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C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 5 1 9 Austin McChord built one of CT's biggest tech success stories — his next acts include smart toilets, robot combat, more startups and transforming a polluted power plant Relentless Builder >> By Harriet Jones According to Austin McChord, true innovation tends to happen in unexpected places. "Generally, the weirder and less interesting the space, the more interesting the person who's building the thing," he said. McChord is pretty familiar with some of those weird and "less interesting" spaces. An inventor, serial entrepreneur and philanthropist, he is best known as the founder of Datto, a data storage and backup company. Built from the ground up by McChord, starting in his parents' basement when he was just 21, it became, according to published reports, the first Connecti- cut-born startup valued at more than a billion dollars — what the entrepre- neurial world calls a "unicorn." McChord sold Datto to private eq- uity investors Vista in 2017, and stayed on as CEO for another year before stepping away in search of a more bal- anced life. Since then, he's been doing "everything, all at once," launching his own venture capital firm, helming more startups, starting a battle robot league, and, with his wife Allison, launching a major coastal restoration project in his hometown. e common threads in that portfolio, according to McChord, are having fun and learning to do new things. "My entire entrepreneurial career is, I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm gonna try to figure it out," he said. 'How things work' To hear him tell the story, McChord became an entrepreneur essentially because he failed in the classroom. "I was not someone that enjoyed school," he said. "I'm sure I was a total pain in the ass as a student." His teachers gave him a computer starting in third grade because his handwriting was so poor. Before long, he grew eager to learn more about technology, teaching himself to code from library books. "Growing up, I've always been fascinated with how things work," he said. A stint at his high school TV station gave him more practice at Auin McChord Managing Director Outsiders Fund Education: Bachelor's degree in bioinformatics, Rochester Institute of Technology Age: 40 Continued on next page Austin McChord in front of the shuttered Manresa Island power plant, a site he hopes to transform into a public waterfront destination. McCHORD