Pinned Social — Daxos Teardown

Pinned is a map-first social app for making plans with friends you already have. The App Store pitch Verified 9 Sep: "Pick a spot. Send the Pin. See who's in." A user pins a bar, restaurant, or spot on the map, sends it to their group, sets a time, and sees who commits. It replaces the group-chat back-and-forth that kills plans; the feed shows where your circle is going in your city. Explicitly anti-feed: "Built for friend groups. Not strangers. Not followers... No algorithms. No endless scrolling."

The product sits on three legs: group plan coordination, friend-sourced place recommendations ("Your city, curated by your friends"), and light location presence among friends. Since mid-August the roadmap has tilted toward AI-driven event planning plus a venue and event-curator marketplace (own places database, "AI partner" for venues, curator subscriptions) Founder-claimed, 17 Aug & 2 Sep calls.

Who uses it: friend groups in cities — young urban demographic, founders ~1 year out of USC, NYC-based, growth via TikTok and Instagram. Where it ships Verified 9 Sep: iOS live since 2 Apr 2026, version 2.1.2 (29 Aug); Android on Google Play since August, 100+ downloads; site in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Team: Carter Munk CEO (~23, USC '25, prior co-founder/COO of dating app Cerca), Tess Sutter CMO, Filipe Alvarenga CTO (Brazilian; Rocket.Chat founding contributor per Carter) Founders verified in 8/12 review; backgrounds founder-claimed. Delaware corp 29 Oct 2025, NY foreign qualification current, HQ is Carter's residential address, no office Verified.

Everything the founders told us, in one place. The App Store ratings are the only independent traction signal; every user/retention number is founder-stated on calls.

Projections Founder-claimed, 27 Jul: Android launch → ~40K users within two weeks; $1.5M = 1+ year runway; 0.5–1M users by end of 2026, then Series A. Carter himself flagged "6M users by month 6" as very optimistic. On 2 Sep: hoping to close a 15-venue pilot on 9 Sep, paying customers by November.

The thesis in Mark's own words Mark, 17 Aug:

"We both really like what you're building, and I think your traction kind of speaks for itself. Joe and I have obviously already committed... I don't do a good job of valuing companies in this pre-revenue situation — you've grown the user base intensely and that's what's super impressive, and I quite like the idea."

Earlier reads, same direction: "definitely interested... up our alley" (9 Jun); "I really like the app. I think it's cool... socially it's really cool" and "DAU 1500 is pretty impressive, man, especially for 20,000 users" (27 Jul) Mark. Joe: "definitely interested... happy to support you and fire a bullet. Just probably want to do a little more DD and iron some wrinkles," and he likes the Match-acquirer angle — a "value acquisition target" Joe, 27 Jul. Mark was also candid on the limits: "it's not as common for us to vet pre-revenue stuff... usually we come in when revenue starts to pile up."

Why it holds together:

• Skin in the game. ~$100K of the founder's own money, no salaries on any raise, $250K of the current round self-committed Founder-claimed. The team spends its own runway, not investors'.
• Capital efficiency. ~$200K still in the bank as of June off a $300K raise plus self-funding Founder-claimed; four people shipping iOS to v2.1.2 in five months, an Android build, and three site languages with zero payroll Shipping tempo verified.
• Demand-side validation. Match Group offered $5M for 30% (with a next-round cap Carter says would have cost founders >50% by Series A) — declined; The Residency angels (first checks into Snapchat, Discord, Instacart, OpenAI, Kalshi per Carter) took the first round; other VCs offered $75K at $10M cap pre-launch, also declined All founder-claimed.
• The category slot. Consumer social group-planning is a graveyard, but Zenly proved tens of millions want a friends-map and died for corporate reasons, not product ones. Partiful starts at the event; Snap Map and Find My are passive; nobody owns "pin a place, rally your group, go." Outcomes here are binary and enormous; a $25K check at a $12M cap is lottery-ticket pricing on a team that behaves like it intends to win one.
• Trust network. The deal came through people Mark actually knows — Dean's intro, the Chase childhood link, the Wednesday basketball crew Verified from transcripts.

