Across the Universe
Thoughts on GV’s investment in the mobile creation service
Two lifetimes ago, before I was an investor and before I was a reporter, I was a web developer. I had long dabbled with early WYSIWYG tools and eventually taught myself HTML and CSS. But I went back to school to learn things like JavaScript to create more robust webpages. That was also nearly 20 years ago. My laptop had what we might consider to be a box fan today. It was technically “portable” provided you were hitting the gym. There were no smartphones. Though I did have a PDA. I played euchre on it.
Point is, times were different back then. And yet, when it comes to web development, the tools — at least the hardware used — is still largely the same. That is, it’s still done on a “traditional” computer, the desktop or laptop variety. There is better software, thanks to how much more robust the web is these days, and more recently, the rise of “no code/low code” tools. But even though the vast majority of our usage of the web is now on mobile devices, the creation of said web is still on desktop or laptop computers. That’s wild.
Not only is it not an exaggeration to say that mobile devices have changed our world, that’s an understatement. Such tools have changed nearly every aspect of life. And that has included content creation in many areas — from photography, to filmmaking, to podcasting, on down. But again, not really web development.
It’s through that lens that I’ve long been looking for a different way of doing website creation. I purposefully don’t say “better” because it’s just different. Coding and desktop tools will likely always have a place and be needed. At the same time, the opportunity that mobile provides is not just ease, it’s democratization. Mobile devices, because everyone has one, expand the scope of who can create sites on the web. But the right mobile tools are needed to facilitate that — tools like Universe.
And so as not to further bury the lede, I’m very happy to announce that GV has led a $10M Series A investment in Universe today, and that I’m joining the board of the company.
I first met Universe founder Joe Cohen almost a decade ago. He was working on a startup in the edtech space at the time — he had dropped out of school to do so — and I found him thoughtful. Later, after he sold that business, we chatted as he was working on some new ideas for how to democratize creation and coding on the web. Think: HyperCard for the 21st century. It’s not hard to draw a line from that concept to where Universe is today.
The entry point Universe decided to go down first was simple, single page websites, built entirely on mobile devices. Over time, the tool has grown to allow for much more complex sites, while still focused on a mobile creation experience. Not just mobile-first, mind you. Mobile only (well, and iPad).
This sounds both simple and obvious because it should be simple and obvious. Yet here we are, some 13 years after the launch of the iPhone, and it’s still very hard to create websites from the devices we all use and have with us at all times of the day. And while other sites and services have created mobile experiences, they seem to fail to catch on, likely because they’re tacked on. Because the interface and ideas need to be thought of from the touchscreen up. Not the desktop down.
That’s where Universe’s tools excel today. Joe and team came up with a clever grid-based system to allow for touch-based creation. And modern day APIs from many of the services you already know and love on the web make this easier still. To folks like you or I who have perhaps done some web development before, it’s fun to just quickly create a site and push it live on the web in an instant all from a mobile app. For people who have never created a website before, it’s something much more than that.
It seems to me that there are a lot of places Universe can go from here. And one timely — rather untimely — direction is commerce. Today, the company is shipping its first built-from-the-touchscreen-up take on how to accept payments and sell items on your own site. Given what’s going on in the world with the COVID-19 situation, it’s a first step to help creators out there attempt to earn a living while we’re all forced to be apart.
Check out Universe for iPhone or iPad. And yes, Android will be coming to further get such a tool for creation in the hands, quite literally, of everyone.
