I’m the cofounder of a startup called Kapwing, a popular website for making videos, images, and GIFs. When we launched two years ago, we added a brand watermark to every clip made on Kapwing. As a result of that watermark, our brand has gone basically as viral as any startup could hope. Clips with the Kapwing watermark have been retweeted by Kanye, shown on TV, featured on r/all, and reached 5M impressions on Facebook …with no marketing spend. »
I’m thrilled to announce today that we’ve partnered up with Saar Gur at CRV to grow Kapwing’s content creation platform. This Series A financing allows us to make Kapwing free to use, to grow our engineering team, and to evolve from a tool to a full multimedia platform for both individuals and teams. We met CRV through Justine and Olivia Moore, two rising investors that I worked with while we were both in college, journalists at The Stanford Daily. »
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — September 24, 2019 10:00AM PT Kapwing, a free online image and video editing platform, announces an $11M Series A financing round led by CRV. Kapwing strives to empower a rising class of modern creators who need faster, simpler, and more accessible software to make and share digital media. The platform has grown to millions of creators since launching two years ago. Kapwing founders Julia Enthoven and Eric Lu, both former Google Product Managers, were inspired to build a better multimedia creative suite after using today’s leading editors: Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and iMovie. »
In the venture-bloated Startup Land, it seems like every founder is trying to give away branded products for free. So how does a company leverage branded gear (“swag”) to win brand affinity? We work at a startup trying to set up a brand ambassador program and build brand awareness with consumers. We noticed that other startups give away swag liberally and wanted to do some first-hand research on how common this actually is. »
We started Kapwing (an online image and video editor) almost two years ago and grew the company from 2 co-founders to 12 full-time employees in the last 12 months. Our team is based full-time in San Francisco, where the unemployment rate is astonishingly low. I wanted to write up a brief article on our learnings around hiring for other first-time entrepreneurs trying to hire engineers. Like marketing and sales, hiring requires hustle. »
In the last two years, we’ve grown Kapwing from two cofounders to 13 full-time employees and secured two rounds of venture funding, but we just moved into our first office space. In this article, I tell the story of our journey between offices and share some tips for other entrepreneurs on responsibly finding and furnishing your own space in SF. Zero Eric (my cofounder) had worked for seven months on his own from his bedroom before I left Google to join him in Startup Land. »
Hello world! My name’s Grace. I’m a rising senior studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, and I love creating videos, adventuring, laughing at memes, and telling stories. That’s how I ended up interning as a Growth Marketing intern at Kapwing, a San Francisco-based startup. On my first day of work at Kapwing, my coworker Peter and I were challenged to put up 400 posters around the Bay Area in one day. »
In the world of subscription payments, service providers face ethical dilemmas on how to charge customers and set policies for their business. A large company might have the financial freedom to take the high road, but startups face a constant existential threat that can force them to make revenue-first decisions. After leaving the company with the tagline “Don’t be evil,” I founded a subscription-based startup with every intention of building a consumer-first subscription model without the “gotchyas” that I hated. »
