Two Silicon Valley veterans behind Twitter and Pinterest have launched a new app that is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation” they say has been caused by social media.
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded online scrapbooking site Pinterest in 2010, have raised $29mn in funding for their new start-up West Co, according to a regulatory filing.
West Co, which the pair founded in 2023, launched its first app, Tangle, in November. It is pitched as a “new kind of social network, designed for intentional living”.
Tangle, which is at present accessible on an invite-only basis, suggests users share personal objectives or “intentions” with their friends, support each other’s goals and “reflect” on how they are achieved.
“It is a tool for meaning that helps people plan with intention, capture the reality of their days, and see the deeper threads that shape their life,” the company said in a recent job advertisement.
West Co, which is headquartered in San Francisco, said on its website that its mission is to “build tools to help people live life more on purpose”. Spark Capital, an early Twitter investor, led West Co’s seed financing round in 2024, according to another job ad.
Stone said the current version of the app — which sends users notifications every morning asking “What’s your intention for today?” — was still an early test and could change before a full public launch.
“It turns out that creating something to help people navigate their lifetime is difficult work,” he told the Financial Times, “but I think it’s worth it.”
In a recent podcast interview, Sharp — who is West Co’s chief executive — described his “eight-year-long obsession” with “really trying to understand what we fundamentally disrupted with the phone and social media so that I could . . . help make that a little bit better”.
“What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought the last 15 years?” he said.
Stone and Sharp are among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built, even as their companies’ success made them wealthy.
Sir Jonathan Ive, the former Apple designer who helped birth the iPhone, has described his project to develop an AI-based consumer device with OpenAI as a response to the “unintended consequences” of the smartphone. Sharp spent two years working at LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, before launching West Co.
Tangle is Stone’s latest attempt to capitalise on his earlier success. He is also a co-founder of Medium, an online publishing platform, and Jelly, a question-and-answer app that was later acquired by Pinterest. He launched investment firm Future Positive in 2019 and at present serves on the board of Mastodon, another social networking group.
After leaving Twitter in 2021, Stone clashed with Elon Musk after the Tesla and SpaceX chief acquired the company, which the billionaire has now renamed X. Musk is “not a serious person”, Stone said in a post in December 2022, describing the changes Musk made to the service as “heartbreaking”.
Several of West Co’s founding team previously worked at Twitter and Pinterest. Another early employee, Reverend Sue Phillips, a former Unitarian Universalist church minister turned tech company adviser, now serves as the start-up’s “head of wise AI and ancient technologist”, according to her LinkedIn profile.
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