Gamador
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Gamador was a San Francisco social-game developer founded in 2010 by Kevin Lacker in Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch. It made Facebook games, releasing three titles quickly, and built Rankador, an analytics platform for social games it described as a 'PageRank for social games.' The company raised Y Combinator seed funding and made some money, but never grew fast enough.
02 / Gamador FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Gamador never grew fast enough to become a big success. Founder Kevin Lacker later said the Facebook games made a little bit of money and he learned a lot, but the company failed to reach meaningful scale and wound down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founding
Kevin Lacker founded Gamador and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch with YC seed funding.
- Games and Rankador
The company released three Facebook games at a rapid pace and built Rankador, an analytics platform for social games.
- Closure
The company did not grow fast enough and shut down; YCDB marks it dead. Lacker left to co-found Parse as CTO in 2011.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In 2010 Kevin Lacker founded Gamador and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch, raising YC seed funding.
- 02
The company released three Facebook games quickly and built Rankador, an analytics platform for social games.
- 03
The games made a little money but the company did not grow fast enough; Gamador shut down and is marked dead in YCDB.
- 04
In 2011 Lacker co-founded Parse as CTO, later acquired by Facebook for $85 million in 2013.
- 05
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.