Leah Culver

Early career

Culver is a co-author of a Python library for the open-standard authentication OAuth 1.0 and a co-author of OEmbed.[2][3]

After graduating, she worked at the startups iLoop Mobile and Instructables. While working at Instructables, she received attention for etching company logos onto her laptop, which was funded by that ad space.[4]

Pownce

In June 2007,[5] she co-founded Pownce, with Digg's cofounder Kevin Rose and Digg's creative director Daniel Burka.[5] Pownce was a micro-blogging site she programmed by herself as an experiment,[6] described as "Twitter meets Napster".[5] The company was funded with investments from Culver's friends and family, rather than venture capitalists. Pownce was acquired by Six Apart in December 2008. The website was shut down after the acquisition, but Culver implemented the technology she built for Pownce in TypePad and TypePad Motion. She left the company in February 2010.

Convore

After leaving Six Apart, Culver, along with Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire, co-founded Convore, backed by Y Combinator. Convore focused primarily on an application for real-time chat, technology that was inspired by FriendFeed groups and 37 Signals’ Campfire .[7] Convore pivoted into Grove, a chat service for workgroups.[8]

Breaker

Culver was CTO of Breaker,[9] a content-discovery platform for podcasts,[10] which she co-founded with Erik Berlin in 2016.[11] In January 2021, Culver and the Breaker team joined Twitter to help build Twitter Spaces.[11] The Breaker application was scheduled for shutdown on January 15, 2021, but instead was taken over by Maple Media.[11]

Investments

Culver has invested in technology such as Maker, a woman-led and minority-owned canned wine company,[12] and Gowalla, a former Foursquare competitor turned augmented reality social application.[13]