Ah, the majestic serial entrepreneur in its natural habitat. GroupMe may have cashed out with a $50+ million acquisition by Skype (after the initial product was built overnight at a TechCrunch Hackathon, no less), but that doesn’t mean its founders are about to yacht up and sail off into retirement.
At this morning’s Twilio Conference, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson brought GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci up on stage and asked him, quite simply: “Is GroupMe going to be your last startup?”
His answer? No way.
Steve was actually the Lead Software Engineer at luxury designer deal site Gilt until about one month after launching GroupMe. He left the day his stock options in Gilt vested.
“Watching all of this, and working with Skype, and this company they might be folded into soon [meaning Microsoft, presumably]… it’s given me a lot of experience. I’m going to take that experience and re-use it with something else.”
Sadly, he didn’t offer up any hints as to what his next startup might entail — whatever it may be, Steve, feel free to launch it at another Disrupt Hackathon.
Update: For clarification, Steve’s folks have asked us to mention that this doesn’t mean he’s trying to leave GroupMe/Skype any time soon (they say “He is 100% committed to seeing Skype and GroupMe grow to 1 billion users and is not planning to go anywhere.”) — just that at some point in the future, eventually, he know’s he’ll be going in for another round in the startup game.
GroupMe is a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones and the web. The service allows you to effortlessly group text with the people in your life that are important to you. It’s totally free and works on every phone. GroupMe is based in New York and was founded in May 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft...
Steve is the Co-Founder of GroupMe, a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones and the web. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in October 2011. Previously, Steve was a Lead Software Engineer at Gilt Groupe. Before joining Gilt, Steve founded Sympact Technologies, a startup focused on developing dynamic images for real-time email marketing, and Bandwith.us, a friends and family ticketing platform...
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