Breaking Barriers: The Journey of a Next-Gen Game Developer Alexandra Takei

[Music] hello everyone and Welcome to our deconstructor of fun interview series I'm your host Jen donaho today I'm very excited for this conversation I have the pleasure of speaking with a fellow game industry podcaster and amongst many other things just an absolute rock star so Alex deay is here and I'm putting her in the hot seat so to speak so one of the things that I love about doing this podcast is the opportunity to talk to people across the game industry with different backgrounds different perspectives and actually just different time in the industry uh I'm often consider myself a little bit of a dinosaur and an OG and so talking to somebody from the Next Generation and highlighting their experiences I think is just really important for all of us to hear and all of us to understand it helps the younger folks really understand how to be an up incomer and for those of us that are older in the industry it helps us

understand the perspective of where those folks are coming from so I'm excited for this conversation because Alex is a NextGen game industry leader and a Trailblazer and has already lived the life of three or four or five different disciplines from big company strategy roles to being at a VC to being in game media and podcasting now to business leadership and a producer she is doing all of these things at a startup and hasn't even hit 30 but in fact she did win and was on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2023 so something I never did so congrats on that girl so since she's typically behind the mic for novic interviews I wanted to put her in front and hear her story we have a lot in common from also being Collegian athletes I'm a uh footballer for our European audience and cheated crew so we'll talk about being you know athletes being Gamers also being a little bit

direct and passionate in our approaches I think that's going to be a fun topic so we're going to get into all of this today and showcase her superpowers welcome Alex yeah hey Jen it's so good to see you in the studio and it's so weird to be on the other side of the mic I'm honestly pretty ecstatic to be here I've been listening to doth since twig one sorry well you know like some girls had like True Crime and I had de instructor of fun and Chris's son's basketball career so I started listening to the show back in like 2017 and so it's such a huge honor to be on the show today I feel like you're an honorary cast member every time we meet up at GDC or whatever it is you know we have a crew meet up and then you're there and it's it's just you're to me you're like honorary and so this is fantastic so let me first do a quick rundown of your key roles so that people kind of have that 30,000 foot view of what you've been doing when you're not hosting podcast so you

started off kind of business finance strategy at blizzard investor at bcrafty and business director and game development producer at Ruckus so Ruckus is a startup with former gearbox Bethesda Riot epic vets known for their work on Borderlands and Elder Scrolls I think you just had a recent games beat Venture beat a bunch of articles about your recent Investments that were really exciting for you guys and it was fun to see you kind of quoted in those articles and as a marketer well done on the messaging and positioning of that like very excited so I want to hear about your journey from the beginning how did you get into gaming I know you were a gaming nerd a lot like me but what did you want to be when you grew up when you were thinking about you know you're Peter Pan like you know what do you want to be when you grow up yeah so I entered the games industry like you mentioned in my intro out of

undergrad at blizzard which is a bit unusual but that's not exactly where my Story begins my entrance to games actually begins with filmmaking when I was younger in middle school and through high school I was obsessed with making movies I did programs at USC New York Film Academy a lot of onset and in editing lab production entered film festivals I had demo reels I want an honorable mention once for a documentary that I made and I was like huge on being a film director like I was a big Christopher Nolan fan David vure fan and I think like like there's an element of nobility and the ability to entertain people and put them in a suspended state of awe and I kind of always had that from the very beginning you know wanting to be a Creator myself however although my parents encouraged me to pursue any passion film school right out of high school seemed a little impractical and I had a pretty strong emphasis on academics growing up and as you mentioned I happened to Excel on Athletics I captain several sports teams and so I end up getting recruited to row at upen and then during my freshman year I kind of had this honest realization that I well I lack natural talent in

film Direction um I was genuinely just worse than everyone else and there's this Japanese concept I'm half Japanese called iy guy which is happiness being derived from the concentric circles of doing what you love but also being good at what you do yes and so I pivoted to film producing thinking that that might be a better path I got internship at Viacom and I just quickly learned that Hollywood wasn't going to be my thing something probably for entirely different conversation but at the time just playing a ton of games like Devil May Cry and a gargantuan amount of League of Legends and I had this Epiphany you know what if I could work in games I've been playing games my whole life I've been moved by the stories in the worlds of games even maybe more than movies let me go figure out if games is a thing and so I started cold emailing everyone in the pen alumni directory associated with gaming to see if I could support them in any way so this like blizzard Riot EA and I was also a venture capital concentration at Wharton and so I even emailed like VCS like gray Croft and March gaming which had shown an appetite for games

