Some New Year’s news: I recently left my role at Thrive to start something new. I spent the last five years there supporting founders, starting new companies, and building the incubation program. I am grateful to draw on those relationships and the support of the Thrive team as I…
Feels like we are re-entering an era of quirky, personality-rich design languages.
It is most apparent in hardware — though we are starting to see it more in software too.
What pains me about the “NYC is done” & “leaving SF forever” crowd isn’t that they’re leaving (I get it) but the attitude that the city was something to take & now that it faces adversity, they’re gone.
Cities are not products you consume—they require participation & investment.
New year, new news: I've joined Thrive Capital to focus on new incubations at the firm. I'm excited to get back to designing and building startups — working with founders to realize great ideas and catalyze companies at their earliest stage. 🚀
Worked from the office with a few other (distanced) people for the first time in a long time and, wow, it was the best.
Idk what the future is, but can tell you it ain’t 100% remote.
Some news! 🎉 it’s the end of a 6+ year ride for me — from founding Oyster to our acquisition and then building products & teams at Google, all alongside the best people I’ve ever worked with.
Now time to get back into startups again, in some new & different ways. More soon! 💫
You can participate & invest in your city in many ways.
One that has been meaningful to me is supporting grassroots groups fighting for change. Here are two in NYC that I care about:
@RidersAlliance
-
@rhookinitiative
-
“The spending on Delta’s American Express cards is…nearly 1% of the entire U.S. gross domestic product….Delta will collect nearly $7 billion in revenue from American Express this year….That’s nearly equal to the amount the airline generated from flying passengers in 2022.”
@papoose
Browser Co, Amo, Aavara/Family, Snap come to mind off the top of my head
— though in software think it’s more about enabling expressive behavior than offering expressive form (credit to
@bartonsmith
for this take)
The team
@Order
knocked the
@Every
brand out of the park — a thoughtful mix of editorial professionalism and the flexibility to fit each author's unique personality.
It is fitting that Oyster would someday make it into literature — just wish my character had also been depicted as “chiseled” and not having “pants so tight I already knew him” 😂 huge congrats
@annawiener
!
Christopher Nolan's movie names all sound like they could be saas or fintech startups in 2020:
Tenet
Interstellar
Memento
Prestige
Inception
Following
Insomnia
Dunkirk
Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight Rises
"The successor to the Personal Computer is imminent. And that starts in the Browser"
Excited for the future the Browser Company is building—so much accomplished in just 4 years
Congrats to the entire
@browsercompany
team on these new resources to help achieve their vision 💙
Late last year, a few of us at Thrive started talking about creating a new web browser, built like the best software in 2020: empowering, powerful, & a joy to use.
Now we are sharing a *little* bit more about what
@joshm
,
@hursh
& the team
@browsercompany
are building.
2 years at Thrive and building 🌎. Feel lucky to do this job every day and the opportunity to work across big problems in healthcare, finance, software, wellness, consumer, and more. Let's gooo.
New investment – Clasp 🔗
Clasp creating the easiest way for HR, saas, and brokerage platforms to launch and grow employee benefits products.
I'm excited to be working with founders Amar & Zach on product, narrative, sales and more as they build.
10 years ago you walk into a cool persons apartment, you’d like like, woah. How’d they think of all this
Now it’s all oh yeah I saw that soy sauce table staining instagram reel too
I'd love to see a company focused on scaling Oyster farming
Oysters
1) Remove CO2 from the ocean
2) Store it in their shells long term
3) Help the ocean capture more atmospheric CO2
4) Reduce ocean acidification
5) Filter toxins / algae (50 gal p/d)
6) Taste great
7) Worth $$$
The Browser Company is on a mission to create a new window to the internet; a new navigator to help make the most of the web.
The team is sharp, growing, and there is a ton to do. Follow along here:
🔺☝🌌⭐⬆🌐🖥️👆🧭🌟🔗🔺
Going 1-0 is a common mantra in the NFL playoffs. You need to earn the right to play each week. I like it for startups as well.
Today is all you can control. The next game is not guaranteed. You just have to perform here and now. Prune everything else away. Go 1-0.
You and your…
If you know me, you know I love RI. So when the state launched a contest to redesign the current plate, I entered (several times actually)...
Now one of my designs,
#newwaveri
was selected as one of the finalists and it is going to a public vote:
If you know me, you know I love RI. So when the state launched a contest to redesign the current plate, I entered (several times actually)...
Now one of my designs,
#newwaveri
was selected as one of the finalists and it is going to a public vote:
After being involved in starting ~10 companies over the last two years, if given the choice, starting a newco in spring is the move.
Momentum builds faster, hiring is easier than end of year, everyone is working, it all just clicks quicker.
I went to art school, which teaches & prioritizes a culture of critique and interrogation.
This is great for deep creation/analysis, but boy does it feel antithetical to the expansive, breezy, “I can conquer the world” attitude that much of investing & startups reward.
Snapchat is underrated as a v accessible design tool and i think a lot of young designers in the near future will say it‘s how they got their start. people are hacking the gif feature to create awesome little animations!
Thrilled to see Cadence expand its collaboration with
@providence
to a system-wide partnership.
Even more – it is continually inspiring to see
@caltchek
and team scale their transformative care for patients battling chronic conditions. 💙
Payroll is a big opportunity for vertical sw platforms but has stagnated for too long—held back by archaic tech & complex dev experiences.
Today I am excited to announce Thrive’s investment in
@Check_HQ
to deliver a moden API for payroll infrastructure.
