He built the app that let millions of people hand out a phone number they could throw away. Then he did the harder thing - he kept it alive.
In 2012, giving someone your phone number was a permanent act. It followed you to spam lists, to exes, to strangers who answered a Craigslist ad. Greg Cohn looked at that and asked a simple question: why can't a phone number be disposable, like a paper cup?
The answer became Burner, the flagship product of Ad Hoc Labs, the Los Angeles studio Cohn co-founded and still runs as CEO. Tap a button, get a working number for calls and texts. Done with it? Burn it. The number evaporates and takes the spam with it. It was privacy for the rest of us - no manifesto required, just a tool that did one thing cleanly.
What makes Cohn interesting is not that he had the idea. It is that he treated a consumer app like a business meant to last, not a lottery ticket. More than a decade later, while a graveyard of better-funded competitors has gone quiet, Burner is still running - and so is the company behind it, now a small suite of privacy products including Dialed and a VPN called Firewall.
Communications, and telephony specifically, have been left behind by the wave of social innovation.Greg Cohn, to Ars Technica
Before Burner there was Wrangle, an app meant to help people find friends who were free to take a call. Nobody wanted it. But building it dropped Cohn into the plumbing of Twilio's API - the programmable telephone layer that would soon let a small team spin up phone numbers on demand.
The second insight was personal. Cohn was tired of handing his real number to every listing, every date, every one-off transaction. He had the frustration and the technical key in the same hand. Burner was the lock they fit.
He resisted the usual startup reflexes. No premature fundraising. No growth-at-all-costs. He shipped something free and useful, listened to the people who used it, and let the product earn its way from paid downloads into a subscription that has kept the lights on for years.
Bars illustrate career emphasis, not exact tenure.
“Burner is a very focused product around anonymity and privacy.”
“Part of the reason we're doing this company is because we're privacy advocates.”
“We are explicitly not going after a market in the vein of Tor or Wikileaks where there's protection from the law.”
The key to success isn't always chasing growth. It is delivering consistent, meaningful value.The lesson of Burner, per the Sub Club Podcast
He taught a generation the phrase “burner number,” but he spent the mid-90s deciding which guidebooks belonged on which shelf. A P&L for travel titles is not an obvious runway to reinventing the telephone, and that is exactly the point. Cohn collects unlikely chapters.
TechCrunch once framed his ambition as building “the Passbook for mobile privacy” - a wallet, but for the different faces you show the world. Long before compartmentalizing your digital identity was a mainstream anxiety, Burner was quietly selling it by the number.
And he runs it his way: a remote, independent product company that never got on the venture treadmill it could have. Ask him and he'll tell you most consumer apps should never raise a dollar of VC at all.
How Burner turned a spy-movie trope into a mainstream privacy tool.
Why he thinks most consumer apps are better off never taking a VC dollar.
Tracing the leap from publishing and Yahoo to reinventing the phone number.
How the flop of Wrangle handed Cohn the insight for a decade-long business.
The counterintuitive experiment that reshaped how Burner converts users.
A deliberate choice to build a lawful tool, not an anonymity crusade.
What Ad Hoc Labs' longevity teaches founders about patience.
How Burner anticipated compartmentalized digital identities.
Growing from disposable numbers into a broader privacy stack.