Zehra Naqvi, 26, grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s.
This was the era of Tumblr and Twitter. She would stay up all night breaking down the release dates of Marvel movies or analyzing the movements of One Direction members. She eventually gained a collective 250,000 followers across the two platforms. “Those early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to not just consume culture but to contribute to it,” she told TechCrunch.
She went on to start a company at 12, study art history at Columbia, and then became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures. (She also writes the popular consumer newsletter The Z List.)
Now, she’s starting something new: Lore, a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. It is set to emerge from stealth on October 6th.
It was a few months ago that she quit her job at Headline she decided to go back to the beginning. She recalled those early days of spiraling down internet rabbit holes and became dismayed when she realized that all that research she spent hours in the pleasure pursuit of was gone. “How is it possible that I’ve spent probably well over 500 hours reading about Marvel movies over 17 years and no single platform tracks my consumption,” she said.
Lore provides the tools she wished “had existed when fandom felt like home before the internet became fractured and joyless,” she said. It lets consumers go down rabbit holes, providing links to fan theories, interpretations, cultural context, and easter eggs. According to Naqvi, it builds a personalized graph of obsessions; surfaces fandom and stan updates in a feed; and gives monthly reports to users about what their obsessions are at any given time.
“You can zoom in on a single theory or zoom out and see how all your fandoms connect,” Naqvi said. “It’s like playing with knowledge instead of just consuming it.”
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Naqvi is mum for now on how the product works. She also declined to share any imagery, saying that Lore’s official hard launch isn’t until next year. “It’s our special sauce,” she said of the technology powering the product.
She did say, however, that rapid fandom consumption hasn’t really changed online, even though new social media channels have popped up for users to interact. “If anything, fandom is more fragmented than ever, and as you get older, joy spiraling becomes harder to find time for,” she said. As an investor, she began to realize that perhaps there didn’t need to be any more social tools for fans.
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