Issues are bleak within the tech sphere as we shut out a yr outlined by plummeting stocks, persistent mass layoffs and a fall from grace for major social media firms. But Stanford dropout Teddy Solomon’s story of co-founding Fizz is so harking back to Fb that he was launched to his investor and now-CEO Rakesh Mathur as “the subsequent Mark Zuckerberg.” So, is it an excellent time to be constructing a buzzy new social app, or is it an entire mess?
Enterprise capitalists a minimum of appear to be desirous to fund the way forward for social media. Fizz closed a $4.5 million seed spherical in June, and already, the social media app for school college students raised its $12 million Collection A. This quick development from seed to Collection A is sort of extraordinary in a bear market, however Fizz appears to be embracing the ethos to move fast and (hopefully not) break things.
Fizz is barely out there to varsity college students, and customers can solely entry the Fizz group for their very own school. On the app, college students can publish textual content posts, polls and pictures with no username or figuring out data hooked up. Like Reddit, classmates can upvote or downvote what they see of their feed. Customers can DM one another, selecting to disclose their id in the event that they so want.
When lined Fizz’s seed round in October, the app had launched on 13 campuses (every campus has its personal particular person group). In underneath two months, that quantity has doubled to 25 campuses. With the assistance of its Collection A, led by NEA with participation from Lightspeed, Rocketship, Owl Ventures, Smash Ventures and New Horizon, Fizz’s aim is to succeed in 1,000 campuses by the tip of 2023.
“What we’ve discovered is that Fizz is impactful throughout a wide range of campus cultures, from extremely tutorial Ivy League faculties to occasion faculties and now HBCUs,” co-founder and COO Teddy Solomon advised . “Fizz is all about offering college students with a safer, non-public and interesting house to attach about their shared expertise of residing on the identical school campus, no matter that have and tradition could also be.”
Fizz says it has reached 95% penetration amongst iPhone customers (it doesn’t have an Android app but) on campuses like Stanford, Dartmouth, Pepperdine and Bethune-Cookman — however the obtain numbers is perhaps a bit inflated, since Fizz employs ways like providing free donuts in trade for downloads, which is customary amongst college-founded apps. Regardless, Fizz claims that over half of its customers are partaking with the app each day, a powerful statistic in itself.
Fizz’s ascension has not been with out battle, although.
As reported by the Stanford Daily earlier this month, Fizz had a critical safety vulnerability in November 2021. Three Stanford college students found that anybody may simply question the app’s Google Firestone-hosted database to determine the creator of any publish on the platform, the place all posts are billed as nameless. Additionally they discovered customers’ private data like cellphone numbers and e mail addresses — plus, the database was editable, which made it doable to edit posts and provides any person moderator standing.
“As quickly as we grew to become conscious of the vulnerability, we labored with a safety marketing consultant who helped us to resolve that particular problem in 24 hours, which ended the danger for our customers. Subsequently, we notified all of our customers of the repair and revealed the adjustments on our web site,” Ashton Cofer, Fizz’s co-founder and CTO, advised . Fizz advised customers concerning the points by way of a blog post.
It’s business customary that when good-faith researchers discover such obtrusive vulnerabilities, they report their findings to the corporate in order that they are often mended earlier than dangerous actors can exploit them. However these well-intentioned college students told the Stanford Daily that “Fizz’s lawyer threatened us with legal, civil, and disciplinary prices except we agreed to maintain quiet concerning the vulnerabilities.” The coed newspaper obtained a replica of the letter (observe: Fizz was referred to as Buzz on the time).
Legal professionals from the Digital Frontiers Basis (EFF) represented the three Stanford college students in a response to Fizz’s authorized risk.
“Your authorized threats towards the scholars endanger safety analysis, discourage vulnerability reporting, and can in the end result in much less safety,” the EFF legal professionals replied to Fizz.
requested Fizz why its staff selected to pursue authorized motion on the time. Cofer mentioned that he and Solomon had adopted the suggestions of a cybersecurity marketing consultant.
“Following the letter, we sat down with the hackers and resolved the matter amicably, and no additional authorized motion has been pursued,” he mentioned. “As we have been a small staff on the time, we selected to observe the recommendation of our consultants and authorized counsel and we’re glad we have been capable of shut out the dialogue with the researchers on good phrases.”
Cofer added that the safety vulnerability additionally stemmed from the truth that the staff was so small on the time — it was simply Cofer and Solomon, who have been then full-time school college students. Now, Cofer says Fizz has a staff of 25 workers, together with engineers with many years of expertise.
“Our safety practices have considerably advanced and we stay dedicated to the safety and privateness of our customers as Fizz grows. Following this incident, we’ve got ensured that the non-public identifiable data (PII) of our customers is saved in a separate, safe database, which is barely accessible by Fizz directors. Which means at no level can Fizz customers, moderators or launch groups see one other person’s PII,” Cofer mentioned. Fizz outlines its safety practices in additional depth on its website.
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