Fizz's founders accuse a Maveron partner of leaking their campus playbook

Why it matters

Fizz's new allegation turns a campus-app competition case into a fundraising-trust case, testing how much protection founders really have when they share private operating data with VCs.

Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer, the Stanford classmates who built Fizz out of their own campus during the pandemic, have expanded Fizz's lawsuit against rival Sidechat with a claim that a Maveron partner used a fundraising conversation to pass Fizz's private operating details to Sidechat's owner, Flower Ave.

The new allegation, reported Friday by TechCrunch, moves the dispute beyond campus marketing tactics and into one of the trust assumptions that early-stage fundraising depends on: founders showing investors enough of the machine to get a term sheet, without knowing whether that same investor is also talking to a direct competitor.

Fizz says Jerry Lu, a partner at consumer VC firm Maveron, met with Fizz in March 2022 while exploring a possible investment. According to the amended complaint linked by TechCrunch, Solomon and Cofer shared non-public material about Fizz's strategy, growth plans, campus-launch methods, user metrics, ambassador program, fundraising and product roadmap. Fizz alleges Lu then shared notes from that meeting with Flower Ave., the operator of Sidechat and Yik Yak.

Those claims remain allegations. TechCrunch reported that a Sidechat and Yik Yak executive denied wrongdoing, called the claims allegations rather than court findings, and said the described conduct predated the current team's 2025 acquisition of the business.

The founder story behind the fight

Fizz began as a Stanford campus network in 2021, built by Solomon and Cofer before they dropped out to work on Fizz full time. In a May 2024 Fizz blog post, Cofer and Solomon wrote that they started Fizz as Stanford freshmen during Covid because the existing options for online connection felt either too curated or too closed off to people students did not already know.

That origin matters because Fizz and Sidechat compete in a market where product features and launch execution are hard to separate. A college social app wins campus by campus. Student-email gates, anonymous posting, brand ambassadors, launch events, flyers, food and trust all matter. A launch playbook is not a side detail. For a product with local network effects, knowing where a rival is launching, how it recruits ambassadors, what it tells investors about growth, and what product changes are coming can have direct commercial value.

Fizz has previously said it reached more than 250 communities and roughly 20 million posts by October 2024, when TechCrunch reported that veteran entrepreneur Rakesh Mathur had stepped down as CEO and handed the role to Solomon. Earlier TechCrunch reporting said Fizz had raised more than $40 million, including a $25 million Series B from Owl Ventures and NEA, while the August 2023 story said the valuation was not disclosed.

Solomon inherited a company with money in the bank, a strong campus footprint and a safety problem that every anonymous app eventually has to face. TechCrunch reported in 2024 that Fizz had started showing ads in the app while still trying to keep advertising from degrading student experience. That makes the lawsuit more than a grudge match. Fizz is defending the distribution system that its revenue story rests on.

What Fizz says Sidechat did

The Lu allegation is the latest chapter in a case that started in 2023. In its original complaint, Fizz accused Flower Ave. of trying to disrupt Fizz launches, spreading rumors that hackers had accessed Fizz data, sending false spam reports against Fizz Instagram accounts, infringing Fizz's bee trademark, and paying students to delete Fizz.

One alleged episode, reported by TechCrunch in 2023, involved Flower Ave. co-founder Sheldon Chang allegedly using a fake name in a Northwestern University GroupMe to obtain information from Solomon about Fizz's planned launches. The allegations were broad enough that a New York court later allowed Fizz's state case to proceed: on April 23rd, 2025, New York Supreme Court Justice Lyle E. Frank denied Flower Ave.'s motion to dismiss, writing that Fizz had alleged tactics including a Sidechat-linked ambassador chanting that Fizz had hackers, false spam reports to Instagram, impersonation to learn expansion plans, and payments to students to delete Fizz.

The amended complaint adds an investor-information theory to that same competitive account. Fizz says discovery revealed Lu's alleged role after the original complaint was filed. Fizz also alleges that Jack Burlinson, described by TechCrunch as an acquaintance of the founders and Lu, shared confidential Fizz materials with Lu, including an investor deck and a fall investor summary, and that Lu then passed information to Sidechat.

Why Maveron's role is the sharper issue

Maveron is not a random fund in this market. The firm was founded in 1998 by Dan Levitan and Starbucks' Howard Schultz and describes itself as a consumer-focused venture firm. Lu's Maveron bio says he worked as a Google data scientist on YouTube Red, YouTube Music and YouTube TV, led operations at YC-backed Spate, worked at Advancit Capital, and holds BS and MS degrees from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Wharton.

Fizz alleges Lu was in discussions with Sidechat as early as 2022 and later invested in Sidechat's second seed round in October 2023. Public securities data for Flower Ave. shows a Form D filed on October 11th, 2023, covering an exempt equity offering. A third-party Form D tracker lists Flower Ave. filings in 2022 and 2023 totaling roughly $12.48 million in sold securities, with Sebastian Gil, Chamal Samaranayake and Sheldon Chang listed as related people (see the FormDs.com entry for Flower Ave.).

The incentive conflict is clear even before a court decides the facts. Consumer VCs often see several startups in the same category before choosing one. Founders know that and still have to disclose enough to make a round possible. That process breaks down if a fundraising meeting becomes another channel for competitive intelligence.

Fizz's own product pitch relies on closed communities: every user gets in through a school email domain, and the network is designed around the real-world campus rather than a public follower graph. The lawsuit says Fizz applied a similar expectation to fundraising confidentiality. Fizz's claim is that its founders showed an investor the inside of their campus expansion engine and watched that information travel to the rival trying to beat them school by school.

The court has not found that Lu, Maveron, Sidechat or Flower Ave. misused Fizz's information. The new filing still matters because it names a risk founders usually discuss privately: the investor who says no, asks for updates, and may have another bet in the same market. For Fizz, that risk is now attached to a docket, a named VC partner and a rival that has been fighting for the same campuses since 2022.