Zach Supalla started Spark to help his deaf father, but failed at his first crowd-funding attempt to get his business off the ground. After this failure, Supalla refocused on developing tools for building connected products. This led to the Spark Core: an open source, full-stack solution for cloud-connected devices. Supalla managed to exceed his crowd-funding goal of $10,000 by a whopping $590,000, and is using this money to launch a suite of products, including an open source Nest-alike thermostat.
