Our First Investment: Gen-Z Dating App, Lolly, Alongside SV Angel & Correlation Ventures
We are super excited to announce California Crescent Fund’s first investment — Lolly!
by Angela Huang, Zach Friedman, James Kaplan, Prerit Seth, & Alexandra Li
What is Lolly?
Lolly is a social dating app that allows users to leverage short-form videos to tell their story. As more of our interactions move online, the app humanizes online dating beyond the traditional “left swipe” and “right swipe.” Combining fun, quirky, TikTok-like short-form videos with innovative algorithms that surface potential matches, Lolly enables users to not only build deeper romantic connections, but also better share their authentic story.
The Partnership
Zach Friedman (CCF Senior Partner at the Claremont Consortium) is also a student founder in the Los Angeles ecosystem. He connected with Marc Baghadijian, co-founder and CEO of Lolly, before Lolly was even formed. The two bounced ideas and talked shop as fellow founders. Through their relationship, Zach got a first hand look at Lolly’s building process before the initial launch. He witnessed the team breath life into their vision within a few short months.
What started out as an exchange of ideas and advice eventually became a fruitful partnership when Zach introduced the Lolly team to CCF. Its thesis resonated with many members of Crescent, all of us college students. “I think the rest of the team saw what I saw: a chance at improving the flawed dating app ecosystem that we’ve all experienced firsthand,” says Zach.
The Lolly team’s unmatched execution and conviction in their mission excited the Crescent team, and the partnership naturally followed.
The Visionaries Behind Lolly
CEO, Marc Baghadijian
Marc started Lolly to solve a personal frustration. After years of empty experiences and limited success with modern dating apps, Marc formed a relationship with someone he grew close to after repeated FaceTime calls. Marc saw this as a massive shift in both the experience and the end-result when compared to traditional, photo-only dating apps. This discovery served as a catalyst in his pursuit of integrating video-based content in the dating world. Even after product pivots, Marc did not waver from this fundamental belief in his vision. He demonstrated perfect founder-market fit, and his passion for the problem space allowed him to build a world-class team.
Lolly wasn’t the first time the 21-year old entrepreneur had exercised his hustle. A current senior studying management and entrepreneurship, Marc immigrated to the United States at age four from Lebanon. He sold his first business, RapidFire Magazines, at age 18. Beyond his business pursuits, he was also a star fencer, competing internationally for Lebanon on the Junior Men’s Epee Team.
President, Sacha Schermerhorn
Like Marc, Sacha Schermerhorn (Lolly’s technical co-founder and president) embodied the same determination before his entrepreneurial pursuits with Lolly. When Sacha wasn’t coding NLP algorithms or cooking gourmet delights, he was making groundbreaking strides in neuroscience research. During his time at NYU’s School of Medicine, he co-discovered the involvement of a new protein, Secernin-1, in Alzheimer’s disease. Schermerhorn won two major fellowships from the NSF and NIH, but decided against pursuing further research or a PhD. Instead, he decided to pursue entrepreneurship after winning the Pioneer Accelerator. It was there where he met one of Marc’s friends, who would connect the two together. That one fateful phone call between two entrepreneurial minded individuals laid the groundwork for Lolly.
Founding PM, Alyssa Goldberg
Alyssa Goldberg, a senior at the University of Southern California, joined Lolly as the founding Product Manager. Her creativity and passion for leveraging technology to solve problems led her to USC’s Iovine and Young Academy. Paired with a demonstrated track record of success as she is a rising star in the social student community, Alyssa is currently a Product Designer at Tesla with previous experience as a Product Designer at Facebook, Quizlet, and Mattel.
CMO, Mike Majlak aka “Big Mike”
Another member of Lolly’s all-star cast, Mike Majlak, is everything a social startup dreams for in a chief marketing officer. “Big Mike,” as he is affectionately known, has over 5 million Gen-Z followers across all platforms. He has generated hundreds of millions of social media impressions in past marketing campaigns and is invaluable in Lolly’s go-to-market strategy.
