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Start-Up: A Chat with Entefy's Brienne Ghafourifar

Intro | Digital Feudalism | Virtual Reality | Start-Up | The Cameraphone | Tech Tunes

UNIVERSAL REMOTE: Brienne Ghafourifar and her brother Alston are building a platform that promises to bring all the most popular social media channels together in a seamless interface.

By virtue of their entrepreneurial upbringing, siblings Brienne and Alston Ghafourifar developed a knack for imagining solutions that didn't exist but should. As kids, they would fixate on myriad "pain points," as they called them, and pitch some clever fix.

Their million-dollar idea materialized first on napkin scribbles at a local coffee shop after observing a pain point common to the modern condition. Brienne was 17 and her brother 20 when they created Entefy, a digital communications app that in 2013 catapulted her into Silicon Valley superstardom as the youngest college graduate to raise more than $1 million in venture funding.

"While we were talking face to face, everybody around us was so immersed in their digital technologies," says Brienne, who has since raised nearly $10 million along with a $50 million valuation. "We realized that people go to so many places to do the exact same thing—social networks, texts, emails, IM."

What if there was a "universal remote," a way to streamline these myriad communications through a single channel?

Though the company is still developing its proprietary product and isn't sharing exactly what Entefy will look like or how it will work, it seems clear that the aim is to pull together existing channels—Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and more—into one seamless platform. And they've managed to convince plenty of investors and tech industry veterans that they are on the right track.

Start-Up: A chat with Entefy's Brienne Ghafourifar

Fri, 1pm

California Theatre