Twitter and Pinterest Founders Unveil a New App to Counter Social Media’s Harms
Stone and Sharp join a growing group of tech executives reassessing the impact of the products they helped build.
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- Twitter and Pinterest Founders Unveil a New App to Counter Social Media’s Harms
[Image source: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
With over 5.6 billion social media users globally, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, have announced a new app, Tangle, touted as an antidote to the current social media landscape.
The duo’s start-up, West Co, has raised $29 million with Spark Capital leading the round, as per regulatory filings. Founded in 2023, West Co launched Tangle, its first app, in November as a “new kind of social network, designed for intentional living.”
Currently accessible on an invite-only basis, the app suggests that users share personal objectives or intentions with their friends, build a community to support each other’s goals, and “reflect” on how they achieved it.
The essence of the app lies in helping people plan with intention, capture the reality of their days, and uncover the deeper nuances that shape their lives. Stone notes that while the current version features options such as asking users “What’s your intention for today?”, it is still at an experimental test stage, with the final output potentially being different at the full public launch.
“It turns out that creating something to help people navigate their lifetime is difficult work…But I think it’s worth it,” he told the Financial Times.
Recently, in a podcast, Sharp revealed how he spent close to a decade fundamentally understanding the disruption that occurred with the phone and social media, to “help make that a little bit better.”
“What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought over the past 15 years?”
Stone and Sharp join the list of executives trying to soothe the effects their products or services have had on the masses. Today, high levels of dependency on social media have led to increased anxiety, depression, and loneliness due to constant comparison, cyberbullying, and the fear of missing out (FOMO).