Instrument Verified, 12 Aug review: YC post-money SAFE v1.2, valuation-cap-only variant, verified genuine clause-by-clause against the official YC form. $12M post-money cap, $25K Daxos check, 0.208% ownership floor. No discount clause, no MFN, no pro rata, no information rights, no amendment protection (§5(a): company plus a majority-in-interest of same-cap SAFE holders can amend without us). The $12M cap is itself the discounted price: Carter's standard SAFEs are at $15M; family and friends, including Daxos, get 20% off Founder-claimed, 27 Jul.

Execution flags on the doc as received Verified: "[Date of Safe]" placeholder never filled; company signed via DocuSign but the investor block blank — not fully executed as of 12 Aug.

The 12 Aug verdict: clean paper, rich price. Four asks before wiring: (1) filled date + both signatures, (2) a one-page side letter (pro rata + MFN + info rights), (3) a cap table showing total SAFEs outstanding, (4) a direct answer on the Cerca breach. "A $25K check needs a ~500x to return a fund at 0.21%."

Negotiation status (17 Aug call): Mark narrowed the asks — MFN and pro rata are the two that matter; info rights "I don't really care... we can nix that one"; amendment consent back-burnered. His MFN logic, on tape: if a down round at $6M ever happens, MFN puts everyone at 6 and cleans the cap table; "we've had experiences where we wished we had MFN, wish we had pro rata." Carter: everything to date is "standard YC safe, no side letters, no pro rata for anyone. MFN was definitely new to me" — agreed to discuss internally and with the bigger checks. Daxos commitment stays soft until MFN / pro rata is resolved. Mark: "even if everyone says no, it doesn't necessarily mean we're out."

Round context: prior round $300K at a $7.5M cap, closed March 2026, pre-launch Founder-claimed. Current raise ~$1.5M (flexible to ~$2M). Committed capital as stated moved across calls: 27 Jul "$750K hard / $1.25M soft" → 17 Aug "$500K hard committed, $300K in the account" → 2 Sep "$500K committed," with Sling Ventures in deep talks on a potential $1M–1.5M. The durable floor is $500K committed / $300K received; the July figures are labeled founder-claimed at the time. Harmonic still records zero rounds Verified 9 Sep.

Monitorables, not a kill memo. These are the things that change our posture on the follow-on, plus the open loops due right now.

• The Cerca answer. Carter's prior company exposed users' phone numbers, private chats, and passport/license scans in April 2025; coverage says users were never notified Verified via press. For a product with friend location sharing this is the single most important diligence question — and it was still unanswered as of 12 Aug. It is also arguably the cheapest scar tissue a security-conscious 23-year-old founder can have. We want concrete evidence of what changed: infrastructure choices, an audit, anything.
• Side letter + cap table. MFN and pro rata unresolved as of 17 Aug; our commitment is soft until they are. We still have not seen total SAFEs outstanding — if they quietly stack $2–3M on the same cap, founder dilution at conversion becomes a motivation risk we would never see coming.
• Doc execution. Blank date and blank investor block on the copy we reviewed. Needs a final, fully executed envelope before any wire.
• Retention, not ratings. 475 five-star-ish ratings prove people like the idea; nothing public proves groups keep using it in week 4. Every dead app in this category had great early ratings. Rating velocity is modest (+8 in four weeks). The next data we need is cohort retention.
• Committed-capital drift. $750K hard (July) stepped down to $500K hard / $300K in account (August). The $500K "Adventures" VC check made final stages but appears not to have closed. Watch whether Sling converts.
• Thesis velocity. Two pivots in ~6 weeks: meetup app → AI event planning (17 Aug, ~6 days old at call time, prompted by an advisor saying AI is needed "to please the VCs") → venue/curator marketplace + own-database narrative (2 Sep). Fast iteration or thesis drift — watch item, not a dealbreaker at this stage.
• Growth tactics. Aggressive social-graph scraping of Instagram/Meta is a stated tactic ("it's not illegal, but... not something they condone") Founder-claimed. Platform-squeeze risk cuts both ways: Snap, Apple, or Instagram can also ship this as a feature.
• Open loops as of 9 Sep: Sling partner-meeting outcome (was due 2 Sep) · 15-venue pilot close (was due today, 9 Sep) · paying customers by November · the MFN / pro-rata answer from Carter.

Four Fireflies calls verified identical across all three Daxos account keys. Call Analyst Supabase has zero Pinned data; Otter/Fathom not accessible. No email thread — the relationship runs through calls and the personal network (verified: zero emails sent to [email protected] as of 5 Jul).