Andy Kleinman, who was chief business officer at Los Angeles-based gaming company Scopely and a general manager at Zynga, left the company to start a mobile products-focused studio called MobLabs.
Kleinman previously co-founded Vostu, a Latin American social gaming company, and later joined Three Melons, a studio that was acquired by Playdom (which was later acquired by Disney). Then he later went onto serve as a general manager at Zynga, before jumping into Scopely, which publishes and distributes mobile games.
“What I wanted to do was get out of games,” Kleinman said. “It’s been too many years of games.” This is funny because that’s literally what he said after he left Zynga too.
Kleinman said he wasn’t able to share too many specifics about what MobLabs is working on.
It’s a studio that’s intended to build and launch mobile products for massive audiences. That conceptually doesn’t sound too different from the kinds of incubators that others like Kevin Rose are building with North. MobLabs has 14 people total on the team and they’re spread out from the U.S. to China. There are three other co-founders, but Kleinman said they’re still finalizing their paperwork. The team has experience at companies like Zynga, Scopely, Disney and Yahoo.
“I was thinking about how to leverage all the stuff I learned from games,” he said. “I thought, why don’t we put a team together with competencies around these areas in mobile.”