TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6! One month to go! It will be the place to come talk about new technology, your startup, other startups, everyone’s startups! Grab tickets here. Today we’re delighted to say Alex (June) Zhu, cofounder of Musical.ly is also joining.
As the Co-founder & Co-CEO of musical.ly, based out of San Francisco, he has been behind the mobile social network’s success around the world, especially amongst teens.
Millions of “musers” come to musical.ly everyday to express themselves, get entertained, and socialize with others. It’s defined many new social interactions that never existed before, like duets, best fan forever, video Q&A, etc.
It’s also run successful campaigns for artists like Jason Derulo and Rihana, and companies like Disney and Fox.
Prior to founding musical.ly, Zhu was Principal Creative Director at Microsoft driving “mobile disruption” initiatives in the consumer space. He also co-led the initial design of SAP’s flagship product at while at SAP.
Zhu had been interested in MOOCs and come up with the idea of short-form education videos. Zhu and his cofounder and co-CEO Louis Yang raised $250,000 from VCs and spent six months building an app called Cicada, where experts could create short three-to-five minute videos explaining a subject. But it never too off as the videos took too long to create and educators could not condense their expertise into three minutes. With only a small amount of money left they come up with a new idea: Musical.ly. The rest, as they say, is history. But we will be learning much about its future plans at Disrupt.
The two-day Disrupt conference runs December 5 to 6 in the Olympic Village’s Copper Box Arena and features Startup Alley and Startup Battlefield where one startup will take home £30,000. You can buy early-bird tickets for Disrupt London here.
You want to display your company? Then go for a booth in the Startup Alley. For startups there is also the brand new CrunchMatch program where we match startups to investors. Check it all out here.
Extra early bird tickets are now available to purchase for the discounted price of just £950 a piece. You can get your tickets at this price until 4 November.
For all you students out there, the deal is about to get even sweeter. We have a limited selection of student tickets to Disrupt London 2016 for just £100 plus VAT, provided you have both a valid university ID and current transcripts.
To reserve your £100 student tickets to Disrupt, simply send a copy of your transcripts showing your current enrolment status, as well as a copy of your university identification card to students@beta.techcrunch.com. Once you’re approved, we’ll send you instructions for how to complete your registration.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team at sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com.