Founder Stories: Leah Culver of Breaker (YC W17) | Hacker News Reader

Founder Stories: Leah Culver of Breaker (YC W17)

blog.ycombinator.com

52 pointscraigcannon15 comments

Woah! Cool to see Leah Culver is still around building stuff. Remember her from the Pownce days.

A fellow Pownce user in the wild! Incredible to think that was 10 years ago. I feel like that app was years ahead of its time — the casual immediacy of Twitter without the character limits, the ease of sharing media like an internet-wide HipChat or Slack, topics like Reddit. Selfishly, I always hoped Leah would stop working at Dropbox and start another company :-)

Pownce WAS ahead of its time. Revision3 built a solid product and I still can't believe that was 10 years ago. God I miss TechTV.

Pownce, represent.

That was my first reaction as well. I really liked Pownce and I think she did great work on it. It was sad to see it shut down.

The embedding stuff (oEmbed?) was pretty great too. I wish it was used by more people.

Also a group chat site call Convore. It didn't last very long from what I remember but was pretty interesting. https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/convore-wants-to-be-the-ea...

Cool. Remembered her from the oauth 1.0 days (She's the author of the oauth python library IIRC)

Culver also wrote the oauth spec itself. Also oembed.

I've been using their beta app for the past week and love it. I have already added several podcasts that hadn't previously been on my radar, via their discovery tools. Cool to read the founder stories.

IIRC, she also wrote quite a bit on using Django. I learned quite a bit about the ins-and-outs of Django because of her writings. Glad she has had a good career.

It's crazy how many things we use today were inspired by something Leah did. She also seems like a pretty cool person from the stories I've heard. Hope this becomes her first massive success.

how would `an iOS app for listening to podcasts focused on social discovery` make money? I couldn't find that question in the interview.

If only they told you their exact business model in every interview. Maybe this will help though:

  Our initial direction wasn’t the direction we ended up going in. 
  I was interested in building tools for podcasters. Then when
  we started to talking to podcasters we realized that podcasters 
  just want listeners and data about those listeners. Just providing good tools 
  didn’t really solve that problem. So we shifted focus to work on
  the user app first.

Did you have to be snarky about it?

Probably didn't have to, but chose to for any one of many reasons.

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