Story
ZoomURL: Eventbrite for Zoom, built by piggybacking a fast-growing platform
Shaan describes his friend Victor building zmurl.com, an 'Eventbrite for Zoom' that turns ugly Zoom links into pretty event landing pages. By piggybacking on Zoom's explosive COVID growth (from ~10M to 250M+ users), he solved a problem Zoom hadn't gotten to yet.
“I had this friend Victor. I don't even remember if I mentioned this on the podcast, but he created this thing called ZoomURL, basically zmurl.com. And it's basically Eventbrite for Zoom. So he noticed the problem of like, hey, cool, everyone's using Zoom to meet up, but Zoom's like kind of invite and like, you know, the sort of like splash that page doesn't exist.”
Steal thisFind a platform growing like crazy and build the obvious feature it hasn't gotten around to yet.
Fact
Nearly every early unicorn broke a 'Silicon Valley rule'
Jack regretted following VC norms (no family/husband-wife teams, no co-CEO/president split). After leaving, he found that of the ~20 unicorns then existing, almost all broke one: Eventbrite (husband-wife), Stripe (brothers), Lyft (CEO + president).
“When I looked at them, pretty much every single one broke one of those rules. Rules. Um, Eventbrite is a husband and wife team. Um, Stripe, they are brothers. Um, Lyft, one of the co-founders is CEO, the other one is president. So kind of there is no rules in Silicon Valley”
Fact
Nearly every early unicorn broke a Silicon Valley 'rule'
After leaving Vungle, Jack found that of the ~20 unicorns at the time, almost all violated conventional VC rules: Eventbrite is a husband-and-wife team, Stripe is brothers, and Lyft has one co-founder as CEO and one as president.
“When I looked at them, pretty much every single one broke one of those rules. Rules. Eventbrite is a husband and wife team. Stripe, they are brothers. Lyft, one of the co-founders is CEO, the other one is president. So kind of there is no rules in Silicon Valley, but at the time I kind of went along with different investors telling me.”