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.

If want to check Rover out, or just think we might be a fun hang, send us a note! We love emails.