Sometimes what sounds like a lot of money isn’t very much at all.
Many had this reaction when Elon Musk raised a reported $6 billion to fund xAI, his effort to catch up to, well, everyone in the AI race.
No one claimed this wasn’t a ton of money. Yet many said a version of “he will need more” after the raise in May. It takes a lot of capital to play catch up vs. Microsoft and Google. And it takes a lot of capital to buy up tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
I had a similar “they’re going to need a bigger boat” reaction (if on a smaller scale) when I read about Fizz. This is an “anonymous” social media app that has been informally labeled as the “anti-Facebook.”
The app was founded in 2021 by two Stanford dropouts (of course) and has focused on creating an anonymous social media experience for college and high school students.
What So Great About Anonymity?
Why is anonymity a good idea? What about“keyboard courage”? This is the phenomenon of posting toxic content while hiding behind a fake username. It is a key reason so many want to regulate social media.
According to Forbes, at its inception, Fizz was designed as a safe place for college students to interact.
“The promise of anonymity among its users would prevent cliques from forming and dissolve the pressure among students to impress one another. Requiring users to log in with an academic email address, Fizz was a protected space for just students.”
The app hasn’t escaped controversy.
According to a May article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “When the social media app Fizz first hit university campuses, college students signed up in droves to post anonymously about their professors, roommates, frat parties, or whatever else popped into their brains, which not surprisingly veered at times into bullying, racism, harassment, sexism, and other online abuse.”
So much so that the app has been banned on some college campuses in Florida and North Carolina.
It’s not completely clear what Fizz intends to do with the $41+ million it has raised. However, it seems to us it will take a whole lot more to be the “anti-Facebook” which is how some describe the app. We are not sure if being the anti-Facebook means being the opposite of Facebook, which based on the numbers, it already is.
Fizz is currently active on 240 college and 60 high school campuses. Facebook has 30 billion monthly active users and about $135 billion in annual revenue.
I think in Fizz’s case the “anti-Facebook” positioning has more to do with the different target demos than anything else.