Investments I ended up getting in touch with this woman who permitted me to do pro boner research and I must have been doing something right because she invited me to this entertainment meet up in LA and there I met a USC game def design Professor who said you sound like you'd love to go to E3 I have free industry tickets if you're interested and if you help bag gift baskets I'll let you go to this Michael pner wed Bush party so I was like okay off to E3 I went to set the scene it's Assassin's Creed Syndicate Destiny taken king battle b or upcoming titles and the show floor was just like absolutely unreal and I remember thinking like holy crap this is super real and there's a business here I'm going to go after this and so after attempting to find employment on the show floor true story which now looking back is really impractical I made it to this wed Bush party in Willshire knowing zero people and after some awkward circling I find myself in a conversation with none other than Vince sella which if the audience doesn't know Vince sella is the original founder of Treyarch and the creative Call of Duty I didn't realize who it was

but basically once I did I was like this is the perfect person to ask for advice and I have this pretty interesting conversation with him and among other things he said something that's really guided my approach to games and he said getting into the game industry really depends on what you want do you want to be at the Rock label or do you want to be in the rock band I think from the business perspective you often gravitate towards the label because you either a fundamentally aren't gifted enough to be in the band or B the label is just a numerically bigger group so statistically it makes more sense to go after that just based on probability but this phrase really guided my time at blizzard where I aspired to get onto a game team and helped hone in on what I wanted to accomplish at business school and honestly helped guide me to Ruckus today oh my God so I'd love that story and I did something similar I went to Washington University in St Louis I did B School undergrad kind of similar we have very similar past just very different times apart and back then I had the look to the alumni directory and

I wanted to work for a toy company a comic book company or a video game company and the best that I could do was I found somebody that worked at Hasbro which was you know a toy company and so I called him and this guy Rick and he took my call and you I said how did you get to where you are today and what advice might you have for someone like me who's looking to you know get into the game industry and he said something very important to me that it's kind of why I do a lot of what I do today is somebody picked up the phone and took his call when he was in a similar position and so he's like I will take your call and I just please as you go forward in life pay it forward and and give that same advice and ironically we stayed in touch and he called me a few months after I graduated and said hey we had such a great call I have an internship open to make Star Wars toys are you interested because you were so passionate about it and I said I'll be

there in two weeks and so my very first job was making Star Wars action figures at Hasbro right at of University because I had the passion and the drive and the proactivity to do what you did which is the similar thing and so I think for you and for others just remember that that mentorship and that helping hand and we'll actually talk a little bit about that later can be such a way for you to kind of help the Next Generation get that shot is by giving a little bit of that time thinking about that pro bono time anyway so I want to get back to you sorry that was a a no I think that was really I think that's really valuable because I think the power of that should not be understated and yeah I think kind of hooking back to the story like that day at E3 introduced me to people who have become lasting connections that I still talk to to this day and who have opened doors and opportunities for me that I've never imagined and I think that I do think about paying it forward quite a bit so if anybody has a conversation with me who's related to my alumni Etc I try to help because I think

that you never know what that opportunity could provide for someone else in the future and I've been the beneficiary of so many people basically Pro boning their time and so I go to this experience at E3 and I basically when I return to school in the fall I like full- on committed I got really curious and passionate about the business of games too so I had like spreadsheets tracking m&a activity and proprietary engines and like I committed to my mission of getting into games either through the VC side or directly at a games company and I got extremely fortunate with an internship at blizzard and the fortune Factor kind of magnified several years down the line as I learned the truth a lot about the recruiting process as I become closer with those team members who have you know eventually become mentors I was an undergrad that he took a chance on when they were actually really looking for NBAs my co- intern was actually another MBA who was like seven years my senior and the first day of my internship was the day that OverWatch came out I remember it very distinctly May 23rd 2016 there was a party Ray gcro the CDO of blizzard and now he's at Disney I think was shooting a Farah themed

