OMGpop, YC Founder Story

Company: OMGpop (originally i'minlikewithyou) Founder: Charles Forman (co-founded with Dan Albritton; later CEO Dan Porter) YC Batch: Summer 2006 (one of YC's earliest classes) Industry: Social Gaming / Mobile Games Founded: Late 2006 | Acquired: March 22, 2012 Exit: $180 million acquisition by Zynga Final Download Count: 250 million+ (Draw Something) Founder's bank account one week before the $180M exit: $1,700

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The One-Line Summary

A twenty-something from Chicago who built a dating site as a joke, accidentally invented "gamification," spent six brutal years making 35 games nobody cared about, burned out and left with $1,700 to his name, and then got a phone call telling him he was about to become a multi-millionaire.

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⚠️ Why This Story Is Different From Almost Every Other YC Story

Most YC founder stories follow a clean arc: problem → product → traction → exit. OMGpop's story is messier, more honest, and arguably more instructive. It involves:

• A company that started as something completely different
• A founder who burned out and walked away before the win
• A CEO who wasn't the founder but delivered the exit
• A hit product built in weeks, after 35 failures over six years
• An exit completed one week before the founder had $1,700 in his bank account

For aspiring founders, this story isn't about genius. It's about persistence infrastructure, the systems, decisions, and pivots that keep a company alive long enough to get lucky.

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Lens 1, The Before State

Who Was Charles Forman Before YC?

Charles Forman grew up in Chicago as a kid who mowed lawns to save up for his first Nintendo. That detail matters, it's not a throwaway line. It tells you his entire relationship with games: visceral, personal, earned. He didn't play games because they were cool. He worked to be able to play them.

By his early twenties, Forman had a background in computer science and design but no conventional career track. He wasn't the polished Stanford dropout or the MIT wunderkind. He described himself plainly: "I'm more of a creative person than a technical one. However, I've been accused of being good at both."

What he had was a specific creative itch, he wanted to make things that people would feel something about. Not products that performed well on metrics. Things that mattered to real people, like a game a kid would mow lawns to afford.

The Personal Pain, Or Rather, The Accidental Observation

Here's the unusual thing about OMGpop's founding: there was no conventional pain point. Charles didn't start the company to solve a problem he was personally frustrated by.

He started it as a joke.

In 2004, he had spent two years living in South Korea and witnessed something that would shape everything he built after: Korea had just emerged from a devastating financial crisis (a $51 billion IMF bailout in the late 1990s) and rebuilt its economy partly through internet infrastructure and online gaming culture. Koreans were spending enormous amounts of time on browser-based games. It was the future, and nobody in the US was paying attention.

Two years later, Forman built a dating website called i'minlikewithyou, a Flash-based platform where users could "auction" themselves to flirts in the network. He saw it as entertainment, not a serious product. The entire website was conceived as a bit of fun.

Then something unexpected happened. People started spending two hours per session on the site. Strangers were sending snail mail with photos of themselves playing. Something about the combination of social interaction, games, and digital expression was deeply sticky, and Forman was sitting on top of it before he even knew what he had built.

Why He Almost Didn't Look Like a "Real" YC Founder

Charles Forman came from Chicago. He wasn't in Silicon Valley. He didn't have a CS degree from a target school. He wasn't building "serious" tech infrastructure, he was building a dating-game hybrid that he himself described as a joke. He was exactly the kind of founder who would second-guess whether YC was for him.

What he had, though, was something YC has always valued above pedigree: a working product that real people were genuinely obsessed with, built with almost no money, by someone who actually cared about the user experience on a human level.

Key Insight for Aspiring Founders

Your founding story doesn't have to start with a problem. It can start with an observation, something you accidentally built that people loved more than you expected. The key is noticing when that happens, and not dismissing it because it feels too small or too silly.

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Lens 2, The Idea Origin

How the Idea Accidentally Became a Company

Charles Forman did not set out to build a gaming company. He set out to build a flirting website. The pivot to games happened because he was watching his own users.

People weren't using i'minlikewithyou to date. They were using it to play. The auction mechanic felt like a game. The engagement loops felt like a game. The virtual currency he built to incentivize certain actions, that was gamification before the word existed. Slack's future CTO reportedly met his wife on the site. Chris Cox from Facebook later said the site's design influenced how Facebook's interface looked.

Forman was sitting in a cramped office in Midtown Manhattan, watching real people have fun, and slowly realizing he had built a game company that looked like a dating site.

The Name Change That Admitted the Truth

In early 2009, roughly two years after going through YC, the company formally rebranded from i'minlikewithyou to OMGPOP, and pivoted fully into browser-based Flash games. This wasn't a loss. It was honesty: we are a game company, and we've always been a game company.

The new platform launched with a library of free-to-play multiplayer Flash games. By 2010, OMGPOP had crossed 100 million game plays. The audience was real. The engagement was real. But the revenue? Almost nonexistent.

The First Version, 35 Games Nobody Bought

Here is what makes OMGpop's story extraordinary and painful in equal measure: between 2006 and 2012, the company shipped approximately 35 games. Not one of them produced the breakout hit they needed to survive long-term.

The games were genuinely good. Users liked them. Letters arrived in the mail. But the audience grew slowly and the revenue didn't materialise at the scale that would justify the team, the office, the investors.

Every founder who has shipped 10 products and gotten polite feedback but no explosive growth will recognise this feeling. The work is good. The users are engaged. But the curve doesn't go up the way it needs to.

The Pattern This Follows

OMGpop fits one of YC's most underrepresented archetypes: the accidental category pioneer. Charles Forman invented what would later be called "gamification", using game mechanics to drive non-game behaviour, years before the term entered the tech vocabulary. He was too early, on the wrong platform (browser-based Flash games when mobile was coming), with the right instinct. Timing and platform were the variables that needed to change. The instinct was always correct.

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Lens 3, The Application Anatomy

What OMGpop's YC Entry Actually Looked Like

OMGpop entered YC in the Summer of 2006, one of the earliest classes in YC's history, when the programme was still small and unproven. Paul Graham was still hand-selecting founders with unconventional profiles. There were no case studies of YC billion-dollar exits yet. This was before Dropbox, before Airbnb, before the playbook existed.

What Charles Forman brought to the YC application was essentially: a working social gaming website that people are genuinely obsessed with, built on Flash, with real engagement metrics, by two twenty-somethings in New York.

No revenue. No users in the millions. No conventional "problem → solution" framing. Just evidence that real people were choosing to spend their time on something he had built.

What Made the Application Work in This Context

In 2006, YC was looking for founders who could build things people actually wanted, the core YC thesis that Paul Graham had been writing about since starting the programme. OMGpop's application didn't need to justify a huge market or cite a category. The product demonstrated engagement directly.

The site had:

• Average session time of 2 hours (a staggering number for any web product)
• A working virtual currency system, novel at the time
• Real social graphs forming organically
• Engaged users sending snail mail