Unify!

I’m really excited to announce our latest investment, Snowball (funny enough the original Snowball was one of my first jobs in tech) . Anish and his team have built a really amazing product and I’m glad that the rest of the world will finally have the opportunity to experience it.

Anish and Jeson set out to solve a simple problem — the abundance of messaging apps on our phones. Because of the fragmentation of social on mobile devices (look no further than Facebook’s suite of apps), the individual has become the operating system and messaging is at the core of many of these apps.

Over the last few years we’ve seen the “rise of many” when it comes to messaging apps. Whether its text messages, WhatsApp messages, Facebook messages, Google Hangouts, Twitter Direct Messages, Instagram Direct Messages (and their new Bolt product), Snapchat messages or any of the other hundreds of “alternative” messaging apps in existence; it’s quite a fragmented experience.

If you invest in startups, you’ve likely seen hundreds of messaging apps since the advent of the iPhone in 2007. In this past year alone I’ve seen about twenty different takes on video messaging. There is no doubt that some of these apps will be successful and some will fail, but managing them all as a user is a painful experience.

This leads to confusion, but what people care most about in these messaging apps isn’t the medium they’re delivered on but who they’re from and the content in the message. That’s why Snowball aggregates all of your messaging apps in one place. The Snowball icon stays on your screen no matter what app you’re using and all of your messages are just a quick swipe away.

Once you aggregate all of a person’s messaging apps you can start to build an operating system that organizes content by people and not by app, creating a far more personalized experience. As I’ve written about before, certain characteristics of mobile allows for the aggregation of human data, feeding into the “Human API”. Snowball leverages this data to bring you the messages that are most important to you, regardless of which app they live on.

Messaging is the key to the social operating system on mobile and I hope you all will give Snowball a spin.