The creator of Google Voice left Google last fall to work on a new start-up, and now he’s ready to talk about what he’s doing.
Craig WalkerCraig Walker, who founded GrandCentral, which became Google Voice after he sold it, has started a new company called Firespotter Labs. The start-up, which Mr. Walker calls “a company creation shop,” will be a breeding ground for mobile and communications products that he hopes will become their own companies someday.
Google Ventures, where Mr. Walker has been an entrepreneur in residence, is investing $3 million in Firespotter.
Mr. Walker joins a club of other successful tech entrepreneurs whose recovery strategy after running fast-growing companies is to start labs where they can quickly crank out new products without any bureaucratic roadblocks. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg, recently left to start a similar company called Milk that is building mobile apps. Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, who recently left to work on new projects, started a similar lab called Obvious Corp. for rapidly building Web products before Twitter.
“Even though you have other ideas, you kind of put them to the side because you’re singularly focused on making that product successful,” Mr. Walker said about why he wanted to start a product-building lab after working at Google. “Maybe it’s a reaction to having some freedom.”
The new model works because it is easier and cheaper than ever to start Web and mobile companies these days, but harder to predict what will take off. And once the team makes something useful, like an easy sign-in or checkout process for an app, it can use those things in other products too, Mr. Walker said.
Unlike a traditional incubator, Firespotter won’t look for outside entrepreneurs to start companies. Its employees will come up with the ideas and develop them themselves, then hire people to run them if they become big and successful enough. Mr. Walker — along with his team of three engineers and a designer, two of whom he hired from Google — will advise the companies and make money by owning a stake in each one that it spins out.
“Small teams can work so fast, particularly when they’re the right DNA,” he said. “There’s no budget or review process. We’re just going to go knock this stuff out, and this is really fun and liberating.”
Firespotter is already working on three ideas, though Mr. Walker would not elaborate on what they were. He said he was broadly interested in communication as well as mobile tools that take advantage of the fact that people carry mini-computers with GPS, cameras and Internet connectivity in their pockets.
But don’t expect Firespotter to follow the trend of building social apps like the photo-sharing ones that are all over. Instead, Mr. Walker wants to build tools for big industries, which he wouldn’t name, that have not yet been transformed by mobile, to change the way they get feedback from customers or communicate with vendors, for instance.
“There’s a lot of things that to me sound like a feature, not a company,” Mr. Walker said. “We’re not interested in building mobile apps for mobile apps’ sake, or doing things that are a little more fun or goofy. The bigger challenge is how do you find big industries that have not yet embraced modern technology.” CREDIT CAPTION
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