San Francisco startup IFTTT recently got $30 million in funding from Norwest Venture and Andreessen Horowitz. At a recent open house co-hosted by NewCo., IFTTT co-founder Alexander Tibbets showed off the new office that IFTTT will be moving into.
IFTTT’s current office is in a three-level building on market street. You enter a tiny door, then go up a narrow, steep staircase. You can smell the startup atmosphere when you enter the office (pirate flag, coconut tree on the wall). The office is open and bright, with few walls to separate people.
Alexander Tibbets said the company will soon be occupying the entire building, and he welcomed guests to the second level, which was just emptied by its previous tenant.
IFTTT stands for “If This Then That.” It connects different applications with each other with the IF logic, but in an easier way than programming it by yourself. According to its website, it’s pronounced like “Gift” without the G.
For example, you can create a “recipe” that allows you to post the message on Facebook whenever you post a tweet. So the “recipe” will be “IF post a tweet on Twitter, then post it on Facebook, too.”
Facebook and Twitter are channels components. “Post a tweet” is the Trigger, and “post the same message on Facebook” is the Action. Combining the channels, trigger, and action will make a recipe.
Norwest partner Josh Goldman praised the company as remarkable because it allows one to master his or her own Internet of things, and not be confused by the many information silos of applications.
Goldman listed some of his favorite recipes, such as:
“Notify my wife via SMS when I’m driving home and I’m 15 minutes from arriving,” or “Automatically set my phone to vibrate when I begin any meeting that I’ve marked as ”#silent“ on my Google calendar, and turn the ringer back on when I leave that meeting.”
CEO Linden Tibbets told guests at the open house that IFTTT also connects the physical world with the Internet of things. For example, if a dog goes a certain distance from the house, it will send a message to its owner.
Linden Tibbets told the New York Times that they see “a need for an operating system that’s detached from any specific device” in the era of Internet of things. And this is what IFTTT is for. Already, 15 million “recipes” are running every day to connect applications.
Alexander Tibbets and his brother Linden founded the company in 2010 in their apartment in Hayes Valley.
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