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Squad, the 'anti-bro startup,' is creating a safe space for teenage girls online – TechCrunch
Squad, an app that allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real time, has tapped into a demographic clamoring for a safe space to gather online. Without any marketing, the startup has collected 450,000 registered users in eight months, 70% of which are teenage girls. So far this year, users have clocked in 1 million hours inside Squad calls.
“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford tells TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudi Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”
“We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out,” – Squad co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford.
Crawford describes Squad, which she’s built alongside her co-founder and chief technology officer Ethan Sutin, as the “anti-bro startup.” Not only because it’s led by a woman and boasts a cap table that’s 30% women and 30% people of color, but because she’s completely rewriting the consumer social startup playbook.
“We are trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit,” Crawford said, referring to Snap, WhatsApp, Twitch and others. Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, has become a social gathering place for Gen Z, she explains, but like many other communities on the internet, it’s failed its female users.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:33PM
My point was that isolating from the rest of the world while waving the empowerment flag is laughable. This "social" service encourage women to stay in their (literal) comfort zones and never challenge themselves in the real world. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own she was talking in the pragmatic context of what it took for her personally to write: A zero distractions working space and financial security. How is a social networking service supposed to achieve that when it only networks young girls with each other and keep them taking selfies with their brand new shoes 24/7?
The subject been studied to exhaustion directly in the context of all-girls boarding school. Gender segregation doesn't empower women to better prepare them "without distractions". It leaves them vulnerable and delusional while even hurting the grade averages.
Seriously, where's the 2nd and 3rd gen feminists when you need them?
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