champagne gun while shouting Justice Reigns from above and I was like loky this industry is super sick I am never leaving and that summer I worked on the economies for OverWatch when it was super hot and Heroes of the Storm earned a return offer and I think this is also not to be understated but I resisted the Wharton pull to go back into Consulting and banking because everyone around me was doing that I feel actually very fortunate for having fallen to the hands of that team particularly and then from there the rest is kind of History I think about my experience on the Star Wars team is my very first experience and how it was so amazing and how that team and those people really you know brought me into the fold taught me about the toy industry allowed me to do things that I never like I had to go speak in front of like 700 people at Star Wars conventions I became a community manager and a and an evangelist for Star Wars action figures because no one wanted to deal with it like I ran the website and they actually told me they're like we don't hire our

interns you're here for 6 months and then go away go get some experience and then come back and then we'll hire you and I said [ __ ] you I'm going to be the first intern you ever hire and so I started to run the website I started to go to these conventions and then when my time was up they're like oh my God we have no one who can do this you're right and then they offered me the job and and I think those experiences kind of really just shape how you think about your career and what is it you want to do so tell me more about your your blizzard experience like how did that in a sense shape you and show you what you wanted to do inside of the industry like you said you still had all of these other paths that you could do what did you take away from that experience that has really like set the foundation for you today yeah I and I think that's right Jen I think when I have conversations with others that are trying to enter the game industry I'm like do not underestimate the amount of impact that your firstc employe or your first boss

is going to happen on you it's like you're very impressionable so you'll pick up a lot of things from that person or that company that may become like entrenched fundamental core values core memories if you've seen inside out that like sit in like your treasure Trove in the back of your mind but yeah I think I was extremely fortunate and I think I'll talk a little bit about why the first is that like it was a very topheavy team with like a treasure Trove of inventors and so what I mean was there was a lot of VPS and directors but very few analysts which is where I entered at and a lot of people like talk about work experience so like in a job description you're looking for requirements like 3 plus years of EX experience Etc or four plus years or five plus years and I kind of feel like years is fundamentally the wrong measurement this might be a little agree I might be kind of like now going and prizz my belief here but I honestly believe it should be like effective labor hours so like not lunch but like you know hours not about years because I had a Super Hyper concentrated experience for about four years of Blizzard where I kind of just like

cranked and it was like driven by three things one a very topheavy team of directors because basically you have like a couple analysts servicing a lot of different directors which obviously leads to a lot of opportunity B at the time there was a good amount of agency and mandate in the COO and the CFO org to get involved in a lot of stuff now whether or not that was good that we were there or bad is often circumstantial and very much depending on the project but it definitely for myself as an individual growth exposure to a lot of things and see kind of the alacrity from my side to just do a ton of work I used to try to beat my first boss into the office I could never do it he would like show up at 6:30 in the morning and to be super clear this is not blizzard culture but it was my boss's culture in a culture that I had also kind of passively absorbed from a lot of like the Wharton investment bankers at the time I was taught at school that you're going to wake up at 6:00 in the morning you're going to head into the office in New York City at 8:00 a.m. and you will be there till 2:00 a.m. in the the morning and then you will repeat that for 2 years and so

bringing some of that energy to Blizzard allowed me kind of to just like work a lot and I think the reason why I say fortunate is that I had the appetite to get exposure to a lot of different things I used to walk into director's offices when I was done with all my work and asked them for more but they also were willing to give it to me right and they also felt that I would be valuable on that project or whatever work they were giving me so I think it takes to to Tango in that sense where someone needs to show hustle to show up but then someone needs to answer the call that's for me like at a high level beyond the specific things that were going on at blizzard but the team structure was a very profound impact on the beginning of my career I think I remember when we talked before it also gave you a lot of exposure to the different kinds and parts of the business part of that comes from the proactivity so whenever I go and do my yoda sessions you know at USC and ironically now Berkeley and U UCLA are all jealous that I I talk always

about going to USC and talking to folks but when I give my yoda advice I talk to them about the four PES proactivity personality and there's one other one that I can't remember on the spot but preparation preparation yes I feel like some of the Next Generation aren't as proactive as they could be aren't as like what else can I do asking these questions and I feel like you had that insight to be able to say well can I help with this can I help with this can I help with this in a way that wasn't annoying and nagging but that was helpful you know one of the phrases I often say is in order for people to help you something is can you help me with this and when you ask it like that it gets people to really want to help you and then vice versa right you're offering that guidance and so as you did that what kind of exposure did you get inside the blizzard like some of your stories were amazing of like what you were able to do being you know like you

