Who may be on first and What may be on second but This. is on its first seed round. The media company, incubated inside of Atlantic Media, is a “curation platform for people passionate about journalism, art and entertainment.”
Users can share their favorite content by submitting just one link a day, thereby reducing the noise associated with similar systems.
Andrew Golis founded and spun off This. after working as The Atlantic’s Entrepreneur in Residence. The company raised $610,000 from angels and seed institutions including The New Republic Fund, Matter Ventures, Fusion CTO Hong Qu, former Twitter VP of Media Chloe Sladden, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Golis was the Director Of Digital Media at Frontline and also ran Yahoo! News and was the deputy publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.
“At Frontline and in my work at The Atlantic, I’d become obsessed with the way the social networks I love (and that were increasingly taking over the media business) weren’t showing me the media that was really worth my time. Instead, they were incentivizing publishers and active users to push more and more volume, making the experience of finding something great exhausting,” said Golis. “In describing my obsession I told a colleague over lunch in the fall of 2013 that I wished I got an email from (our friend and colleague) Ta-Nehisi Coates every night with the subject line ‘This.’ and a just a link. The thought stuck in my head.”
Thus This. thickened.
“I love the restraint built into This.,” said former Tumblr president and This. investor John Maloney. “Golis and his team are solving a huge problem. There is so much good media on the web each day, but it’s only getting harder to find amidst the glut of everything else.”
The site is currently in private beta and has about 4,500 users. It will launch this fall.