How do you become a startup founder? There are many paths, but often founders grow up at other startups. GroupMe co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are still pretty young. Both graduated from college only a few years ago, but both also did stints at other startups before creating group-messaging phenom GroupMe at last year’s Disrupt Hackathon and subsequently raising $10.6 million. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).
In the Founder Stories video above, Hecht and Martocci talk about their previous experience. Hecht was the biz dev manager at Tumblr. Martocci was lead software engineer at Gilt, and before that founded an email marketing image company called Sympact Technologies. There is nothing like learning on the job to prepare you for startup life. Their friends who opted for higher-paying salaries on Wall Street and elsewhere in New York City now want to copy them and start their own companies.
In the video below, Hecht and Martocci explain what GroupMe is for people who haven’t tried it yet. (It’s a group text messaging app that works over SMS or in-app). “We built this originally to go to a music festival,” says Martocci.
You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.
Steve is a co-founder of GroupMe.
GroupMe helps people stay connected and get together better with their friends. GroupMe’s two core offerings are: GroupMe, the group mobile messaging service, and Experiences, a service for finding, planning and purchasing group activities. GroupMe is based in New York and was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci in May 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in October 2011. For more information, please visit...
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