Plancast Founder Mark Hendrickson Joins Obvious-Incubated Lift As Head Of Product
Last June, Biz Stone and Evan Williams teamed up with long-time collaborator (and early Twitter employee) Jason Goldman to dust off and re-start The Obvious Corporation — the very idea incubator that produced …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mark Hendrickson's move closes a short, public arc. He launched Plancast in December 2009 as "Foursquare for the future" for planned events, then in January 2012 wrote his own post-mortem on why social event sharing never found scale. Two months later he is back in the game — not with a new idea of his own, but as Head of Product at Lift, a project incubated inside The Obvious Corporation.
The destination matters as much as the departure. Biz Stone, Evan Williams and early Twitter collaborator Jason Goldman restarted Obvious in June 2011 as an idea incubator rather than a fund or studio in the conventional mold, and the August 2011 "Unlocking Potential" essay laid out its thesis that ideas deserve dedicated teams. Hiring a founder who just publicly dissected his own failed social product is the first visible test of whether that model can attract proven operators.
First-order effects
- Lift gains a consumer-social product leader who has both built an event-planning network and written candidly about why it stalled — directly relevant experience for a behavior-change product.
- Hendrickson shifts from founder and commentator to employee inside someone else's incubated idea, trading equity upside for the resources of the Stone–Williams–Goldman team.
Second-order effects
- Obvious's recruiting pitch strengthens if this hire works: founders with failed startups get a soft landing and a fresh swing, making the incubator a magnet for exactly the talent that just shut something down.
- Rivals building habit-forming or social products now compete against an Obvious-backed team staffed by operators who have already run the experiment once.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Twitter alumni orbit functions as a rolling talent pool — failed experiments feed people back into new Obvious projects rather than scattering to acquirers or venture firms.
- It points toward incubation-as-career-path, where the studio, not the individual startup, becomes the durable institution and founders become interchangeable product leadership within it.
The trend: Founder-led idea incubators like Obvious are turning the post-mortem cycle into a talent-recycling engine, keeping experienced operators inside one studio across successive bets.