Secret’s founder returns with anti-loneliness app Ikaria

In my opinion, with regards to friendship, there is simply no substitute for an in person conversation. I happily drive 6 hours to see my best friends for a weekend; that's at least $70 in gas as well. FaceTime just isn't the same and I have a hard time imagining the people in my circle (the same type of people I would like to meet) spending their time trying to meet people on an app.

I live in New Zealand and most of what you say already exists. Yet we still have all the normal social ills. So I think that's proof you're wrong.

> If everyone needed to expend less and less of their day working as things got more efficient

We have that! Get an unskilled part time job and the government will give you a bit extra to pay the rent, and even more to support your children, etc. They'll also actively help you find work if you're unemployed. To remain unemployed here, you have to really put an effort in if you're not disabled.

Personally, I have fairly high value skills and only use them part time, so I'm living your utopia. Most people with high earning capacity choose to earn more though.

So the big problem for you is how do you limit the efforts of ambitious people to enforce this easy life on them?

I think you have some of it, not all of it.

I invested in Ikaria and feel like someone should speak up here.

I was early investor with Chrys Bader previously on his startup Secret. He was a YC batchmate of mine from 2008. I watched him build an initial prototype that had the chance to be a real social network that had very high long term retention, but in the end the company didn't invest deeply enough into moderation and the long term retention cohorts went down steeply past 6 months of use.

Chrys is a great designer and product manager who caught lightning in a bottle previously, and lost it. Founders often catch lightning in a bottle and then fail to keep it because scaling operations like moderation, or sometimes even just keeping the servers online, through hyper scale, is hard.

Many founders never find lightning in a bottle even once. Even in my experience I felt like we caught lightning in a bottle with Posterous and failed to properly bring it to the scale I wish we could have.

I realize I am going out on a limb to defend him here, but founders going back into the arena deserve at least a little bit of defense because it's hard enough to take the chance to make anything ever.

You'll hear more about how Ikaria really works, and I realize the post is light on details, but don't write this startup off before you actually try the software itself.

I spent an entire year living on my own, never inviting a single other person into my home and only entering the home of another person (save for immediate family, during holiday) once. Having chat apps made that experience much more bearable and actually did lead to a handful of real-world, albeit mostly long-distance, friendships (in that I host them in town for one week out of the year and they host me for one week out of the year).

At this point, I think chat apps can improve things in some ways for some people.

But that year alone mostly just made me hungry for more real face-to-face bonding. Apart from the people who are well-enough off to travel, but poor enough to have no friends, I’m not sure any chat app really has a place in your social life unless creating real-world friendships is one of its primary goals and it’s designed to actually achieve that effectively.