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XMeWe Billed Itself as the Anti-Facebook. Now It's Going Hollywood.
Rachel Uranga
andRachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Francesca Billington
Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
The new chief executive of MeWe, the social network that billed itself the anti-Facebook, wants to lure in Hollywood talent — and is eyeing advertisers.
The move, steered by veteran tech and Hollywood executive Jeffrey Edell, is a departure for the Los Angeles company, which promises users it'll protect their privacy and prohibit manipulative algorithms with an ad-free network.
"I want to stay true to the privacy and those efforts, but I don't think it makes sense personally to be the quote anti-Facebook publicly," said Edell, who most recently was president of the entertainment and licensing company WTG Enterprises.
MeWe chief executive Jeffrey Edell
Since replacing founder Mark Weinstein — now the company's "chief evangelist" — last week as the network's chief executive, Edell has already signed on the comic duo Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, better known as Cheech & Chong, to help promote the site.
"What I want to do is make the experience at MeWe an experience of chat and socializing around content, whether it be voice content like music or content that you would see documentaries, niche-based content, things like that," Edell said. "It would be really cool to have the ability to Chromecast or Rokucast, if you will, content that we would licensed or in our control and be able to have chat groups and socialize in and around that content."
The former chairman of Intermix Media, the parent company of MySpace, and a longtime executive for media distribution and licensing companies, Edell said he will use his Hollywood connections to build up partnerships. He noted that MeWe is already in talks with A-level talent.
About 17 million users are signed up worldwide for the free version of MeWe, about half in North America. The Culver City-based site appealed to some of those users by selling itself as privacy focused, with a "Privacy Bill of Rights" that vowed not to manipulate, filter or change newsfeeds or use facial recognition technology.
It kept those protections.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, MeWe's revenue comes from subscribers who pay a monthly or annual fee to talk with a camera, access private chat rooms and get free emojis and other perks. Weinstein told dot.LA in March that the social platform makes $1 million each month from those subscribers alone.
Weinstein wouldn't disclose how many users pay for their accounts, but said 95% use the free version. MeWe has raised about $24 million from "high net-worth individuals," Edell said. And it's seeking another $20 million of funding from venture firms as it looks forward to creating new offices in a post-pandemic world.
Edell vowed to "stay true to the concept of privacy and security and protection of people's personal information." But, he says, he's open to partnering with advertisers to "give people the opportunity to make choices of what it is they want to see, listen to and do."
Until recently, the social network has relied on users' discontent with big social networks like Facebook to grow its base. When Facebook rolled out new WhatsApp privacy policies in January, upset users flocked to MeWe. The site gained 2.5 million users in one week. Some observers said it became a haven for anti-vaxxers and extremists.
Edell wants the site to appeal to users widely and while continuing to moderate content, although he didn't say how.
"If you're going to have crazy theories, again as long as you're not damaging to people, you're not pointing a gun at Obama's head, you're not raiding the Capitol to get to Nancy Pelosi... then a person should be available to be as silly as they want and they can not make sense or make sense, just don't cross the line," he said.
"The subscription model is going to stay," Edell said. "And there won't be a situation where I know exactly how you behave, so I send you an advertisement to buy Nike shoes and get creepy like that, but I'm thinking there has to be a way – as we move towards the future – to give you the option to figure out what it is you want, and then give you a place within the platform you can go and get it," he said.
For instance, he said, members might be able to opt into stores or groups with advertisers. That strategy will be key, he said, if it's to make a dent in Hollywood, where studios and talent alike depend on social media.
"We just have to be more sensitive towards the entertainment community and the people that are going to be on that platform and not create conflict," he said. "That doesn't mean we still can't be different."
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Rachel Uranga
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Francesca Billington
Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
https://twitter.com/racheluranga
rachel@dot.la
This is Part II of our deep dive on Adam Miller, one of LA’s most successful (and philanthropic) tech entrepreneurs. When we left off Adam’s story last week, he had just sold his Santa Monica-based HR tech company Cornerstone OnDemand for $5.2B in 2021.
(If you missed Part I last week, you can find that here.)
After 20 years of company building and an exit like Cornerstone’s, most of us would take a deep breath and think about retirement, or at least a very long vacation. But Adam Miller is not a guy who sits still. He embarked on Act II of the Adam Miller story. You can think of his second act in two parts: Social Impact and Entrepreneurship.
Social Impact
As early as college, Adam began work on homelessness fundraising and advocacy, which has remained a core area of focus to this day. While at Cornerstone, Adam prioritized serving on the boards of several nonprofits rather than sitting on corporate boards (as many other prominent CEOs do). Most notably, for nearly a decade, Adam was chairman of Team Rubicon, a veteran-led organization focused on disaster response. Team Rubicon has led over 500 operations in response to events like the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Sandy, the war in Ukraine, and many others. Team Rubicon is now one of the largest disaster relief organizations in the world, with over 160,000 volunteers, and hundreds of thousands of disaster victims served. He also helped create FARE, the world’s largest food allergy nonprofit.
Now that was all during his tenure at Cornerstone. After leaving, Adam stepped on the accelerator in his nonprofit work. Adam and his wife Staci dived deep into the mechanics of nonprofits. How were they structured? What is the state of the art? How can we most effectively translate dollars into results?
They found a few things, but two of the most important were:
- There had been little innovation in the space for years.
- Most effective charitable organizations were integrated across multiple dimensions from grant giving, to direct on the ground action, to political advocacy, to social impact investing.
Put a pin in 1, but based on 2, Adam and Staci founded 1P.org (1P stands for One Planet), which has dedicated its efforts to addressing intractable problems in our society. 1P.org has built concentric circles of focus from local (homelessness) to state-level (workforce development) to national (gun safety) to global (climate change), and operates different organizations attempting to solve each problem.
