaped everything I believe now. Plenty of devices measured more than ours did. What got us on shelves, into the press, and eventually into Mattel was the story. Anxious new parents don’t buy sensors. They buy sleep. We sold sleep.

Mattel acquired Sproutling in January 2016. The machine one shelf over tells that chapter.

hardware
wearables
ml
consumer
baby-tech

People

Mathew Spolin Co-founder & CTO
Shawn Fanning Early investor

Guided tours

Prefer a curated route? Each tour visits the timeline machine by machine. In the game they play as quests.

The Founder's Path

Thirty years in eleven machines: from a beige box in the high desert to a Berlin film studio, with two acquisitions on the way.
The Four Bubbles

Social gaming, consumer hardware, crypto, AI. The constraint moves every time. The lesson doesn't.
The Rust Thread

One language, five machines: how everything since 2019 ended up compiled, fast, and self-hosted.
The Creative Cut

Into the break room: the studio, the channel, the ads, the films, and the podcast.

The timeline as text

Everything in the archive, grouped by bubble rather than by date: all the crypto work together, all the AI work together. The game keeps the strict timeline.

The AI bubble

The current bet, plus the vision-AI years at Lumeo that came before the wave had a name. Product, story, and brand on top of working code.

Chris Bruce

Person

Product & Engineering Leader · Berlin ⇄ SF

Product and engineering leader. Five startups, two exits (Mattel, EA), four tech bubbles survived. Headquartered in Berlin, with deep San Francisco roots and regular time on the ground there.
- product
- engineering
- story
- brand
Pavilion

Project · 2026–present

One upload, infinite screens

Open-source film distribution and white-label streaming. Upload once, screen everywhere. Built with Rust, Axum, and SurrealDB.
- rust
- streaming
- open-source
- film-tech
Story & Brand

Practice · 2023–present

The scarce skill in the AI bubble

Anyone can build an app now. Almost nobody can get one used. Story and brand are the moat when code is free.
- story
- brand
- distribution
- product
Lumeo

Company · 2019–2022

Co-founder & CTO

No-code computer vision. Lumeo turns any camera into an AI sensor with drag-and-drop pipelines. Co-founded with Devarshi Shah; I built the platform as CTO.
- computer-vision
- ai
- video
- no-code
- saas
AI & Semantic Search

Technology

Twenty years of shipping machine intelligence

From Sproutling's sleep prediction in 2013 to LLM screenplay tools today. In the AI bubble, the model is the easy part.
- ai
- ml
- llm
- computer-vision
- semantic-search
SlateHub

Project

The free home for filmmakers

An open-source, free-forever home for filmmakers, actors, and crew. Verified profiles, credits, crew search, a job board, and production tools. Built in Rust.
- rust
- open-source
- film-tech
Seceda Studios

Company

Founder · Berlin video production studio

A Berlin film studio with a compiler in the back room. Where product, engineering, story, and brand finally run on the same machine.
- film
- directing
- berlin
- brand

Rust & open source

The workbench: Rust as the primary language, a Matrix homeserver, and the small tools that keep the hands honest.

Maelstrom

Project · 2020–present

Matrix homeserver in Rust

An open-source Matrix homeserver built for serious scale. Stateless clustering on Tokio, Axum, and SurrealDB. Listed on matrix.org.
- rust
- matrix
- open-source
- distributed-systems
Rust

Technology · 2019–present

Primary language

GitHub bio: “Rust'ing away.” Everything I ship now is Rust: BlockVisor, SlateHub, Pavilion, Maelstrom, and this website, one binary with no cloud.
- rust
- systems
- performance
- self-hosted
Open Source Workbench

Project

Small tools, sharp edges

The small-tools shelf: linkly (self-hosted URL shortener), film-finder (Berlin cinema listings), scrapling-rs (web scraping), and other Rust experiments.
- rust
- tools
- open-source

The crypto bubble

Token incentives and bare metal: Helium's people-powered wireless network, then BlockJoy, built to outlive the narrative.

BlockJoy

Company · 2021–present

Founder & CEO

Blockchain nodes on bare metal for up to 80% less than cloud. Founded in the crypto bubble, built to outlive it. About $11M raised. Written in Rust.
- rust
- blockchain
- infrastructure
- bare-metal
Helium

Company · 2019–2022

VP of Product & Technology

The people's wireless network, live in 425+ US cities while I ran product and technology. My front-row seat to the crypto bubble.
- iot
- wireless
- depin
- crypto

The hardware bubble

The Fitbit years: Sproutling's learning baby monitor, and shipping it inside Mattel after the acquisition.

Mattel

Company · 2016–2018

Sr. Director, Product & Technology · GM, Sproutling

Running Sproutling inside a Fortune 500 as the hardware bubble cooled. Shipped the Fisher-Price Sproutling wearable in 2017.
- hardware
- consumer
- brand
Sproutling

Company · 2012–2016

Co-founder & CEO

A baby monitor that learned your kid and predicted sleep. Built in the consumer hardware bubble, backed by First Round, acquired by Mattel in January 2016.
- hardware
- wearables
- ml
- consumer
- baby-tech

Origins & the through-line

Where it started, and how I work: the first machines, and leading from both sides of the product and engineering line.

The First Machine

Practice · 1982–1995

Apple II Plus · age nine

An Apple II Plus, a nine-year-old, and eventually a modem. Programming since 1982, a BBS sysop by grade six, Slackware 1.0 when Linux arrived on floppies.
- apple-ii
- bbs
- commodore
- linux
- origins
Product & Engineering Leadership

Practice

CEO · CTO · VP Product · VP Engineering · GM

Equally fluent in product and engineering. One person who speaks both languages saves a company from its most expensive meetings.
- leadership
- product
- engineering

Filmmaking

Directing and shooting out of Berlin: narrative shorts, spec ads, the showreel, and the Seceda Studios channel. Where the story muscle gets trained daily.

Poster frame from the Seceda Studios 2025 showreel — Showreel 2025 Seceda Studios · 30 sec

Poster frame from The Backdoor — The Backdoor Narrative short · Director & DP

Poster frame from Waldeinsamkeit — Waldeinsamkeit Sci-fi short · An alien encounter in the woods

Poster frame from the Dulens spec ad — Dulens: It's an Emotion Spec ad · 49 sec

The Long Take Podcast

Creative Work · 2025–present

Weekly, from Seceda Studios

A weekly filmmaking podcast: production stories, gear talk, and the business of making films, hosted with Tom.
- podcast
- filmmaking
Spec Ads & Branded Work

Creative Work

Cinematic video that converts

Commercial craft: an Adidas spec, a Rose Bikes spec shot on the Sony FX3, branded mini-docs, and event films.
- commercial
- branded
- advertising
Short Films

Creative Work

Director & DP

Narrative work out of Berlin: 'The Backdoor' (festival-bound) and 'Christmas Gift' (2025), made with the studio's crews.
- directing
- narrative
- festivals
- berlin
Seceda Studios on YouTube

Creative Work

Filmmaking, cameras, craft

Cinema-camera shootouts (URSA Cine 12K vs. Alexa Mini LF), budget-versus-legend tests, DaVinci Resolve technique, and how small crews make big images.
- youtube
- cameras
- color
- education

High scores

Guided quests

THE ARCHIVE RUN

Sproutling

People

Guided tours

The Founder's Path

The Four Bubbles

The Rust Thread

The Creative Cut