Medium Partners with Greylock—and Friends
A Medium Round
Almost two years ago, we started an exploratory project at The Obvious Corporation to figure out what a publishing platform built from scratch for today’s world would look like. A platform that was open to everyone, as simple as possible, encouraged collaboration, and helped the best ideas and stories rise to the top.
Today, Medium is its own company, building out that vision in a dedicated and focused way. We’re making great progress — 2013 was a huge year for Medium in terms of growth and fleshing out the product. But we’re still just getting started. That’s why we’re happy today to announce some new partners — via our first outside funding round, led by David Sze and Josh Elman of the venerable Greylock Partners.
Greylock is joined in Medium by a handful of angel investors and friends of Medium, all of whom we’re very excited to have on board.
Why now? Why these guys?
At the outset, Obvious — the operating portion of which turned into Medium — was funded by Biz Stone, Jason Goldman, and me. Since then, I’ve continued to fund Medium primarily myself. As an investor, I’d be happy to continue to do so. As CEO, my aim is to maximize Medium’s chances for success. Expanding our network and having partners to lean on is a useful way to do that.
I’ve known Josh Elman since working together at Twitter when I was CEO. I’ve known David Sze since pitching him Twitter in 2009 (sorry that didn’t work out, David). They were the first people I thought to call when looking to do this round, and I’m delighted to be working with them both, along with their many impressive partners.
Medium is seeing terrific momentum right now as the go-to place to share your stories and ideas if you want the simplest writing experience, beautiful output, and maximum reach. We have only scratched the surface of what we are aiming to do. But now is the time to — intelligently, organically — expand. This round is one step along the way.
