AdMob Founder’s Churn Labs To Shut Down, Team Lured Away By New Startups

The end is in sight for Churn Labs, the startup generator created by AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and AdMob’s first engineer Mike Rowehl. Two new companies will be spinning out in mid-July, Hamoui tells me, and they’ll be taking the Churn team with them.

This doesn’t mean Churn Labs has failed, he says. In a way, Hamoui argues that it has succeeded. After all, the plan was never to create another Y Combinator, but instead to bring entrepreneurs together (the organization has offices in Irvine and San Mateo), have them churn through ideas, and then eventually spin those ideas out into startups that took the entrepreneurs with them.

“We actually wanted to start companies,” Hamoui says. “We did, and now there’s nobody left.”

His description is pretty consistent with the way he described Churn when it launched in March 2011. At the time, Hamoui suggested that he and Rowehl would be the only people who remained indefinitely — everyone else would be joining new companies.

But it looks like the startup life (or at least the specific startups that were created at Churn) was too tempting. Rowehl decided to join the first spinoff, Metaresolver. And now Hamoui has been lured away by one of the startups that’s planning to launch this summer. (He says it’s too early to reveal any details about either of them.)

Churn Labs was funded by Sequoia Capital and Hamoui himself. He says there’s still a little investment money left, and they’re still deciding what to do with it.