When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When this startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app was centered around subscription software for managing contacts, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner. Today, after Sunshine launched two equally mundane features – organizing events and sharing photos – the Internet commentators were decisive mysterious.
I was also confused last week when Mayer walked me through Sunshine’s new offerings. While there are elements of AI in everything Sunshine offers, it’s hard to see how Sunshine’s new Photos app improves photo sharing as it exists today, and the same could be said for its new Events app, which looks very similar to something that was designed 20 years ago and, like other apps, encourages users to share photos linked to events organized on the platform. (Photos are hosted on Shine’s servers and are “available indefinitely,” Mayer said, adding that users can share albums and send invitations easily via text, iMessage, email and other communication and sharing platforms.)
It’s tempting to dismiss the 15-man outfit as out of touch. But Mayer might have something going for Sunshine, and that’s nostalgia. While most Silicon Valley startups are focused on the newest new thing, America is grow up, as the US Census Bureau announced last year. Mayer says Sunshine has issues for people of “all ages,” but targeting a slightly older, intimate-leaning demographic would be a smart move. Older Americans now account for a record share of spending. They have time to socialize and take pictures. Sunshine’s interface is still filled with the same purple hue long associated with Yahoo, which it famously led for five years starting in 2012.
Asked if the choice of design was intentional, Mayer looked momentarily surprised, calling it “purely coincidental.”
Mayer sees the need for something simpler, certainly. “There are a lot of companies that are focused on that bleeding edge and the cutting edge of artificial intelligence,” he said. “But we think there are a lot of things that can be done with AI that just help with everyday problems, things that we all experience every day that are often overlooked.”
He said, for example, that before events and photo sharing began, Sunshine launched a birthday app as “a kind of neighborhood area for addresses and contacts.”
He declined to discuss customer numbers, but the move is reminiscent of an app run by entrepreneurs Michael and Xochi Birch called BirthdayAlarm.com. The birthday reminder and e-card site isn’t exactly by design, but with more than 50 million registered members at one point, it’s made the couple — who earlier sold a social media company to AOL for $850 million in cash — many millions more.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mayer is friends with Birch and says she’s “definitely influenced by Michael. He talked about the fact that [BirthdayAlarm] it was a very simple app and it got a lot of traction early on.”
Sunshine doesn’t seem to have seen that kind of traction with its contact management offering. But perhaps free (for now) photo sharing and event scheduling will be a game-changer for Sunshine, which highlighted a $20 million round in 2020 and is largely self-funded, per Mayer.
In the meantime, Mayer has other tricks up her sleeve, including, eventually, video sharing. “I’ve got a list of all the different things that we thought would be in the first version and hopefully come out soon after,” he said last week. “We always knew we were going to be a holding company. The core position has always been to take the mundane and make it magical.”
The team “thought of calling it Global AI,” he continued. “Sometimes I think that might have been a better name.”
Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Yahoo.
