Sunshine, songs and six strings filled the mountain air of the 2025 WinterWonderGrass Music Festival this past weekend in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner. Today, after Sunshine released two equally mundane features – event organizing and photo sharing – internet commenters were decidedly mystified.I was also baffled last week, when Mayer walked me through Sunshine’s new offerings. Though there are AI components to all that Sunshine offers, it’s hard to understand how Sunshine’s new photo app enhances photo sharing as it exists today, and the same could be said of its new events app, which looks very much like something that was designed 20 years ago and, like other apps, encourages users to share photos tied to events organized on the platform. (The photos are hosted on Shine’s servers and “available indefinitely,” said Mayer, adding that users can share albums and send invites easily through text, iMessage, email and other communication and sharing platforms.)It’s tempting to dismiss the 15-person outfit as out of touch. But Mayer may be onto something with Sunshine, and that’s nostalgia