A new filing in the Fizz confidential information lawsuit names venture capitalist Jerry Lu as a central figure in what the college social app claims was a deliberate campaign to feed its non-public data to direct rival Sidechat.
Lu is a partner at Maveron, the venture capital firm. According to Fizz’s amended complaint, he approached the company’s founders under the guise of exploring a potential investment, then passed what he learned to Sidechat’s parent company, Flower Ave Inc.
The Fizz Confidential Information Lawsuit Gets a New Defendant
Fizz says it discovered Lu’s role only through the legal discovery process. A screenshot of a text message attached to the filing allegedly shows Lu sharing notes with Flower Ave after meeting with Fizz in March 2022. In that meeting, founders Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer shared details covering Fizz’s ‘business strategy, growth plans, campus-launch playbook, user metrics, ambassador programme, fundraising efforts, and product roadmap,’ according to the complaint.
Fizz further alleges that Jack Burlinson, an acquaintance of both the founders and Lu, separately handed Lu confidential materials including Fizz’s investor deck and its autumn investor summary. Lu then passed those materials straight to Sidechat, the filing claims.
Lu went on to invest in Sidechat’s second seed round in October 2023, per PitchBook data cited in the complaint. Fizz alleges, however, that Lu had been in active discussions with Sidechat as far back as 2022, well before that investment formally closed. Neither Lu nor Maveron responded to requests for comment.
A Rivalry That Has Been Running Since 2023
The original Fizz suit against Sidechat dates to 2023. Yahoo Finance’s report on that original filing shows the early allegations included trademark infringement, a coordinated campaign to get Fizz delisted from Instagram by directing Sidechat’s own ambassadors to report its account as spam, and efforts to disrupt Fizz’s campus-by-campus launches. The complaint sought a jury trial, damages, and an injunction against Flower Ave’s interference with Fizz’s trademark. Fizz learned of the launch-disruption effort when a member of Sidechat’s own ambassador group chat forwarded those internal messages to Fizz.
Flower Ave has been active on the acquisition front beyond Sidechat. It picked up Yik Yak on 16 March 2023, folding the anonymous campus app into its portfolio. The integration was rough: Sidechat republished the Yik Yak app under the Flower Ave developer account, and users complained in App Store reviews about a forced migration from one product to the other.
Yik Yak itself carries a chequered history. It was previously absorbed in an acqui-hire by Square following earlier bullying and harassment issues, then relaunched in 2021 under new Nashville-based ownership with promises of improved moderation, before Flower Ave acquired it.
Sidechat’s Response and the Broader VC Question
Kyle Venn, CEO of Yik Yak and Sidechat, told TechCrunch: ‘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.’
Venn’s point about the current team is straightforward enough. What the case raises for the wider venture industry is less comfortable. Founders routinely share detailed financials, growth metrics, and product roadmaps with investors exploring deals they never close. Some VCs continue requesting updates from startups they passed on entirely, as founders have noted publicly. The Fizz confidential information lawsuit makes the risk in that dynamic unusually explicit: the core allegation is not that Lu stayed passively informed, but that he actively served as a conduit between Fizz and a direct competitor.
A 2025 New York slip opinion published by Justia confirms the case, styled Fizz Social Corp. v. Flower Ave, Inc., remains active, with the court referencing Flower Ave’s creation of Sidechat and its subsequent acquisition of Yik Yak.
Both apps are competing for the same anonymous-forum audience on college campuses, a market where traction is won school by school and where the UNC system has already moved to ban both platforms, citing bullying on anonymous networks. Fizz’s own format, which allows students to post a peer’s name and invite open commentary, illustrates precisely why university administrators keep reaching for the off switch.
The amended complaint did not add Lu by accident. If discovery has produced what Fizz claims it has, the Fizz confidential information lawsuit is heading somewhere considerably messier than a routine startup rivalry ever gets.
