I’ve got exciting news to share. We’ve closed a seed round of investment to build Timehop into the ultimate digital history experience. 

You may already know (and love) timehop, a simple but deeply powerful daily email answering the question “what did you do this day last year?”

In a world focused on real time, we believe there’s an untapped opportunity in the past. We’re building timehop into the best way of recording, remembering, and reconnecting around our digital histories. The data exhaust of today’s services can tell your life story, but so far this data remains disaggregated and silo’d across devices and services. Timehop is a powerful product that brings together all your content into a single re-experience moment.

Timehop started as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a fun hack that Benny and I built at foursquare’s first ever hackathon back in February. For several months, the product was on autopilot as Benny and I went through Techstars focused on our core product, Friendslist. But each morning I’d wake up and check the tweets and emails about 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo and curse myself at the money we were paying to send all the emails with no end in sight. Eventually, we started to realize there was something “big” in this “small” product.  Long before the internet existed, people have kept diaries and taken photographs. They do this to document their lives and acknowledge the passing of time. Timehop taps into that same powerful deeply human desire for self-documentation and the resulting nostalgia.

I’ll give more of the backstory of how this all came together at a later time, but for now let me just say how happy I am to be working with two of the best tech startup investors: Bryce Roberts from OATV and Andrew Parker from Spark Capital.

These two firms complement each other perefectly. OATV’s focus on data and self tracking is exemplified by its investments in Foursquare, RunKeeper, bitly and chartbeat. And Spark’s focus on content is exemplified by its investments in Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare.  Timehop is about both: content and data.

Bryce and Andrew are each amazing in their own ways. Bryce is super smart (and all that other good stuff) but what I truly love about Bryce is this: he’s a person first and an investor second. That’s a rarity and I sleep well knowing he’ll be by our side through thick and thin. Last but not least, Andrew is a razor sharp product thinker with a rare mix of academic intelligence and human intelligence. He’s truly a pleasure to work with.

We also have an incredible collection of angel investors: Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai, Alex Rainert, Steve Martocci, Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.

I could write a novel about each of these guys and why they’re awesome. But for now I’ll leave it at this:  I couldn’t be more psyched about the amazing group of people backing us and the exciting opportunity that lies ahead.

Right now we have a small team of hotshots: Benny Wong (our CTO) came from Gilt Groupe where he single-handedly build the entire Gilt City product and then built the engineering team around it too. He’s a true Ruby on Rails master. Rachel Nash (our lead designer) came from The Barbarian Group and before that Big Spaceship. And then there’s me (handling business/press/product/taking out the trash etc) who was formerly doing product management for a bunch of awesome startups and launching awesome subway apps. 

With this funding, we’re looking to add two or three engineers to our team. If you’ve ever wanted to join a small and passionate team building a product that people love, let’s talk. Digital history hasn’t been done right and we’re the team to do it. We’ve got a knack for making awesome products, backing from all the right investors, and a giant opportunity in front of us: a chance to define an entirely new product category.  Let’s blow this out of the water. Get in touch:  jwegener@gmail.com

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 5]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 4]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 3]
• All accelerator programs are not the same
• The Three Types of ‘Computer’ People