Float was founded in February 2011 by Glenn Rogers, Lars Gelfan, and Yaron Schoen in New York City, New York. Established under the company name Pixel Paddock, a New York-based LLC, Float was officially launched on February 28, 2012.
Glenn had worked in the advertising industry for most of his career before starting Float. Having experienced the pain of scheduling teams across multiple projects at scale via a single shared spreadsheet, he figured there had to be a better way. He pitched a concept, originally named Curately (yep, a terrible name), to Lars, a workmate at the advertising agency, Razorfish. The solution would be fast, collaborative, cloud-based, and visual. Lars had already helped a client solve a similar problem at another agency and understood the pain point, agreeing to lead the technical development. Having experienced this issue firsthand at another agency where Glenn and Yaron met, Yaron joined to lead design.
The first version of Float was launched at the New York Tech Meetup and on Techcrunch on February 28, 2012. Float was originally accessible from floatschedule.com. The float.com domain was acquired in 2015, and the switch was made in August of that year.
Self-funded by the founders, they worked on Float nights and weekends for the first three years until it could afford them a salary. To this day, Float hasn’t taken a single dollar of outside capital, and remains proudly bootstrapped and profitable.
Yaron left the company in May 2016 and remains a good friend. Glenn moved back to his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, in July 2016.
If you’d like to learn more about the journey so far, Lars and Glenn shared the founding story on the recent 'Hard Mode' podcast and Glenn was recently interviewed for the Startup Playbook Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpOoydpG-E
The name 'Float' was chosen because it was short, easy to say, and simple to spell. It is also a project management term, with 'Float' or 'Slack' referring to the amount of time that a task can be delayed without causing a delay to subsequent tasks or the project's completion. Perfect for a scheduling app! (Wiki)
Glenn wrote a blog post about the naming process here: Naming your startup.
Page Ownership: Glenn Rogers
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