Fred Seibert, the founder of animation company Frederator Studios, has long invested in the online video industry. With his newest venture, he will search for more projects worth funding. Seibert is one of the co-founders of Thirty Labs, a startup incubator that has raised $2 million in venture capital.
Seibert launched Thirty Labs alongside John Borthwick; Borthwick is best known as the founder of Betaworks, which devotes small teams to individual startups and builds larger companies for the products that prove most successful. Services owned by Betaworks include Bitly, Giphy, and Digg, and it has also invested in a number of major web-based companies.
Thirty Labs will take the Betaworks model and apply it specifically to the online video industry. The company’s team will be broken down into specific projects, with plans to expand the best performers. TechCrunch notes that Thirty Labs has worked on ten of these “alpha projects” so far, but details about them are sparse. The only one shared with the public is Crumbles, which was posted on Reddit late last year. It lets users cobble together short video messages using one-word clips from movies and TV shows.
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“One of the things we have seen over and over again with people who have ideas in the video space is that a guy alone in his room launching a product will have a tough time,” Seibert told TechCrunch. “Video by its nature needs an audience… and finding spontaneous ways to build out audience is very difficult.”
In addition to founding Frederator, which now runs a major animation network on YouTube, Seibert was also one of the founders of Next New Networks, a company that housed prominent video channels like Barely Political and ThreadBanger. Next New Networks, which was sold to YouTube in 2011, was a sort of proto-multi-channel-network, so it’s not an exaggeration to call Seibert’s online video work ahead of its time. For that reason, we’re expecting big things from Thirty Labs. Seibert says the startup will publicly launch its first projects in the coming months.
