During my career, I’ve started or been the founding investor in five companies and own more than 3,000 domain names, so people naturally ask me why I launch and support new ventures. I like to create something from nothing.
I’ve always been a creative problem-solver. I also have a bit of a hacker mentality at heart. When I wanted to get better at piano as a child, for example, I sought out Billy Joel’s piano teacher, Morton Estrin, in Hicksville, New York and studied classical with him. (His son is actually teaching my kids now!) I was in my first band at age 15 and started playing shows in New York City before I turned 18. And at Duke, I formed a band and we played for two years after college. While the band didn’t hit it big time, I did get to play in The Vanity Set (with Jim Sclavunos of the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds fame) on a dream-fulfilling European tour. I even got to sing lead on a song once (and only once). Around the time my band career chapter ended, I had already found my new love–technology. So I applied my creativity to the world of computers, the internet, and, now today, to how we watch videos online.
What We’re Solving For: An Internet Filled with Distraction
In those early days of the internet, it was just fun to find things in the digital haystack and you were thankful to find these new things. Now, however, the experience is not as fun because there are mounds of content all competing for your attention, and social platforms making use of everything they know about you at every moment to bend you towards their will (or greatest monetization path).
Without an altruistic navigator, YouTube quickly turns into an endless algorithm-fueled machine.
While there is more great video content online than ever, I feel the internet is really beckoning me (and maybe you too) with distraction. Today more than 80% of the internet is video, and there are approximately 800 million videos currently on YouTube, with another 3.7 million being uploaded each day. In other words, it’s impossible to even watch a fraction of what there is online. YouTube is great for discovery, when you want to let the algorithm guide you, but it’s lacking when it comes to personalization. Without an altruistic navigator, YouTube quickly turns into an endless algorithm-fueled machine–one that is very hard to turn “off.”
Introducing Sifts to Organize the Chaos
The need to organize the chaos led us to build echocast, the video platform where you can have more control over your YouTube experience and find, focus on, and share the videos that most resonate with your interests. Our objective is to organize the chaos in the video space and make the infinite finite.
In addition to making traditional playlists, you are invited to make “sifts,” a proprietary dynamic feed that pulls in specific filtered content from multiple channels selected by the user. Once you create them, Sifts work for you. They go out and find the videos that match your interests, and bypass the plain vanilla recommendations you otherwise see. The Sift is one of the most compelling features of echocast’s current product as it’s it not available on YouTube’s own platform. With it, we bring back the excitement of finding something you really want, without it being an ordeal or a herculean task of focus and discipline.
We are weirdly enthusiastic about helping people find all the little things they love.
Find Your Passions (and Only Your Passions)
With echocast, we want you to be able to explore any pocket of the online universe that speaks to your passions, no matter how broad or how niche: origami videos, horror movie trailers, live concerts from your favorite band, and more. And we’re purposefully family friendly. My children love the “bad” lip reading Star Wars songs. (It all started with the "SEAGULLS! (Stop It Now)" aka a bad lip reading of The Empire Strikes Back. It excites me to create a tool that will connect people over their shared interests. That’s how the internet should be. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing a paradigm shift on the internet.
In his new piece in The New Yorker, Kyle Chaka says what many of us are thinking: the internet isn’t fun anymore. “In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems,” he writes.
The reality is that the internet is full of good stuff. And we are weirdly enthusiastic about helping people find all the little things they love. We envision Sifts becoming useful gathering places for their respective communities where people can collaborate and share ideas. That’s what the internet felt like in its early innings when I launched my first site, and it’s what it should feel like again today.
So come find what you like on echocast. And follow only what you love. That’s how we will make the internet is fun again. Get started and explore all of our Sifts today.