Making “Social” Social Again
Announcing Mozi
I think it’s tough to appreciate how much relationships determine the course of our lives — and how randomly many of them come to be. A chance conversation turns into an introduction, turns into a job, turns into a life partner, turns into moving across the country.
Sliding doors, every step we take.
There’s beauty in this randomness. Or maybe it’s not random at all. I’m not sure.
I am sure that most of the good things in my life — whether I appreciated it at the time or not — would not have come to be had I not happened to meet certain people and develop chance connections into relationships. Friends, collaborators, connectors.
(I also know that most of the stress and anxiety I’ve experienced has come from poorly managing relationships or associating with people I shouldn’t have.)
While I treasure and nurture my friendships today, I was not always so mindful about them. In fact, just a couple of years ago, I was trying to make a list of people to invite to my 50th birthday, and I had a sad realization: I didn’t have a robust set of friendships I felt great about given my stage in life.
I could point to many reasons for this: Covid, startups, introversion. Of course, everything goes back to childhood. I grew up in a very small town where I didn’t find a lot of people on my wavelength. While I desperately wanted to connect with people, I also cut myself off and developed a fiercely independent mindset. My strategy, at a subconscious level, was to succeed. If I could prove I mattered, by doing something impressive, people would come to me.
After a lifetime working at mattering, I realized I had under-invested in what really mattered: Relationships.
As I was making my birthday list, another, more practical, thing struck me: I had no go-to source for knowing who I knew. No online social network reflected my real-life relationships. The closest thing, by far, was the contacts app on my phone.
And, boy, was that a mess. I’m guessing, yours is too.
Why?
Twenty years ago, there was an internet company called Plaxo. There have been others like it, but Plaxo was the first big online address book. I remember thinking it was one those simple but profound twists on an old product that was now possible because of the internet, i.e.: Why do I have to keep details up to date for hundreds of people in my address book? Now that we have the internet, you can update your address in my address book, and I only have to keep mine updated.
It was an obvious idea. And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information.
Perhaps the reason for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved this problem—for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in common, and all kinds of other details.
Another idea that seemed obvious was that, given how deeply social humans are, social products would dominate the internet. Ten to fifteen years ago, this seemed inevitable.
But something else happened instead.
Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their waking hours making “content.”
In other words, social media became…media.
To tell you the truth, I think there are positive aspects of this evolution (perhaps I’ll get into that in another post). But we clearly lost something. In the words of Ellis Hamburger:
I am here for the Japanese frog videos I see on TikTok. But in no way do I see them as a replacement for keeping up with friends and family — the goal of social media to begin with.
When you spend your life building internet platforms, it’s hard to quit the habit. So while trying to get a grasp on the people I knew to invite to my birthday, I started thinking: What if we did have a network designed for this purpose? Not just invites, but a map of the people we actually knew and tools for enhancing those relationships?
In other words, what would an actually social network look like?
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.
Perhaps it starts with a better contacts app. I started to look for one for my own purposes and I found quite a few out there with some nice features. But not quite what I was looking for. So I started building one.
When I say I had “started building,” what I actually did is write a two-page memo and hire a dev shop to build a prototype. This was shortly after I stepped away from day-to-day operations at Medium. And I was in no hurry to start another company.
Around this time, I went to a holiday party in San Francisco.
At that party, a woman (who wasn’t actually invited but snuck in with another friend) said hello to me because her friend had recently started working for me. That woman was Molly DeWolf Swenson. Molly and I became friends, and I learned that she was obsessed with the very problem that I had been thinking about. She kept a massive spreadsheet of her contacts in order to facilitate introductions and know who to contact when she was traveling.
She was also a multi-talented entrepreneur and operator starting to think about her next move. Once she expressed interest in what I was working on, I asked her if she’d spend some time with me figuring out if it was an idea worth pursuing.
After spending some time white boarding and talking and prototyping, we decided there was a compelling place to start: Solving the “where are my people and where are they going to be” problem.
Fast forward to today, I’m happy to announce our new company and product, Mozi — pronounced like moh-zee, as in “Let’s mosey around.”
It’s available for iOS now. (Android wait list.)
Mozi v1.0
Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.
In fact, it’s not a media app at all. There is no posting photos or videos or liking or following. There are no influencers — except your friend who may influence you to meet up for a coffee when you’re in town.
The primary value proposition of Mozi (today) is simple: It lets you know when you’re going to be in the same place (city or event) as someone you know. And the goal is straightforward: to connect more often—and in person—with the people you care about.
For example, I just got back from Miami. Before going, I put my plan (just the city and what days) into Mozi. This information was shared just with my contacts (minus any I wouldn’t want it to be). So, even before going, I was able to see both the people I know who live there and other friends who were visiting at the same time, so we could meet up and make plans.
Mozi also helps you decide where to go. “Events” on Mozi (currently a beta feature) lets you see who you know may be going—or considering going—to a conference or event before you go. (If you happen to be going to SXSW, join the Mozi event. I’ll be there too.)
While Mozi is great for people who move around a lot, it’s also useful if you live somewhere people visit by giving you a heads-up when someone is visiting your city.
We soft-launched Mozi a few months ago and have been using it with a relatively small community. And even with this small group, we’ve seen “Mozi moments” happen on a regular basis — people getting together who otherwise wouldn’t have because they see they will be in the same place.
Mozi addresses the original problem I described by syncing with your contacts (all data is encrypted, and we never contact anyone on your behalf) and keeping their data up to date in your phone’s address book. And Mozi profiles give you useful information about your friends and people you meet (should they choose to share it).
Note: There are no public profiles, plans, or any other information on Mozi that is shared publicly. Everything is viewable only with mutual contacts (i.e., you have each other’s phone numbers). If you like, you can mark any plan for “close friends” only. And you can easily remove any contact you don’t want to see anything.
In other words, Mozi is the private social network that helps you build real-word relationships.
Part of my condition for starting this company was that Molly be the CEO. She was at the right stage of her career, had the passion, the drive, the relationship-building instincts, and perfect “market-founder fit.” She quickly proved this by recruiting an awesome team, who rebuilt the app from scratch in a beautiful and robust way.
(BTW, we are fully staffed right now but will be slowly adding to the team this year. If interested, please reach out.)
Now we are off to the races.
I am serving the role of chairman and work with the leadership team on product and strategy.
A lot has changed for me in the last couple years. I made a lot of new friendships and rebuilt old ones. I did a lot of growth and healing work. I now have a robust network of friends from coast to coast. Not because of an app, but because I prioritized relationships and invested the time.
I don’t think technology is the answer to our most human needs. But it would be silly not to use the tools at our fingertips to serve those needs. I love seeing when I will be in the same place as people I care about via Mozi.
I’d love for you to try out Mozi and let us know what you think. There is much more to come to build the private social network, but we are finding even with a few friends on the app, it’s making life richer and more connected (so tell your friends too :).
Thanks.
