Our audience would love to hear more about your career and the trajectory that landed you here today.
Prior to getting into the gaming industry, I’ve always been a lifelong gamer. My dad was an engineer and he taught me how to build my first computer when I was four or five. I’ve always been around computers playing games with family and all that stuff but I never thought about joining the industry. Out of school I ended up working initially as a software engineer at Google and from there I think that was where I really got a taste of Google’s early slice of what AI looked like.
There was an app called Inbox which was by the Gmail team and there was another email client that was piloting all of the smart capabilities that came from gmail. So smart reply, smart compose, auto tagging, all the other stuff, I guess you can call it like AI nowadays. The technology around that and around tech synthesis and everything that comes with that. That was actually my foray into working as a professional in the tech industry. Later on everyone was kind of sad about it but they sunsetted inbox. It had become quite large and I think it hit half a billion users.
It was still massive but it wasn’t good enough for Google. For Google you’re talking about multi-billion. Basically most of the projects ended up harvesting all those features into gmail and then after that I ended up getting recruited out, EA reached out to me and was like “Hey, do you want to work in games?”
They were looking to build out product management disciplines for their publishing group. That was actually kind of my intro into gaming. Ended up going over to EA, and did a lot of the growth initiatives there.
I was working on all the subscription gaming stuff, basically rolling out EA Access that was initially the deal with Microsoft and this was prior to Microsoft getting into GamePass, Sony, Epic, Steam, basically built out that entire business. Then I went over and took a look at cloud gaming to see if it made sense from a strategic perspective, and I would say not really, so that’s why it didn’t really go anywhere, but I gained a ton of experience understanding how to distribute games. The deals that went into that and basically the marketing, tech, and publishing side of the business from there.
More Like This
Ended up working really closely with Maxis which is the studio that makes the Sims. They were building out their product management team and I moved over to help build it out because they wanted to become much more of a live service, but they wanted to have, I guess, more of the traditional either tech or Zynga like product metrics that were tracking mobile since it was really picking up. I helped build out some of the expansion content as a hybrid product producer type of role and then worked on a couple of expansions. Rolled out the Sims mobile as well. During that time, I think that was like a huge amount of growth.
And from there I caught wind of Respawn, which I think they weren’t acquired by EA yet. They were still doing a published deal fresh off of Titanfall 2. But Apex Legends was basically very early in R and D still at the time.
I was then fortunate to be able to join the Apex team build out.
It is really cool you were a part of building Apex, I know people that play that game everyday, it is still very popular!
Yeah, it’s crazy! Some of our team that we ended up bringing on that weren’t from the initial Apex team love the game, they are still playing it. It’s nice to see, it’s very rewarding. After that a couple of us left Respawn, as it wasn’t really a startup anymore. The culture has changed tremendously. They’re still an amazing organization, but I’m a startup person, really. I like small teams. We ended up starting a company and it’s been a little over a year now, but we’ve been in stealth in the Web3 space.
I’ve been in crypto or around crypto since like 2015 – 2016, just being a Degen pretty early on. I had a lot of friends in university mining Bitcoin in 2010 – 2011. They’re like you should get into Bitcoin. I’m like, what is this? I have no idea what this is?
Regretfully, I should have done that.
I know your team is in stealth now, but do you have any sort of timeline for when you will go public?
Yeah, we want to announce something like “Hello World” this year. Probably more towards Q3 or Q4. And then from there it’s mostly just slowly building up the community. Right now we’re still getting our bearings and I think we have a very good team, but it’s still the essence of what is the game that we’re trying to build? What’s the fun of it? We felt that if we don’t have those strong convictions to answer that yet, it’s like, well, is there a point in announcing, maybe not? We’re just keeping people curious for now.
For someone who has extensive experience in Web2 gaming, do you ever interact with people from that space who judge you for pivoting into Web3? Do you think those who come from very traditional Web2 gaming spaces agree with Web3 gaming?
It’s totally a spectrum, at least in my personal interactions with everyone that I’ve talked to. You obviously talk to or I know people who are totally anti-crypto, anti- blockchain, they are closed minded about it. They don’t really want to understand the technology. But the majority of it actually lies somewhere in the middle where their question is, Why would you want to use blockchain? What are the benefits of it? And I think that’s the big point of it. You can point them to some use cases where it’s a really good application of blockchain, and then they can say, all right, actually that makes a lot of sense. Things like payment rails and all the stuff crypto allows for.
I think there’s others where they have seen at least through media, when it comes to the last two years the whole play-to-earn scene. A lot of developers are looking into the space and they’re kind of analyzing, and they don’t think the economics really make sense. This model is fundamentally broken. Even us, as in the Web3 industry, are still trying to figure out what is the right thing.
But, I know the traditional AAA developers, that a lot of them actually have a very open mind, but they are adopting a wait and see type of strategy.
How do you see AI integrating within Web3 Gaming? With your history in the industry, how do you see AI disrupting the job market?
I think AI is going to disrupt everything. I mean, that was one thing where I’ve always thought from the beginning, or I guess maybe my foundations coming from and seeing how Google operated and the data they collected, it was already huge.
I don’t know if you can call it a red flag or it might have been more like a yellow flag, because there are concerns. It’s going to disrupt Web3. It’s going to disrupt every other industry that we work in. It’s definitely a huge natural evolution of technology, the next wave of the internet like Web3. And for me, that realization really clicked off when deep learning achieved what self driving cars were able to do.
Then from there I thought, all right, the skies will be the limit. It’s just a matter of timing. You touched upon job loss. I definitely think society as a whole, obviously with any kind of revolution there’s going to be losses, but I think as a whole, society is going to level up and jobs are going to be more intellectually stimulating for those and adapt. It’s the ones that don’t want to adapt who might be the ones that get left behind like everything else.
