Founder of Grouper, now Crackle, tells the story of the company from founding to sale to Sony
Josh Felser / Re/code : Tweets: @joshmedia Tweets: Josh Felser / @joshmedia : In my 1st ever guest post, thx to @pkafka, hope you will enjoy reading the story of @Crackle, where I was cofounder http://recode.net/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Josh Felser is telling his own company's origin story: he cofounded Grouper, watched it get renamed Crackle, and lived through its sale to Sony — and this Re/code guest post walks readers through the whole arc from founding to acquisition. Founder-authored exit histories like this are rare primary sources; most acquisition accounts come from press releases or the buyer.
The timing matters because Sony's appetite for streaming assets did not end with Crackle. The company later built out a major anime streaming position with Crunchyroll, whose president Rahul Purini has discussed competing head-on with Netflix — making Felser's account an early chapter of the streaming portfolio Sony now runs.
First-order effects
- Felser hands other founders a documented, insider view of what an early-stage video platform sale to a consumer-electronics giant actually involved, from Grouper's founding decisions through the Sony handoff.
- For Sony, the retold history surfaces while its streaming holdings — including Crunchyroll under Rahul Purini — are actively positioned against Netflix, giving the company's streaming strategy a visible pre-history.
Second-order effects
- Founders fielding strategic offers from large media or device makers gain a concrete benchmark: the Crackle-to-Sony path is one of the few fully narrated examples of taking that route instead of staying independent.
- The independent alternative Felser's cohort passed on has since been mapped in detail elsewhere — the Anthony Wood Roku story shows what staying private and building a hardware-software platform looks like — which sharpens the sell-versus-build comparison for the next generation of video entrepreneurs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large consumer-tech conglomerates will keep assembling streaming capability through acquisition — Sony's move from Crackle to Crunchyroll being the clearest traceable sequence — which structurally reduces the number of independent outcomes available to video startups and pushes founders toward earlier strategic exits.
The trend: Video startups are increasingly absorbed into conglomerate streaming portfolios rather than scaling independently, with Sony's Crackle-then-Crunchyroll path marking the pattern.