Houseparty’s Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani: “An epidemic of loneliness”

The Times Tech Podcast

• Episode: Houseparty’s Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani: “An epidemic of loneliness”
• Website: The Times Tech Podcast
• Feed URL: http://rss.acast.com/dannyinthevalley
• Duration: 00:52:34
• Published: 2018-11-16 15:58

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, founders of video chat app Houseparty, to talk about trying and failing multiple times (3:00), why live streaming didn’t work (5:50), telling investors that their company was a bust - three months after raising $14m (8:50), focussing on the 99% (10:45), how Sima and Ben teamed up (14:15), building an alternative to “performative” social media (17:35), Sima’s background in banking (21:00), countering the loneliness epidemic (22:40), launching Houseparty (26:00), reengineering the app after it took off (29:30), raising $50m from Sequoia Capital (32:10), on everyone copying everyone in Silicon Valley (33:10), how Houseparty works (37:30), how both being immigrants influenced how they built the product (39:05), on not having a plan to make money (46:10), and their worst days of work (47:30).

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