Facteroid

Facteroid is a fresh new approach to news. Facteroid’s mission was to bring transparency and accuracy to news reporting. Events were presented in short, factual updates with direct links to the primary source. Some entries were lists or data points extracted from primary sources.

Note: I stopped working on Facteroid in 2024 and it’s no longer updated. I’m mostly leaving it up for posterity.

Taking on Misinformation

You might be surprised to learn that the Internet has a misinformation problem. Jokes aside, you can hardly click around on the internet without seeing misleading or inaccurate information.

In 2017 I was feeling the entrepreneurial itck and decided to leave my job at the time to work on a startup to take on the misinformation. The first iteration was a product that marked up articles to highlight misleading or innaccurate information.

The idea was you installed a browser plugin or browsed through a proxy and saw articles marked up with tags highlighting problems with it. In addition, users could hightlight text and tag is to point out problems with it.

Y Combinator Application

I dived into the problem with enthusiasm and built a quick prototype and applied to Y Combinator.

My very crude and ugly implementation got me past the initial screening rounds to the final interview round—they paid for me to fly all the way to San Fransisco for a 15 minute interview with the partners.

Although I didn’t get in, the fact that I made it that far was an exciting bit of validation for the idea.