In 2012, three Stanford PhD students (TJ Purtell, Ben Dodson, and Ian Vo) and one Stanford Masters student (Will Wu) dropped out of the university to try to change the world.  Our professor (Monica Lam) was able to take a sabbatical to help us launch the company. 

 

The goal was give people the chance to protect their personal from data gobbling monsters, like Facebook, by building a new kind of social experience that protects users by giving them total ownership of their data.  We built a go-to-market plan to work with Android OEMs to rapidly scale the user base.  To make that happen, we recruited amazing talent in Taiwan to work directly with the manufacturers.  In 2013, during our session at the StartX accelerator, Omlet Chat was born.

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After three years trying to scale the chat business, we found it was too hard to move people over from the messengers where they already had their friends.  Users wouldn't move for protection, only for exciting new features.  So we pivoted to creating a social platform for mobile gamers.  Phones were just getting powerful enough to play AAA quality games and encode video in real-time, so we hatched the Omlet Arcade.

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Omlet Arcade launched in July 2016, bringing gamers all around the world the power to live stream directly from their phone.  The reception was amazing as millions of gamers came to hang out together.  The Arcade had huge organic audiences in South East Asia and Latin America.  With a growing community, we raised our Series A investment in 2018 and started growing the team.  As the company matured, the Taiwan team attracted amazing talent on the engineering and community side and became a hub of Omlet's operations.

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The Arcade grew and developed new features constantly over the years with hundreds of releases bringing features to help creators build community, make friends, and monetize.  In 2021, fueled by the growth of gaming during the COVID pandemic, we raised our Series B to continue development focusing on building the economy for Omlet Arcade.  In 2022, Omlet adapted a native blockchain wallet based on the Polygon network into the platform.  This empowered creators around the world to earn more money from the time and investment they put into building their gaming communities.

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As the COVID pandemic wound down, usage across live streaming platforms dwindled and many products by huge platforms shutdown, such as Microsoft Mixer, Facebook Gaming, and Garena Booyah.  Omlet was able to keep pushing into the space for a long time because of the efficiency and scalability of our technology, but we were not immune to the market dynamics.  In 2023, we took on one more pivot into Virtual Avatar streaming (VTubing).  Unfortunately, it did not monetize strongly enough to turn the company around, and we were forced to shutdown on June 30, 2023.

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We are grateful for the opportunities to work together and bring joy to millions of gamers around the world.  It brings a smile to our faces that 90 million gamers played with us, but also a tear since we had to wind it down.  Game over with love.

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