The fired employee of Twitter makes the competing app Spill: It is now funded

January 31, 2023 By Raulf Hernes

(Image Credit Google)

According to Alphonzo Phonz Terrell, "I'm at a loss for words." It's strange." After losing his position to Elon Musk, the former global head of Social & Editorial at Twitter had a driving need to keep going. Fortunately for Terrell, his new social media app, Spill, has already received a $2.75 million pre-seed round, the company announced today. The spill has received 60,000 handle reservations since announcing the project in mid-December. The spill has fewer than 10 employees and three strategic advisors, including Dantley Davis, the former Twitter design chief, #OscarsSoWhite creator, and DEI advocate April Reign, and DeRay Mckesson, a civil rights activist. Terrell has more than a decade of directorial experience in marketing and social content and has run campaigns for companies such as HBO and Showtime before starting Twitter. But he is the only tech pioneer who can get to the heart of what social media users want, especially with an all-star team of advisers and colleagues in his corner. Spill will feature a live news feed, where users can post “spills,” a reference to the phrase “spill the tea.” The spill is also introducing a new feature called "tea parties," in which users can host both online and in-person events and earn in-app incentives for things like promoting posts; these bonuses will also be available for purchase.

Terrell has observed how Black cultural contributions are snubbed or forgotten, while white creators are credited for creating dances or memes that they had nothing to do with. Spill plans to use blockchain technology to credit and compensate creators who start trends and broad-based conversations, but Terrell insists that Spill is not a crypto project and will not accept payments in crypto. It’s not much more than another technical tool that will be hidden under the hood. Black people have established their own communities on traditional social media platforms, including Black Twitter. Spill wants to be a home for Black users from the start because the people who are developing the app are members of that community. Terrell has been consulting with Black creators about what they want on Spill, while DeVaris Brown is building an AI moderation model that reflects Black dialects. Historically, tweets written in AAVE (African American vernacular English) were shown to be 2.2 times more likely to be marked as inappropriate. This is because most artificial intelligence (AI) systems don't understand the cultural context in which certain speech is being spoken, especially if the algorithms themselves aren't understood by humans. "We will be more conscious and precise about things that are deemed offensive because, again, this is our lived or learned experience," Brown uttered in an interview. The app will begin expanding its team with its pre-seed investment of $2.75 million; it will first hire for four roles in engineering and community management. MaC Venture Capital and Kapor Center will lead the deal, with Sunset Ventures participating. As TechCrunch reports, Black founders remain disproportionately under-represented in venture capital, raising just 1% of funds in 2022. Terrell says they knew they were up against quite a lot of odds, but when Terrell pitched Spill to the Kapor Center, a fund that focuses on closing access gaps for diverse founders, the investors agreed to give their support within 10 minutes of their pitch. The spill is expected to launch in alpha in the first quarter of this year, and the Kapor Center's CEO, Allison Scott, expressed her delight in an e-mail statement.

By Raulf Hernes

If you ask me raulf means ALL ABOUT TECH!!

The fired employee of Twitter makes the competing app Spill: It is now funded

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