Welcome to YouWeb Incubator
In 2007, YouWeb created a unique “Cradle to Exit” approach to helping brilliant technical entrepreneurs achieve their ambitions! Unlike YC, we don’t require, (in fact we don’t accept), business plans or teams. Just a single technical entrepreneur who may not have an idea or a business plan, but a has great mind and a huge passion to be a founder in Silicon Valley. Created by Peter Relan, a successful serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley executive, angel investor and technology veteran for over 25 years, YouWeb works with the best and brightest young technical talent in the industry to create new products and business models. If you want to start your own company with a high probability of success, YouWeb is the place for you.
Read Peter’s blog for aspiring founders at founderquorum.com
Case Study: OpenFeint (Acquired by GREE for $104 million)
Jason Citron joined YouWeb at 22. A brilliant developer, who has been programming since middle school, Jason spun out OpenFeint from YouWeb, with Peter as co-founder in 2008, and by 2011 had built the largest social gaming network for smartphones in the world. YouWeb then found Gree Inc. a multi-billion dollar social gaming platform in Japan looking for a partner in the US to expand globally. In April 2011, Gree bought OpenFeint for $104M and Jason ran the OpenFeint business for Gree as CEO of OpenFeint, until recently when he started his next company, Phoenix Guild.
Case Study: CrowdStar’s Major Financing
Suren Markosian (2008 EIR), spun out CrowdStar from YouWeb in 2008 and quickly turned it into a profitable venture in its first year. Soon after that, with the help of co-founder Jeffrey Tseng, he launches Happy Aquarium and became the second largest social game developer on Facebook. However, looking into the future and observing YouWeb’s other companies like OpenFeint, Suren and Jeffrey recruited Peter to help raise $30M from Time Warner Investments, Intel Capital and Chinese gaming company The9 and pivoted the company towards mobile gaming starting with number one top grossing hit Top Girl. Today, CrowdStar is the leading developer of mobile social games for female gamers.
Case Study: Spaceport and BBC Financing
Ben Savage (2007 EIR), spun out Spaceport in 2008 from YouWeb and became profitable in the first year, also building Facebook social games. However, Ben saw the need for a cross platform game development framework as early as 2009. He began the difficult task of building a platform that would allow Flash developers to use the same workflow as they did on the web, but apply it to developing, marketing and monetizing mobile games. Since Adobe had abandoned the Flash player for mobile, Spaceport today is the only company that can enable Flash developers to build once, deploy everywhere, with native performance and over the air updates. In fact BBC, a major global media company, was so impressed that not only did they sign up as a customer, they agreed to invest in Spaceport.
Case Study: Agawi Licensing Drives more than $10M in Revenues
Rajat Gupta (2010 EIR) spun out Agawi (formerly iswifter) in 2011 from YouWeb, to provide cloud based gaming for the post PC era. Initially the target was just iPads and social games, but today the company is targeting all client devices and all types of games. With co-founder Rohan’s help and an rockstar technical team Agawi’s platform is so well liked that their licensing revenues have already exceeded $10M eliminating the need for financing in the short term.
Read more about our projects in our People section.
