It’s been an amazing 3 years since I dropped out of my EECS PhD at MIT and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley. My goal was to found a successful Silicon Valley startup that would revolutionize they way people interact with each other and the world using their smartphone camera.
After attending the Stanford Summer Institute of Entrepreneurship, I began recruiting an amazing team of engineers to found Focal Labs – most notably my fantastic co-founders, Brad Smith and Maxime Domain. Together, we built an early prototype of the Clixtr app (the first social sharing camera app) and connected with an amazing VC team, including the legendary Tim Draper at DFJ & several famous Silicon Valley angel investors.
Focal Labs Founders: Fergus Hurley, Brad Smith, Maxime Domain
As the first venture-backed mobile photo app company, we had the phenomenal opportunity to launch Clixtr, The Ultimate Social Camera, in front of thousands of people at TechCrunch50. The judging panel included Sean Parker, Reid Hoffman, Robert Scoble, Dick Costolo, Mike Schroepfer & rapper Chamillionaire.
After advocating the “mobile first” strategy at TC50 2009, we launched the web version of Clixtr.com in late 2009. Clixtr’s real-time, location-aware media sharing platform was innovative and far-reaching at the time. It went on to win the Silicon Valley Business Journal Emerging Technology Award for Social Networking 2009 and take home the grand prize at the first CES Mobile App Showdown in Las Vegas in 2010. We added a lot of social hooks to Clixtr and iterated the product, but soon realized if we wanted to own the mobile camera, what we really needed to build was a fast and easy photo sharing application.
As a result, we launched PicBounce in September 2010. It’s the “easiest and fastest way to upload a photo from your iPhone to Facebook or Twitter.” PicBounce was soon featured by Apple, and to date it has been downloaded over a million times. Through constant iteration and development, we added new features and filters. The user response was incredibly enthusiastic, with over a thousand reviews with an average of over four stars. Nevertheless, Instagram launched about a month after PicBounce, then Path, then Color, then LiveShare, and many many more! Therefore, even though we have a roadmap for what we still believe is the “killer” mobile photo app, we came to a simple realization: raising more money was not the solution. To execute our vision, we needed to be part of something bigger. Something with complementary skill sets and more resources, existing partnerships, and users.
After looking at both partnership and acquisition opportunities, we found RadiumOne. Today, we are very excited to announce that Focal Labs has been acquired by RadiumOne. Our entire team will join RadiumOne and our products will be supported by the company. Most importantly, we now have the resources to achieve the vision we had when we founded Focal Labs.
RadiumOne founder, Gurbaksh Chahal is one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in the world. His vision for RadiumOne is inspired by 13 years of being an Internet advertising pioneer and he has built an incredible team. We are the first acquisition by RadiumOne and we are extremely excited and honored to be working with him and the rest of the team which has grown from 7 people 2 years ago to over 150 today.
Last but not least, we are immensely grateful and forever indebted to all our supporters especially our users, colleagues, investors, advisors, friends and family for all their help and encouragement.
Thank you and happy holidays,
Fergus Hurley (@fergushurley)
RadiumOne Press Release link: http://radiumone.com/about/press/radiumone-acquires-focal-labs.html
