E1026: Cocoon Co-Founders Sachin Monga & Alex Cornell are building an intimate app to connect close circles, share insights on key standout features, raising money as a messaging app, breeding trust via strong domain names, ideal customers & more

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2020

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:57 Jason intros Alex & Sachin
4:46 When and why did they start Cocoon?
6:40 Why did Facebook keep changing their developer tools platform?
9:22 What is the vision for Cocoon and who is it made for?
14:58 How did they get the cocoon.com domain name and why do strong domain names breed trust?
16:57 What are they doing with customer data and how will they monetize?
20:20 Cocoon demo and Alex takes us through some key features
29:45 How difficult was raising money going up against Facebook, iMessage, etc.?
33:04 Who is their ideal customer?
38:35 Building a company in San Francisco vs. outside of it
41:57 Jason tries to invest in Cocoon live on air
47:45 Growing Cocoon in the crowded app store
51:51 Why do Cocoon founders use Notion?
54:37 Jason calls Ben Horowitz

Transcript

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0:55.0	dot com slash twist back in the day on this weekend startups I had a founder
1:00.2	named Kevin on the podcast and he was working on a corny little app called
1:06.2	Bourbon where you could check in and maybe tell your friends where you were but he was
1:10.9	in the face of Go Wall and Four Square and he pivoted and he made a photo sharing app
1:16.0	We could change the filters which people were doing already only using Photoshop and desktop computers.
1:23.0	And that company became Instagram.
1:25.0	And we had him on back in 2011,
1:29.0	episode 196 if you want to see Kevin Sistram on the pod.
1:33.6	And since that time, Facebook has run the table and social.
1:37.2	And not only have they run the table and social, they have compromised people's mental health, they've outed young gay men who joined groups that
1:47.1	they'd never accepted, and with their move fast and break everything, they may have in fact broken our democracy, allowing the
1:54.8	Russians to spend rubles to promote racist ideology and create massive strife
	...

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