Sources: Andy Rubin has tried to recruit personnel to help build a new Android phone company
For Andy Rubin, Android Comes Calling Again — Andy Rubin, the father of Google's Android smartphone operating system, has recently talked about getting back in the Android phone business after more than two years away from it.
Context & Ripple Effects
After leaving Google following his run building Android, Rubin had settled into investing — he joined Redpoint as a venture partner in April 2015. By December, sources say he was back recruiting people for a new Android phone company, ending any read of the Redpoint seat as a soft landing.
The recruiting report proved to be the seed of Essential: within about a year the same sourcing pipeline described him as working on a suite of consumer hardware products with a smartphone targeted for 2017. This article matters because it catches the founder of the platform attempting to compete on top of it.
First-order effects
- Rubin's hiring push pulls Android-experienced engineers out of Google and incumbent handset makers into a well-funded startup built specifically to compete with them.
Second-order effects
- A new Android entrant would sell into the same premium handset market as Google's own device partners, forcing those manufacturers to treat the operating system's creator as a rival rather than an ally.
Third-order effects
- The follow-through visible in the corpus — Essential shipping a consumer hardware line by 2017 — points to a structure where platform veterans spin up independent hardware companies on the ecosystems they built, decoupling founder talent from the platform owner.
The trend: Platform founders are increasingly returning as independent hardware competitors, using the ecosystems they created as the base for new companies.