About Jellyfish
The equation to a good time.
Helping people be where they're supposed to be. Built in San Diego. Built for everywhere worth going.
Helping people be where they're supposed to be. Built in San Diego. Built for everywhere worth going.
I like going out. So do my friends. We've been to bars across the country and around the world, and every so often you walk into a room where everything is right — the crowd, the music, the timing, who happens to be there — and you think, this place is awesome. Those nights are the entire reason this exists.
That's what we're trying to deliver. Not once in a while, by luck. On an ordinary Thursday, because you could see where the night actually was.
Everyone wanting to be in the same place at the same time, given all of their preferences and options.
A map of every bar in San Diego, colored by how busy it is right now. That's the whole thing. An old-school tool that does one job properly, free to download, with no feed to scroll and nothing to post. We built the thing we wanted to use.
Right now that's me and Chelsey, plus a handful of friends who believe in this enough to keep showing up for it. Small team, no committee. We answer our own emails, and if something on here is wrong, it's one of us who got it wrong.
San Diego could be one of the best places in the world to go out. The bars are here, the weather is here, the people are here. What's missing is a way to find the room that's actually good tonight — so we start here, and we try to lift the whole scene while we're at it: our bars, our neighborhoods, our nights.
If it works, people go out a little more, spend it in rooms that earned it, and have a better time in public. That's the whole vision. There's no clever machine underneath it.
Penn State. Same bar, same friends — and a night that hit different. James starts asking why. The Equation to a Good Time goes from bar napkin to a real framework his professors sign off on. The first build team comes together: 9-10 friends and classmates who'd been in those nights and wanted to figure out why.
Three other companies started and run in parallel. Small teams form around every Jellyfish attempt — friends, classmates, collaborators — building, breaking, and rebuilding what would become this product. Lots of versions. None of them ready yet, but every attempt the same shape: never a one-person show.
A San Diego venue map with hand-curated occupancy. Friends start asking for the link. The product finally has a shape that makes sense in five seconds.
Geofence presence ships. User-submitted pulse reports ship. The map stops being static and starts feeling like the city. Crew layer + Tonight's Plan land later in the year.
A growing waitlist of early users. Pro tier rolling out. Scaling carefully so the signal stays clean. The equation, finally shipping.
If we can't tell you what's happening tonight, we won't pretend we can. No fake activity, no inflated numbers.
Presence is anonymized. We never expose individual locations to other users. Crew sharing is opt-in per friend.
Pro adds the power features. Free gives you the map and the dots — the core read on the whole city, no strings. Anything else would be sleazy.
One city right, then the next. We'd rather be the best in San Diego than the third-best in twelve markets.
A 4.5-star venue with no one in it is dead. A 4.0 with a packed patio is the move. Our product reflects that.
You should spend less time in the app, not more. Glance, decide, get on with the night.
Two people. One builds the product, one builds the company around it.
Founder, CEO, and the guy writing the code at one in the morning — he built the app, the backend and the data operation behind it. Economics at Penn State, then nine years proving a good night out is a math problem. Former point guard, current believer that the group chat is the worst technology ever invented. Jellyfish is the thing he would have built for free.
Chelsey runs the company the app sits on top of — operations, the venue relationships, and the thousand things that have to be true before a map can tell anyone anything. A decade behind that: strategic operations at MTM, and before it seven years running the command center at Veyo Logistics. She has stood up new markets before, which is the next thing we do.
Finance, capital, investing and sales — decades of it, behind a founder who builds.
Forty production plants' worth of finance, run from the inside. Fifteen years at Allergan took him to Global Vice President of Finance and Operations, and he is now Corporate Controller and VP of Finance at Tanvex Biopharma. He has closed books at a scale most companies never reach.
A decade at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, now a Director and Market Executive — the job where you carry a market rather than a book. He has spent his career on the side of the table where capital gets decided.
Vanguard, Mercer and Guggenheim Securities, now an MBA at Chicago Booth. The index house, the consultant and the bank — three seats, so he has watched a valuation argued from every direction.
Started out filling rooms as an event organizer and ended up running solar sales across the West Coast as Senior Director at Sunpro, which is the same problem at a different scale. He runs his own solar company now, and advises on how a new city learns a name.