social-discovery
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John Peterson Built a Company to Rescue Your Weekend. Then the Deal Vanished.
For eight years, John Peterson and his sister built The Nudge around a charmingly stubborn idea: a phone could help people leave their phones. Its final chapter became a candid lesson in community, product taste and the peril hidden inside a signed term sheet.
Avante Price Is Building the Exit Door From the Feed
He learned to DJ at five, built a marketplace at 15, and left NYU to turn a student-party workaround into Posh. His wager is simple: the next useful social network may be the one that persuades you to close it.
Bumble Is Rebuilding the First Move
The women-centered dating company is shrinking its paying base on purpose, rebuilding its app with AI and betting that fewer bad interactions can lead to more real dates.
The Company That Owns Your Love Life
One company sits behind Tinder, Hinge, Match and dozens of other apps. Here is how a portfolio of swipes became a $3.5 billion business - and why its next move is a bet on AI.
Trell
Trell was an India-founded lifestyle social commerce platform where users shared roughly three-minute vertical videos about their interests - travel, beauty, food, fashion and wellness - across eight regional languages. Started in 2016 by four IIT-Bombay friends, it grew a large community skewed toward Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, then pivoted in 2020 into in-app shopping through 'Trell Shop.' It raised about $66 million from investors including Sequoia/Peak XV, KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Mirae Asset and H&M, before a 2022 governance probe and cash crunch triggered mass layoffs and a steep revenue collapse.