In this episode of the Startup Foundations Podcast, host Greg Miaszkiewicz interviews serial entrepreneur Jude Gomila, founder of the knowledge‑mapping startup Golden and former CEO of Heyzap (formerly HazeApp). Jude recounts his path from early internships at a solar‑inverter startup and Synaptics, through a series of experimental ventures—including a peritoneal‑dialysis device, an egg‑packaging import‑export business, an alcoholic‑drink concept, and a digital photo‑frame OEM—before discovering a lucrative arbitrage opportunity with out‑of‑stock Nintendo Wii consoles (SourceWii.com). Using the profits, he moved to San Francisco, interned at ClickPass, and met co‑founder Imad (later of Mercury). Together they founded HazeApp, initially a “smart ballooning” idea that morphed into a Flash‑game widget that quickly gained traction on 350,000 websites. Their rapid prototype impressed Paul Graham, earning them a spot in Y Combinator with $30 k funding (double the standard amount). Jude describes the scrappy early days—visa lawyer costs, a $2 k/month SoHo flat, and running out of cash before Demo Day—highlighting the lean, experiment‑driven mindset that propelled Heyzap to later success and eventual acquisition by Fiverr for $45 million. Throughout, Jude reflects on the importance of taking initiative, learning by doing, and the value of co‑founder chemistry.
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Hello, founders and entrepreneurs. Welcome to the Startup Foundations Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Miaszkiewicz, and today on the show, I speak with Jude Gomila, who is CEO and founder of Golden, a startup mapping the world's knowledge. Jude is a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company, HazeApp, for $45 million to Fiverr in 2015. In addition, he's a prolific angel investor who has invested hundreds of startups over the years. In our conversation, we discussed Jude's journey as an entrepreneur and investor.
So your first company was Heyzap in the mobile advertising space.
Yeah.
Tell me the story of how you met your co-founders, how you actually ended up getting the idea for the company and, and making the leap to quit whatever else you were doing and start working on Heyzap.
Sure. So I might start in reverse because it chronologically matches. So I, you know, I was always into taking my own path. I never really wanted to work for someone. I did a couple of internships, one at a solar-powered inverter company. They put me in the basement of Cambridge University Engineering Department and put me on a really hard problem to solve the inverter's the capacitors failing on it. And it was an industry problem. They didn't tell me. I was naive and they said, go solve this problem. So I spent ages trying to solve this problem. And I came to the conclusion that this is an industry problem that everybody was working on, which I should have gotten day one. So I learned a little bit there. Yeah, zero feedback from the managers. It was terrible, but it was a startup, so it's kind of fun. Then I worked for another startup. So I worked for Synaptics. in the UK underneath the guy that set up Cambridge Sensors, which got bought out by Synaptics, which made— they made the iPod Touch dial.
Wow.
And so I was seeking working in startups and wanting to get involved in startups fairly early. I didn't really know about Silicon Valley. I love technology. I had been involved in various entrepreneurs programs like Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. I met Raoul there who's formed Superhuman. So we bumped into each other in Freshers' Fair when we were both 18 and weirdly squared off. It's like, what are you working on? It was always like, yeah, I'm gonna run a company. I'm gonna run a company. And it was just like weird, weird that we like wanted to do it and like didn't really know anything about that stuff. And I registered the company in the UK just to get kicked off with without an idea. And I was really scared of breaking the law when I, when I was setting up a Companies House company without any information, no context, no mentors. It's like, I'm just gonna try it and see what happens. Hopefully I won't break something. And it seems very formal, director this. And, but I, I was also tinkering with various projects. So I actually did a medical device project in my 4th year and we tried to turn this into a company. It's called Connectese. It was peritoneal dialysis machine. And we had redesigned all the different kind of components. And I was really keen to make this into a real project and turn it into a company. The other 3 people on the project didn't wanna do a startup. They were like, no, this is a university project. And like, you know, so it was kind of like trying to find ways to actually do a company. And that sounds kind of a bit strange. And then I started a proper startup with 2 other people and we tried a lot of different things. We actually got to about 5% UK market share on egg packaging. So we built—
Egg packaging?
