Business
Why this Silicon Valley, Erik Moore, VC Avoids Gaming, Sports & Music
One of the buzz words out there is disruptive technologies. Can you give me an example of a disruptive company in your portfolio?
Moore: Pigeonly. In a nutshell, not only did the founder not go to Stanford or Harvard or Wharton, but he spent four years in federal prison. He came out with an idea of how to disrupt what is going on in the prison system from a communications standpoint by getting the incarcerated people information from the outside. He is helping inmates communicate with people on the outside in a much more efficient and much cheaper way than anybody else has in the past. They built, for a lack of a better word, an algorithm to find everybody in prison. The one right that prisons have that is not a prison phone is the right to receive first class mail. One thing they crave is information and contact from the outside world. Prisoners can’t get email with pictures attached, they need a hard copy.
What Pigeonly has done is make it so you can download a picture from your phone to their service center which will turn around and send a hard copy to your friend or loved one in prison. It makes it a much easier process to email or any time you think of them you can just download a picture and it gets automatically sent. Just as easily as you can text a picture to a friend, with the same amount of steps send it to a loved one in prison. Nobody has done that to date. It also keeps track of inmates when they’re moved from one facility to another.
Copyright Black Enterprise Magazine 2014
