I Need Money

The day that Groupon died was the day that Andrew Mason was fired. While it’s true that post firing, it took a full two years for the stock to recede to Mason era lows and the better part of a decade to fully drift towards irrelevance, his departure removed one of the few technology CEOs who has ever had near prescient understanding of the mobile app ecosystem and the consumers that depend on it.

Although best known for his irreverence and wit, his intuitions remain poignant to this day. My personal favorite? Just months before their IPO, Mason launched the Company’s highly anticipated mobile app, the future of its platform growth - Groupon Now - with only two buttons to tap. The first? “I’m hungry.” And the second?  “I’m bored.” Never has a more concise synthesis of Maslow’s hierarchy been presented to Wall Street. Pundits groaned (some laughed.) Bloomberg ran a rhetorical piece questioning “Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion For Groupon?”

 But Mason was right. In the years that followed that 2011 app launch, the vast majority of the value that would accrue to winners in consumer internet serviced those two core value props: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tik Tok, Netflix to aid boredom, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash to service hunger. Mason had a fundamental understanding of the functions the mobile ecosystem could service for humans.

But as technology and the workplace have evolved, we now need a third homescreen button: “I need money.”

Underpinning this belief are two macro themes that have continued to proliferate since we launched Starting Line in 2018: (1) the increasing ability of fintech apps to understand our finances and earning potential and (2) the increasing ability to monetize one’s time and interests directly through the interface of a mobile phone. 

We have put our money where our mouth is; regarding the former, our portfolio company Klover provides interest free wage advances on demand with a single-click bank integration. On the latter, our investment in Cameo enables anyone with a digital following to monetize their time, on demand, in the palm of their hand. Both come from different angles, yet both enable users to solve an “I need money” now problem. 

In today’s heated political climate there are admittedly few places on the internet that one can go to relax. But one of my personal favorites is Reddit’s r/beermoney forum which provides tips on earning hundreds of dollars one dumb task at a time from the comfort of a mobile phone. Except that, well, some of them aren’t quite so dumb. Consistent visitors of the forum would have gained early exposure to bitcoin (through the concept of “faucets”), would have been amongst the earliest users of once buzzy HQ Trivia, as well as unicorn receipt scanning app Ibotta. It turns out that next gen mechanics of earning money is a pretty good way to source future unicorns.

We are continually on the lookout for new products and services that broadly fit the directional theme of “I need money” – particularly from the comfort of one’s own mobile phone - and hope to continue backing imaginative founders innovating new mechanisms for earning or accessing money over the coming months and years.