Our Seed Investment in Val Town: Making Programming Accessible, Collaborative, and Fun

In January of 2022, I came across Steve’s blog and determined I should email him. We met for the first time in-person in February. I decided I really liked Steve. 

Steve has a long, documented history of passion for developer tools and a love for teaching programming. He has formidable technical talent and the creativity that I always look for in founders. We resolved to hang out regularly and see if there might be some way to work together. 

Software is everywhere, it’s a critical part of the infrastructure we rely on. It’s grown increasingly advanced and often complex. Incredible advances have been made in scalability, performance and UX of software and infrastructure that serves it. Those advances often come at the cost of simplicity, collaboration, and fun for the programmer.

Val Town’s mission is end-user programming. It makes programming accessible, collaborative, and fun. If you know a bit of JavaScript, you can deploy it to Val Town in just 100ms. Every save thereafter is another lightning-fast deploy. You can share with friends, solicit feedback, and even get pull requests as quickly and easily as you can send a link. It’s never been easier to launch that idea you’ve had sitting around in your Notes/Notion/Obsidian.

People have been building truly awesome stuff with Val Town, here are just a few of my favorites!

• Build a battle royale for AI-powered connect 4 bots. I’m excited to see all kinds of situations where AI on Val Town interacts with other AI on Val Town!
• Get notified about new subscribers from Stripe in your Discord, Slack, email etc. And because it’s JavaScript, you can easily add filters for bigger customers or add in context from Clearbit to learn more about them!
• Start your Subaru's engine. That’s just cool.
• Build a custom newsletter system—just a great example of someone building a full end-to-end application.
• Book reservations on Resy or for other young parents, that swim class you’ve been trying to get into!

Accel led Val Town’s pre-seed round in August 2022 and now I’m thrilled to share we are leading their Seed round and I am joining the board. I can’t wait to see what you all build with it!

– Dan Levine