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Ride It to the Sky

jared.xyz · 1,108 words · saved by 1 readers

I have seen a lot of young first-time founders play it fast and loose in their fundraising processes the past several years. It’s been frothy times, so I think it brings out a lot of strange behavior. It got me thinking of when I was a young founder and the things I’d do, particularly one specific story that I tell people when I get asked “what not to do” when fundraising. Back in 2010 Steve and I launched GroupMe to much fanfare. It got a lot of attention out the gate because we built it at the first TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in NYC and the press thought it was neat that something could be built in a night and actually work. It was a good story. We raised a round of financing really quickly ($850k on a $2.5m pre-money - those were the days!), and then immediately got more inbound interest from VCs as the service began to take off. We were invited to demo some new features at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (here's some video footage I found) so we flew out to the west coast and took some inv

Ride It to the Sky June 4, 2026 Introducing Postcards Social media in its purest form - sharing and connecting with real friends - is incredibly fun. It’s a great example of how technology can bring people closer together. It’s what I grew up with on the internet. Unfortunately, outside of our group chats, there are very few platforms that focus on connecting with people we actually know and care about. Maybe there’s no market for it anymore and we are in a post-social media world. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think there will always be a desire to share and connect with other human be

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