Ev Williams, the billionaire who co-founded Twitter and Medium,is sad.
To fight that sadness, Williams is doing the only thing he knows how: launching a new app.
Behold Mozi: the fruit of Williamss mid-life crisis.
Medium Founder & CEO Ev Williams speaks during the Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal on November 8, 2018.© Photo by Pedro Fiúza/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Mozi is a private social data pipe for seeing your people more, IRL.
Im not a billionaire investor, but I am a man approaching middle age.
Ive tended to some relationships well and others poorly.
I use a variety of different digital tools to keep up with friends.
I was in D.C. last week for a conference on nuclear weapons.
I had dinner with one who was available.
It was pretty easy to set up.
I didnt need an app for it.
Many Americans go through a kind of midlife crisis.
Time, which once seemed so limitless, is running out.
Hes powerful enough that the Times will spill ink about his sad and lonely life.
Scrambling to put together an app wont fix the underlying problem.
Mozi is so strange to me because it feels like its solving problems that have long been solved.
It wasnt me, Williams seems to be saying.
It was this damn social media.
If only Id made the right app, the right way.
The internet did make us more connected.
It just also made us more divided.
It made us more everything, Williams told the Times.
Like all good entrepreneurs, Williams also outsourced the problem of actually developing Mozi.
He needed someone else to solve the problem of his faltering human connections for him.
This was shortly after I stepped away from day-to-day operations at Medium.
And I was in no hurry to start another company, he said in his blog.
Some people have a hard time keeping up the human connections in their lives, its true.
Mozi probably wont help them.
Moziis not the thing.
Its just another chore that keeps you from making direct contact with the people you want in your life.
Its another way to file them away into an abstract digital space.
Make a phone call.
Start a group chat.
We have thousands of solutions to the problems Mozi solves.
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