Editor’s note: June is Pride Month — a time for us to come together to celebrate and support the diverse set of experiences, perspectives and identities of the LGBTQ+ community. This month Chris Curtis, Startup Marketing Manager, Google Cloud, is showcasing startups led by LGBTQ+ founders and how they use Google Cloud to grow their businesses. This feature highlights Castro Labs and their new platform Bent, a platform for queer communities to come together and thrive.
The team at Castro Labs are no stranger to balancing their LGBTQ+ identities and careers in tech. Tech has been as much a part of their lives as their experiences in the queer community.
“I’ve always been passionate about the power of connecting people,” says Jeff Kanter, Castro Labs founder and CEO, drawing on his own experience as an early product leader at Facebook and his time at Instagram after. “But I wanted to build a solution for the problems of the community I know, love and belong to.” This led him to found Castro Labs and their mission of building the next generation of LGBTQ+ technology to help queer people feel seen, safe, valued and desired.
In 2022, Jeff put out the word that he had founded Castro Labs. For David Ressler, Head of Engineering, and Jeffrey Gerson, Head of Community, Marketing and Policy, it was an easy decision to join. “When Jeff asked me to help build more equitable products for the queer community, I couldn’t say no!” David says.
Building a safe space for people to host and join queer communities
The company’s main offering is calledBent, a platform that’s designed to help queer communities come together and thrive, which you can findhere. As Jeffrey Gerson shares, “One of the biggest things we heard in our research was that while there are so many apps for queer dating and hookups, it’s really hard to make queer friends. This inspired us to build a platform with queer-first policies that can be a safe, well-facilitated space for people to host and join queer communities that align with their interests.”
Inspiring queer communities to come together
For the Castro Labs team, nothing is more inspiring than watching communities emerge on the platform. “We really loveClub Quarantine, a queer digital community that came to life during the pandemic, throwing online parties to help people stay connected,” says Jeffrey. Queer Surf is another exciting community on their platform, which is led by queer pro surfer Kyla Langen. “They recently used Bent to coordinate a surf camp that hosted over a hundred queer people, helping them connect and get comfortable in the ocean, surfing and learning about marine science,” he says.
Castro Labs is also proud of its culture that is an intersection of all things queer and tech. For instance, it recently sponsored a recruitment conference for queer people that David first attended as a student several years ago. “We got to connect with a bunch of amazing people and actually hired someone we met at the conference onto the team! When you think about a lot of the companies that show up at these places, they’re normally big organizations trying to recruit queer employees. But we were one of the only ones that was a queer business trying to solve queer problems,” says David. The company remains small but nimble with a team currently co-located between San Francisco and New York City (“Shoutout to Michelle, Noah, V and Joe, who also drive all of our decisions at Castro Labs and never fail to offer a helping hand or new point of view.”)
The challenge of moving from a large organization to launching a startup
The Castro Labs team also had to shift from a mindset of developing solutions for a wide audience to focusing on specific issues that resonate with a more targeted group. Jeffrey says, “Originally, we were also working on a queer flirting app, but as we spoke with more people, we discovered this larger need for queer friendships and queer communities,” so the team evolved its focus to developing Bent. “Another challenge we’ve faced as a startup has been trying to build processes and structure while remaining agile and evolving fast,” says Jeffrey. “Our processes break about every 3-4 months as we grow and evolve — and that’s a good sign of growth!”
Using Google Cloud to power the business
David used to work at Google, so Castro Labs already had a good understanding of Google Cloud’s potential. “Google Cloud powers the majority of our back-end infrastructure for our products, especially Bent,” he says. Castro Labs usesCloud Run to build and deploy their serverless infrastructure,Cloud SQL for storing application data,Cloud Storage and Cloud Load Balancing to host their own CDN, andBigQuery andLooker Studio for data analysis, dashboards and reporting. “We also useIdentity Platform for customer identity and access management and things like Firebase Remote Config to make our mobile application development even smoother,” says David.
Castro Labs is part of theGoogle for Startups Cloud Program, which gave it access to Google credits. Jeff explains, “With financial support from Google Credits, we worry less about budgets and can focus more on innovation.” The Google for Startups Cloud Program also gave Castro Labs access to premier Google Cloud partner,SADA. “We’re a small startup right now, so it’s helpful to have them validate different ideas and review our infrastructure,” says David. Recently, the team had an urgent question about media uploads and image and video processing. “SADA was able to advise us immediately on which Google Cloud products would be best for our needs. Between SADA and the Google Cloud team, we have the support we need to navigate building our technology,” David shares.
Jeff says that another great strength of Google Cloud is the flexibility it gives the Castro Labs team to flesh out its strategies and adjust when it needed to. “It’s removed a lot of variables and let us dive into the problem we’re trying to solve for people in the queer community,” he says. “We have to be hyper-focused at this stage, and Google Cloud helps us focus on building for our end-users.”
Advice for queer entrepreneurs
Jeffrey and David previously led Instagram’s global pride efforts, but while they and other members of the Castro Labs team enjoyed working on solutions for the queer community in companies where they worked in the past, they couldn’t put their full resources behind it given competing business priorities. But more importantly, Jeffrey calls out the need for gay entrepreneurs to question their own assumptions and check their privilege as they build. “We really believe in building with; not building for. To do that responsibly, we need to talk to and partner with as many people as possible to factor in their experiences and bring them on this journey. We always aim to leave our own assumptions at the door and let others leverage us to guide the solutions that they need.”
Jeff also highlights the role navigating pushback in his startup journey. “One of the biggest things a queer entrepreneur should be ready for is clearly conveying to investors the growing potential and opportunity to build for an audience they might otherwise think is ‘too small,’ as it continues to rapidly grow,” he says. But he remains confident that this is a growing total addressable market. “A recentGallup survey showed that one in five people within Generation Z identify as LGBTQ+. This number doubled in just four years. When you combine that with the trend of consumers embracing more niche community platforms, we think we are in a great place to grow our audience. And with Google Cloud and partners such as SADA behind us, we look forward to helping people host and join communities where they can come together and thrive.”
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