RYZ Labs, a Santa Monica-based startup studio and human capital agency, officially launched on August 17 to incubate new ventures and help existing businesses scale quickly and spend less.
Jordan Metzner and Sam Nadler, who founded the company last year, bring together their years of entrepreneurial experience. In 2006, their first venture was to create California Burrito Co., a chain of restaurants that started in Argentina and expanded to six Latin American countries. It still has locations in Latin America.
Later, the two built an on-demand laundry service, Washio, described as the “Uber for laundry.”
Most recently, Metzner and Nadler spent five years as senior director of product management at Amazon.com Inc. and regional director at Lyft, respectively, before deciding to return to their entrepreneurial roots.
The RYZ team incubates ideas and creates minimum viable products before recruiting leaders and preparing revenue-generating businesses for outside investment. The company makes money by taking founder’s shares in the companies it helps create.
“We’re really focused on building and creating new startups,” Metzner said. “And we’re still working on our next idea and hope to not only help develop more ideas over time, but also help support these startups with the agency side of our business, to help them with developers, designers , product managers, program managers and all they need to do to help support the ecosystem we are building.
RYZ Labs has been working in stealth mode for a year and has helped launch two startups – HipTrain, a marketplace for wellness coaching, and Offsiteio, a booking site for offsite businesses. According to RYZ Labs, both companies have grown significantly in less than a year, with HipTrain hosting over 15,000 fitness workouts and Offsiteio on track to surpass $1 million in revenue this year.
“Working with RYZ has been a game-changer for HipTrain. Our partnership has allowed us to quickly launch and scale our product cost-effectively and quickly,” said Joshua Ford, CEO of HipTrain.
Metzner said RYZ is a combination of his two passions: Latin America and building a business. Having lived and worked in Latin America for many years, he fell in love with the people there and said he believed in the technological potential of the region. The partners’ shared expertise in the region’s market, combined with their start-up knowledge, enables them to identify and engage with the best engineers in the region, he added.
