Congrats to Flektor
Flektor, the online video/photo editing web application, was bought by MySpace. Not bad for a company whose product went into testing six months before and debuted just a few months ago.
But of course, the real story is who’s behind Flektor: Jason Rubin, Andy Gavin, Scott Shumaker and Jason Kay. Jason and Andy founded a little company called Naughty Dog thirteen years ago. They made a couple of games that sold like 25 million copies altogether, something like that. Scott Shumaker you probably don’t know, but he’s like the Tiger Woods of game programming. And Jason Kay is just the guy who would get this kind of thing going.
But anyway, the Flektor founders were at the core of Naughty Dog, then they left and started a new company. Maybe there should be a particular word for that, because that’s what ended up happening at Luxoflux. What’s very interesting to me is that they took this right turn into web applications from video games. It’s a transition I’m doing in my own much less sophisticated way.
Jason Rubin left Naughty Dog after giving a well-publicized speech about the need for game development talent to demand respect. It made a splash which led to very interested anticipation of what his next move would be when he expressed intent to “explore other options in the gaming sector.”
I think everyone assumed that he was going to start a new studio, and in fact I had heard “Jason Rubin Games” mentioned off-handedly. But he went for the Flektor venture instead. It should give pause to any game entrepreneur out there, because the message it conveys is that the opportunities in web software are better than in game software, even if you’re Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin.
Now that’s a thought which indicates that there’s something wrong with the game industry. Of course, maybe they just like programming in Rails more, but I think that’s my own imagination!
Anyway, if the $10 million thrown around for this is the full paid-up price, that seems like a heckuva deal for MySpace. But hey, no slight to Flektor for not getting more. Any liquidity event beats an illiquidity event. I’ve seen those, too. Well done, Flektors.