About
Built in a garage. On purpose.
GarageLabs is the SuperIntelligence Venture Studio, headquartered in Austin, Texas. We build our own companies. Ideas go in. Companies come out.
Story
Some of the most important companies of the last century have a garage in their founding story: a bench, a few tools, a light left on late, and people who refused to wait for permission. The tools have changed. The garage has not.
We started GarageLabs because this moment is rare. Machine intelligence is changing what a small team can build and how fast it can build it. We would rather lead that shift than read about it.
So we built a studio that builds its own companies around one idea: build the hard, boring parts once, and let every new company start at mile ten. Shared platform packages are how the second company is faster than the first, and the tenth is faster still.
Why a garage?
The soul of the name.
A name should carry a story. Ours carries two words, and both of them were earned by someone else first.
Garage
Garages are where great companies keep getting their start. Not in a boardroom, not behind a velvet rope, but in a cold room off the driveway, with the door cracked open and a few people who believed something before anyone else did. A garage asks for nothing but the work.
Labs
Labs is for the tinkerers. The ones who take things apart to see how they work, try the idea everyone said was silly, and try it again when it breaks. Invention has always been a little messy. That is how you know it is real.
Born in garages, sheds, and spare rooms
1903 · Milwaukee
Harley-Davidson
William Harley and Arthur Davidson built their first motorcycle in a wooden shed, about ten by fifteen feet, in the Davidson family's backyard. A shed, not a garage. Same spirit.
1923 · Los Angeles
Disney
Newly arrived in California, Walt Disney built a stand for his animation camera in his uncle Robert's garage, before he and Roy rented their first studio space.
1938–39 · Palo Alto
Hewlett-Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built their first product, an audio oscillator, in the garage behind 367 Addison Avenue. California calls it the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
1976 · Los Altos
Apple
The Jobs family garage is Apple's best-known founding story. Steve Wozniak has called it "a bit of a myth": the design work happened elsewhere. It was still home base when there was no money.
1994 · Bellevue
Amazon
Jeff Bezos started the company in the garage of a rented house. It had been turned into a rec room, so he called it only "somewhat legitimate." He wanted a garage anyway.
1998 · Menlo Park
Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented Susan Wojcicki's garage as Google's first office, after outgrowing their Stanford dorm rooms.
The tinkerers' honor roll
It always starts small.
A back room. A dorm. A gas station with ice on the floor. Labs is their word: try, fail, try again, and keep the light on.
- Garage
Jeff Bezos
In 1994 he quit a Wall Street job, drove west, and started Amazon in the garage of a rented house in Bellevue, Washington. An online bookstore, run from a converted rec room, with the whole internet ahead of it.
- Garage
Walt Disney
In 1923, newly arrived in Los Angeles, he set up his animation camera in his uncle Robert's garage in Los Feliz. Within months he and his brother Roy had a studio of their own.
- Garage
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard
In 1939 they started with $538 in a one-car garage behind 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Their first product was an audio oscillator, and Disney bought eight of them for Fantasia.
- Garage
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Apple's founding story lives in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Wozniak designed the first Apple computer at night, at his Hewlett-Packard cubicle and in his apartment, and has called the garage "a bit of a myth." It was still home base when there was no money.
- Dorm room
Michael Dell
Started PC's Limited in 1984 as a University of Texas freshman, selling computers out of his room at Dobie Center, then left school after that first year to build it.
- Office floor
Elon Musk
He and his brother Kimbal started Zip2 in a tiny Palo Alto office, slept there, and showered at the YMCA. Later, SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches failed. The fourth reached orbit in 2008.
- Garage
Palmer Luckey
At 17, in his parents' garage in Long Beach, he built PR1, the first prototype of what became the Oculus Rift, paid for with money from fixing iPhones. He kept rebuilding it, prototype after prototype.
- Back room
Wilbur and Orville Wright
Paid for every flying experiment out of their Dayton bicycle shop, took no outside money, and kept going back to Kitty Hawk after disappointing glider seasons until December 17, 1903.
- Lab
Thomas Edison
His Menlo Park lab carbonized thread, cardboard, grasses, and canes before settling on bamboo, then hunted through thousands of bamboo samples for a better filament.
- Coach house
James Dyson
Built 5,127 prototypes over five years before his bagless vacuum worked. By his own count, the first 5,126 failed.
- Garage
Mattel
Harold Matson and Elliot Handler, with Ruth Handler, started in a Los Angeles garage workshop in 1945 making picture frames, then turned the scraps into dollhouse furniture.
- Candy shop
Milton Hershey
His first candy business went bankrupt after six years, and the next one in New York failed too. The third, Lancaster Caramel, worked. Chocolate came after.
- Spare room
Warren Buffett
Sold gum and Coca-Cola door to door as a boy. In 1956, at 26, he started his first partnership with $100 of his own money, working from a small room off the bedroom of a rented house in Omaha.
- Gas station
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
Split a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making, scraped together $12,000, and opened in a run-down Burlington gas station with ice on the floor.
- Apartment
Sara Blakely
Still selling fax machines door to door, she put $5,000 of savings into an idea every hosiery mill turned down, until one mill owner called back.
Austin footnote: Michael Dell started here. Tesla is headquartered here now. GarageLabs builds here too.
GarageLabs carries that tradition into the SuperIntelligence era. Same open door, same late light, new tools on the bench.
History, told with respect. GarageLabs is not affiliated with any of these companies or people.
What we believe
Four things we hold to.
- 01
The best time to build is when the tools change. That time is now.
- 02
Speed is a discipline, not a mood.
- 03
A studio earns trust by naming what it will stop.
- 04
Companies should leave the garage standing on their own.
Artificial Ventures is GarageLabs' private capital partner. GarageLabs builds. They are separate companies.
People
The people
Joshua Bolin
Founder
Joshua founded GarageLabs in Austin, Texas, to build companies the way the great ones started: small, fast and close to the work. He believes we're in a unique moment, when superintelligence changes what a small team can build, and GarageLabs is built to lead that shift, not follow it. Batch 1 is ten companies, across law, money, insurance, education, security, health and more, all built on one shared platform. The companies he has founded include Artificial Ventures, Outside.com, and the ten companies of Batch 1: LegalNerds, MoneyNerds, PolicyNerds, Insureya, Christian Academy, Securefy, SalonASI, KidsMin, Payio, and Cleave Health. Joshua is a father of three and an active member of Austin Baptist Church, where he serves on the Board of Trustees. When he's not in the Garage, he's making YouTube videos with his sons.
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