Founder of infamous Silicon Valley failure raises US$1 million to sell a bot-powered blog site to businesses

David Byttow, the former founder and CEO of notorious Silicon Valley flop Secret, has a new company brewing, called Bold — and this time, he thinks he can crack the notoriously difficult business market. 

Secret, an app that let you anonymously share your thoughts with the world, started off strong when it launched in 2014.

But Secret quickly became better known for its founders' lavish spending habits and its reputation as a gathering place for cyber-bullies than as an open communications tool. 

After gaining 15 million users, raising US$35 million in venture funding, and drastically changing the product a few times, Byttow made the decision to shut down the year-old Secret. Most of the money was returned to investors, but Byttow and Chrys Bader-Wechseler had each taken US$3 million of the venture investment off the table for their personal coffers, and it's not clear if they ever gave this money back.

Now, as TechCrunch reports, Byttow's four-person Bold team has raised US$1 million in funding from Index Ventures. 

Bold is a product for letting people inside of companies write long-form content — blog entries, memos, product manuals, that kind of thing. A lot of that is already handled by products like Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Docs, so it'll be an uphill battle.

"Everyone has opinions, yet they often go unshared—we want to solve that problem," Byttow writes in a blog post.