As we continue to build Branch, the product and company, I will use this space to share many of the observations and learnings that I pick up along the way.

Inspired by Fred Wilson's A VC and Dave Winer's "Narrate Your Work," it will be a entrepreneurial diary, of sorts. Very unpolished and personal. But I feel fortunate to have this opportunity and hope that, by sharing my mistakes and learnings, I can pay it forward in some small way.

Yesterday, I visited BuzzFeed to catch up with Jonah Peretti, one of Branch's closest advisors. When I asked him to explain the difference between a Media and a Platform company, he said (paraphrased):

"If a lot of people see the same homepage, it is a Media company. If a lot of people see different homepages, it is a Platform company."

He went on to explain that, in this sense, Digg is really a traditional Media company – not a Platform – because everyone who visits Digg.com has the exact same experience. Yes, Digg's editorial duties are democratized (the community is in control), but their content is not personalized.

My hunch is that Branch will end up somewhere in-between these two models.

According to Ev, the most important feature of any publishing platform is audience. Nifty tools and novel UIs are great, but without audience you will eventually lose to a networked competitor.

Ev didn't realize this while he was building Blogger, and Tumblr is the household name today. He also credits the "Follow" model for Twitter's success - not its 140 character constraint.

Similarly, do you keep going back to Instagram for its Filters, or do the Likes and Comments have you hooked?

If Branch is going to be successful, we'll have to provide a compelling audience as well. Ours will be based around intimacy and trust, but my hunch is that that will be just as compelling.

"Let's make the Internet more like the real world and the real world more like the Internet."

Amen.

(h/t: Steven Lehrburger)

One year ago today, Hursh Agrawal and I took first place at a Lean Startup workshop, having only met two days prior to the event. At the end of the awards ceremony we realized that we were on the same flight to New Delhi, India, two weeks later. Not only that, we were going to be in the same city (Jaipur), by complete chance! I ended up staying with his family during the trip – met the grandparents and the cows! – and one month later we officially took a leave of absence from college to start Branch.

One year later, this is our team: imgur.com

I could not be more proud of all that we have accomplished, and all that is yet to come.

When Ev and I were on the same flight to Los Angeles a few days ago he shared an awesome insight:

"All major Internet things are marketplaces."

Think about it, it's true!

Stuff like this makes it all worth it...

Here are my thoughts on the future of social/publishing platforms...

Yesterday, the New York Times used Branch for the first time. A big win for the team!