What excites us about the space:
Existing Outdated Dating App Models
“The tools to express yourself on Tinder are primitive. I am still waiting for great innovation in the space to disrupt how we express ourselves on dating applications.”
— Sean Rad, Co-Founder of Tinder.
Lolly has the opportunity to disrupt the current market order via their innovative methods of user engagement. The incumbents have all built success off of innovation that has begun to collect dust: the classic swipe or no swipe based off of a picture or two. Lolly presents something entirely different: an authentic video experience. The app provides a far more tangible perspective into someone’s character, mannerisms, and passions vis-a-vis video content. They also offer a unique medium for non-platonic social interaction, one that includes engagement through personalized user content.
Lolly’s Non-Binary Matching Model
To cement this further, Lolly allows users to engage with others in a non-binary fashion. Users are no longer restricted to a simple rejection or acceptance. That is, instead of simply swiping right or left, the app allows you to “clap” first and then “crush” on another user. The combination of having claps and crushes allows for interest to be more casual while still having the ability to move towards a genuine connection. Not ready to fully commit to a potential match? Send some claps instead.
Creating a few short videos for a Lolly profile requires more effort on users’ end than uploading a couple photos on other dating apps, a friction point that will lower in the long-run as short form video creation becomes increasingly normalized through TikTok and other mediums. Regardless, we felt that in the short-run these barriers would work towards Lolly’s benefit and increase user buy-in and engagement.
The Age of Short Form Video
“Living at the intersection of social and dating gives us that perfect sweet spot of entertainment and self-expression to create more engaging connections, not just a platform for virality.”
— Alyssa Goldberg, Lolly Product Manager
Some point to TikTok as the Gen-Z evolution of Facebook and social media. TikTok is the way social media is transitioning with incumbent platforms reducing friction points to finding the content users want and with users increasingly engaging with influencers compared to their friend graph. TikTok is a very social platform with the sharing of videos and the act of creating videos with friends; however, it is not a platform to make new friends. TikTok is fundamentally a media company, and there is no platform that leverages short form video and algorithmic matching to actually help you be social and meet people. So we were very attracted by Lolly’s potential to use the same addictive mechanisms of engagement as a way to facilitate more genuine social connection than existing dating apps.
Our synergies
In lieu of social dating, the Crescent Team had unique chemistry with the Lolly team since day one and have been committed to being involved partners. As Gen Z’ers, some of which are founders ourselves, we can empathize with the student founder journey and offer insights from an end user perspective.
“CCF has been one of the most hands-on investors we’ve had. Their help on the ground has been invaluable so far,” founder Marc Baghadjian states.
Crescent has been involved in various aspects of the business, ranging from growth and community to marketing and product feedback. Whether that be reaching out to personal connections to build out Lolly’s team, create viral content, form feedback clusters on each represented CCF campus, or create press kits to better market Lolly, we are committed to help Lolly bring a better dating experience to the masses. We are students with a personal understanding of Lolly’s target customer, so we love to get our hands dirty operationally in ways other investors can’t.
At CCF, our mission is to grow the Southern California student startup ecosystem and to inspire and partner with the next wave of great entrepreneurs from the region. We seek to be the first movers in fellow student dreamers and help student founders feel more confident taking a lead into entrepreneurship. As Marc iterates Lolly and moves closer to product-market fit, we at CCF are on our own journey to be the hub of student entrepreneurship!
Angela Huang is the Senior Partner at UCSD
Zach Friedman is the Senior Partner at Claremont Consortium
James Kaplan is a University Partner at USC
Alexandra Li a Founding Partner at California Crescent Fund
Prerit Seth is a Founding Partner at California Crescent Fund
Are you a SoCal student interested in joining us? Apply for a role
Are you a student founder? Get in touch.
Inquiries & investor relations? Email: ops@californiacrescent.fund
Twitter: @CrescentFund | LinkedIn
