Giant Pixel Launches Startup Studio For Tech Company Creation

Giant Pixel is launching a new startup studio to create mobile-focused application companies.

Based in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood, Giant Pixel is one of several companies looking to change the ways in which entrepreneurs and investors think about starting up businesses.

The company is the brain child of seasoned entrepreneurs and angel investors Alan Braverman, Elliot Loh, and John Cwikla.

Braverman has helped launch several large technology companies. He served as the chief technology officer and co-founder of the genealogy social network, Geni, and its spin-off enterprise social network, Yammer. Before Yammer and Geni, Braverman co-founded Mollyguard Corp., a payment-themed studio which spun off Xoom and Eventbrite, and cut his teeth as a software engineer at Silicon Graphics, eGroups, and Yahoo. Loh worked with Braverman at Yammer and at Geni, where he served as chief operating oficer; while Cwikla worked with Braverman at eGroups and held the chief technology officer position at Xoom and Doostang.

Like many of the companies and studios that have launched in recent years, the idea at Giant Pixel is to build multiple projects and spin off the successful ones into startups, Braverman said. The company will build three projects at a time and has already selected the first batch that it will be building.

“One’s in development, one’s in beta testing and one’s pretty much done,” Braverman said. “We’re working on a collaboration tool and we are actually working on a messaging tool,” Braverman said. Giant Pixel is also tinkering with an audio focused application also.

The way Giant Pixel operates is that everyone working for Giant Pixel shares in the equity component of each project that comes through the studio. “Our goal is to build a collaborative environment where everyone is rooting for these projects to be successful so that no one feels they’re working on the wrong project.”

Once a project reaches maturity it would spin out as an independent company and raise a round of financing. As part of the spinout process some members of Giant Pixel would spin out and become the founding team of the spin off company.

“We’re trying to make the seed stage a lot more convenient and less risky and less time consuming,” said Loh. “We’ve built a platform of methodologies and experience, and technology. All of our apps share some part of the same code base.”