Last week, First Round Capital had its annual meeting, where we got to walk through our portfolio with our investors. Honestly, I didn’t realize how many cool companies we had invested in, so I’m going to take the time each Friday to highlight another company.
Since I got a “One of Josh Kopelman’s friends likes your photo” note from Thread yesterday, that’s going to be today’s spotlight.
Thread is a pretty simple concept: Meet people through your friends on Facebook. Now, conceptually, meeting people through social networks is a good idea—but we all know how unappealing setups can be. Thread enables you to get proactive about searching your friends’ networks while minimizing the effort and risk they put in as a middleman.
What I really like is the anonymizing features of the site—where someone can reach out to you, but they’re shown to you in a group. You only get matched when there’s mutual interest. That keeps down the awkwardness of a turndown should you ever meet in person. For all they know, you just don’t check the site. This works a little like those “One of your friends likes you” viral sites from the late 90’s, but now you’ve got the assurance that there’s a real human behind the interest.
The site could do a little better job learning about my preferences and keeping me searching for more people, but overall, it’s a pretty solid concept and execution. So, if you feel like you’ve got a pretty good network of single friends, but don’t really want to get too involved with matching people up, let the interwebz do all the heavy lifting and sign up for Thread. You can just sit back and reap all the social capital.