About

We're a team of veteran technologists, designers and journalists who believe in the power of social media to make the world a better place. (Yes, we know.)

Josh (LinkedIn): I led products at Flickr and Tumblr during the “good times”. Those products made their mark, because we believed in building uplifting spaces grounded in our better natures. They weren't perfect, but they were built by good people working in small teams dreaming big dreams.

At Flickr, early algorithms showed that people tend to self-select into feeds full of photos of sunsets and kittens, so we invented the idea of interestingness - a feed that just didn't give you more of the things you craved. We were one of the first to use tags to organize content. We tried to embed the idea of storytelling and preservation into photosharing.

At Tumblr, we infamously held off on comments because we didn't want to trade away our positive community in exchange for user growth. We built tools to let people express their weirdness and creativity and curiosity. We thought about feature bloat just as much as feature development.

The social web has turned sour. And the fun, camaraderie and positivity of connecting with other people have vanished. AI is coming. Can we have a healthy online social life again? I believe we can. I think it's more important than ever to build good things. And it starts with good people working in small teams dreaming big dreams.

Mark (LinkedIn): What do I want from Rover? Like everyone, I want love, I want drugs, I want sex and affection. But mainly, I want joy. Because if there's one thing that's gone missing from social media over the past decade, it's that sense of sheer fun that you get connecting with other people, not to build klout, or to savagely dunk on people, or to pwn the libs, but just the unique thrill of learning from each other. The joy you get from finding a common ground with your friend that you never knew before. The joy you get from learning something completely new about the world. The joy of connecting with another person you would have never otherwise known.

My whole career stems from that joy; Time magazine hired me over the Internet in 1994 because I emailed an editor there about a typo in the headline of the top story on Time.com. That kind of connection is still magical, and core to what we're building at Rover; a place to hear from and find joy with each other.

John (LinkedIn): For as long as I’ve been building products, my center has been the same: help people get the information they need, in the clearest, most human way possible.

Whether it was optimizing the emails new parents received at BabyCenter or helping millions of learners understand what to study next at Udemy, my focus has always been on people who are trying to make sense of something — and giving them tools that genuinely help.

Working on Rover has let me push that mission one step further: helping people create their own content from scratch, and share it in spaces that feel like real conversation again.

I’ve felt, like a lot of people have, how social platforms have drifted into the opposite of social — louder, angrier, more polarized. I’ve also felt the quiet mid-life truth that connection doesn’t maintain itself. It has to be built, rebuilt, and protected. And I’ve struggled, like many people, to keep an information system that keeps me informed without burning me out. Rover is my answer to all of that.

My hope is simple: by betting on information over opinion, quality over glut, clarity over noise, and genuine connection over performance, we create a product I’m not only proud to have helped build — but one I feel compelled and grateful to use every day. That’s the bar for me. Rover is for anyone who needs a better way to stay informed, stay connected, and stay human.

If want to check Rover out, or just think we might be a fun hang (Mark and John are for sure), send us a note! We love emails.