Introducing Little Bird, the Best Way to Find the Key People Online

I’m excited to announce this morning the unveiling of the startup I co-founded, left journalism to do and have spent the last year working with my team to build. It’s called Little Bird.

Little Bird automates the discovery of community-trusted topic influencers and experts on any topic. You can find the best sources of information online in minutes using Little Bird. Once you find them, we’ve got a whole bunch of very cool tools you can use to leverage their collective knowledge.

Yesterday my co-founders Mikalina Kirkpatrick, Tyler Gillies and I closed a $1 million round of funding, with the participation of an All Star team of social media innovators, engineers and practitioners. The round was led by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who been a great lead investor to work with through our private beta period. Our other investors are Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage, Wieden + Kennedy, Hubspot and OnStartups.com founder Dharmesh Shah, leading marketing consultant Jay Baer, Henry Copeland, Jonathan Siegel, Matt Haughey and Blaine Cook. If you’re familiar with the last 10 years of social media history, you’ll probably recognize these as some incredibly experienced and innovative people.

Introducing Little BIrd from Little Bird on Vimeo.

If you spend time online doing research to figure out who the best people to connect with are on Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Google+ or elsewhere – you’re going to love Little Bird. If you believe, as we do, that connecting with the right sources of information and engaging with them using the right tools can move mountains for your career, business and worldview – then I really hope you’ll dig in to what we’re building.

Sometimes I describe it as a robot librarian, swooping down out of the sky with arms full of power tools to augment human perception and memory.

I’ll write more later, but I’ve got to focus on getting ready to pitch the company at the demo day for the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). PIE has been a great experience and there are five other companies pitching today. You can check out the live streaming video at 2:00 PM PST today at http://livestream.com/piepdx

You can read more at the following coverage: AdWeek, Techcrunch, The Next Web, All Things D, Venturebeat, Betakit, Digital Trends and GigaOm and Wired! That’s most of the coverage, but my favorite so far has been Lora Kolodny’s write-up on the WSJ. (Yay!)

  • Congrats Marshall – cant wait to try it out!

  • Congratulations on the launch and the funding Marshall!

  • Congratulations on the great idea and getting the funding to make it happen! Can’t wait to try it out.

  • Lots of great investors there – congrats, Marshall!

  • thanks everybody!

  • jon knight

    Looks like something lots of folks could use… I’ll try it out!
    Thanks Marshall and congrats to you and your team!

  • Congratulations! This looks really interesting. I hope you’re not relying on PBS funding.

  • Oren Michels

    Congrats to you, Mikalina and the whole flock of little birders!

  • Kelly Camp

    looks interesting marshall can’t wait to take a look

  • Cool!

  • There is nothing better than seeing good people do great things. Congratulations Marshall. I can’t wait to see the beta. I already know it will be a huge success.

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