About 6 weeks ago I left Venmo & I haven’t been talking a lot about what was next. Well today, we’re ready to talk about what that is.. Button.

http://usebutton.com

so… what is Button?

Button is an acquisition and retention platform for mobile commerce, focussed first on the rapidly growing on-demand space.

button_techcrunch_landscape_medium

When I was thinking about what to do next, I knew that I wanted to build something from the ground up that could help to shape & really add value to a space, and for that space to be changing the way we do the things we do every day. I think that Button is a chance to do exactly this and I can’t wait to start helping on-demand companies to grow their user-bases, engagement and ultimately their businesses.

Making the jump

I believe very strongly against entrepreneurship for the sake of being an entrepreneur. I don’t think that it’s good for anyone… least of all you. You will fail because you won’t have the passion required for every late night, early morning & bitter disappointment along the way.

So, I devised the 10 day rule.

When you wake up ten consecutive mornings & one of the first things you think about is building the product in question, quit your job and do it!

This happened for me almost 7 weeks ago, and here we are.. building Button.

Building with Openness

I’m really excited at the idea of building what we’re building, but I’m also excited to take the Open Source work that we did at Venmo to a whole new level. Openness not just of code, but around building a company.

Obviously there are things that you can’t share when you’re building a company in a competitive space, but I’ve learned so much from the work of Joel Gascoigne (Buffer), Rand Fishkin (Moz) and Brian Chesky (AirBnB) and want to do our bit to share as we learn.

More to come

This is just a quick intro to Button & now that we’re publicly announced, I’ll begin sharing more about what we’re doing and what we’re learning about mobile commerce, the on-demand space and about building a company in this fast-paced industry.