Egg packaging.
Yeah.
We built an import-export business from China to bring egg packaging from China to the UK. It was all European packaging. So I learned a lot about that. And then the margins were zero. So we realized we weren't making any money and we couldn't make any money. So we got out of this business. Yeah, fun. And then—
What else did you do? Juice boxes?
We actually did look at building an alcoholic drink that would make you feel good in the morning. So actually, we would try to nullify all the effects of alcohol. We looked into legislation in the UK. And the Portman Group had blocked any of these kind of devices like that could be marked as a healthy alcoholic drink or other things like this. So we did look into that. And that team actually, we built an electronics product as well. And we were OEMing a digital photo frame from China as well. And it was actually a very good spec at the start. We broke into the UK, we had some market share, prices started to come down and we got pushed out of that. So I went solo overnight. I was broke. I was like minus $20K and I needed some money out of university. So I started working on SourceWii.com. I detected that Nintendo Wiis were out of stock in Europe in general. So I bought a bunch of them. So I bought them and I sold them at 3x the price and made some fairly good money. And from that cash flew out to San Francisco and said, I want to get into Y Combinator. So I actually worked with Imad who's working on Mercury, my co-founder of— So Imad had got out to San Francisco about 18 months, I think beforehand, and he got into a YC company called ClickPass. So I went and did an internship, unpaid internship at ClickPass for a month. So I got there on day 1 and the company was kind of not really going anywhere. So I just kind of took off and I was like, okay, I'm gonna get out of here. So I started walking around looking for a co-founder in San Francisco, meeting a bunch of people and meeting early YC founders and Imad was also looking for a co-founder as well. And we were trying to help each other with the co-founder search. Believe it or not. So we're literally trying to help each other find co-founders and we never, it just was so in front of us that we couldn't see we should just do it together. So we went and started up Haze App and we called it Smart Ballooning. We didn't know what we were building. We just thought, okay, let's just start the company and start thinking about what we're gonna build. And we went for walks. We used to go for walks in San Francisco talking about what idea we could make. And then we just picked one. Let's do gaming. We enjoy games. So we jumped into Flash games and we tried to make a prototype in a YC fashion, like overnight, like get traction in 2 weeks, no matter what. It doesn't matter what you build. It was a very different mindset back then, right? Less architecture, more get traction, get something that can blow up. And so we had made this, we compiled, we We pulled all the Flash games from the internet and compiled it into one widget and we built this thing that could be deployed on different sites. We somehow got 350,000 websites to install this widget. And so the traffic, people were playing this and they loved it. When they were bored, they could go to the next one. I had to learn CSS and frontend in like a week to production grade and get IE 5.5 working with transparencies and random shit that's not supposed to work. And Imran did the backend and we launched it and it got traction enough to get to YC. And then we met with Paul Graham on a sunny afternoon and on the roadside actually outside Mountain View and he interviewed us and he said, I don't know what you guys are making, but I really like you. So you're in. It was like, okay. It should have been a pointer to like, that's a very bad idea. Don't do it. I want you in, but pivot. It should have been, I want you in, but pivot to something I understand. So that was the start of Y Combinator and we got our $30K. They were giving out $15K. We asked for $30K, so we got double the money. And we used $20,000 of that on our visa lawyer. So we had $10K left and we're 3 months before YC starts. We get a flat in SoHo, around $2K per month. By the time we get to the start of Demo Day, we had zero money. We were in trouble. So I stopped there. The fun's begin. Yeah, the fun began.
All right, awesome, Jude. Thanks for joining us and thanks for the valuable advice you've shared.
It's great to see you, man. I hope you're well.
Thanks for listening to the Startup Foundations Podcast, the podcast that tells the stories of startup founders and how they built their companies from the ground up. Until next time, keep building and keep innovating.
