Otis Chandler
Founder of Smashing and Goodreads
San Francisco, California
Invests in
Sectors:
Locations:
Min Investment:
$5,000.00Max Investment:
$100,000.00Target Investment:
$25,000.00
Skills
Education
- SU
Lists including Otis
Work Experience
2022
Cofounder & CEO
2022
Smashing is a new app that transforms curious users into smarter readers. It’s now possible, thanks to AI, to scour the internet daily—across all articles, blogs, newsletters, and podcasts—and match the best, most relevant content to an individual user’s interests. Smashing conquers content overload by providing finely tuned recommendation feeds filled with truly worthwhile reads so that users can easily stay on top of, and share, what matters most to them. And Smashing AI Answers reimagines the traditional article reading experience by letting people instantly understand both sides of a story, or asking other AI prompts like "tear it down" or "make it funny".
2006 - 2019
Founder & CEO
2006 - 2019
Goodreads is the world's largest site for book readers and recommendations, with over 160 million members. My wife and I founded it in 2007. We raised an Angel round in 2007, a series A round of financing in 2009 from True Ventures, and were acquired by Amazon in 2013, joining the Kindle organization. Goodreads is a team of over 100 people and hiring, and working hard on inventing the future of reading.
2004 - 2006
Product Manager
2004 - 2006
Ran Tickle's dating site. Worked with CEO to spin out Tickle Matchmaking into it's own brand, with a new unique position: www.lovehappens.com. Built LoveHappens into a Comscore top 10 dating site in 2005-2006. Was responsible for all aspects of the business, and led a team of 8-10 people, including marketing, design, engineering, and customer service.
2000 - 2004
Team Development Leader
2002 - 2004
Lead a team of 2-3 engineers on various engineering projects for Tickle.com. Built and architected various pieces of Tickle Matchmaking and Tickle Connect (at one point the largest social network behind MySpace).
Software Engineer
2000 - 2002
Software Engineer for Tickle.com
1999 - 1999
Web Developer
1999 - 1999
Built a database and associated UI to access various Mechanical Engineering formulas and engineering properties.