• Home
  • Latest
  • Fortune 500
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia

Trendingnow

1

Corporate America has been draining the world's water. Matt Damon's new campaign calls on Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon to help give it back

2

When SpaceX starts trading, some 'shareholders' will discover they own nothing at all

3

Analysts expected oil to surge above $200 but China has quietly kept prices half of that—and can’t for much longer

1

Corporate America has been draining the world's water. Matt Damon's new campaign calls on Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon to help give it back

2

When SpaceX starts trading, some 'shareholders' will discover they own nothing at all

3

Analysts expected oil to surge above $200 but China has quietly kept prices half of that—and can’t for much longer
TechBiz Stone

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone’s Q&A App Is Back Again

By
Kia Kokalitcheva
Kia Kokalitcheva
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
Kia Kokalitcheva
Kia Kokalitcheva
Down Arrow Button Icon
April 28, 2016, 6:05 PM ET
Courtesy of Jelly

Last year at Austin’s annual South by Southwest tech festival, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sat on stage and talked about how his supposed third act, a funky question-and-answers app named Jelly, had failed and how his company was abandoning the project. But things didn’t go quite as planned.

Stone, instead, is pushing for a second time to make Jelly a success. Jelly 2.0, as Stone refers to the revamped version, which invites users to query others about virtually any topic, is now publicly available for free to users on iOS and the web, the company said on Thursday.

“Our thing is really about helping you get through your day,” Stone said in an interview at Jelly’s office. Ideally, people will ask questions like, “Who is great real estate agent in San Francisco?” or “What’s a good snack for my kid at school?”

The revamped Jelly has a few noticeable changes to folks who used the first version. Asking questions can now be done anonymously and it does not require creating an account because, as Jelly’s team realized, people are more apprehensive to ask questions when their identity is known. “Imagine if a Google search was a tweet—you’d not search for 99% of the things you do,” Stone said last month during a return visit to South By Southwest.

The Jelly team also tossed out its initial thought that users could find answers from others in their social media networks. As Stone explains, while that might work in some cases, fielding questions to people with expertise in a topic is much more efficient, so that’s how the new Jelly works.

“We should start from scratch and build what we should have built from the beginning,” Stone told his fellow Jelly co-founder, Ben Finkel, when the two sat in their office’s conference room to discuss Jelly’s fate. The conversation was supposed to be about how to completely kill off Jelly and fully commit to their new app, Super, which lets users create and share colorful collages that include a superlative like “My favorite animal is the pug.” But as the discussion continued, they decided they couldn’t give up on Jelly just yet.

“Ben, this is gonna be really awkward, we’re gonna have to tell the team that we’re going back to Jelly after we said it would over,” Stone told his co-founder.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

To make light of the situation, Stone says he came up with the idea of calling it an “un-pivot,” a joking take on the popular Silicon Valley term of “pivoting,” or drastically shifting a company’s focus after an initial product flops. Soon enough, the press was having fun with it too. BuzzFeed published a list of “History’s 8 Most Important Un-Pivots,” featuring Prohibition and Michael Jordan’s return to basketball after a brief stint in minor league baseball.

Surprisingly, the story of how Stone came up with the idea for Jelly isn’t all that riveting. As he tells it, the idea occurred to him while taking a walk with Finkel, a close friend of his from Twitter. Finkel, who Stone describes as one of the smartest people around and a talented engineer, soon quit his job at Twitter, and the two started working on Jelly.

“We think the future of search in general is no results. You ask a question, you get the answer,” said Stone. On the conference room table next to him was an Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated gadget for shopping, playing music, or other tasks. Though Jelly was founded before Amazon released the Echo, it’s become a good proxy for how Stone envisions the next phase of search engines. Sure, the Echo can’t answer any and all questions at the moment, but it also doesn’t provide its owner with pages and pages of results to wade through.

For now, getting an answer through Jelly takes anywhere between a few seconds to 10 to 15 minutes, but as the company adds more and more users, Stone hopes it will provide a quicker turnaround. Since every startup needs some sort of vanity metric, “average time to first answer” is Jelly’s.

Right now, all answers are submitted by users in response to individual questions. Although it sounds crazy that people will voluntary spend their time answering strangers’ questions, Stone claims that it’s in fact something people want to do. “People love answering the questions, especially when they know the answer” because it’s a topic they know well, he said. Users can select topics they’re experts in, and the app will route relevant questions to them.

Eventually, Jelly will also start to recycle answers for similar questions and even further down the line, it could also pull information from certain websites and serve up quick answers, similarly to Google’s “Featured Snippets,” though he wouldn’t say more about this.

Jelly is of course not the first attempt at human-powered answers—there’s already Yahoo Answers, which gained decent traction after it debuted in late 2005, but was then overwhelmed by spammy and low quality responses. Quora, a seven year-old service that is popular with Silicon Valley insiders and has maintained a relatively high quality, is another example.

