My dad was born an entrepreneur. When he was 7, he sold lemons and avocados from the tree in the backyard on the side of the street. When he was 11, he got a job as a paperboy that required him to wake up at 4am before middle school. In high school, he and his brother moved junk in the family truck, and during college he made money playing for two local bands. »
History For the last decade, it has been a mobile web UX standard that users can long-press on photos and videos to save the media to their local camera roll. On most Android phones today, you can long-press on a photo or video in Chrome and download it from the web. Downloading a Kapwing video on Android Chrome Sometime last year in an iOS 11 update, Apple silently added a change that prevents web developers from enabling video downloads from mobile Safari. »
Last July, I left a six-figure salary to work with a friend, Eric Lu, on starting a company. It didn’t work. We had to try out multiple ideas before we found one that stuck. Now that we’re running a thriving startup, Eric and I both know that we wouldn’t have been able to start Kapwing without the other. In this post, I’ll share my thoughts on finding a cofounder for people considering the tradeoffs of starting a company solo or looking for a partner. »
A blog about entrepreneurship has been the highest return on investment for my startup. Popular posts have driven leads worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to our website with little engineering effort. In this post, I’ll share some strategies and tips for blogging for the tech community. Background I’m the CEO of an early-stage startup called Kapwing, an online video editor for casual creators. Last November, a month after we launched, my co-founder and I decided to try blogging as an SEO strategy. »
Last week, I was asked by a talented engineering candidate about my startup’s paternity leave policy. In this post, I’ll share how I designed a paternity leave policy for other clueless early-stage startup CEOs. Background I’m the CEO of a seed-stage startup called Kapwing, an online video editing platform. As 24-year-olds and first-time entrepreneurs, my co-founder and I started Kapwing last September in a casual, scrappy way: no health insurance, salaries, office, lawyer, or formal incorporation, just a Stripe account and two technical founders. »
Last week, we announced Kapwing’s seed round publically. Like most startup founders who have just closed a financing round, we’re thrilled to have found investors and optimistic about the future. But I also feel that these reports paint a misleading picture of the fundraising process. For us and for many founders, the process of raising a seed round was discouraging, stressful, and very difficult. In this post, I describe the side of fundraising not covered in outcome announcements, the lessons and realities that inexperienced entrepreneurs should know to expect. »
In the beginning, all we wanted was to eat ramen on our own dime. Now, we’ve raised $1.7 million from Silicon Valley VCs. In this post, I’ll tell the story of why we decided to raise money from investors for our online video editing startup, Kapwing. Background There’s humble glory in bootstrapping a business because you can take full credit for every dollar in revenue. Eric and I celebrate every uptick in daily video count, every Stripe notification, every new link from bloggers and journalists. »
Company founded by two former Googlers aspires to make short-form video production a quick, intuitive task for everyone rather than a specialized, full-time profession SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — July 16, 2018 10:03AM — Kapwing, the popular video editing website, announced today that it has raised $1.7M seed round to expand its online video editing platform for casual creators. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Shasta Ventures, Sinai Ventures, Village Global, Shrug Capital, and ZhenFund. »
