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Every startup is not just a business adventure, but also a human journey. Today, Sense360 is getting acquired by Medallia (NYSE: MDLA), see the press release. It’s one of those bittersweet moments where I’m very proud of the team and company, but also realize I’ll really miss working with this great group of folks.

My journey with Sense360 started before there was a team, a product or even a company.

I had been a personal angel investor in Eli Portnoy’s previous company, Thinknear, which had seen a quick acquisition by Telenav (yes, with today’s acquisition, Eli is officially two for two). Eli and I had hit it off working in that context. As he was nearing the end of his tour of duty at Telenav (where he very significantly scaled the Thinknear business), Eli sent me the kind of email that every investor wants to receive from a serial entrepreneur they know and admire: “Over the last few weeks I have become very excited about an idea“, he said, “and I wanted to get your thoughts.”

While Eli could have probably said “I’m building a new brand of vacuum cleaners” and I would have said “I’m in!” (he’s just that kind of founder), it so happened that Eli wanted to build a very interesting B2B play, leveraging the large amounts of data captured by phone sensors, which happened to be right up my alley.”

Read Matt’s full congratulatory piece on his blog here.