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The founder of Timehop is going to work at Snapchat

Jonathan Wegener will work on product.

Snapchat Spectacles
Snapchat Spectacles
YouTube Screenshot
Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

Last week, Jonathan Wegener, the CEO of Timehop, a social photo app that once showed a lot of promise, announced he was leaving the startup.

Now we know where he’s going: Wegener is heading to Snapchat, where he will work on product.

Snap and Wegener confirmed the hire.

Snap Inc. is prepping to go public this spring, so Wegener should get there in advance of the IPO. If things go well, that timing could be very lucrative.

Timehop, the company Wegener co-founded in 2011, resurfaced old social media posts you had made as a quirky reminder of your digital history — almost like a mirror image of Snapchat and its now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t ethos.

As TechCrunch noted last week, Timehop raised $14 million from investors including Shasta Ventures and Spark Capital. But its days seemed officially numbered by March 2015, when Facebook introduced an “on this day” feature, which resurfaced old Facebook posts.

Wegener, meanwhile, has been a public Snapchat fan for some time. Last July, after Snapchat released its Spectacles sunglass camera, he published a post praising the company.

“I’m incredibly bullish on Snapchat as a company and this new move in particular,” Wegener wrote. “I believe Snapchat more than anyone else today understands the intricacies of how users think about photos and their mobile devices.”


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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