A new court filing in the Fizz Sidechat investor leak dispute names Jerry Lu, a partner at venture capital firm Maveron, alleging he attended a meeting with Fizz under the pretence of evaluating an investment, then passed the startup’s confidential information directly to its rival.
The allegation lands in a lawsuit that has been running since 2023, when Fizz originally sued Sidechat over a range of alleged abuses: disrupting campus launches, spreading false rumours about a data breach, filing spam reports against Fizz’s Instagram account, and paying students to delete the app. The original complaint demanded a jury trial, damages, and an injunction against Sidechat’s parent company, Flower Ave Inc.
What the Fizz Sidechat Investor Leak Complaint Claims
In March 2022, Fizz co-founders Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer met with Lu. According to the filing, they disclosed the company’s ‘business strategy, growth plans, campus-launch playbook, user metrics, ambassador program, fundraising efforts, and product roadmap.’ The complaint alleges Lu then shared notes from that meeting with Flower Ave, a text screenshot attached to the filing purporting to show the exchange.
Fizz says it learned of Lu’s involvement only through discovery. The original complaint did not name him. The filing further alleges that Jack Burlinson, an acquaintance of both the founders and Lu, also provided Lu with Fizz’s investor deck and a fall investor summary, which Lu then forwarded to Sidechat.
Lu went on to invest in Sidechat’s second seed round in October 2023, according to PitchBook data cited in the complaint. Fizz claims, however, that Lu had been in contact with Sidechat as far back as 2022. Requests for comment to Lu and Maveron were not returned.
Kyle Venn, chief executive of Yik Yak and Sidechat, responded by email: ‘These are allegations, not court findings. We deny any wrongdoing and will address this through the legal process. The alleged events happened before the current Sidechat team acquired the business in 2025 and inherited the lawsuit. No one on today’s operating team was involved. We’re currently focused on making a great product, not suing other apps.’
Two Startups Competing for the Same Campus Audience
The stakes behind the litigation come into focus when you consider how closely the two companies’ businesses overlap. Both run anonymous online forums aimed at college students, competing for exactly the same audience on exactly the same campuses. That proximity makes every piece of strategic information, campus-launch timing, growth rates, fundraising pipeline, worth protecting.
Fizz was founded in November 2020 by Solomon and Cofer while they were students at Stanford. The company closed a $4.5 million seed round in October 2022, with chief executive Rakesh Mathur setting a target of more than 1,000 U.S. campuses by the end of the 2023 academic year, according to the Stanford Daily. Solomon and Cofer, who left Stanford to build the company, were later named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Media list for 2024.
Sidechat launched in early 2022. Its parent, Flower Ave, raised over $10 million in the summer of 2022, according to an SEC filing reviewed by Favs HQ. Flower Ave later acquired Yik Yak in March 2023 and pushed its users toward the Sidechat app; the two platforms appeared to run on shared servers, as TechCrunch reported at the time.
The anonymous-campus-app category carries its own problems beyond competitive rivalry. The University of North Carolina system banned both apps from its campuses, citing bullying and harmful behaviour on anonymous platforms. Sidechat faced pressure from Harvard officials in January 2024 after a rise in antisemitic posts; the company assured the university it would enforce its community guidelines more rigorously.
The new allegations fit a pattern that founders have raised more broadly: investors who pass on a deal sometimes continue requesting updates, and a pitch meeting creates a structural information asymmetry that is difficult to police. Fizz’s complaint makes that tension concrete, giving the case a significance that extends beyond two anonymous apps scrapping for dormitory market share.
Discovery is still underway. How Lu responds to the amended complaint, and whether Maveron faces any institutional exposure, will shape whether this remains a startup-versus-startup grievance or becomes a test case for investor confidentiality obligations in competitive markets.
