Patrick Ip’s new photography startup Catalog raised seed funding

Catalog co-founders Patrick Ip and
Jacobo Lumber
Day One
Ventures

• Patrick Ip, an ex-Googler who was involved in a Nobel Peace
  Prize nominated project, has a new startup called Catalog.
• Ip and his co-founder Jacobo Lumberas hope Catalog
  can create steady work and full-time jobs for independent
  photographers around the country. 
• Ip’s project at Google — One Billion Acts of
  Peace — didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but has
  documented 53 million so-called acts of peace thus
  far. 

When Patrick Ip joined Google in 2014, he was quickly introduced
to a man named Meng. 

Meng, whose full name is Chade Meng-Tan, was an early engineer at
Google turned full-time motivator for the company with the
memorable job title of “Jolly Good Fellow.”

In one of their first meetings together, Ip remembers Meng
pondering a new idea: “Google’s mission is to organize the
world’s information. What if we tried to organize the world’s
goodness?”

Meng’s idea would eventually lead to
a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

For Ip, it was a formative lesson about the power of innovative
ideas and technology. 

On Wednesday, Patrick Ip announced the
$1.5 million funding led by Moonshot Capital for his new
company — Catalog — and it’s a
slight departure from his Nobel Peace nominated work at
Google. 

Ip, along with his co-founder Jacobo Lumberas, created
Catalog to help small to medium-sized brands get unique,
high-quality product photography at a lower cost than what was
available before. 

“It just shows how arcane the process is, where the only thing
that is really a substitute [to Catalugue] are stock images that
everyone already has access to,” Ip explains. “On the high end,
the only other substitutes are in-house studios and
agencies.” 

One of Catalog’s first customers — an all-natural cosmetics
company named Naked Poppy — was quoted $7,000 for 15 photos
by an agency.

Catalog’s product shots, by contrast, only cost $20 per
photo. 

Ip said he saw the problem first hand while he was at Google. Not
having quality photography was one of the top reasons smaller
companies weren’t able to find success on Adwords — Google’s
search advertising service — and ultimately left the Google
platform. 

“What separates these highly saturated markets is the content you
have, the photos that tell your story to connect with people,” Ip
says. “I got to see the problem at Google’s scale, so I know
it’s huge.” 

To achieve lower costs, Catalog connects brands with independent
photographers around the country. They hope their two-sided
marketplace will create steady work for the photography
community. 

“[Photographers] can’t quit their [day] jobs on one-off deals.
They need to know that work will continue to come,” Ip says.
“[Catalog] could become a way for [them] to do this full time.”

If it can create more jobs for photographers and help small
brands grow, Ip hopes that Catalog could ultimately represent its
own act of good.

The project at Google — One Billion Acts of
Peace — didn’t ultimately win the Nobel Peace Prize, but
it did gain the support of 14 Nobel Laureates,
including the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond
Tutu. 

Over 53 million acts of peace have been documented by the project
thus far.