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Many venture capital investors talk about understanding entrepreneurs. One young VC is taking it a step further — by becoming one.
Ziad Sultan, an associate at Longworth Venture Partners, is launching a startup on his night and weekend time. Called Marginize, it allows a real-time conversation on top of an existing webpage, by overlaying a marginal column that tracks conversations about that page on Twitter and other existing social-media networks, reproduces them and invites users to continue the conversation right next to the webpage they are discussing.
Sultan, a former management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, joined Longworth exactly a year ago, in January 2009, as an analyst. Soon after, he conceived the idea for Marginize, and has invested his own money — in an amount which he declined to disclose — in paying developers to code the application launched last month.
“Because people are sharing so many links, they’re actually talking about the web,” he said. “If you could group the conversation and display it next to the content to which it refers, you would be able to create a threaded conversation that would be able to be followed by anybody.” He calls this conversation the “metaweb.” When on a webpage a user would click a Marginize bookmark to open a second window displaying comments.
Sultan, who is Lebanese by birth, said the metaweb idea flowed in part from his observation of how web technology has brought transparency to events like protests over the Iran elections. He said without the ability to share links online, these events could become like the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon — shrouded in uncertainty over what actually happened.
Although individuals are free to comment on other platforms, the majority of web pages don’t allow users to have conversations on them, about them, Sultan said. “The only thing that’s free is the publisher’s opinion. Nobody can come and say that’s not true.”
With a service like Marginize, Sultan hopes that will begin to change. “If something happens, whether it’s a political context or another context, hundreds of users can get together and start posting petitions, start correcting articles and collaborating around the content independently. It can’t be curated by the owner,” he said.
That hasn’t happened yet, but technology cognoscenti have begun to take notice and use the service.
Laura Fitton, social media entrepreneur and founder of Twitter application store startup Oneforty, said she used Marginize in December to track @wellwishes, her online fundraising campaign for Charity: Water, a New York-based nonprofit that funds drinking water projects in developing countries. “Very handy and simple,” she wrote of the service. “Once I realized what it can do, I used it to check different pages on Oneforty, @wellwishes, everything.”
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