Ex-Gowalla Founders Raise $2.1 Million for Last, a Stealth Mobile Startup
Josh Williams has been involved in geolocation services for quite some time. He's one of the founders of Gowalla, a mobile-focused location sharing startup he sold to Facebook in 2011, and worked on more mobile products inside the social network.
Context & Ripple Effects
Josh Williams' arc runs through one of the era's defining acqui-hires: Facebook bought his location-sharing startup Gowalla in December 2011, and by March 2012 the service had been shut down entirely after the 2011 acquisition, with Williams staying inside Facebook working on additional mobile products.
Raising $2.1 million for Last, a deliberately unnamed mobile venture, puts him back on the founder side of the table roughly two years later — and the pickup across TechCrunch, Medium, and individual investor accounts shows how closely the angel community tracks talent exiting Facebook's mobile teams.
First-order effects
- Williams and his ex-Gowalla co-founders trade Facebook salaries for startup risk again, with $2.1 million of seed capital buying them time to find product-market fit while keeping Last in stealth.
- Facebook loses another piece of the Gowalla team's institutional mobile expertise, which it absorbed in 2011 largely for talent rather than product.
Second-order effects
- Consumer location startups get a credibility signal: a founder whose first company was acquired by Facebook can seed-fund quickly, pressuring rivals like Foursquare — already shaken by co-founder Naveen Selvadurai's departure in March 2012 — to retain their own founding talent.
- Investors who missed or passed on Gowalla's original run now get a second entry point into the same founding team, concentrating early-stage bets around proven mobile operators.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, acqui-hires function less as endings than as paid apprenticeships: founders absorbed by large platforms re-emerge within a few years with sharper mobile instincts and easier fundraising, feeding a recurring cycle of talent out of Facebook and similar acquirers.
- Location-based social products keep attracting founder-led retries even after high-profile shutdowns, suggesting the category's failures are read as timing problems rather than dead ends.
The trend: Founders of acquired consumer-mobile startups increasingly treat platform acqui-hires as a launchpad, recycling their teams and reputations into new stealth ventures within a couple of years of the deal.