Button: bringing symbiosis to the mobile app ecosystem
I think about performance marketing as the business world’s equivalent of symbiosis — where two living things benefit from each other and work together throughout their lives. Button, our latest investment, is the mobile app ecosystem’s mechanism that allows for symbiosis among different apps.
Some apps are great at on-demand transportation, like Uber, others, at restaurant reservations, such as Resy. Both apps are quite different businesses. However, both apps benefit when, for example, the user books a restaurant on Resy and clicks on the Uber button within the app to get a car. It’s magic! And like many ingenious ideas, it’s executed seamlessly from app-to-app so the user just feels like it’s a natural transition.
On the back end, Resy gets a small fee that when aggregated over many users becomes an interesting income stream. For Uber, it allows them to integrate with thousands of apps without lifting a finger and they benefit from increased traffic to their app. Both apps prosper in the exchange and neither is focused on the complex challenge of building this technology, which is where Button steps in.
In the mobile world, intent is often inherently created in one application — but often fulfilled in another. Button’s ability to understand or infer a user’s intent in one app — and match that intent with the good or service to fulfill it in another app — is something that the mobile app economy has needed for a long time. Making that process seamless, efficient, and delightful for the user is what Button is focused on.
Repeat entrepreneurs that bring together teams that have worked together in the past and have solved similar problems are three signals that are amongst the best predictors of success we have found in our data. The team behind Button is exactly that. Michael Jaconi, the Co-Founder and CEO, is a repeat offender in the entrepreneurial world. The last company he was a part of sold to Rakuten, where he stayed on to help lead investments and was responsible for Rakuten’s blockbuster investment in Pinterest. Tanner Hackett formerly headed up Rocket Internet’s Lazada business in Southeast Asia — one of the fastest growing in their portfolio. Mike Dudas, of Twitter fame, formerly ran BD at Braintree/PayPal and formerly Google Wallet — and is one of the highest caliber sales people we’ve met. Chris Maddern, former Lead Engineer of Venmo (a former Greycroft portfolio company), is a product and engineering leader in the NY tech community, and Mike Wakerly, former Lead Engineer of Google Wallet, is a highly respected engineer in the community.
