Welcome to the inaugural edition of Lalawag’s ongoing feature, “LA Startup Spotlight”! Throughout the year, we’ll be interviewing some of the most innovative and exciting startups from the LA area.
We’ll kick things off by chatting with Diego Prats, the CEO of BorderStylo. Their flagship product, a browser extension called Glass, hopes to change the way we read and share websites.
Pitch us your flagship product in three sentences or less.
Glass is a browser extension that allows people to create private and contextual conversations on top of websites. Currently, the product we have serves mostly for having private conversations on websites, but we have built a platform which allows for various different products which leverage the privacy and web curation aspects of Glass.
What made you decide to focus your company on Glass?
We see a lot of opportunities for building and sharing human experiences online. But, to facilitate those exchanges, we needed to create Glass. Glass is the best gateway for sharing and experiencing the internet with others. For example, I can show my family in Mexico exactly what on a website I am referring to (“Click here to buy the book, Mom” being a classic use case). We can do this all while supporting the open web. We knew we wanted to have a more private way of communicating, which gives credit to the original content creators. Every conversation that happens on a slide in Glass is more audience that website now has. It does not happen on an email thread or forum. Glass is designed as a consumer-friendly manner fo supporting content creators and the importance of an open web, while raising the bar on user privacy.
In short, Glass is the best way for us to flex our tech muscle as we tackle the creation of our platform where we will expand to new products over the year.
Love that animated introduction video for Glass you have on your homepage with the gorilla and his friends! Who produced it and how did it come about?
The video was a collaborative effort between people inside the company and the multi-talented director Jonathan Barenboim. Plus, Gorillas are awesome.
The internet as seen through Glass looks very cool indeed. However, it appears as if the app will only be as useful as the people using it with me. Will I still want to use Glass even if I have a hard time convincing all of my friends to sign up?
Absolutely. In addition to using Glass as a bookmark and note taking system, you can reach out to some of the other Glass users in the world. Have a look at http://foundonglass.tumblr.com/ and if you see an interesting post, request to connect with the poster. We’re also hard at work building some new social features that will help create a more cohesive community on Glass.
How big is your team?
25, plus a few interns.
How did your company get its initial funding? How much funding do you currently have?
We got our initial funding from private angel investors. We can’t disclose the exact amount, but we’ll definitely be expanding our team this year.
Describe your company’s culture. How has it affected your growth?
We have a few tenets we like to live by: intellectual honesty, humility, and ownership.
It is very important to us that we measure ourselves in honest manners and we work towards constantly improving ourselves as individuals and as a group. It is also very important that people be respectful towards each other and check their ego at their door. This has affected our growth because it is not difficult to find smart people, but we also look for people who are humble enough to learn from their mistakes but confident enough to take on new challenges. One thing which we have certainly learned is the value of having the right people, not just the smartest or most experienced.
Tell us a little about your own background. What made you want to start your own company?
My personal background is more in economics and math. I was doing an industrial engineering PhD at USC when the other founders and I began to think about Glass. We always knew in our hearts that we would start our own company, though. We really value working in a creative atmosphere with brilliant people and that not many places would meet our standards.
Has your company ever had to pivot? If so, what was that like?
We definitely pivoted last year. We had been focusing on creating and improving Glass, but recently have focused a lot more on the platform we are building, and how we can address the bigger problems we see in the social media world, like privacy, security, and contextualizing information. The results of that work are already visible in Glass: slides on Glass are completely invisible to the underlying websites and our app has been entirely in SSL for a long time now. In the future, you’ll see a lot more evidence of this change in priorities. For us, pivoting is innovating. Both in the implementation of Glass and future products.
How do you deal with competition? Do you keep tabs on other companies that are doing similar things? How does that change your company’s approach?
We read a lot. We have a pulse on the landscape.
On an operational level, we study the market and see what works and what does not and try to adjust our strategy accordingly. Culturally, we believe it is important to be intellectual honest about what succeeds and what fails, with ourselves and everybody we work with. Even when being intellectually honest is difficult.
What are some of your most successful decisions? What’s worked really well for you guys that you think other entrepreneurs could learn from?
Partnerships.
We have partnered up with the best group of investors I have ever known (or heard of). They have been quite supportive, but most importantly, they have never let us reach for anything less than “the vision.” They definitely push us to create some big things, but we prefer being pushed rather than slowed down.
Another form of partnerships – hiring – has been a series of important and successful decisions for us. I am very happy with our team and how we have become much more of a team by working together on our shared vision.
Where have you struggled? What mistakes have you made that you think other entrepreneurs could learn from?
In the early days, we over-romanticized the startup culture to the point of eschewing more mature processes and other things that seemed too “corporate.” We have evolved a lot from then and continually force ourselves to look at our product development process and try to improve it.
What are your thoughts on the LA entrepreneurial/startup scene?
Los Angeles is booming with opportunity for those who can see the connections. World class universities, a long history of scientific and business innovation, and the entertainment industry have made Los Angeles a city which favors and supports people who want to make something. This is a city that does not care where you come from, only where you are going.
My biggest pet peeve in the LA scene is that it is actually a series of scenes, ranging from Santa Monica to Pasadena and they are all quite isolated from each other by nature of geographical distance. After living for a few years in LA, this isolation has definitely decreased, albeit slower than I would have liked.
Its funny, because when we first set up shop in LA, many people told us that “real startups” start in the bay area, which is of course hogwash. Then, when we started in LA, others told us that we had to be in Santa Monica where the “real” scene is. We love Santa Monica (our CTO lives there), but we found Hollywood to be easier for the team (and more affordable).
Finally, Glass is still in an invite-only phase. When do you plan on opening it up for everyone?
Very soon! We will be dropping the invite wall in February.
