Adi Sideman: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Founded YouNow

Build platforms, not apps. Apps come and go. Platforms take a life of their own.

YouNow founder and CEO Adi Sideman is a pioneer in participatory media, with more than 20 years of experience creating apps and companies in the user-generated content space. Sideman founded YouNow in 2011 to provide a live social platform for people to connect, interact, and express themselves. YouNow grew to be a global social network with more

than 100 million user sessions a month, and creators and audiences now produce more than 50,000 hours of original live content each day. YouNow has been named one of the most innovative companies of 2016 by Fast Company and was a finalist for Fastest Rising Startup of 2016 at the Crunchies Awards.

As a developer, Sideman produced the first animated ads on AOL and founded Squeeze, a web development venture that provided services to Fortune 500 companies like Starbucks and Con Edison. He also produced more than 30 online games for major-studio film and TV franchises. In 1999, he founded the interactive marketing firm Oddcast, which continues to develop such groundbreaking apps as “Elf Yourself.” In 2005 he co-founded KSolo, the first online karaoke service (acquired by Fox Interactive/MySpace) and, in…