Sure sure. You’ve heard the stories before. Cofounders reuniting to pursue another venture or found another company. Those are regular occurrences. What’s not so regular is when those cofounders reunite to run the same company. But that’s exactly what’s happening with Portland’s Urban Airship.
While cofounders Scott Kveton and Adam Lowry have been holding down the fort at the Portland office, cofounder Michael Richardson had moved to London to help stand up the UA office there. And cofounder Steven Osborn had left the company to pursue other projects.
Well, now they’re all back together. Here in Portland. At Urban Airship.
Michael has returned from London and Steven, the former CTO of UA, has been drawn back to serve as Principal Research Engineer, focusing on helping the company adapt to the changing market with new services and products—like their foray into iBeacon technology.
But Steven’s role isn’t the only thing that has changed, Steven now reports for Michael.
“I always told Michael I knew I would wind up working for him,” said Steven. “I just never imagined it would be at Urban Airship.”
He shared some other thoughts on the UA blog:
Anyone that knows me, knows I’m a sucker for new and emerging technologies and am always interested in the next big evolution in computing. Just as I saw a big opportunity in mobile when we got together to found Urban Airship, I saw great opportunity in connected devices or the Internet of Things (IoT). Having a strong entrepreneurial drive (or as my wife might say “suffering from the start-up bug”) I naturally go after what I see in front of me, which caused me to go out on my own in 2013 and co-found Smart Mocha.
While I wasn’t looking to come back to Urban Airship, it felt like I was being called home and the whole family was tugging.
It will be interesting to see what happens now that they’ve got the cofounding team back together—all with a significant amount of experience under their belts.
For more information, see Steven’s post on the Urban Airship blog.
[Full disclosure: Urban Airship was one of the first companies in PIE. I cofounded PIE. And another thing? PIE applications are currently open.]
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Great article, Rick. Glad to hear the founders are reunited. What a great opportunity — and huge success story for the PDX startup scene.