Angel player Tom Anderson has managed to re-invent himself as an investor through angel investments. He is best known for his historic role in founding MySpace, but he now invests in many ecommerce companies that are related to social media.
Anderson was an early backer of the photo sharing app Pinterest, which recently received a $100 million boost from Japanese company Rakuten Inc. This funding round valued Pinterest at $1.5 billion – three times the value it held just one year ago when Anderson first invested.
“I love Pinterest because I believe it’s not only helping people discover beautiful things but also building relationships between individuals,” said Anderson on “Yahoo! News.” “[Pinterest] functioned similarly to what my former company MySpace would have, had it not decided to become a really big company.”
MySpace is an example of what happens when companies spend their early years building up massive staffs and massive warehouses — they lose sight of what made them attractive in the first place. “You do get carried away,” admitted Anderson. “But for us, we did focus on making sure that people had free hosting so they could build these pages more quickly than they would have otherwise… We were great at promoting things, because you know–back then–when there was only one site out there, if you posted something on Myspace everyone was gonna click through. So it’s kind of like what Facebook is aiming to be now.”
Anderson shared his thoughts on Myspace and its future with Kevin Rose on the Diggnation podcast. He said that he hopes to see the site return to its roots – a place where people can build profiles and share photographs, videos and other multimedia content.
This is Anderson’s next big project: he has just launched an online photo-sharing service called Neighbourly that aims for a level of intimacy not found in Facebook or Google+. According to Anderson, this is a web service for neighborhoods — it allows neighbors to upload their photos while geo-tagging them so you always know where a photograph was taken. It also encourages users to talk about the pictures they post. “You can write notes,” says Anderson, “[Neighbourly] is for all those things you do when you walk on your street, or when you go on a trip.”
Neighbourly’s goal is to encourage users to talk online about the pictures they like and “add some emotion to them,” says Anderson. There is also an incentive for people who post popular photographs: once their image has been viewed by enough people, it starts to accrue credits that can be cashed in for actual goods and services. Because this all happens within a neighborhood setting, earning credit is like receiving ‘neighborhood bucks’. You can then use these credits at local businesses such as cafes or bakeries.
Anderson’s new startup offers another way of sharing content; it offers an alternative – and complementary – service to Facebook. Yet there are parallels between Neighbourly and Facebook, particularly in how they encourage users to do things in bulk. “You’re going to see a lot of stuff,” says Anderson. “So you need a few days for it all to sort of sink in you know–like four or five cups of coffee”. According to Anderson, this is probably the most troublesome aspect of social media: that there is so much content being posted online it is hard to keep up with everything.