The end is in sight for Churn Labs, the startup generator created by AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and AdMob's first engineer Mike Rowehl. Two new companies will be spinning out in mid-July, Hamoui tells me, and they'll be taking the Churn team with them.
This doesn't mean Churn Labs has failed, he says. In a way, Hamoui argues that it has succeeded. After all, the plan was never to create another Y Combinator, but instead to bring entrepreneurs together (the organization has offices in Irvine and San Mateo), have them churn through ideas, and then eventually spin those ideas out into startups that took the entrepreneurs with them.
"We actually wanted to start companies," Hamoui says. "We did, and now there's nobody left."
His description is pretty consistent with the way he described Churn when it launched in March 2011. At the time, Hamoui suggested that he and Rowehl would be the only people who remained indefinitely — everyone else would be joining new companies.
But it looks like the startup life (or at least the specific startups that were created at Churn) was too tempting. Rowehl decided to join the first spinoff, Metaresolver. And now Hamoui has been lured away by one of the startups that's planning to launch this summer. (He says it's too early to reveal any details about either of them.)
Churn Labs was funded by Sequoia Capital and Hamoui himself. He says there's still a little investment money left, and they're still deciding what to do with it.
Churn Labs focuses on building and iterating on new Internet and Mobile products and bringing the best to market. There are plenty of places where existing startups can get help, funding, and mentorship. Churn is not one of them. It does not want to just politely assist; it wants to do. Rather than find companies to help, Churn Labs finds entrepreneurial people: engineers, designers and product specialists and we brainstorm, prototype, and build companies together. It's often said that the...
Omar is an entrepreneur with deep roots in the mobile industry. After earning a degree in Computer Science at UCLA, Omar founded and ran several companies in mobile software and services. At the time, he was frustrated by the lack of available options when it came to promoting and monetizing mobile products. Omar realized that mobile service and content firms needed better ways to advertise and make money on the mobile Web. While earning his MBA at the Wharton...
Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms" and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms". It invests between $100,000 and $1 million in seed stage, between $1 million and $10 million in early stage, and between $10 million and $100 million in growth stage. The firm has offices in the U.S., China, India and...
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