Ah, the majestic serial entrepreneur in its natural habitat. GroupMe may have cashed out with a $50+ million acquisition by Skype (after the initial product was built overnight at a TechCrunch Hackathon, no less), but that doesn’t mean its founders are about to yacht up and sail off into retirement.
At this morning’s Twilio Conference, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson brought GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci up on stage and asked him, quite simply: “Is GroupMe going to be your last startup?”
His answer? No way.
Steve was actually the Lead Software Engineer at luxury designer deal site Gilt until about one month after launching GroupMe. He left the day his stock options in Gilt vested.
“Watching all of this, and working with Skype, and this company they might be folded into soon [meaning Microsoft, presumably]… it’s given me a lot of experience. I’m going to take that experience and re-use it with something else.”
Sadly, he didn’t offer up any hints as to what his next startup might entail — whatever it may be, Steve, feel free to launch it at another Disrupt Hackathon.
Update: For clarification, Steve’s folks have asked us to mention that this doesn’t mean he’s trying to leave GroupMe/Skype any time soon (they say “He is 100% committed to seeing Skype and GroupMe grow to 1 billion users and is not planning to go anywhere.”) — just that at some point in the future, eventually, he know’s he’ll be going in for another round in the startup game.
