Secret

» see secret.ly as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

secret launched on january 30, 2014. david byttow had been the lead engineer on square wallet. chrys bader-wechseler had been a product manager at google. the two of them built an anonymous-sharing app where you connected your phone contacts and the system showed posts from anyone in your network who was also on secret. the sender's name was stripped from each post. on the surface it was a friend feed where everyone was a ghost.

the funding came fast. an initial pre-seed round closed for $1.4 million in december 2013. series a hit $8.6 million in march 2014. series b added $25 million in july 2014, valuing the company at around $100 million. total raised inside fifteen months: $34.6 million. the app climbed the US app store rankings in mid-2014 and got installed deep inside silicon valley itself, where it became the place to anonymously trash startups by name.

the trouble started almost immediately. anonymous posts about specific named people turned into harassment campaigns. journalist sarah lacy at pando reported being targeted personally and started writing a sustained critique of the format. in august 2014 a brazilian court issued an injunction ordering the app removed from local stores, citing the brazilian constitution's ban on anonymous speech. co-founder chrys bader-wechseler left in january 2015 after disagreements with byttow about where the product was going.

david byttow announced the shutdown on april 29, 2015. the medium post said the app had become something he no longer wanted to support, and that he would be returning the remaining venture money to investors. that part was unusual. most failed startups burn the cash through to the last week of operations. secret had over half its series b still in the bank when byttow chose to wind down. the app stopped accepting new posts within days. byttow later joined google to work on cryptography.

i never used secret. by 2014 i was a working engineer in turkey on a normal twitter account, with no interest in an anonymous network whose audience was the san francisco startup scene. the app barely had a user base outside the bay area. i learned about it from techcrunch coverage when it raised the series b, then from the same coverage when it folded. the brazilian court angle came across in international tech press as a curiosity rather than a story that touched anyone i knew.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

a friends-of-friends anonymous feed. you connected your phone contacts and the app showed posts from anyone in your network who was also on the service. the sender's identity was hidden. there was a separate explore tab that surfaced popular posts from outside your immediate network. the design was a black background with white text in a serif font. each post got a like-equivalent button and a comment thread. byttow described the goal as honest communication freed from social-graph performance pressure.

~ why anonymity broke ~

because the addressable surface was small enough that everyone could guess. inside silicon valley the network was a few thousand people, most of whom worked at the same fifty companies. an anonymous post saying "this ceo is sleeping with this employee" had a short list of plausible targets, and someone always thought they recognized the prose style. the layer of anonymity that was supposed to enable honest feedback ended up enabling targeted harassment with a thin coat of denial. byttow's medium post on shutdown acknowledged this directly.

~ the cyberbullying problem ~

sarah lacy at pando published a sustained series of pieces in 2014 documenting harassment campaigns running on secret against named tech-industry women. the founders responded with content moderation tooling and post-flagging, then with a "redacted" feature that blanked out specific names from posts. it did not stop. the brazilian injunction in august 2014 was the first government-level pushback on the format. byttow later said the moderation problem was the main reason he gave up on the product.

~ the returned funding ~

the april 29, 2015 medium post said secret would be returning the remaining money in its bank account to investors. press coverage estimated the return at over $20 million. it was almost unheard of for a venture-backed startup to do this. most companies in the same position would have pivoted to a new product or simply ridden the cash out. byttow chose to wind the company down cleanly instead. the gesture is still cited in venture-capital writing about founder ethics, and it was one of the few endings of a 2010s startup that did not end with a fire sale.

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