Less Stories, More Funding!
The last few months at Summify have been really groundbreaking and we wanted to share some of the exciting updates with you!
More Funding
We have raised a seed round from a great group of investors and here is the full list is in no particular order:
- Accel Partners, represented by Andrew Braccia. These guys are one of the most respected VC firms in the Valley and it’s an amazing vote of confidence for us
- Rob Glaser, Founder of Real Networks and Co-founder of SocialEyes
- Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder of TinySpeck and Flickr (sold to Yahoo)
- Steve Olechowski, Co-Founder of FeedBurner (sold to Google)
- Boris Wertz, Founder of W Media Ventures, a Vancouver-based angel fund and COO of AbeBooks (Sold to Amazon)
- Michael Edwards, Co-founder of Sosido Networks
- Brent Holliday, Head of Technology Practice at Capital West Partners
- Jim Fletcher, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital
It wasn’t that long ago that we were back in Romania dreaming of startup ideas and hoping someday we’d get to work with such great industry leaders. It’s truly amazing to us how far we’ve come. While the investment will help Summify accelerate its growth, the experience our investors bring to the table is even more important to us.
By the way, did we mention we’re hiring?
Less Stories
Like just about everybody we know, we’ve been struggling to keep up with the avalanche of updates coming at us in the news, on Facebook, Twitter and RSS. It’s amazing that people have just sort of gotten used to so much noise and so little signal. It’s impossible to keep up and it’s only getting worse!
We first thought the solution was to build a better social news reader, so we did that. After we released it, we realized that we had built the wrong thing. Our users didn’t really want another news reader, another destination site to check every day… they just wanted the serendipity offered by our results!
The nature of social media is such that even the most devoted users miss more than half of what comes at them, so we established the idea that you can’t and shouldn’t read everything – read just the good stuff! It stands to reason that the good stuff is usually what your friends and your sources are talking about the most.
We rebuilt Summify by mixing these two ideas together and we think we have hit on something magical. With Summify, you can know what’s going on by just looking at an intelligent summary of the news, only 5 to 10 stories, every few hours!
Obviously, we had to put a lot effort in making sure it doesn’t become a popularity contest, and we think we’ve struck the right balance of highly relevant and diverse stories. Sign up, check it out and please tell us what you think!
