Version 1: Silly. Version 7: Dent in the universe.

David Burt
YouCan Startup
Published in
1 min readJan 26, 2016

James Beshara, CEO and co-founder of mobile-crowdfunding platform Tilt:

Version 7 of Facebook [was] powering 14 nonviolent revolutions, two of which afterwards became violent… That’s version 7. Version 1 was an application for voyeurism and exhibitionism on a college campus. I remember my freshman year when it launch, it really was just: what did your friends do last night? Which cute girls are in your class on Tuesday/Thursday? And it needed to start that way because it had this everyday, this daily utility in our lives when we started using it. There were many… social networks launched… coming from the nonprofit space. I made note of every single one of them, and they were all dead on arrival because they didn’t have that frequency, that daily use, that utility in people’s daily lives that Facebook had.

What are some current version 1's whose version 7's could change the world?

The quote is from a great episode of Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast. Listen to the whole episode here.

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David Burt
YouCan Startup

Chief of Staff at The Atlantic | Community building and storytelling