Palisades-Raised Tech Entrepreneur Debuts ‘Intelligent’ Oven Amid Media Frenzy

By FRANCES SHARPE | Editor-in-Chief

It’s been a wild couple of weeks for Matt Van Horn. The Palisades-raised tech entrepreneur has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, Slate and dozens of other publications as well as on TV.

How many interviews has he done recently? “It feels like about a million!” Van Horn, 31, told the Palisadian-Post.

So, what’s all the fuss about?

The media frenzy started on June 9 when Van Horn and his business partner Nikhil Bhogal, both former executives at the social network Path, unveiled the highly anticipated secret project they had been working on for nearly two years – the June Intelligent Oven, which they hope will revolutionize the way people cook.

“What’s crazy is if you watch ‘Mad Men,’ the kitchens today are almost identical,” said San Francisco-based June’s CEO Van Horn, who grew up in the El Medio Bluffs and attended Village School and New Roads Middle School and High School.

“We haven’t seen a major movement in the kitchen since the microwave came to the market in the 1950s,” added Van Horn, who also co-founded Zimride (now Lyft).

Thanks to $7 million in venture funding and a team of 22 engineers, the June countertop oven’s ‘smart’ technology includes an internal camera that can tell the difference between a bagel and a frozen pizza, among other foods. The camera comes courtesy of Bhogal, a former Apple engineer who is an inventor on many of the tech giant’s camera technology patents.

Other innovations include weight sensors, digital temperature probes and an app that will send an alert to your iPhone when your food is done.

It’s all designed to make cooking easier and more convenient for busy people and amateur chefs, according to Van Horn.

“It’s hard to cook a good meal, let alone eat healthfully,” he said. “June aims to help you do both by making it easier to cook delicious food to perfection.”

The response to June so far has been “amazing,” he added.

A simple Google search for “June Intelligent Oven” brings up more than half a million results – pretty impressive for a product nobody had heard of before June 9.

When the company began accepting orders for the product, which is currently available for pre-sale at a pricey $1,495.

The first person to order the oven was none other than Van Horn’s mom, Joan Van Horn, who still lives in the El Medio Bluffs house where June’s inventor grew up.

A longtime TV producer (“Seinfeld,” “Castle”) and a lifelong foodie, she told the Post she’s extraordinarily proud of her son’s latest accomplishment, but not surprised.

“He’s always been a tech geek,” she said. “The crowd he met at New Roads, they’ve all done really well for themselves and they’re all entrepreneurs. It’s a very empowering place.”

Van Horn’s love for technology started at a young age in the Palisades.

“I’ve been obsessed with Apple my entire life,” he said.

This eventually led to a four-year role doing higher education marketing for Apple while he was attending the University of Arizona.

Van Horn’s career focus started taking shape during college, but his mom worried that his major in entrepreneurship might not lead to a ‘real job.’

“I asked him, ‘Matt, what are you going to do when you graduate?’” she said. “He told me, ‘Mom, the business I’m going to be in doesn’t even exist yet.’ He was right.”

Van Horn, who has lived in the Bay Area since college, said the No. 1 thing he misses about the Palisades is “my mom’s cooking.”

His mom said that when the entrepreneur comes home to visit, she fixes his favorite meal, Chambord Chicken, a dish she invented after a family trip to France.

In fact, a longing to recreate some of his mom’s recipes was one of the things that inspired Van Horn to create June.

So far, June is programmed to cook 15 foods – from Brussels sprouts to a 12.5” pizza to a 12-lb. turkey – and the list is expanding.

When asked about his favorite June recipe, Van Horn said, “Our original chocolate chip cookies [recipe] is near and dear to me, as one of the first recipes we developed as a team.”

The oven won’t hit consumers’ countertops until next Spring 2016, but when it does, perhaps Joan Van Horn will whip up some Chambord Chicken for her son on his next visit to the Palisades.

Until then, Van Horn will continue meeting the demands for interviews from the press. None of them, however, will be quite like being interviewed for his hometown paper.

“As a lifelong reader of the Palisadian-Post,” he said, “I can say that second to launching my own company, this is definitely a childhood dream come true.”

For more information, visit juneoven.com. Contact the writer at frances@palipost.com.