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Scott Lahman is co-founder of Los Angeles-based GOGII (www.gogii.com), the developer of group text messaging application textPlus. Lahman is also one of the co-founders of JAMDAT Mobile, the immensely successful developer of mobile games, which had an IPO in 2004, and eventually became part of Electronic Arts in 2006. We spoke with Scott about GOGII and textPlus, the shifting mobile market, and also what lessons he’s applied to his new startup.

What’s the story behind GOGII?

Scott Lahman: As you know, we did really well with JAMDAT and mobile games. We loved the mobile space, and when we sold Jamdat we felt that market was just getting started. However, we were a little burnt on all of the porting that has to happen to get games on worldwide distribution on a phone. We literally had 5,000 to 10,000 SKUs to get our products out worldwide. We felt there had to be an easier way to reach a broad audience in mobile, so we started looking at messaging. We knew messaging was early in the hockey stick here in the U.S., and already had been there worldwide, but that there had been no innovation in 20 years in text messages. That was our basis for doing something in text messaging. So, we really built some innovation into our platform, to make it ubiquitous in the mobile space. We called the company GOGII—literally, our short text code of 60611, which you can looks a little like GOGII.

Read the complete interview here: