It must be something in the air. Spring perhaps. But when high level employees start to leave perfectly good startups before a liquidity event, there’s usually something pretty important that they think they need to work on. A recent example is Twitter creator Jack Dorsey starting his own mobile payments company. And today we saw Digg’s Lead Architect Joe Stump announce his departure to start something new.
It turns out Stump has teamed with Matt Galligan, who founded Social Thing and sold it to AOL last August. Big company life wasn’t for Galligan, he said in a phone interview this evening. “I’m an ideas and products guy, and needed to try something new.”
So what’s the new company? It’s Crash Corp., a “Alternate Reality Mobile Gaming” startup. Their games will mix the real world with fictional story lines – expect the first title later this year on the iPhone. They’ll also build on other mobile platforms, Galligan says.
Galligan, who leaves AOL at the end of this month, will be CEO of Crash Corp.; Stump takes the CTO role once he leaves Digg full time in June. The company, which will have dual offices in Boulder and San Francisco, has yet to raise funding, Galligan says, but they’re starting to pitch angels and venture capitalists now. My guess is they’ll be funded in short order.
One thing to note: Stump has clearly been working on Crash Corp. for at least a few months. On March 14 he said in a now deleted blog post (cached version here) that the company would launch classic games against your friends on the iPhone using Facebook connect. It sounds like it has evolved significantly since then.
Crash Corp is pleased to announce the launch of three classic games that you can play against your Facebook friends via Facebook Connect. We started Crash Corp built on the simple idea that playing classic games with your friends should be simple and, thanks to our friends at Facebook, we’re bringing these games to you.
The iPhone SDK for Facebook Connect delivers the familiar Facebook experience that will allow you to seamlessly take your Facebook friends and identity with you to your iPhone games. Of course, Facebook Connect for the iPhone also lets you share your gaming experience back with your friends on your Facebook profile.
Today we’re announcing three games that allow you keep track of multiple games using your built-in iPhone inbox and play at your leisure, against your Facebook friends, with a simple turn-based concept.
* Chess Wars lets you check your mates on Facebook. Crash Corp was founded on Garren’s idea that playing Chess against his friends on his iPhone should be easy. With Chess Wars we hope to realize Garren’s vision.
* Checker Wars brings back a classic, an old favorite of pretty much everyone. Why not challenge your friends and relive a little bit of your youth while you’re at it?
* Reversi Wars is a subtle and nuanced strategy game that has been a favorite of Joe’s for years. He’s looking forward to beating his friends and hopes you enjoy it as well.We’ll be submitting all three of these applications to Apple’s App Store in the next week or two. We firmly believe that we’ve created a seamless, simple and beautifully designed social gaming experience and hope you enjoy it too.
If you’re interested in participating in our private beta please contact Joe.
Update: From Galligan regarding the classic games: “Those apps are definitely still being released, however, not under the Crash Corp name. After Joe asked me to get involved, we decided it was best to move away from the board games, so we put up the splash page on the site, and will be moving the board games to a new company name, and spinning those out. They are almost ready to hit the app store…”
Joe will be speaking on mobile dev at MobiFestival in Arizona this weekend @Gangplank. Check it out at MobiFestival.com and GangplankHQ.com
Crash Corp link is broken?
yeah fixed.
Had met Joe at Startup Weekend. Good to seem him on TechCrunch … Good luck to his new venture Crash Corp.
Wow short headline. Good thing corp was abbreviated.
yes, it wasn’t my best headline ever.
I still believe my best headline ever was:
Twitter Suffers Minor Period Of Uptime
i can’t read that without chuckling.
http://www.tech...time-overnight/
Indeed
yeah, that one was pretty good. laughed my ass off when i read that back when.
however these days i think MG is giving you a run for your money on best headlines… better watch out.
*nerdgasm*
Just heard from my sources that are close to Digg executives that Digg is planning to acquire one of the real-time search engines next week. Not sure who that would be and whether this is going to really happen, but some speculation from my source says that it could be either http://www.boilingpage.com or http://www.twitutrly.com. Looks like Digg is in talks with one of these companies. I guess that’s a smart move from Digg. Anyone, any thoughts?
My sources say that your sources are very boring… keep it to your own blog.
Wow, huge news….or not
Everyone’s going mobile huh
think its not going to be all rosy In rose’s world.
it’s a good time to fork certain popular ideas.
Congratulations to both, certainly going to be an interesting product.
We were trying to contact them for a story on http://www.rev2.org and have had no success. We saw Joe speak many times, and never did he hint he was unhappy there. He should also consider a career in Hollywood with those acting skills.
I can’t act. I love Digg and the people there and have loved every minute working there. The opportunity to strike out on my own with Matt was simply too compelling.
Best of luck matt & joe! sounds like a fun gig
making games may even be a better job than blogging, now that I think about it.
meh
isn’t blogging a game for you anyway mike?
Best of luck to Joe and Matt! I’ve been beta testing their app for the last couple of months, and it’s amazing. The work that has gone into this application is awesome.
Grats Matt,
Good Luck to you guys, Cant wait to see what you do with this.
Bring some Innovation!
SD
Joe is one of the nicest guys around the SF tech scene. Who else would name a startup after his cat?
It’s just not fair Michael, to promote a website that doesn’t even exist as of now and write a page about it. I understand the creators are significantly successful in their companies and most probably they will come up with a brilliant idea. But how about other startups who die to to reach people using by this kind of websites and they just can’t. Because they are not in the valley and don’t have any relationship with you guys.
I know you don’t care what people want to see but at least try to be little bit more fair.
Thanks
Just a hunch here that ‘crash’ was named after Joe’s cat…
Is Sequoia China in Trouble?
Mike you guys removed Lacy’s post on and about Sequoia.
I believe you owe us your readers an explaination why you did this.
Oh and I still have a copy of the article.
I’d suggest folks google “Is Sequoia China in Trouble”
CIAO
having been through two liquidity events myself, and having seen people prematurely bailout of both, I can tell you that it is almost never about the opportunity and almost always about a loss of confidence in the end game. In the case of DIGG, they had a failed sales process and now we will see a number of people leave because there are NO buyers for the company. That is the dirty, messy truth.
I want to contact Joe, who can provide me his email? best vW
If anyone needs to get ahold of us, just contact us at “mail at crashcorp dot com”
Congratulations on your new project, Matt. I was a believer in SocialThing, and I know this is going to be a success, too. Are you taking inspiration from some Japanese mobile games? (I know stuff like RPGs and darting simulators are popular there.
Congrats Joe and Matt! Haven’t met Matt yet, but Joe is smart as hell — pumped to see the games.