Apple Alumni Don't Fall Far from the Tree

After selling mobile ad startup Quattro Wireless to Apple (AAPL) in late 2009, Lars Albright took a job helping the iPhone maker work with its community of mobile app developers. He noticed that programmers were having trouble keeping users glued to their apps. Voilà: business opportunity. This spring he left Apple to start Session M. He won't elaborate other than that the startup has raised $6.5 million in venture capital and will help app makers build customer loyalty. Albright is one of a string of Apple managers and engineers who've quit to get a piece of the mobile app boom, a gold rush they helped create. Startups including photo-sharing app Color, tablet magazine Flipboard, and iPad textbook maker Inkling were all founded by Apple departees.

These alumni are using their Apple experience and relationships as a competitive edge. While building an iPad app for fitness trainers called FitView, former Apple engineers Calin Pacurariu and Rainer Brodersen ran into a bug. Unable to quickly fix the problem, Pacurariu sent a note to a former colleague. "Five seconds later, he said, 'Look at this, this, and this,' and sure enough, it was one of those three things," Pacurariu says.