About a year ago, while on a trip to NYC, I had back to back to back meetings at Pastis. For those who know, this isn’t that far out of the ordinary. 

What was unusual about this particular morning were the two names that kept surfacing in each of the three meetings- Wegs and Benny. Apparently these two were making waves at Techstars NYC HQ, and I was instructed to keep an eye on them.

Then I heard what they working on and lost interest in just two words- Craigslist Killer.

When we finally did connect, Techstars demo day had passed and the team of Wegs and Benny made a concious decision not to pitch at the event. Their project, Friendslist, wasn’t seeing the uptake the’d hope to see and, tho raising money for it may have been an option, they weren’t feeling it.

As we settled into sloppy bbq sandwiches on the Highline, we talked about potential pivots for friendslist, but it soon became clear they had another project that had captured their imaginations.

At a Foursquare hack event, the two had cooked up a little service that emailed Foursquare users past checkins called 4squareand7yearsago. As it turns out, I was a huge fan of the service. It was an email I looked forward to reading every morning. The email also encouraged me to engage more deeply with the supported services knowing that the trail of tweets, checkins and photos I was leaving today would be resurfaced rather than fall into oblivion at the end of some virtual wall. 

As we talked on the Highline that day it became clearer and clearer to me, and to them, that there seemed to be more going on here than just an email. 

We were witnessing a shift in how people were documenting their lives. It was digital, it was distributed, it was chaotic, and, in the moment, it felt ephemeral. But, when recombined at a future date, it was magical and moving in unanticipated ways.

Our lives are progressively playing out online and one single metaphor, be it a timeline, a clock, a journal or an email really can’t really do it justice. The data that ecompasess our lives holds within it the a range of product possibilities from an evocative daily newsletter to eternal life. 

With our investment in TImeHop, we’re hoping to explore all of the possibilities this new form of personal time travel presents.