The startup culture at Posterous

This segment of Startup Sessions dives into the world of Posterous, and a Pittsburgh-style lunch

And now, from our Sponsor Smule:  For those of you who have the Ocarina app on your iPhone or iPod touch, Smule has just released a new songbook. Head over to smule.com to download it and learn to play folksongs from around the world!" 

Garry Tan, Co-founder of Posterous compared his his blogging platform to life in North Beach, "People live here, people eat here.  That's the kind of site we want to have, actually.  Some place that's actually lived in."  It all made sense when thinking about what Posterous offers its users - a platform to post blog entries, not limited to 140 character Tweets, but instead, through the most universal of all Internet communication technologies, email.

Launched in July of 2008,  Posterous is a blogging platform based on the notion of simplicity.  It enables its users to post on their blogs via email, which Tan referred to as, "the universal API."  Users can upload various forms of rich media like photos, videos and audio clips, which Posterous takes and re-formats for optimal display on the user's blog. 

The startup also recently released an iPhone app called PicPosterous, which lets users create an album and upload photos to that album in real time.  The album can instantly be viewed on the user's blog in a nifty player which updates as users upload more photos from whatever party or event they are at.  Also, just a few days ago, Posterous launched a new 'theming feature', enabling users to change the look and style of their pages.  To make things more universal, users can create their own CSS/HTML themes, along with obviously importing others.

Posterous came out of Y-Combinator last year and since then raised $740,000 in funding from XG Ventures and several angel investors including Guy Kawasaki.  The startup said it isn't looking for further investment at the moment and would rather keep things lean.  

In this segment of Startup Sessions, we hung out with the owners who showed us around their new North Beach location and why to them it was a better choice than following the trend of opening shop in SoMa.

We're looking for startups to feature on our show!  Please contact Chris Caceres via Vator to arrange for an interview.