Following in the footsteps of co-founder Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo CTO and co-founder Joe Stump has announced he is leaving the company today; In a blog post titled “Looking Back While Moving Forward” the former Digg lead architect talks about the recent Urban Airship acquisition of SimpleGeo and his future plans, which include a recreational vehicle and a “lovely lady” but don’t include SimpleGeo in any capacity that isn’t advisory.
“On October 31st, we announced that we’d been acquired by Urban Airship. I’m extremely excited to see what the combined teams cook up in the coming months. Having locationally aware push notifications is going to allow businesses to engage with their customers in ways they’ve never dreamed. Additionally, I know SimpleGeo’s world class engineering team will be able to help the new company build features at scale that the competition won’t be able to match. The best is truly yet to come from this company and I’m sure Scott Kveton will be a great shepherd moving forward.
As for me, I’ve decided to move on post-acquisition. I need to step away from the echo chamber and spend time focusing on what is important to me in general; not just professionally. To that end, my lovely lady and I have bought an RV and plan on touring around the Southwest this winter. I’d like to visit as many incubators and coworking places as possible.”
Raising $10 million from investor hotshots like Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Timothy Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and helmed by an all-star team of Jay Adelson, Galligan and Stump, SimpleGeo took advantage of the influx of location-based apps to generate buzz around its location infrastructure product, even if how exactly that product worked wasn’t that intelligible to laymen.