
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.

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.