QOTD: The Rise of Ello

"The first year was only 100 people!?"

Yeah, it was totally private. About a year and a half ago I went and visited a couple of my friends, Todd Berger and Lucian Föhr, who are my partners on Ello. We said, “You know, all these other social networks are such a drag to us. They’re so cluttered and full of ads and I can’t find my friends anymore and we keep seeing these boosted posts and for some reason Facebook’s decided I’m like a middle-aged woman and I’ve got pantyhose ads.” (Laughs.) It was a drag.

I wasn’t using it much anymore, so we decided to build our own [social network], which we did. All of us got on and talked to each other and it was so nice to have a social network that was really a social network and nothing else.