Last November, location startup SimpleGeo brought in former Digg CEO Jay Adelson to replace co-founder Matt Galligan as CEO. At the time, Galligan slid into the role of Chief Strategy Officer and became more of a public face for the company. Now he’s leaving the company entirely.
You can read the news on SimpleGeo’s blog here, as well as Galligan’s own thoughts here. But essentially this is something that has been in the works ever since Adelson took over those many months ago, Galligan tells us. With the company now transitioning into their next phase, Galligan felt the time was right to fully step aside. He’ll continue to serve as an advisor, but Adelson and SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump will continue to steer the ship.
While Galligan figures out what he wants to do next, he’s going to take an extended period of time off. He dove right into SimpleGeo (then known as Crash Corp.) after leaving AOL in May 2009. He sold his first startup, Socialthing, to AOL in August 2008.
But Galligan isn’t fully taking a step back from the startup scene during his time off. He’ll be helping out TechStars, giving the incubator a much-needed voice and presence on the west coast. Galligan has long had ties to the TechStars community, as Socialthing was in the inaugural class in 2007.
Additionally, he’ll soon be launching a non-profit foundation with Shervin Pishevar, a longtime entrepreneur and now a managing director at Menlo Ventures. Called “1% of Nothing“, the foundation will ask founders to commit a one percent stake in their company to be given to charity in the case of a liquidity event. Galligan did this himself, giving one percent of the sale of Socialthing to Community Foundation in Boulder, Colorado.
SimpleGeo has raised around $10 million in funding so far. As they enter this next phase, whispers have them out there raising more.
SimpleGeo provides a ready-to-use location infrastructure that makes it easy to ad location-aware features to applications. The company was founded in 2009 by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump and was acquired by Urban Airship in October 2011.
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