Canadian game accelerator and investor Execution Labs is shutting down.
Jason Della Rocca, cofounder of the Montreal-based company, announced on Facebook that the company has deployed all of its capital and that it will not be making new investments.
“Well, that’s been an intense and inspiring four and a half years!,” Della Rocca wrote. “Execution Labs was a crazy idea from the start, and we had no clue if doing early stage investing and providing hands-on support would enable entrepreneurial game developers to flourish. We now have 20 or so active game studios in the XL family, and they are all working on amazing stuff. So, we’re pretty sure the answer is ‘yes.'”
The company started in 2012.
“The awesome XL support team will be moving on to new adventures of their own. My co-founder Keith Katz and I will too, though we will still help our portfolio studios at a strategic (and sometimes tactical) level,” Della Rocca said.
“At a time when the game business has been evolving constantly, I have learned as much as I’ve mentored. I am thankful to all the teams for the amazing experiences we have shared together,” Della Rocca, and he thank all those who helped the company.
Della Rocca gave a talk at the recent Casual Connect Europe event in Berlin. He did a tongue-in-cheek session about why game startups won’t get funding, but he stirred a lot of criticism for his perhaps overly harsh views.