For Singapore Y Combinator entrant Padlet, 5 years was worth the wait

Disclosure: SGE co-founders Gwendolyn Regina Tan and Bernard Leong are investors in Padlet through Thymos Capital.

In the startup world, five years is a long time to be doing anything. Often, it wouldn’t take a year for a startup to either shut down, pivot, or in rare instances experience rapid growth.

Yet, half a decade was precisely how long it took for Padlet to get its time in the sun: Along with one Semantics3, it is one of the first Singapore startups  to make it to famed startup accelerator Y Combinator.

So what exactly is Padlet? Formerly Wallwisher, it is a website that allows users to drag-and-drop content into an online canvas. The collaborative real-time platform supports a wide variety of content, including text, photos, links, files and videos.

It’s a technology play that has a swath of use cases, ranging from a web bulletin board to a to-do-list and even a timeline for journalistic stories.

The startup was founded in 2008 by Nitesh Goel and Pranav Piyush, then final-year NUS students, and received an investment from Thymos Capital the same year.

But while the idea showed some promise initially, both founders decided to put it in maintenance mode  out of their own pockets as they sought careers in other tech companies.

So I naturally asked: Why did you guys put it in the backburner, and pick it up again only last year?

It boiled down to three things: Money, boredom, and technology.

Nitesh and Pranav were both passionate about what they’ve created, spending very little time on their university coursework and most of their waking hours on Padlet.

Like many of us, their university years was a period where people could devote their time to creative endeavors without a care about mortgages and other burdens.

“It isn’t easy to put content on the Internet, and people are still reaching out for their pen and paper,” said Nitesh, who has an interest in user interfaces.

“Software is still complicated. So we sought to remove barriers to creation. Our goals weren’t lofty — we simply wanted to simplify creation on the web.”