Two UVA roommates pitch food ordering by phone.
Their first idea got rejected. Their first users were fake.
Front page of the internet
Visit Reddit ↗Go meet the legends.
Read how each one started, then go try the real thing.
Web 2.0
2002–2009 Everyone's a user. Nobody's a customer.
2005. Apple adds podcasts to iTunes.
A podcast startup pivoted to telling people what you had for lunch.
Now X, for reasons
Visit Twitter ↗
Boston to New York. He forgot his USB stick.
Dropbox
Forgot his USB stick on a bus. Turned down Steve Jobs.
A feature that became a company
Visit Dropbox ↗
2007. A Ruby meetup at a sports bar.
GitHub
A sports-bar side project. Bootstrapped for four years.
Microsoft paid $7.5B
Visit GitHub ↗
2007. Rent's due. Hotels are sold out.
Airbnb
Rent was due. So they sold cereal.
Biggest hotel with no hotels
Visit Airbnb ↗
Paris, 2008. Snow. No cabs.
Uber
Couldn't get a cab in Paris. Rage-built a global taxi.
The Uber for Ubers
Visit Uber ↗
As a kid, one founder collected food stamps here.
Rejected by Facebook. Then sold to Facebook for $19B.
No ads, no games, no gimmicks
Visit WhatsApp ↗The Long Bull Run
2010–2015 Cheap money, per-seat pricing.
Two brothers from rural Ireland.
Stripe
Seven lines of code. Then two brothers took your laptop.
The internet's cash register
Visit Stripe ↗
Their first app, Burbn, did too much.
A failed check-in app. A filter on a Mexican beach.
13 people. $1B.
Visit Instagram ↗
Stanford product class, 2011.
Snapchat
Class laughed at it. Facebook offered $3B. He said no.
Texts that disappear
Visit Snapchat ↗
China, the '80s: a 10-hour train to see his girlfriend.
Zoom
Built because a 10-hour train ride was too long.
You're on mute
Visit Zoom ↗
2012. A Brown student takes a Thiel Fellowship.
Figma
Four years in stealth. $20B on the table. Then the deal died.
Designers in a browser tab
Visit Figma ↗