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Gordian Labs was formed back in late 2006 as a boutique software development and consultancy firm. It was co-founded by five close friends and fellow techies who loved working together and building cool stuff, mostly in fintech: Robert Seymour, Andy Carra, John Wolthuis, Hrishi Dixit, and Bill Merrill.
We did several projects for financial and other institutions like Thomson Reuters, Bear Stearns, NYU, BountyJobs, MySQL, and others. Those paid the bills. What we particularly enjoyed was 0-to-1 bootstraps of tech startups, which we lovingly called "tech incubations" or "bench equity" gigs (these were often paid purely in equity). These didn't always pay the bills, but they were a blast to work on. Occasionally, some worked out well, like LearnVest, or Twilio! In fact, one of the Gordian founding partners went on to become a Twilio co-founder.
The old Gordian Labs ceased active operations in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession, as its principals moved on to co-found or take leadership roles in various startups like LearnVest, SoFi, Sindeo, and Yieldstreet.
The new Gordian Labs was resurrected as a single-member (me) advisory and seed investing firm in late 2024, 18 years after its original founding.
And that is the brief history of Gordian Labs.