TWiST, Garry Tan of Posterous
Date: Sept. 4, 2009
Live at Sequoia Capital, including Mike Arrington
Guest: Garry Tan, Co-founder of Posterous
Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email. We launched in July 2008 and we’ve been steadily growing and adding features.
We love sharing thoughts, photos, audio, and files with our friends and family, but we didn’t like how hard it was… so we made a better way.
That’s posterous. We’re super excited to see what happens when blogging becomes as easy as email, and we hope you enjoy posterous as much as we do. Thanks for trying it.
Interview: (03 min)
- Where did the idea come from? Email is the simplest way we all communicate why not just email something and have it integrated into many services.
- To start an account it is very easy just email a picture to post@posterous.com
- Jason and Mike use the service but the beauty is someone who doesn’t know how to blog can get started right away
- How much money have you raised? $15,000 originally from Y Combinator
- What are the terms and why did you choose Ycombinator? They got about 6% of the company for about $15,000. It wasn’t about the money it was more about connections, they have weekly dinners (about 20 to 25 startups per session) and it has that fraternity feel, a Band of Brothers.
- They raised $725,000 Angel round (pre-series A, convertible round with a Cap.) they have used less than half, they want to stay lean (4 people: 3 fulltime and 1 contractor) only a month ago they got an official office.
- Been in operation for 14 months, experiencing 25% growth monthly
- A feature Jason wants to see is default settings for different formats ie. pictures go to Flickr, Posts go to his blog. Garry comments that it is more than likely going to happen.
- Who do you call when you need advice? Our lead investors
- Garry admires and respect? Jeff Bezos of Amazon, he is doing great with whatever he touches. Jason agrees he is the most underrated CEO and does great stuff.
- How do you make money? Never answered
- What did you do before Posterous? Product Manager for Microsoft (02-03) he thought the internet was dead, he learned what to do and not, basically do less. He learned it was difficult to get a feature in a product and then just as difficult to take it out. Cannot move quickly as a company.
- Garry is a big believer in less is more, people try to add too many features, do less.
- What are the challenges? What is the hardest thing? “Cutting to the bone” with resources
- What is next? Keep growing, full template themes.
- What do the other users (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) think about Posterous? No pushback yet, they built it because people wanted it.
The News: (40 min.) with Tyler Crowley
- Facebook mobile connecting 65 mil. people on mobile phone app, stunning but not surprising, people use FB like their inbox in a way competing with Gmail.
- Former CEO and Co-founder of FeedBurner, is now the COO at Twitter. What does this say? Dick Costello is the next CEO, succession plan, they get to see how they work together for when the company goes public.
- Ebay signs agreement to sell majority stake in Skype for $2.3 bil., founders are suing, Skype is an amazing product, Jason’s question, why haven’t they been able to grow the company?
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