mobile-storytelling
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Anatolii Kasianov and the plot that kept changing
He joined as an iOS developer and helped build a company around stories. At HOLYWATER TECH, Anatolii Kasianov’s route to co-CEO runs through a changed brief, a million-dollar app sale, and the machinery behind vertical drama.
Ryan David Mullins and the shoes that became a map
A sneaker collector built a game that sent players into the streets. Now the Onlife co-founder is applying what that game taught his team to the business of getting through an ordinary day.
HOOKED
HOOKED is a mobile entertainment company that pioneered "chat fiction" - bite-sized stories told as text-message conversations between characters, designed to be read in about five minutes. Built by husband-and-wife founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia under the company Telepathic Inc., the app turned suspense and horror into thumb-tapping cliffhangers and reached tens of millions of mostly teen and young-adult readers, repeatedly topping the App Store charts in dozens of countries.
Prerna Gupta
Prerna Gupta is the founder and CEO of Hooked, the chat-fiction app that turned bite-sized text-message stories into a habit for over 100 million Gen Z readers and topped the App Store in 25 countries. A Stanford economics grad who once ran consulting decks before building apps, she co-created the music hits LaDiDa and Songify under her startup Khush (acquired by Smule, where she became Chief Product Officer) before reinventing fiction for the smartphone generation. She describes Hooked as 'books for the Snapchat generation' and her own role as a product CEO who would rather build with her team than work a room.