Flipboard

Flipboard is a news reading app that collects stories from publishers and social networks and lays them out like the pages of a magazine. Readers flip through them with a swipe. It launched for the iPad in July 2010 and helped define what reading on a tablet could look like. Press coverage has described the company behind it as a Palo Alto company since its early years. It still gives a Palo Alto address today.

Flipboard is not a giant employer and does not run a big campus. Its Palo Alto story is about founders who had already built companies in the area, a product that rode the arrival of the iPad and a company that kept going as social media changed around it.

What Flipboard does

Flipboard pulls articles, photos and videos from many sources into one place. A reader picks topics, publications or people to follow. The app turns those feeds into pages that look like a printed magazine, with large images and headlines.

Users can also build their own collections, which Flipboard calls magazines. By March 2016 the company said readers had created 28 million of them. Publishers use Flipboard to reach readers. Brands buy advertising inside the app. Reading is free.

The app is localized in more than 20 languages and runs on phones, tablets and the web.

The founders

Mike McCue was a serial entrepreneur before Flipboard. He had worked at Netscape and in 1999 launched Tellme Networks with Angus Davis, a former Netscape employee. Tellme built voice recognition services for telephone systems. Microsoft bought it in March 2007 for a reported $800 million or more. McCue stayed on for a time as a general manager, then retired in mid 2009.

He soon started sketching an idea for a better way to read the social web. Evan Doll joined him. Doll had spent about six years at Apple and was an early engineer on the iPhone. According to a 2014 profile in Entrepreneur, he quit Apple within weeks of meeting McCue. The pair started building in earnest after that.

Their timing was good. Apple announced the iPad in early 2010. A large touch screen suited exactly the kind of flipping, magazine-style layout they had in mind.

The 2010 launch

Flipboard released its iPad app on July 21, 2010, a few months after the iPad reached stores. It drew strong early attention. Time magazine named it one of the 50 best inventions of 2010. Apple named it the iPad App of the Year for 2010.

Other platforms followed over the next five years.

1. December 2011. Versions for iPhone and iPod Touch.
2. May and June 2012. Android, starting with the Samsung Galaxy S3, then a general release on Google Play.
3. October 2014. Windows Phone devices.
4. February 2015. A web version for desktop browsers.

In March 2014 Flipboard bought Zite, a rival reading app, from CNN. Zite's topic engine and recommendation system were folded into Flipboard. Zite itself shut down in December 2015. In July 2015 the company raised another $50 million from JPMorgan Chase.

The China edition

Flipboard's global reach brought it up against censorship early. On May 15, 2011, the app was blocked in mainland China, which McCue confirmed in a post on Twitter. The company later released an edition localized for China. Beginning in February 2015 that edition left out Twitter and Facebook content. Existing subscriptions to those services were removed automatically for users there. The episode is a reminder that a small Palo Alto software company can find itself making choices about governments and speech that are usually associated with much larger firms.

Later years and the open social web

Flipboard redesigned its apps in February 2017 and added a For You personalization tool in September 2021. In May 2019 it disclosed a security breach involving customer databases and reset passwords and connection tokens as a precaution.

The biggest recent change is its move toward the open social web. In December 2023 Flipboard began a phased connection to the fediverse, the network of services that use the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon among them. In December 2024 it launched Surf, a separate app that reads feeds from fediverse services and from Bluesky's AT Protocol along with traditional RSS feeds.

That shift brings Flipboard back toward its original idea: one place to read what many sources are sharing, without being tied to a single social network.

Flipboard in Palo Alto

Coverage of the company has called it a Palo Alto company since its early years. A 2014 Entrepreneur profile described it as based in Palo Alto. Wikipedia lists Palo Alto as its home, with offices in New York, Vancouver and Beijing, though we could not confirm the current list of offices from the company itself.

The company's own documents tie it to the city. Its privacy policy, as posted in 2026, gives a legal mailing address of 555 Bryant Street #352, Palo Alto, CA 94301. Its terms of service say that arbitration will take place in Palo Alto or another agreed location. We could not confirm a street address for a staffed Flipboard office, so treat the Bryant Street address as a mailing address only.

That makes Flipboard typical of many Palo Alto software companies today. Teams are spread out and offices are modest. The city still matters as a legal home, a meeting point and a place to hire. Our downtown guide and our page on University Avenue's tech history show how many companies have passed through the same few blocks.

Flipboard's place in the local ecosystem

Flipboard sits in a line of Palo Alto companies that tried to reshape how people get information. Google started downtown in 1999. Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006, during its Palo Alto years. Our Google and Facebook profiles cover those years. Flipboard took a different route, treating news more like a magazine than a list.

The city also has a long print tradition, from student papers at Stanford to local weeklies. Our history of Palo Alto's newspapers covers that side of the story.

Flipboard timeline

Visiting notes

For more companies with a Palo Alto chapter, see our companies hub.

Frequently asked questions