Allow us to reintroduce ourselves…
After a summer deep in the backend, we’re excited this fall to start shipping features again, building our community, and helping you control what you share online. Our technical work this summer, which we’ll tell you more about soon, has furthered our mission to build messaging technology you can trust to work for you and your relationships.
As you know, trust isn’t just a property of technology. It’s about people, and it’s built over time. So we thought we’d introduce ourselves to you more personally, so that you can get to know us, where we’re coming from, and why we’re building Germ. If you’re here, you probably care about trust too.
Germ is a California-based startup composed of two cofounders, CEO and cofounder Tessa Brown and CTO and cofounder Mark Xue. We’ve also been supported by wonderful interns and collaborators, some fantastic attorneys, and an outstanding Advisory Board. We’re a public benefit corporation, which means that we can take growth capital—we’ve raised a bit so far—but we are also beholden to our mission: to promote healthy communication. And we’re committed to exploring free and subscription tiers of our product so that we’re never dependent on ad revenue that pushes us to surveil and addict our users.
Here’s a bit about us individually:
I’m Tessa, Germ’s CEO and cofounder. I use she/her pronouns and identify as a queer woman, a progressive Jew, and a San Franciscan by residence, Chicagoan for life. I came up in the ‘90s and ‘00s as a social media superuser; as I developed my career as a writer and writing educator, self-publishing tools were central to my teaching. My goal was always to empower my students to sieze their voices—especially students from historically marginalized groups—and so I encouraged them to use social media, blogs, zines and more to speak the world they were waiting for into existence. But the more I studied social media, and used these tools myself as a writer and community organizer, the more I saw them as inherently disempowering, blasting past our boundaries to manipulate us. My friends and students felt trapped—we needed new tools. And core to my conviction was the (weirdly American?) paradox that to be more free to connect, we needed more privacy by default: because nothing is more disempowering than a world without personal space, without boundaries, without control. So after four years as a lecturer at Stanford, I followed my creative process somewhere I never saw coming: into entrepreneurship.
I’m Mark, Germ’s CTO and cofounder. I am an immigrant and a veteran, and I use he/him pronouns. I’ve grown up on the internet, from mailing lists and IRC, to AIM, ICQ, Adium, and now into our current social networking and mobile app paradigm. I’ve been fortunate to live through the global deployment of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging on top of phone numbers as identity. I believe the next big frontier for E2EE communications will be to leave behind the scaffolding of phone numbers and accommodate people’s myriad, evolving identities. I’ve partnered with Tessa to build this digital-native identity layer, starting with empowering the digital-native young people who have grown up on their iteration of the internet.
We’re also supported by these amazing advisors:
Richard Barnes, Cisco distinguished engineer, co-author of internet standards HPKE and
MLS (Strategic Advisor)
Nicholas Sullivan, co-author of internet standards TLS and MLS, former founder and
head of Cloudflare Research (Strategic Advisor)
Ilyse Hogue, progressive strategist and former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America
(Strategic Advisor)
Riana Pfefferkorn, JD, end-to-end encryption and AI policy researcher at the Stanford Internet
Observatory
Tom Siegel, CEO of Trust Lab, formerly Google’s first Vice President of Trust and Safety
Jon Fernandez, COO of Yale Investments Office, formerly in operations at VMWare and
Bridgewater
Micah Schaffer, Trust and Safety expert, early Trust and Safety leader at Snap and
YouTube
Privacy isn’t just for the private. We all make decisions every day about what we want to share—with our friends and loved ones, with people we kind of know on the internet, with businesses and other services we interact with. Our goal at Germ is to build you human-first private messaging software that makes it easier and less stressful to connect with who you care about, and let you filter out the rest. Thanks for being here and helping us build a future we can all trust. We’re always glad to hear from you via email or in our Discord.