But perhaps what’s most interesting about Stone, is that he seems quite comfortable with the unknown, including whether Jelly will work out at all this second time around.

Stone is quite aware that the idea seems ridiculous to some folks and that he hasn’t “invented water,” as one critic has said to him. But he also believes there could be space for an alternative to Google. “There’s a huge percentage of queries that are better answered by a person,” he said, adding that technically, even Google results were written by humans because most things on websites were put there by people.

Asked if he thinks Jelly will be as big as Google, he said he doesn’t know. “That would be great,” he added casually, though he didn’t seem to delude himself too much about this.

Jelly also got “lucky,” as Stone says, when it came to the undisclosed amount of funding he has raised after personally getting the company off the ground. Not too long after raising its first round of institutional funding in 2013, Greylock Partners’ Josh Elman approached Stone and asked to participate in his next round, and though Jelly hadn’t even begun to spend its first round of venture capital money, Stone accepted.

“I grew up on welfare and was in debt until I was 37, so I took the money,” Stone laughed, adding that “in retrospect, it looked like I was a genius.”

About the Author
By Kia Kokalitcheva
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon

Latest in Tech

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025

Most Popular

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Fortune Secondary Logo
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • World's Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
  • Lists Calendar
Sections
  • Finance
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Features
  • Leadership
  • Health
  • Commentary
  • Success
  • Retail
  • Mpw
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • CEO Initiative
  • Asia
  • Politics
  • Conferences
  • Europe
  • Newsletters
  • Personal Finance
  • Environment
  • Magazine
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
  • Group Subscriptions
About Us
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • LinkedIn icon
  • Instagram icon
  • Pinterest icon

Latest in Tech

Elon Musk stands behind the Nasdaq opening bell and in front of a "SpaceX" background.
Startups & VentureSpaceX
Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Valor, and the biggest VC winners from SpaceX’s IPO
By Allie GarfinkleJune 12, 2026
21 minutes ago
Sven Gerjets, chief technology officer at Gap, speaks on stage on a panel at Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2026.
Future of WorkBrainstorm Tech
Why companies are treating AI as a strategic partner rather than a passive technology, and how to avoid an ‘AI hangover’
By Sebastian HerreraJune 12, 2026
53 minutes ago
Elon Musk stands behind the Nasdaq opening bell and in front of a "SpaceX" background.
Future of WorkElon Musk
Despite his new trillionaire status, Elon Musk says money ‘will stop being relevant’ in the future because of AI
By Sasha RogelbergJune 12, 2026
2 hours ago
AI was supposed to cut health care costs. One of its first jobs was charging you more, PwC report shows
AIHealth Care Service
AI was supposed to cut health care costs. One of its first jobs was charging you more, PwC report shows
By Whizy Kim and Tech BrewJune 12, 2026
3 hours ago
paul
AIWorld Cup
Machine learning gives the U.S. a 1% chance of winning the World Cup final in its own backyard
By Achim Zeileis and The ConversationJune 12, 2026
3 hours ago
DoorDash wants you to stop scrolling and just tell its new AI chatbot what you’re hungry for
RetailDoorDash
DoorDash wants you to stop scrolling and just tell its new AI chatbot what you’re hungry for
By Dave Lozo and Morning BrewJune 12, 2026
3 hours ago

Most Popular

Corporate America has been draining the world's water. Matt Damon's new campaign calls on Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon to help give it back
Environment
Corporate America has been draining the world's water. Matt Damon's new campaign calls on Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon to help give it back
By Catherina GioinoJune 9, 2026
3 days ago
When SpaceX starts trading, some 'shareholders' will discover they own nothing at all
Investing
When SpaceX starts trading, some 'shareholders' will discover they own nothing at all
By Jim EdwardsJune 12, 2026
11 hours ago
Analysts expected oil to surge above $200 but China has quietly kept prices half of that—and can’t for much longer
Energy
Analysts expected oil to surge above $200 but China has quietly kept prices half of that—and can’t for much longer
By Sasha RogelbergJune 10, 2026
2 days ago
Current price of oil as of June 11, 2026
Personal Finance
Current price of oil as of June 11, 2026
By Joseph HostetlerJune 11, 2026
1 day ago
American taxpayers have spent $33 billion on sports stadiums. They got fewer seats—and higher prices
Success
American taxpayers have spent $33 billion on sports stadiums. They got fewer seats—and higher prices
By Catherina GioinoJune 11, 2026
1 day ago
Current price of oil as of June 12, 2026
Personal Finance
Current price of oil as of June 12, 2026
By Joseph HostetlerJune 12, 2026
8 hours ago

© 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.