Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X
After years of work and continuous learning, 2020 was our year to launch our namesake findSisterhood, an online platform that creates safe spaces and connects people across socioeconomics.
The idea for this new app was inspired by one product we launched a year ago that allowed women to talk anonymously to each other. We created a safe space where thousands of women got their questions answered around sex, relationships and also abuse and mental health issues. Women left abusive relationships and reported sexual assault. But the sensitive conversations triggered difficult emotions for others. My co-founder Stephan Hagemann and I knew we needed to find the balance between creating a safe space for those conversations without hurting others. So we built a social network that could filter out unwanted discussions and be uplifting.
We spent the last two years analyzing data, testing various features, and talking to users in many different countries from diverse backgrounds to start solving the problem of how to create empathy online and to connect people through kindness and allow for safe conversations. At our peak, our beta app had users in 38 countries and over 1,500 cities.
Things were looking great. We started by hiring a fantastic UX/UI team, new look, logo, color. We had plans for a new website with blogs, integrated podcasts, a store for our merchandise, events, and so on.
The kick-off event, a dinner party, hosted by our investor Sarah Harden, CEO of Hello Sunshine, at the Beverly Hills Club All Bright, was scheduled for the end of March. Getting everyone in Hollywood excited about our upcoming launch, raise funds, but also recruit ambassadors that would support our launch. We created partnerships with the most prestigious talent agencies in L.A. and had a pipeline of exciting announcements and events around our big reveal planned.
And then COVID-19 happened.
We had to cancel all our events, including our fundraising dinner. Our timeline got turned upside down, and there was a decision to be made. Do we keep going as planned? Or, do we make sure to do whatever possible to use whatever technology we already have, to help people despite the cost and pivot in the midst of a crisis?
I saw the deep mental health and economic crisis on top of this pandemic unfolding and realized we were sitting on technology that could save lives right now.
The trigger warning that we had built for findSisterhood does precisely what we need right now, filter out content that affects our mental health, and allows for safe conversations during social distancing.
After working 20 hours a day, seven days a week as an entire team, we were able to build a COVID-19 trigger warning and filter system.
I had to make some tough calls after long conversations with my co-founder. We decided to forgo the big splash and release whatever we were able to build within the next three weeks. It was a big move for a two-year old startup that saw this project as the face and core of our company. There was money that was lost. Stephan and I took over the remaining UX, and UI design works ourselves to reduce cash burn. We did everything humanly possible to get this app out the door as fast as we could. I built our new website myself at 3 AM on the morning of our launch and emailed back and forth with Apple all week to get this app released in the App Store. And let's not get me started on doing this while homeschooling two small kids at home, I have never been more exhausted in my entire life.
It is not at all what I had envisioned. It's not perfect. I spent the last two years of my life researching kindness and empathy, behavioral patterns, talking to experts, interviewing users, testing all over the world. And what it has come down to was our app that still has many of the features missing, and after all of this work, we launched yet another of what is known in the startup world as minimum viable product.
But this is the job we signed up for as founders. And as I told our investors, if we can even save one life by creating a space that allows people to cancel out the noise and anxiety and help endure the collective grief we are all feeling, it was worth the last two years of my life.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
www.amazon.jobs