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Before Homebrew makes any investment, we ask ourselves “do we want to put sweat and reputation behind this team every day?” In some ways the wire transfer is the easy part; it’s signing up to go to work on behalf of the founders for a decade or more that really matters. With Winnie, the answer was indisputable. We’re thrilled to partner with this team and lead its pre-seed round.
Our ties to Winnie CEO, Sara Mauskopf, run deep. She worked with Hunter at YouTube and with Satya at Twitter (before also holding a product leadership role at Postmates). We knew firsthand the strength of her experience, breadth of her talents and overall grit. Her CPO cofounder, Anne Halsall, has a similarly impressive background with time spent at Google, Inkling, Quora and Postmates. And we love seeing former coworkers launch new companies together.
And so what is Winnie? Whether you describe it as a “clever new social networking app built specifically for parents,” or an app that “helps find family-friendly places, share their experiences,” Sara and Anne might simply tell you it’s a company designed to build tools that help make parents feel better, not worse, about being moms and dads. And as parents ourselves, we get that.
Homebrew also believes that your first product is your company. The Winnie founders take this to heart. We saw them seek out diverse beta testers and opinions, not just ask 30 parents in tech for feedback. We see them focused on building a team that doesn’t look like the standard tech company. So yeah, it’s easy to get up every day and put sweat and reputation behind Sara, Anne and Winnie.
Check out the Winnie app on iOS.