He studied a civilization that vanished a thousand years ago, then spent a decade building software so the rest of us could keep the moments we never want to lose.
// The face of a man who's equally comfortable holding a 1,200-year-old artifact and a product roadmap.
Ankarino Lara co-founded Thismoment on a premise most people would call too philosophical for a software company: that the basic unit of human experience is the Moment. Not the day. Not the photo album. The moment - a single slice of time with a place, usually some people, and always emotion attached to it. He built a platform to catch those before they scattered across a dozen apps.
Thismoment started in 2008 as a consumer product that let people pull what they had already uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter and wrap it into one beautifully packaged story. It grew into something more practical: an enterprise content-marketing platform that helped the world's largest brands collect user-generated content, curate it, and publish it across every channel they touched. The poetry stayed; the business model matured.
What makes Lara worth a second look is not the funding or the title. It is the path. He did not arrive at technology through a computer science degree or a coding bootcamp. He arrived through a museum, with a trowel and a magnifying glass, photographing the broken faces of Maya kings. Almost nobody in martech has that on their resume.
He didn't build it alone, either. Lara co-founded Thismoment with Vince Broady and Scott Bedard, and the division of labor told you something about how he saw the work: Bedard ran the engineering as CTO while Lara owned the product. He has been described as the company's chief product officer as much as its CEO, which fits a founder who cared more about what the thing should be than about the org chart around it.
Lara liked to describe life as a continuous flow, with the meaningful parts - the things that make us laugh, smile, cry, or shudder - rising out of it like landmarks. Those were the moments. The job of the software was modest and enormous at the same time: don't make people create new content, just let them gather what already exists and give it shape. A status update is a sentence. A Moment, in his telling, was a chapter.
It is a worldview that reads differently once you know where he came from. An archaeologist spends his days reassembling meaning from fragments other people left behind. So does a content platform. Lara essentially took the discipline of the dig - context, provenance, careful reconstruction - and pointed it at the firehose of the social web.
Lara's resume reads like two different people stapled together. The first one earned a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology from Harvard and went to work at the university's Peabody Museum from 1995 to 1997. The job was hands-on and slow: cataloging, conserving, restoring and photographing artifacts and sculpture casts brought back from Central America, with a focus on the Maya Classic Period. There is no growth-hacking in that work. There is patience, accuracy, and a respect for the object in front of you.
Then he carried that respect into a classroom. From 1997 to 1999 he was an educator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, teaching Maya archaeology and epigraphy to public-school students through an outreach program. Epigraphy - the study of inscriptions - is among the harder things to explain to a teenager. Doing it well means stripping a dense subject down to its load-bearing ideas. That is also, not coincidentally, the core skill of a product leader: decide what matters, throw out the rest, make the remainder legible.
The second person on the resume shows up in 1999, when Lara joined CNET as VP of Product Development. He stayed seven years, through the stretch when the consumer internet stopped being a novelty and became infrastructure. In 2007 he moved to Yahoo! as VP of Product Development, overseeing the company's 'Worlds' initiative inside its Entertainment Division. By the time he left in 2008 to start his own company, he had spent the better part of a decade learning how large media organizations actually ship software - and where they get stuck.
Thismoment did not stay a consumer app. The same machinery that let an individual gather scattered posts into a story turned out to be exactly what big brands needed. They were drowning in user-generated content - photos, videos, tweets, reviews - and had no good way to collect it, get the rights to it, curate it, and push it back out across their own channels. Thismoment built the plumbing for that, positioning itself as an enterprise content-marketing platform.
The company put real money behind the bet. It raised more than $55M over multiple rounds, with a Series D reported in 2014, backed by investors including Sierra Ventures, Trident Capital and UMC Capital. In 2012 it acquired Position2 Brand Monitor, folding social analytics into the platform so brands could measure what their content was actually doing. The arc is tidy in hindsight: start with a poetic idea about human memory, end with dashboards for Fortune 500 marketing teams. Lara managed to keep one foot in each.
Cataloged, conserved, restored and photographed Maya artifacts and sculpture casts from Central America, focused on the Maya Classic Period.
Taught Maya archaeology and epigraphy to Los Angeles public-school students through a museum outreach program.
Spent the formative years of the consumer web building products at one of its defining brands.
Oversaw the 'Worlds' initiative inside Yahoo!'s Entertainment Division.
Launches with Vince Broady and Scott Bedard, betting that the Moment is the unit worth building around.
Adds social analytics, pushing the platform further into enterprise brand marketing.
The company's last reported round, bringing total funding to roughly $55M.
Let people pull all the stuff that they've already uploaded to the web to create a beautifully packaged and presented Moment.
Two years restoring Maya artifacts at Harvard before he ever shipped a product. The same instinct - reconstruct meaning from fragments - runs straight through his software.
He explained ancient epigraphy to schoolkids at LACMA. Founders who can teach a hard idea simply tend to build products people actually understand.
Most platforms start with a feature. Thismoment started with a definition of human experience, then worked backward to the code.
It would be easy to file the Maya years under "interesting trivia" and move on to the funding rounds. That misses the point. The specific work Lara did - taking damaged fragments, understanding the context they came from, and reconstructing them into something a museum visitor could read - is the same job he gave his software. Thismoment's entire promise was that your moments already exist, scattered and half-formed across the web, and the work that matters is gathering and presenting them, not generating more.
There's a quieter lesson in his path too, one for anyone who thinks careers have to run in a straight line. Lara spent his twenties in museums and classrooms, doing work with no obvious bridge to Silicon Valley. The bridge turned out to be the habits of mind underneath: precision, the patience to handle something fragile, and the teacher's reflex to make a hard idea simple. He carried those from the Peabody to CNET to Yahoo! to a company of his own. Nothing was wasted; it just took a while to see the shape of it.
He also resisted the temptation most founders give in to - leading with the technology. When he talked about Thismoment, he didn't open with the stack or the integrations. He opened with a claim about what a moment is and why it's worth keeping. Friends could add photos and videos to a shared moment in real time, from a phone or by email, so a single experience could be assembled from many points of view. The features served the idea, not the other way around. That ordering is rarer than it should be.
Whatever comes next for him, the record already says something specific: a person who learned to value the things worth preserving long before he built a business out of helping the rest of us preserve ours. The trowel and the product roadmap turned out to be the same tool, used on different centuries.