Harker Aquila interviewed Meograph CEO Misha Leybovich about Trio, a new form of social media built around creating mashups using pictures, videos, tweets, and texts from other forms of social media.

Q: What is the context for what you are building?

A: It’s basically creating video type mashups, using your own content, but also using other people’s content. This whole notion that with Tumblr, you use other people’s content for articles, with Pinterest, you use other’s people content to make galleries, and with ours, you use other people’s content to make mashups.

Trying to address some of the difficulty in creating rich media, the part that that addresses is where the assets come from, going you access to the world of different assets, so you can be creative even when you are at home, and not doing anything particular. You can still be creative.

Q: So is your primary market going to be more for newspaper journalists or are you looking to implement an acquisition through Facebook or Twitter where you can really incorporate this into a larger scale. What is your vision of where you want to see this product go?

A: Twitter did words, Instagram did photos, Vine did videos, and we are looking to do mashups. The business outcome is I mean, when you go into these things, you always try to build, you make an independent company. We’ve been working for the past 2 and a half years. We actually have a business model, with paying customers that pay for a web product that we built, now we are trying to address some of the shortfalls of the web product by building a big mobile audience.

Q: How did you come up with the idea?

A: Well initially, I wanted to tell my own stories. I had traveled to about 70 countries in the 7 years after college and I had collected a lot of media…I went to Everest base camp and I did Mongolian wrestling. But I am a dummy that doesn’t know how to use Final Cut Pro. So I was just looking for a way to mix together media I had collected and tell stories. Over time then the idea evolved. First it was a web product…and now it is a mobile app. Throughout, you just start to put it together.

Q: Can you talk about your funding situation and whether you are looking for funding?

A: We raised an angel round about a year and a half ago around our earlier product. We are fundraising now. You know, just talking to different angles, seeds, VCs about our vision for things. Fundraising is just a lot of being told “no” all the time. You just keep pushing, pushing, and pushing. It ends up being a numbers game.

Q: Can you share any tips or insights for students?

A: Get started practicing now. It’s cool because you have less risk now and can experiment and you have…opportunities to just try different stuff. In terms of technical stuff, build mobile apps. It took us embarrassingly long to realize that we need to make our product more mobile.