Gateway had incredible vibes.
Low price point, graphic yet folksy aesthetic, Made in the USA hardware, and approachable demo-filled “Country” stores. 🐄
Would fit into tech well today.
Have been using
@Pitch
for the last few months and it is flat out the best way to make, collaborate, and share presentations. Excited to see them share more of their vision.
Big news from
@Pitch
. Today, we’re officially announcing our invite-only beta, plus an additional $30m in financing from Thrive Capital and the founders of Instagram and Superhuman. It’s a huge milestone for us, let me explain why. 👇 1/7
After wrestling with it for years, I’m working to understand: your energy grows by using more of it. Scrap the notion that you shouldn’t drain the battery. This is true both physically and mentally. Put it into the world and, in turn, the world refuels you — often unexpectedly.
Payroll is a colossal opportunity.
• $150B market cap for payroll cos
• Incumbents are > 50 years old
• Largest player has just 17% share
• NPS score often 0
This is why I'm so bullish about
@check_hq
. Could prove one of the most dominant fintech cos of the 2020s. 👇
It's not everyday you get to congratulate your fiancée on a Supreme Court victory! Congrats
@betsyplum
,
@thenyic
,
@ACLU
❤️🇺🇸 This result is a huge win for immigrants and democracy!
#everyonecounts
Breaking News: In a major setback for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court sent a case on adding a citizenship question to the census to a lower court
Peter
@pter
is one of those designers whose work I've long enjoyed: always original, thoughtful, and full of personality. Excited for him and the team at the Browser Company - what a match!
When picking a startup idea the business primitive is almost always more relevant to your day-to-day work than the market or space.
I think a lot of first-time founders don't fully recognize that (I know I didn't).
@libbybrittain
@zachklein
Totally! I think COVID also accelerated a lot folks future plans. They don't *want* to leave but it makes too much sense not to (e.g. family who was already thinking of leaving due to costs, etc).
Why do we all shoot iPhone videos at concerts and sporting events or (worse yet) fireworks?
The iPhone camera is good at many things but this isn’t one of them. I’d also wager that the median views on most concert videos is 0. While it certainly takes you out of the moment, I…
In short, we want Thrive to be the best place for founders to start companies and are working hard to make that true. I couldn't be more excited for the road ahead. We have A LOT in the works.
If you're a proven, passionate builder thinking about what's next, let's talk.
We are humbled to announce Thrive VIII. Totaling $3BN, Thrive VIII will comprise two funds, with $500MM designated for incubations and early-stage investments, and $2.5BN designated for late-stage investments.
Six months ago, we started onboarding people to
@browsercompany
’s product – one-by-one, by hand.
Today, our cohort retention + engagement is so strong that we’re transitioning to self-serve soon! We didn't trust the data at first but it's clear something's working.
More:
Lastly – I’m really excited to share a little more about Thrive Inc.
The team at Thrive has been hard at work collaborating with a group of ambitious founders to incubate several new companies like
@browsercompany
. Looking forward to sharing more on those soon.
We will look back on conversations about designers getting a "seat at the table" as a quaint moment in the past due to a few catalysts but more than anything... I think it will be because of Figma.
Whoa, Google Maps got a new icon.
Have to believe it was prompted by confusion from Apple Maps copycat icon and desire to build the brand on places vs. turn-by-turn.
One quality measure of products is how they make you feel about yourself when you use them — in control, creative, empowered, etc.
Very excited for
@browsercompany
's latest act to bring that to search and more.
It has been a real privilege to partner with
@caltchek
and team from day one.
Excited for this milestone and for Cadence to get out into the world helping patients at a massive scale with LifePoint.
Contact tracing — that protects user privacy — will be our best path out of COVID quarantines and towards awareness and more reliable disease tracking.
Looking forward to seeing what comes of this effort:
When starting something, I often see founders underweight their personal fit on an opportunity.
They know software and software is eating the world, so every problem can feel like something you can take on...
It has been a privilege to run design sprints for over 30 startups the past few years. I’m excited to be working with
@rsg
to bring these processes to a new generation of early-stage companies.
Saving patients $$ to see better doctors leads to better health outcomes. Excited for
@nickpreber
and
@getgarner
to announce their vision and fundraise today:
New York-based health tech company Garner Health, developer of a platform that analyzes large amounts of medical insurance claims to identify the highest-quality doctors in a city or neighborhood, has raised a Series A round of funding.
This investment, alongside Stripe, Bedrock, and Index, is also a continuation of my (nearly) decades-long partnership with
@ericstromberg
,
@almostabc
, and
@revivek
and I am thrilled to continue working together in support of each of them in this way. 🤝
was born out of our own frustration naming companies, products, kids. We hope it can be a helpful tool for anyone finding themselves in the naming process.
You should start many books but finish relatively few.
Reading less for information retention and more for dipping, however briefly, into new ideas and views.
It varies but an overly simple rubric for some primitives:
DTC: ops, marketing
Consumer Social: product iteration, community
Subscription: retention, perf marketing
Saas: product innovation, sales
Tech-Enabled: value chains, regulatory, sales
I am consistently impressed by Steve, Demetri, and the
@thirtymadison
team. They are the epitome of "show don't tell" entrepreneurship. Excited about where this merger will take them next.
Very excited to share that
@thirtymadison
and
@nurxapp
have signed a definitive agreement to merge. Michelle,
@dkaragas
and I are thrilled to work with
@varsharao
@Dreddielicious
and the Nurx team to continue building the leading specialty healthcare company in the U.S. (1/2)