1/ Palley: “any complaint that is decently written by a decent lawyer is going to make the reader think: oh no, that’s bad”
With 2 years and 50k+ documents of source material, anyone could paint a disparaging picture by piecing together sentence segments and truncating context.
With 2 years and 50k+ documents of source material, anyone could paint a disparaging picture by piecing together sentence segments and truncating context.
2/ While the SEC’s complaint paints a picture of a “failing” business, in reality, Kik, like every other messenger (FBM, WA, Telegram, Snapchat) was indeed not profitable yet continued to find a way to innovate when most others have died or been acquired and repurposed.
3/ Today Kik remains one of the most engaging apps, with more time spent per user than Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. statista.com/statistics/579…
4/ “Pivot” can be a loaded word in consumer tech, often misappropriated as flippant change in course, when in reality, a good “pivot” is leaning into emergent opportunities from insights gleaned from being in-market.
5/ At Kik, we have refused to stay stagnant and have consistently been first to market with products that now permeate consumer tech.
6/ First chat app to go viral (0-1MM users in 15 days; 1MM-2MM in 7 days) venturebeat.com/2010/11/05/kik…
7/ First chat app to become a platform thenextweb.com/mobile/2013/10…
8/ First chat app in the western world to launch a bot platform (soon followed by FB, telegram, google) forbes.com/sites/parmyols…
9/ Over the last decade, Kik has been first on a lot of things and has inspired some of the biggest innovations in tech. WeChat, which now powers >$10 trillion of commerce annually, was inspired by Kik in 2010 (years later Tencent invested $50MM in Kik at a $1 billion valuation) 
10/ There was a quote in the SEC’s complaint that Kin was a “Hail Mary”, and the insinuation made was that this was a flippant, last-ditch effort to catch a rising trend in crypto. When in reality it was 6 years in the making (8 if you count from today).
11/ When I started at Kik over 5 years ago Kin was already in development, it just wasn’t called Kin yet. The team had been working on a digital economy since 2011 when Ted first got into Bitcoin. First building a platform, and next launching a currency in 2014 called Kik Points.
12/ I worked on Kik Points from the day it launched. It was an experiment to see if we could launch an economy in the digital world, but the vision was always bigger. Kik points was a proof-of-concept for what ultimately became Kin. I wrote about that here link.medium.com/aWewTKL3lX
13/ A Hail Mary is a designed play. It’s a big play designed to win the game. That’s what Kin was. We saw the increasing monopolization of big tech and more developers struggling to find a sustainable business model, so we pulled out our big play we had been working on for 6+ yrs
14/ So in 2017 we launched Kin. Not just for Kik, for every other developer that was struggling to find a sustainable business model.
15/ And now, like every other cycle of innovation at Kik, the biggest players in the space are following suit with a foray into crypto. As @ted_livingston said: we wouldn’t call it a Hail Mary as much as “one of the best plays in the history of business”
16/ And it’s working. 2MM people have earned Kin and over 450k people have spent Kin across 44 different independent apps in the last month (5.5MM+ and 1MM+ all time). Kin is money for the digital world. public.tableau.com/profile/kinfou…
17/ So just like Kin was launched not just for Kik, but for every other developer that needed a sustainable path forward, we will take this fight on for everyone. Because in order for this industry to move forward someone needs to go first, and we are no strangers to being first.
