Clockwise from left: Engineers Matt
Matteson, Dan Dofter, Morin (circled), and
Dustin Mierau in front of the Path office;
Matteson and Dofter on a late night;
champagne marking the launch; meeting
with Kleiner Perkins’s Chi-Hua Chien
ing self and the experiencing
self,” Morin says. “How do I feel in
my life right now versus how do
I feel about my life?” Ultimately,
Path endeavored to create a
trusted place where people could
save iPhone snapshots of their
lives in real time and share them
with the number of people that
was more likely to preserve a
sense of personal intimacy. It
was a simple idea, hiding in plain
sight. Users have responded; more
than 3. 4 million moments were
shared in the first four months
that the site was open to everyone.
“There aren’t a lot of Internet products that help you decide how you
feel about your life,” he says.
This quieter style of network
represents a business challenge
that Morin has considered care-
fully. “One of the things you notice
with most network businesses is
that they end up pursuing a media
business model,” he says. In order
to make money, they need to grow
big and grow fast, adding lots of
features in the hopes of adding
more people to attract marketers.
“But once you increase the scale
and density, it decreases the qual-
ity and creates a lot of noise.” Path
will be focusing less on generating
scale, though it matters, and more
on adding premium options into
the mix. It introduced seven
“lenses”—three of which are for
sale—at the South by Southwest
Festival in March, real-time filters
Valley, the company passed. “My
official answer is no comment,”
says Morin with a smile. “But I
think that one of the unique characteristics of people who worked
at Facebook is a desire to build
meaning in the world.” (Morin
says that Mark Zuckerberg,
who remains a friend and informal adviser, supported his thinking.) And though he doesn’t say it,
being part of Google’s future social
strategy probably wasn’t going to
give him the chance to fully
explore the company’s potential.
The Google path not taken
was memorialized in Morin’s
photo stream: “Scheming with
Chi-Hua (KP)” was a nod to his
recent round of Series A funding
with Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers and Index Ventures
for $8.65 million, which closed in
January. Chi-Hua Chien, a partner
at the firm, joined Path’s board
last fall. Chien is an avid user of
Path and has a recurring special
moment—his 3-year-old daughter,
Claire, running down the hall to
see him when he gets home. It’s
a simple moment that Path has
enabled him to share with his
mother in China, who has limited
access to the Internet. She can
now experience these moments
through Path’s email feature.
I flip through my own
moments—a sleeping 5-year-old,
a trip to the ER with a mangled
finger, dinner with friends, my
family collapsing into a laughing
pile, a snowman dressed as a
Packer fan. I feel happy. It’s hard
not to. It is, after all, my life in
review. “And I feel I know you so
much better because you use
Path,” Morin tells me. “Isn’t that
a good thing?”
that let users get artsy with their
photos. The free high-contrast
black-and-white filter called
“Ansel” was an immediate hit,
as was the sepia-toned “Old Time.”
At 99 cents, Old Time provides
Path with its first revenue stream.
Expect also digital goods that
people can give to their friends to
comment on their photos. “We’ve
learned from social games that
people love them.” It’s estimated
that the U. S. virtual-goods market
will hit $2.1 billion in 2011.
“I applaud the simple beauty of
product, interaction, and identity
design in Ammunition’s work.
The museum-quality aesthetic in
every single millimeter of what
they design is remarkable.”
FEBRUARY 2010 FASTCOMPANY.COM 50
Brett Wickens, Ammunition
“Matt Jones at digital-design
studio Berg understands what it
is to be a designer in the new
world. He not only helps clients
uncover possibilities, but he’s
adept at creating the tools to
make them a reality.”
