MENLO PARK, Calif. — Evan Williams did not want to start another startup. He had already enjoyed the kind of rare, unfathomable success most entrepreneurs only dream of, starting tech companies that made products used by millions — the early blogging site Blogger, the social media giant Twitter, the publishing platform Medium.
Along the way, Williams had grappled with corporate turmoil and angst. His last company, Medium, was a decade-long slog that never lived up to its $600 million valuation or lofty mission of solving the internet’s ugliest problems. By the time he stepped down as CEO in 2022, he had no desire to do it again, he said.
But he was lonely. He had gotten divorced and moved cross-country twice in a few years. Before his 50th birthday in 2022, he realized he had “underinvested” in his friendships, he said. Post-pandemic, he did not even know where many of his friends were living.
“I was doing a lot of reflecting,” Williams said. “In this stage of life, I really wanted to focus on relationships.”
Pouring so much energy into his startups was one reason he had this problem. But maybe a startup could also help fix it.
In 2022, Williams began working on a Rolodex app that would tell him where his friends were living and traveling. It would be more “social” than “social media,” with none of the comments, stories, posts, likes, hearts or follows that made his previous creations so addicting.
But Williams still didn’t want to run a company. Through mutual friends, he met Molly DeWolf Swenson, an entrepreneur, who became a co-founder and the CEO. Last month, they raised $6 million in funding from Obvious Ventures, an investment firm co-founded by Williams, as well as WndrCo and BBG Ventures.
This week, they plan to unveil their app, Mozi, which is aimed at helping people foster in-person connections with their social circle. It lets people tell their friends about upcoming plans that may overlap. Those who join the app will see a private friend list based on their phone contacts. They get notifications if a contact plans to visit their city or attend the same event. Profiles include user-supplied information such as dietary restrictions, relationship status, family members and pet names.
Organizing contacts by location and travel plans may appeal to a certain type of jet-setting tech worker whose friends are spread around the world. Mozi’s founders hope it will be just as useful for people who don’t travel but want to know when their friends are in town. The company also plans to promote itself around events like music festivals and business conferences.
Williams views Mozi as an attempt to return to social media’s original intention, which was about interacting with people you already knew. Over the years, social media companies evolved into just plain media — a place for watching videos from influencers and professional entertainers, reading links to news stories, sharing memes or impulse shopping via highly targeted ads. Many of the apps are optimized to get users hooked on an endless scroll of new information.
Williams once spoke out about how wrong he had been about the promise and benefits of social media like Twitter and how he was determined to address thorny problems such as harassment, misinformation and extremism at Medium. He is now more at peace with the role of the internet and its trade-offs.
“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview in Menlo Park, California. “It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything.”
Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s texting app.
“We’re not trying to keep people on the app,” said DeWolf Swenson, 37, who was a founder of RYOT, a virtual reality startup, and was head of global partnerships at Community, an app that allows public figures and brands to text their fans. “If we’re doing our job well, you’re finding that information as quickly as possible and then getting off the app.”
As a power networker who created an elaborate spreadsheet tracking her friends and business contacts, DeWolf Swenson was Mozi’s ideal user. But even the best system could not tell her if someone would be home when she visited their city, she said.
Consumer apps like Mozi are out of step with the tech zeitgeist, which has centered most recently on artificial intelligence. But James Joaquin, a co-founder of Obvious Ventures, said he was compelled to invest in Mozi after talking to its early testers. They shared stories about reconnecting with old friends via the app — moments that seemed valuable enough that customers might pay for it, he said. Mozi is free, but plans to charge for premium features it develops.
Other founders also see the potential of using online tools to help people connect in person. Andy Dunn, a founder of the e-commerce company Bonobos, raised $24 million over the past four years for Pie, an app that lets creators organize events like running clubs and game nights with the goal of helping people make new friends. The app, available in Chicago and San Francisco, took off this year with 50,000 monthly users, he said.
“Even people who love social media or use it frequently know it’s not necessarily that social,” Dunn said. “Mostly it’s an experience we do alone.”
Williams also invested in Pie. The two entrepreneurs spent time together last year in Brazil, where they debated social media’s future at the beach. Williams wore a T-shirt that said “More social less media,” Dunn recalled. They determined that the challenges created by social media wouldn’t be solved by making a better social media product.
Williams said he decided Mozi was worth building after reflecting on the importance of relationships. Looking back, he said, “everything that had gone really well, even in work, was about relationships, and everything that went poorly was mismanaging relationships.”
He added that he was not raised with good relationship models. “I learned late in life what a healthy relationship and conflict resolution looked like, and that was a cause of a lot of my pain and suffering,” he said.
When Williams turned 50, his son called it “halftime.” The analogy made him feel optimistic, he said, since “a lot can be determined in the second half of the game.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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