Where do you see the Web3 gaming industry, in six months, a year from now? Do you see it completely transforming? Will people still be using tokens in game?
That’s hard because we move so fast, two months and it’s something new. My macro view has stayed pretty consistent. The infrastructure is not there yet, we’re not ready. The thing is when you’re basically trying to reinvent paradigms of the internet and just the way digital economies function, blockchain technology isn’t performant at the scale of what consumer web is right now. And it’s not going to become competitive until it’s able to do so. Web3 as an industry, we talk a lot about it from a dollar perspective, it’s like, oh, there’s billions in the space and the transaction numbers are extremely high and stuff like that. But really, if you take a look at user count, it’s nothing compared to what Google and Amazon are doing.
It’s not to say that can’t turn around, but I definitely think there’s a lot of challenges right now, when it comes to user onboarding. I feel like a broken record, but what everyone else is talking about, where it’s user onboarding, there’s friction, there’s all this other stuff and you have to have a seed phrase and what about if you lose your money? Who do you go to? The whole thing around trust.
You don’t need to trust an entity, right? Everything is built around trustless mechanisms. There’s a reason why banks still exist for humanity. I have a much more realistic approach for what we’re doing and I can only speak to ourselves.
I think Blockchain and being able to have assets on-chain solve a very specific need for the game that we’re trying to build. That’s a reason why we’re using blockchain. I think prior to, because I’ve always been a fan of crypto, I’ve never actually considered building a proper business using the technology. But it wasn’t until what we were looking for in terms of, we have this idea for the type of game that we want to make. And it just made natural sense that I thought, oh, blockchain is built for decentralization and it’s built for longevity. One of the frustrating parts about games is that with every new wave of content that comes out, the older content becomes irrelevant.
Then people lose their value, that they put so much money into. Blockchain is a means to preserve that value and it’s just a different way to design around it. For us, that was absolutely a huge plus and it was something that we wanted to embrace. It was a natural fit to what we wanted to do. I can only speak on that perspective where it’s like, it solves the problem for what we’re trying to do. As a whole, I think we’re still super early, like a year out. I think the infrastructure is going to get significantly better.
Can you give us any sort of insight into what it is that you’re building? Is there anything that you could share with us about how it’s different then another Web3 gaming studio, or another Web3 game? Any little teasers?
The biggest thing I can say is that we are fundamentally building around decentralized storytelling. That’s probably as much as I could say right now. I can lead you to a bunch of examples where you see things like Momoguru, what that team is doing. I think very early on, like Loot Project and what Treasure is trying to do as well. But a lot of things around being able to build up an IP, build out a franchise from the ground up with community, being able to contribute to it and basically being owners from that. I think how it materializes is going to probably be a little different than what everyone else is doing. But that’s the gist of it, the long term mission of what we’re trying to do.
What do you think some of the hurdles are for getting Web2 gamers into Web3? I know the common hurdles that people say, but I’m curious, from your perspective, what do you think we need to solve in Web3 to craft more of those players in?
I don’t know if there’s going to be something obvious. I think the big thing around Web3 is the finance angle, you’re going to have your players on the traditional side, where it’s like, I just want to buy a game and I want to enjoy a game and not get monetized from it. I think the big thing is how do you balance the really good, really fun games that are at par with not in terms of visual fidelity, but in terms of just pure gameplay mechanics on par with what we’re seeing in the traditional realm? Then two, if you’re experimenting with an economy, the balance of that open economy is almost like make or break.
A lot of the time right now, it’s the initial whales that are coming in that are playing the game that’s affecting the economy quite a bit. Prices either dip or drop, and you could see in scary cases, cascading effects across everything else. Once that’s kind of out the door, is the game still alive or not? I don’t know. Most of the time it’s dead. You might be able to operate with a very low user base, but the chances of that going up is pretty slim.
Right now, it really is around this one thing that when I’m taking a look at the Web3 games, it’s none of these games I would actually, within the last, probably two years, none of the games were stuff that I would play. Intrinsically, I’m there because of some sort of earnings potential.
Is there anything you wanted to share on your perspective of Web3 gaming? Or anything you want to share with a Web3 gaming audience about either what you’re building or something you’re excited about in the industry?
I’ll talk about what I’m definitely excited about in the industry. I think Web3 has a very interesting opportunity, and I think I heard it on a podcast yesterday I was listening to with one of the Yuga guys. Web3 has an opportunity to run a new service model as they are coining or they have talked about it, “community as a service”. I think that’s one thing that you see a lot of, Triple A or Single A games that are trying to double down on “How do I become closer with my community?”
Web3 has definitely figured out something there because it’s mostly community on steroids, but now they have to take a step back and figure out what the product is, what is the product?
I’m super bullish and I’m excited about being able to be closer with the community that Web3 empowers. Then I think it’s around that decentralized storytelling and all the teams that are building around that. I think there is so much opportunity in the next wave of entertainment franchises coming that is going to come from this space.
My message to it is more of a matter of timing. I know everyone’s very impatient when it comes to like, oh, we want it now, we want our prices to go up. The next big thing is going to come next year, and hold a long time horizon. If you do hold a long time horizon, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed because right now I consider this almost at the bottom and there’s nowhere really to go but up.
There’s a ton of talent that’s coming in and I probably wouldn’t be able to name names, but there’s a lot of talent that have built amazing stories, very seasoned veterans, that are super interested in this space. It’s just a good indicator that there’s talent coming into it.
They understand, at least when I talk to them, they understand the power of the technology of blockchain. There are definitely going to be great products built out in the future, but you’re taking a look at like a five year time horizon.
