Kippt, the bookmarking service started by Finnish entrepreneurs Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo, has been accepted into perhaps the world’s most famous startup accelerator, Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator. Along with the announcement, Kippt has announced new social features that help groups share lists of bookmarks publicly and privately. We covered the company previously just a couple of weeks ago here on ArcticStartup.
Kippt allows users to bookmark websites through a bookmarklet or web extension. When doing so, you throw the bookmark into a folder, allowing you to keep your bookmarks organized. The new sharing features build off of thus feature, allowing users to share their folders publicly or privately.
“We think the collaborative lists will help people to work together with their projects, on certain topics or with their teams. I have several long running projects with other people, and we all collect the same press stories and other information related to that. Being part of the same list also gives you a new way of finding information through your small group of friends or coworkers, without spamming everyone with emails,” says Saarinen.
Rather than a more consumer-focused bookmarking service, Kippt sees their core audience as people that build things and work with information.
The team says the process of getting accepted to Y Combinator was pretty quick. They started applying sometime back in March, and when they got the word that they were accepted, they needed to quickly wrap up things in Finland and join the program in California within a couple weeks.
“YC pretty much advices to work on your product, making things people want. Everything else before Demo Day is secondary or waste. This is pretty much what we do. People may think it’s like a bootcamp, but it’s not. You run your own company and spend most of your time building your product, YC just helps you with that.”
Kippt, just as all the Y Combinator startups, are given the option to take a $150k convertible note from Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and now General Catalyst. While Kippt hasn’t confirmed this to us the company will most likely take this opportunity to fund future growth and recruitments.
In addition to the convertible note, all companies are given a certain amount of funding based on the amount of co-founders they have. The usual deal is that the accelerated companies give away around 7-8% of equity for Y Combinator.
