The Masterminds Behind Uber And Foursquare Are Teaming Up On A New Startup Venture
The new venture is called Expa, and it's a startup lab that will create and incubate new companies until they gain traction. It's similar to the Twitter co-founders' Obvious Corp and Max Levchin's HVF, according to TechCrunch's Ryan Lawler. In February, Lawler reported that Camp was raising $75 million to get Expa off the ground.
Camp is the mastermind behind Uber. It was his idea to build a black car service for the elite, and he hacked together the first prototype of the app with some of his graduate school friends. Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO, was an advisor who became the startup's second CEO, following Ryan Graves. Camp was also Uber's initial seed investor before firms like First Round Capital ever put in money. Prior to co-founding Uber, Camp created Stumble Upon and sold it to eBay for $75 million.
Selvadurai co-founded Foursquare with Dennis Crowley, but was forced out of the company in 2012. Since then, he's been trying to figure out what's next. He recently announced he'd be joining Camp as Expa's east coast partner.
Here's his blog post announcing his new role at Expa:
I am excited to announce that I am joining Garrett and Expa as a partner based in New York City. Expa is a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new companies. We have a few things in the works already at Expa HQ in SoMa. I will be helping on all these existing projects. And soon, I will launch some new products based in SoHo. We plan to work on just a few companies at a time, with our focus directed at areas we love and in which we have deep experience: mobile, platforms and marketplaces.
I spent much of the last year tinkering, reading and learning as much as I could from others. In all these explorations and sketches, one desire stood out: I want to create things that are good for the web. I want to leave the internet in a better place than I found it. With this new model in Expa and with a great team behind us, I hope to bring a lot of these ideas to life.
We're always looking for great engineers, designers and product minds to come join us. I'd love to work with you on our new projects both here in New York as well as in San Francisco, so please get in touch at join@expa.com.