Stealth startup Jelly announces ex-Twitter growth engineer as co-founder
We’re still not totally sure what former Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is up to with Jelly, his stealth startup announced earlier this month. But it is clear now that Stone is looking to his last major venture for help in revealing his co-founder: ex-Twitter engineer Ben Finkel.
“Ben Finkel is my co-founder here at Jelly. Ben and I have been friends and collaborators for many years. During one of our frequent walk-and-talks around San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Park, we accidentally came up with the idea for Jelly. It was one of those ideas that we couldn’t get out of our heads,” Stone wrote in a blog post on Monday.
Finkel will join Stone at Jelly as CTO of the company, but there is still no word on when Jelly will open its doors. The company is backed by the Obvious Corp., the parent company created by Twitter co-founders and early employees including Stone to incubate a couple of content-related startups like Medium, Branch, and now Jelly.
Finkel originally founded Fluther, a question and answer site that was seed funded by a group of angels including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen. Stone served as an advisor to the company, and in December 2010, Twitter went ahead and acquired the startup, primarily for the engineering talent behind the company. Finkel then served as a senior software engineer and then engineering manager for Twitter, where he was in charge of user growth.
“Ben managed New User Experience on the Growth Team at Twitter, helping grow an active user base from fifty million to more than two hundred million people,” Stone wrote. That’s certainly no small job, and according to his LinkedIn page, Finkel just departed Twitter last month.
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