Folks who meet Danny for the first time will be impressed by his maturity despite his tender age. He is the Foounder (excuse the pun) of Foound. Way Of The VC interview him here:
Name of Entrepreneur / Venture and Company Motto
Danny Tan/Foound, "Bringing the world closer, one hangout at a time"
Brief Profile of Entrepreneur
Danny leads the Foound team in product and marketing strategies. Danny fell in love with the juxtaposition of business, technology, and social causes as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. At age 23, he started his first company with a team of leading scientists in the US to find a cure for epilepsy. 2 years, USD100,000 and 3 dead monkeys later, Danny found his real passion in consumer internet technologies, and spent the summer of 2009 working on the launch of novaglobal.com in Stockholm Sweden under the tutelage of Lars-Henrik Friis Molin. Since late 2009, Danny has been working on Foound as a way for busy city dwellers (read himself) to stay ahead of their social life. Danny won the Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge in 2008, and was featured on the Business Times’ BT-Citibank Young Investors’ Forum in early 2009.
What's new, interesting, or different about what your company does?*
With useful features in a simple design, Foound makes organizing hangouts with friends a breeze. Gone are the days of sending and relaying multiple text messages or emails just to get your friends together for a cup of coffee. Foound’s web and mobile application allow organizers to convey all relevant information in one single invitation, and send it to friends through multiple channels. Then recipients respond to these invitations and interact with one another in real-time. In short, Foound makes it incredibly simple and easy to invite and update friends on any real life meet-ups.
Given 20-20 hindsight, what would you do differently?
I would have started this company 5 years earlier!
What is your most memorable fund-raising experience?
This definitely has to be raising our current seed funding round led by Neoteny Labs, which gives us instant access to the international tech community.
What do you do or make?
"Foound Pte Ltd is a Singapore based software company developing Foound, a “short-term invitation” service which helps users organize hangouts with friends in real-life via web and mobile.
Through our web and mobile applications, Foound makes it easy for users to organize hangouts with each other by
• Updating their location and inviting friends to join them in real-time
• Specifying information such as address, people and time in a single message
• Sending and responding to invitations and updates to and from multiple users"
Explain how the company will make money?
While monetization is not our immediate priority, probable business models in the future includes location-triggered mobile advertisements (Placecast), mobile coupons (Yoose), group discounts (Groupon), loyalty rewards (Foursquare), or lead generation for businesses (e.g. for credit card companies). We can do this through building a global sales force, or through strategic partnerships in different geographies.
Why is the addressable market you are targetting interesting?
"In a recent report (2010), Analysys Mason estimated that worldwide smart phone usage will increase by 32% annually over the next 5 years, from 424 million in 2009 to 1.7 billion in 2014. Of these, comScore MobiLens reported that approximately 20% of smart phone users access social media on their mobile devices, representing a total of 340 million potential users by 2014.
These users spend a good amount of time daily on social networking sites and are accustomed to making fractional purchases such as mobile app or virtual items. These type of behavior were not seen on dated mobile platforms that is the feature phones today."
Why should we choose your company?
Foound is a uniquely Singaporean company which has strong global ambitions. The team is young, yet capable and dynamic. The team came from a diverse background of overseas experiences and strong technical skill-sets, including former experiences from companies such as Google, Honeywell, etc.
