Welcome Cocoon

Star product and design talent joins Substack

I’m thrilled to announce that the world class team from subscription-based private sharing app Cocoon has joined Substack.

When something is built with care, using it lets you learn about the people who made it. The first time I used the Cocoon app, I could tell it was built with a thoughtful ambition. A desire to make something new, different, and better, born of respect for the people who use it, and backed up with real craft. That rare alchemy is what we value at Substack, and Cocoon was a product we would be proud to have built.

While the Cocoon app will remain independent and will not become part of Substack, the brilliant design and engineering talent that built Cocoon will be joining our team to contribute their skills, creativity, and vision to strengthening Substack’s network of writers and readers.

Cocoon’s cofounders, Alex Cornell and Sachin Monga, are formidable product and design leaders. Before Cocoon, Alex was the lead designer for Facebook Video and cofounder of Moonbase and UberConference. Sachin was also previously at Facebook, where he led the advertiser growth team before starting a team aimed at creating more meaningful social interactions. Influenced by these experiences, both of them are deeply knowledgeable and thoughtful about ways we need to improve our time spent online, which led them to start Cocoon. 

Along with their accomplished engineers, Alex and Sachin have successfully built not only an award-winning app but a happy and healthy community, whose behavior is never manipulated to serve corporate advertisers. Cocoon, like Substack, was designed to put its users in control and foster meaningful long-term relationships between people – in our case, readers and writers – rather than provoke short bursts of emotion to sell ads.

Welcome to Substack, Alex, Sachin, and the Cocoon team. I can’t wait for what we’ll build together.

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