Fanvibe

Overview

Fanvibe was a San Francisco-based mobile sports social network that operated from late 2009 through July 2011. Founded under the parent company "We The Fan" by Vishwas Prabhakara, Art Chang, and Joe Pestro, the company built an iPhone app that let fans check in to live games, trash-talk with friends watching the same broadcast, and receive real-time scores and breaking news. It launched originally as FanPulse, rebranded to Fanvibe, and graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2010 batch before reaching approximately 100,000 users and securing a partnership with the NBA.^[1]

Fanvibe did not fail because of a flawed product or a crowded market. It failed because its entire reason for existing — live sports — disappeared. The simultaneous 2011 NFL and NBA labor lockouts eliminated the games that powered every check-in, every score alert, and every piece of social engagement the app was built around.

In June 2011, Fanvibe was acquired by beRecruited in what appeared to be a clean acqui-hire. Twenty-one days later, beRecruited shut the product down entirely, citing the lockouts as having "effectively destroyed the point of the service."^[2] The founders landed well — Prabhakara became CEO of beRecruited, which was itself later acquired for $17–22 million — but Fanvibe itself became a case study in existential dependency risk.

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Founding Story

Fanvibe was built by a team with unusually direct credentials for the problem they were solving. Vishwas Prabhakara had worked at ESPN and Digg before co-founding the company — a combination that gave him both sports-media domain knowledge and a firsthand understanding of how social content discovery worked at scale.^[3] He holds a BS in Information Systems and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.^[4] Art Chang and Joe Pestro both came from Yardbarker, an early sports social network that had been acquired by Fox Sports in 2010 — meaning two of the three founders had already built and sold a sports-focused digital product before starting Fanvibe.^[5]

The founding insight was straightforward: sports fandom is inherently social, but the tools fans used to share the experience of watching live games were generic. Twitter and Facebook were not built around the rhythms of a fourth-quarter comeback or a walk-off home run. The founders wanted to build something purpose-built for the live-game moment — a product where checking in to a game was the primary action, and everything else (scores, news, trash talk) flowed from that anchor.

The company was incorporated as "We The Fan," a name that signaled the fan-first mission from the outset.^[6] It launched in approximately November 2009 under the name FanPulse before rebranding to Fanvibe — the reasons for the name change are not documented in available sources, though the shift may reflect an early pivot in product positioning or a trademark issue.^[7]

The team incubated at Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco before entering Y Combinator's Summer 2010 batch. As Chang later reflected: "The path through the early days at Dogpatch Labs, through the Y Combinator experience, and now being acquired has been quite the bumpy road. It wasn't all easy and success the whole time, in fact it has been quite the opposite."^[8]