A year ago, when Twitter co-founder Biz Stone relaunched Jelly, an app for people looking to get human-generated answers to their everyday questions, he told his co-founder Ben Finkel that it was go time.
Pinterest has acquired Jelly, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s Q&A startup
Stone and co-founder Ben Finkel are taking new roles at Pinterest.
Andrew Burton / Getty
“We just need to swing for the fences on this one,” Stone told him. “Let’s spend some money. Let’s go crazy on this, because if this doesn’t work, then we’re screwed.”
Well, it worked — at least well enough to get Stone and Finkel new jobs at Pinterest, which just bought their company.
Pinterest announced Wednesday that it has acquired Jelly for an undisclosed sum. (Bloomberg reports Pinterest is buying Jelly with stock.) Stone will work part-time at Pinterest as an adviser to co-founder and Chief Product Officer Evan Sharp; Finkel is joining Pinterest full-time.
A Pinterest spokesperson says it’s currently “discussing next steps” with the rest of Jelly’s employees. (The team is fewer than 10 people.)
It sounds like an “acqhire,” though, because Stone says he doesn’t know what is going to happen to Jelly’s app. Pinterest is a search company, and Jelly was working on search technology, and he claims it was simply a great fit.
“The more we talked, the more we realized we had the same interest in reimagining search,” Stone wrote in a blog post. “We were finishing each other’s sentences.”
Also worth noting: Stone was a Pinterest angel investor. “I put money into Pinterest years ago,” he wrote.
A number of folks connected to Twitter have also backed Jelly, including Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams, and early Twitter investor and board member Bijan Sabet, according to Crunchbase. It’s unknown how much Jelly raised.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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