#11 — Joseph Cohen, founder & CEO of Universe on empowering everyone to build the internet

Li Jin and Nathan Baschez interview Joseph Cohen. Joseph is the founder and CEO of Universe -- a new kind of website creation tool. It’s a mobile-only, no-code website builder that allows anyone to create a website through a grid-like drag-and-drop interface and it powers over 500,000 websites around the globe. Universe was a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 class and has raised $17.3M from investors like BoxGroup, General Catalyst and GV. This is Joe’s second startup. He started his first company Lore (which was an online classroom platform) while he was in college at Penn and later sold it to Noodle. He’s a self-taught designer and proponent of the open web. In this interview, we are going to talk to Joseph about: How the function of personal websites has changed in the age of social mediaIf Universe is an example of disruption or if they are creating an entirely new marketHow Universe started as an extended Instagram bioThe decision to add commerce functionalityThe most surprising use case for UniverseAnd more!Related links:everything.substack.commeansofcreation.substack.comjoe.onuniverse.com/Show theme music: Compassion by Stefan Kartenberg