Twitter Co-founders Announce Backing for Lift
Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have announced the first project for their incubator and start-up lab, The Obvious Corp. The lab will back Lift, which is developing an application to help people meet goals through positive reinforcement. In a blog post on the Obvious site, Stone wrote that Obvious would help Lift with strategy, design, funding and recruiting. In exchange, he wrote, Obvious will own an undisclosed amount of equity in the start-up.
BLOG POST
It’s important never to delude ourselves into thinking that technology changes the world. People are responsible for change—technology just helps out. At Obvious, our goal is to foster systems that help people work together to improve the world. Our approach is threefold: Build, partner, and invest. We’ve started working on some ideas ourselves, we’re researching how best to create an investment vehicle, and today we’re thrilled to announce our first official partnership.
Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby have created an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement. We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works. Our plan is to build something extraordinary together. The Obvious Corporation will assist the talented Lift team with strategy, design, funding, recruiting—in general, we’ll be helpful wherever possible. In exchange, Obvious will own some equity in Lift.
We’re excited about this team—both Tony and Jon are spirited entrepreneurs who have brought their deep technical strength and leadership to some fantastic startups prior to founding Lift. We’re exploring an interesting model by teaming up such that Lift is “An Obvious Company.” We offer our team’s combined expertise while Lift maintains the freedoms of a new startup. We’re eager to tell you more but for now, Lift remains in private Alpha.
Related posts:
Joseph Satto said on August 24, 2011
As the Founder of http://www.mySomeday.com, a social goal-achievement platform, I look forward to competitors putting a spotlight on this space. I understand that Biz says it works but considering that his company is incubating the product, I’m not particularly surprised at this claim.
While the world holds its breath in anticipation of Biz’s new ideas, our application is actually alive and proving itself, reflected in the fact that we’ve helped hundreds of people actually achieve goals. In our opinion, the key element in achievement is having a detailed plan and then working toward that goal incrementally through actionable steps. This is why our platform focuses on helping users build or copy expertise in the form of interactive step-by-step plans.
Of course, we recognize the value of encouragement so we display real-time updates as users take steps towards achievement and also enable users to ‘Facebook-enable’ their profile so that friends and family are updated each time that user takes a step toward achievement.
Is it possible that we’re one step ahead of Biz Stone? We certainly hope so.