About Kevin
Kevin Gillespie is an undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying EECS and Business Administration in the M.E.T. program. His biggest passion is building teams to do difficult and meaningful work. During the pandemic, he founded Open-source Print and Protect, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that donated over 7,000 custom-manufactured face shields to essential workers. Now, at Gravity Platforms, he currently leads the development of the front-end app and our novel AI recommender system, in addition to his responsibilities as CEO. Kevin’s favorite hobbies are coding, songwriting, and playing jazz saxophone.
Why is Gravity’s mission important to you?
"Our first year in college, Jolene and I kept a note entitled “badger ideas,” where we kept a list of possible companies we could start. As we thought of issues that needed solving, we ultimately realized that every single one of them could be traced back to social media in some way.
Social media and entertainment has such potential to be an amazing force of human creativity and connection; in many ways, it already is. However, its structure has also created dire issues for which users and creators are not to blame. The fault most clearly lies with those at the top of the major companies, right? But then, how are they going to do anything when their livelihoods are tied to the very problems they created?
I can’t blame them either; their experiment failed, and now they are trapped. I do hope, however, that Gravity Platforms will disrupt them while truly taking on the issues of social media–not to tear it down, but to re-build it. We are re-building to return agency to our stakeholders and tear down dangerous false illusions. We are re-building to elevate creativity and information flow to ultimately bring us all closer together."