Yik Yak and Sidechat’s new CEO wants to protect “one of the last good social platforms”
While at Northeastern University, all Kyle Venn wanted to do was create a social media app like the college student-focused Yik Yak. Now, he’s running what he said is one of the last bastions for positivity online.
To enter Yik Yak is like opening the beating heart of a university, albeit a virtual one.
The college-focused social media platform is an online portal for students to bond over shared hobbies, talk about their favorite (or least favorite) classes, share information about parties and spread the word about emergencies on campus. With the promise of anonymity, it’s an all-access pass to the most honest representation of campus life – from a student’s perspective.
In 2014, when Kyle Venn first came upon Yik Yak, it inspired a years-long chase to create his own social media app. A computer science student at Northeastern University, Venn was fascinated by an online space that seemed to deliver on the promise of online social networks: actual connections.
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More than a decade later, he is the CEO of the company that owns Yik Yak and its partner app Sidechat, running the very app that he fell in love with. He now brings a decade of experience in tech and online platforms to an app that he calls “one of the last good social platforms.”
“What apps are social anymore?” Venn said, referring to the fact that many social media platforms have become mediated more by algorithms than by human relationships. In contrast, Yik Yak is “just a platform that’s about community. It’s about bringing people together,” Venn said. “We’re able to foster these types of communities in a way that’s really hard and really rare, too.”
More similar to Reddit and its legion of online posters and forums than the likes of Instagram or Facebook, Yik Yak and Sidechat are designed to foster campus communities and connections between students. With around 2.2 million unique users per semester, around 15% of all undergraduate students in the U.S., according to Venn, the promise of a safe, positive social media platform is more important than ever in an ecosystem mediated by algorithms that push conversations to the extremes, Venn said.
But to get to his current position, Venn had to climb the ranks. Venn honed his coding and programming skills at Northeastern through a series of impactful co-op jobs at TurboTax, Paypal and the run tracker app Runkeeper. After he graduated in 2015, he went on to work as an engineer at the massively popular online video streaming platform Vimeo. During his seven-year tenure at Vimeo, he worked his way up to be the director of a 30-person engineering team. In 2021, he left it all behind to try his hand at creating a social media startup, a road that eventually led him to acquiring Yik Yak and Sidechat in 2025.
Venn is aware of the double-edged nature of the app’s signature feature of anonymity. It allows students to be themselves but also runs the risk of letting toxic behavior run rampant, to the point that the app has been banned on some college campuses. A 2015 incident involving death threats aimed at students of color resulted in a student being arrested. More recently, in 2024, the app also became a hotbed of hate speech during campus protests over the Israel-Hamas War. As Venn steps into the role of CEO, he wants to protect that anonymity while also establishing more protections for the students on Yik Yak and Sidechat who rely on that feature to be honest in asking questions or making statements they otherwise wouldn’t feel comfortable doing.
“I think we want the best of both worlds,” Venn said. “We want people to have that superpower and that comfort of anonymity.”
Northeastern Global News recently spoke with Venn about how he went from being someone with almost no programming experience to the CEO of a social media app with a massive reach. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why do you think it’s important for college students to have a positive social platform?
It’s our main focus to be able to create those safe spaces, those comfortable spaces where people can connect like that.
When you’re first getting to college, Yik Yak and Sidechat are great for you because you’re able to find a community that resonates with you and your identity and college is a big piece of that.
You entered Northeastern with little coding or programming experience. How did your experience at the university, specifically your three co-ops at TurboTax, Paypal and Runkeeper, help you in your career?
Those are the three best co-ops I could have possibly ever gotten, at least for what I was looking for. Intuit, I literally got to write code. This was my first co-op, literally ever. I got to write code on TurboTax to rebuild their framework to change how the flow of the core product worked. I learned more in those nine months than I could have possibly learned in any semester.
It taught me an ethos of building for everything. Don’t look at just one code, one platform, one solution. Approach it more broadly, which increased my appetite for taking on bigger challenges and trying new frontiers and new things, which was really big.
Coming out of your co-ops, you ended up working at Vimeo for almost seven years. What is it that you liked about this kind of consumer-facing engineering work?
I think I found front-end development and building products for people was a thing that resonated with me. So, coming out of Northeastern, I knew that that’s what I wanted to do.
It was the intersection of both reach and impact. [Vimeo] had millions of users, even just on the Android app. That was really cool. It was the ability to reach that many people to have this experience that we knew was working because users were growing, engagement was growing.
And also, video is cool. The tech was really interesting. I am also a tech nerd at my core now, so to be able to build upload and download and video streaming and to be a pioneer in the space, that was really cool, too.
With Yik Yak and Side Chat, you are coming into a well-established ecosystem, one that’s known for the anonymity promised to users. Coming onboard, how have you approached the question of anonymity and ensuring users are safe?
I think before, when it was location-based, it lended itself a little bit more towards this toxicity or full anonymity. But with our platform, it’s a combination of verified and anonymous, which is a pretty big change.
You validate with your [dot] edu email address, and then you’re presented in the Northeastern community feed. And because now everyone else in that community knows you’re not just some random person, they know this person’s actually part of their community. But you still have the level of anonymity that allows you to be your true self, that allows for authenticity that’s so hard to find, especially for Gen Z.
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I will say, 99% of people are there to post about positive things or just talk about life, but there is some percentage that is going to be toxic in some form or maybe just be more negative. Moderation is really important to be able to keep these things clean. So one of the first things we did is, we obviously have a pretty large moderation team, but we also invested heavily in AI moderation.
We also don’t share your identity. It is not tied to anything you post unless you want to attach a username. If we need to ban a person who is just a repeat offender, that level of verification allows us to make sure they stay off the platform, which I think is actually also unbelievably important for keeping communities safe.
Our average time from a post being flagged/reported on the platform to having action taken on is around 46 seconds. There’s almost no social platform where they can say that they respond that quickly, but that’s how seriously we take it.
Do you feel like you’ve been able to foster the kind of real, positive connections you hoped for coming into Yik Yak and Sidechat?
There’s an anecdote I absolutely love. We released this feature called Yak Match around Valentine’s Day. It was literally just like a one-off promotion. People would fill out this 40-question questionnaire and we would then match them with a person on their campus that they had the highest percentage overlap with.
I was talking to a student who was telling me she was put into a group that was matched based on a love of baking. They’re telling me that within the first 10 minutes of the chat, they had decided to reveal their identities, meet up and have a bake-off. That is the dream. Those are 15 people who would have never known each other ever, but they were able to connect on a mutual love for something.