Most relevant to our LA community are the organizations focused on homelessness and workforce development, Better Angels, and LA-tech.org, respectively.
Better Angels’ mission is to end the epidemic of homelessness in Los Angeles by unlocking the power of the LA community. The organization is tackling homelessness from every angle, including providing micro-loans to prevent vulnerable Angelenos from becoming unhoused, creating an affordable housing REIT to build housing, and developing technology to better meet unhoused individuals where they are. To learn more or get involved with Better Angels, click here.
LA-tech.org is a nonprofit coalition of LA’s top tech companies built to expand economic opportunities for LA’s underserved communities. Adam conceived of LA-Tech’s core initiative following the murder of George Floyd: finding internships for 1,000 LA students of color at LA’s great tech companies. People thought he was crazy, but after two years, the organization has passed 950 internships and is now setting its sights on 1,000 new internships per year. To learn more or host interns at your company, click here.
As if all this philanthropic activity isn’t enough to keep one person busy, Adam has gone back to the world of entrepreneurship. Remember we said that during his research, Adam found nonprofits hadn’t seen much innovation in years?
Entrepreneurship (Again)
Adam is back in the founder/CEO seat. His new company is called Instil, and the company’s goal is to bring the tech infrastructure for nonprofits into the modern era. Instil is a mobile-first SaaS product that gives nonprofit operators visibility into donations, community, membership, volunteers, and data. The company is a for-profit business focused on nonprofit impact and has raised funding from top investors like LA-based Greycroft, Threshold, USVP and Bessemer Venture Partners.
So are we finally done cataloging Adam’s second act, with a multitude of nonprofit boards, running a full nonprofit himself, and starting a new venture backed software business? Of course not.
Adam is also incubating, advising and supporting additional startups where he serves as Executive Chair, including Groundswell, the “Robinhood of philanthropy,” and Clovers, a company reinventing the interview process. In addition, he continues to invest in early stage companies through 1P Ventures.
So how does Adam keep all this straight?
According to Adam things are easier today than they were in the Cornerstone days.
“Cornerstone was very complex - it had many different businesses, and by the end, I was spending 70% of my time on the road, traveling. Today we have amazing tools. I run everything with Zoom, Slack and Evernote. It also helps that I’ve gone through every stage of a company. I make decisions faster. It’s easier to raise money, easier to hire. I can do things in a fraction of the time.”
For the rest of us mere mortals, all we can do is watch with our jaws on the floor and hope to make a tenth of the impact that Adam has made and continues to contribute.
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Christian Hetrick
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Real Estate Data, Virtual Homes and the Future of Proptech at dot.LA's Salon Event
04:17 PM | May 11, 2022
Photo by Briland Graves
On Tuesday evening, dot.LA hosted a Proptech Salon to create space and encourage proptech founders and investors to discuss how Southern California real estate startups are disrupting the industry. Over 70 invited guests gathered at WeWork's Century City location, including Michael Martin of Avenue 8, Nick Marino of TruLiv and Andrew Swerdloff of StayOpen.
The event kicked off with a conversation with JoyHub co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Braman, who announced the data aggregation and business intelligence platform will soon change its name to Revolution RE. Prior to starting JoyHub, Braman spent time at crowdfunding real estate platform Realty Mogul as senior managing director.
Braman said the inspiration for creating JoyHub came from the problems she saw in the real estate industry around the lack of data consistency and the overwhelming amount of data that real estate operators of apartments and rental properties have to make sense of. She saw a need for a tool that could simplify the data for real estate companies so they could use it effectively.
“I learned that legacy technology created a lot of problems," she said. "Proptech and all these new innovative solutions were compounding the problem by creating massive amounts of data silos.”
dot.LA CEO Sam Adams and JoyHub co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Braman at dot.LA's Proptech Salon on May 10, 2022.Photo by Briland Graves
With any new venture or startup, there’s always a risk of it failing, she said:
“Anyone who tells you that starting a company during a pandemic is easy is not being truthful,” she said, adding that she was lucky that she was able to work with a team she already knew well from her first startup experience.
For much of the rest of the startup community, times are looking more challenging than they were not long ago.
“The high-gross C, D unicorn-type companies are having a very challenging time raising up rounds," dot LA Executive Chairman Spencer Rascoff said. "And A and B—not so great.”
Rascoff offered some advice to young companies hoping to weather the storm.
“Realistically, you should try to tighten your belt as much as possible to extend the runway as long as possible so that if you can't get a round done this year, you prioritize survival over growth," he said. "Because there'll be time for growth later.”
Another hot topic in proptech was virtual real estate. The concept of the metaverse has grown in popularity as new virtual environments go online. Celebrities like Snoop Dogg already own land in some of these new worlds. In December, one of his fans purchased a plot of land for $450,000 just to be the rapper-entrepreneur's virtual neighbor.
dot.LA CEO Sam Adams and Chairman Spencer Rascoff at dot.LA's Proptech Salon on May 10, 2022.Photo by Briland Graves
As an investor, Rascoff said he’s skeptical about buying land in the metaverse.
“The big reason why I'm overall skeptical of this is for some of these things, you need counties to play ball,” Rascoff said. “But it's fun and interesting to talk about how title might be disruptive through blockchain.”
The night was capped with a question from dot LA CEO Sam Adams:
“If given a million dollars to invest, where would that money go?”
Braman said she would have to diversify and choose cannabis along with venture funds.
Rascoff admitted his answer was less exciting, but said he'd would use the money to buy a “basket of growth tech stocks that are at two-to-five-year lows.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled StayOpen co-founder Andrew Swerdloff's last name.
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Decerry Donato
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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