This morning’s TechCrunch post and last Friday’s Startup Crawl heralds the public announcement of my new startup – Plato’s Forms.
I’ve been working with Darryl Siry (former CMO Tesla Motors) on this project since Spring, with us producing a demo for investors in September/early-October. That seemed to be successful because we managed to raise $545k angel round, led by a group of private investors, Darryl and ZelkovaVC (although the note remains open to $750k if anyone wants to get in at this early stage!).
So what are we building?
Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment. A piece is written up about your product/service/company that contains some incorrect facts or draws a conclusion that didn’t include a pertinent piece of information. Maybe you are frustrated the journalist didn’t reach out to you during the creation of their article and you want to reach out. Or perhaps a piece on a competitor misses an opportunity to present an alternative perspective around your product/service/company.
The solution is a professional communication platform that allows PR/corporate communication professionals to engage journalists and pro-bloggers in a ‘velvet rope’ vetted environment. There are a number of products we’re building on top of this platform, but we’re not talking about implementation points right now — we have some very interesting ways to solve these problems. 🙂
Some of these problems (and solutions) are new. Some are just reducing the friction of the existing communication mechanisms these folk already have in place.
What’s under the hood?
Everything is Ruby on Rails… very agile, very rapid development. It’s my first time working with RoR and I’m really enjoying the experience. Pivotal Tracker continues to be an amazing productivity tool for development, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ever worked before DropBox, EtherPad and BaseCamp.
BTW if this all sounds like fun (which it is) we’re looking for top Ruby on Rails talent right now, working out of our digs in South Park, SF!
Busy bee
Plato’s Forms is obviously going to be my main project and focus moving forward, although for now I will continue to work with Seesmic on a small scale (my BlackBerry app shipped last week) and maintain my advisory board responsibilities with my portfolio.
Oh and I’m going to be in Europe for most of December – MC’ing at Le Web in Paris again, and then Christmas at home in London.
Very awesome, good luck ben!
Glad to see it come together Ben! This is going to be a great project to challenge you with. As bloggers grow in reach with news organizations losing audience, the editorial layers that were once in place are sorely missed.
I hope your service brings a nice check and balance to new media!
Dave
Plato’s Forms eh? So what’s that?
“So what are we building?
Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment.”
I see, a murky plan that leverages big words got you funding. Congratulations and good luck . . .
-danny
Congratulations! Looking forward to learning more about it.
No, I think it’s the amazing prototype we have already built that got us the funding, thanks.
We’re just not demo’ing it pre-launch (why would we?)
Congats, Ben! Can’t wait to try it out once you release the first public version. Definitely sounds like something that we could use.
Exciting stuff mate. Rails is a lot of fun, which matters most WRT productivity 🙂
Can’t wait to use the tool and give it a run.
Cheers,
Dion
Sounds very interesting, will be keeping an eye on your blog for updates.