Thing Labs/Plinky

Plinky, which is now ThingLabs, was the fourth company I started at Polaris. I co-founded the company with former Googler Jason Shellen who was at Pyra Labs, maker of Blogger, with @ev and later created Google Reader.

The story is one of serendipity. Jason and I met through my partner Mike Hirshland. Jason had some novel ideas about how to drive consumer engagement by radically changing the experience for creating user-generated content. At the time I had been thinking a lot about UGC monetization in the context of SEO. We hit it off and our ideas meshed nicely. We talked casually about starting something for a few months and in early April of 2008 we decided to go for it. Two months later Polaris, SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier) and some West Coast angels seeded the company.

Working with Jason got me deep into the social Web. I was interim CTO at Plinky for a little over a year. After that, the mission of the company expanded and it became Thing Labs. Brizzly, the leading product, is the best Twitter client on the market.