Signs that the startup culture has truly permeated the mainstream: Selena Gomez, familiar to you as Ms. Bieber and Disney star, is now a tech investor. The what, the where, the how and the why follow:
Selena Gomez joined the likes of CrossCut Ventures, Mike Jones, Kamran Pourzanjani, Brian Fitzgerald, among others in a $750k funding round for Postcard On the Run.
Postcard On the Run, to the uninitiated, is an iPhone app that allows anyone to take a picture and send it as a postcard for a mere $1. The company does all the hard work: printing and mailing, while you get to send a piece of paper nostalgia to a loved one. Impressive idea that caught on well enough to compel Apple to release a similar service, and court the attention of tween celebrities like Selena Gomez.
If Selena Gomez’ involvement wasn’t strange enough, here’s more: the company is releasing a new service, ‘Smell Mail’. For a mere extra 50¢, your postcards can smell of chocolate, flowers, popcorn, pine, or baby-powder. I’ve never understood the kind of people who would pay for something like this, but apparently, there is a big enough market for it.
Moving back to Selena Gomez.
It wasn’t too long ago that one wise men proclaimed: the geek shall inherit the earth.
And sure enough, the geeks complied.
Your mom is on Facebook. Protests are organized through Twitter. You find your dates through OkCupid. You obsess over iPhones, lust over iPads, and gush with excitement over WWDC keynotes. That the death of Steve Jobs prompted as many obituaries as Michael Jackson speaks volumes for just how deep technology has permeated the mainstream.
It was only a matter of time before the tech world caught the attention of Hollywood.
The leader of the pack is undoubtedly, Ashton Klutcher. I was a late follower on Twitter, numbering well over the 8th million. I was expecting the usual vapid celebrity narcissism but instead found cogent arguments, witty one-liners, and breaking news, all about tech startups. Hello, Ashton! Where’s the insider Hollywood gossip? Did you forget that you were a model-turned-actor and not a startup founder?
Ashton even looks the part these days. He would fit right in at any Silicon Valley hacker event: the same disheveled appearance, the haggard hirsuteness, the ‘was-up-all-night-coding-dude’ look that all geeks wear with pride.
And of course, a shower and a stylist visit later, Ashton would look like a movie-star again for a promo shoot.
Ashton is where the entertainment world collated with the tech world. He was the pioneer so to speak. His investment portfolio is strong (HipMunk, AirBnB, GrubWithUs, among others), and it’s easy to imagine that he introduced not a few celebrities to the only world that, perhaps, moves faster than Hollywood.
And sure enough, Hollywood has responded. With aplomb. Chamillionaire is a regular at TechCrunch events. LadyGaga is an investor in Backplane. Leonardo DiCaprio has active interest in Mobli.
And now, of course, Selena Gomez and Postcards On the Run.
These celebrities are not just investors; they are also users.
Each time you download an app with your iPhone, read a book on your Kindle, or play a game on your PC, you are employing incredibly advanced technology. You have access to more computing power in the palm of your hand today than the entire computer science department of MIT did in 1990. To the average user (as the average celebrity), technology is a part of everyday life now, as common as cassette tapes and boomboxes were to a kid in the 1980s.
We might not all be nerds, but we are all definitely becoming geeks. And that’s a good thing.
Selena Gomez’ involvement in the tech world should be welcomed. It’s great press for Postcards on the Run, of course, but it is also a harbinger of things to come. Of course, lets not forget that among her millions of followers on Twitter, at least a few curious minds will read about this career move and wonder, ‘what the hell is a startup?’. And that is a wonderfully delightful road to lead a curious mind through.