said like an undergraduate like right out of school you know Padawan Jedi who actually became a bit of a you know a Jedi master at blizzard in just like a few short years yeah well and again this is why I so fortunate because I feel like the team structure right there was a super Catalyst because basically like it's easy to dismiss resources when you don't need them right but at the time like there's like five or six directors and two or three analysts I think at one point in time I was pathing into like directors one on OverWatch one on Hearthstone one on all the classic games so D3 Starcraft star 2 Hots that included also Fenris Diablo 4 at the time and I was also on some of the long-term blizzard strategic and financial planning stuff and then I also worked in the Partnerships team which kind of like the Enterprise level ABK deals so like ABK Amazon ABK Google and I think blizzard also itself had an interesting structure where there are so many different games and all of those games have different business models different stages of economic health and so there's so many different incidents

and different projects going across all the franchises so by being multif franchise you able to experience a lot of different problems or structures of what you were working on so you know on OverWatch you have a PVP game that's incredibly successful very hot loot boox economy that then's getting shipped Away by the new battle Royals when they launch in 2018 that's also incubating a second game while also supporting an Esports league and so helped launch the over watch League helped thinking about the owl MTX program so that's kind of just like one ecosystem itself business model work on OverWatch 2 and making sure that like those resourcing and development in the team is set up correctly to some extent and then you have a game like Heroes which is kind of in an opposite State a game that's kind of in Decline a game that has an economy that's mismatched to the kind of player base that it has and trying to figure out how to support this game in a margin a creative way entirely different problem Hearthstone is another problem you have this amazing robust card pack

model but you have a bunch of players that are turning out because there's a such a large catalog so when people come back they've lost all the cards so you're thinking about kind of how to reinvigorate the Hearthstone economy launching a new game mode like Hearthstone Battlegrounds inside a game and then you kind of have like a game like a franchise like Diablo which like D3 for some reason is still printing box sales even though there's absolutely nothing to buy and you're like oh my God if I could just sell something for 2cent ARP down multiplied by this da would making a couple extra million dollars would be great but how do we get that done and so I think like the franchises themselves allowed me to experience a lot of different problems that games might have at different life cycles and as well as was a good mix of work strategic work like thinking about the business model of a game but also like the guts of the finance of the games my old Mentor used to make me do this thing called the blizzard Factbook where I had to assemble these stacks of financial reports cutting the blizzard games by region quarter Revenue stream platform splitting up the business by some like OverWatch one OverWatch 2 owl or this

other phrase that's like ped to call this financial forensics where I'd have to go and find where the missing Revenue was or what the costs were for bloating the quarter and I think that that p&l work focusing on cost which like nobody thinks is sexy Revenue sexy but cost suck right but it's an amazing way to learn about the business of the industry costs Drive the product cost Drive development developing those sort of early muscles in my early in my career helped kind of develop an applicable level of technical skill and like right now for example at Ruckus what do we got going on costs right and it's really important and I was willing to do a lot of that grunt work basically at a point in time I was also managing all the call centers for Team Four Team 2 Team 1s Etc and so I was learning a lot about like what was driving the Game Dev cost at a micro level which helped me understand kind of like where the resourcing is coming from what's something like odf Outsource development fees how does that interplay into the development cycle and so I think that there was a lot of a benefit at blizzard because within those

pnls right there's a lot of different things going on and it was a nice mix of actual strategy work actual impact PM stuff as well as kind of in the hardcore fpna realm yeah I think the important lesson there is doing the grunt work from the ground up gives you a foundation to become you know such a better leader to understand where you know where all the bodies are buried where are all the skeletons and you know one of the things I would love to do is have an Excel battle between you and Phil and I think that would be really really fun to have you two go at it attention app and game developers are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top performing apps and games with sensor Tower you get the ultimate Competitive Edge whether it's breaking into new markets fine-tuning your UA strategies or boosting monetization dive into Data like never before track Global Trends across app stores analyze Market leading inap

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product you get everything you need including event capture player segmentation feature Flags remote configuration AB testing experimentation live events calendar messaging retention grafing analytics and so much more if you're serious about running live services in a game get serious about the tools you use connect with heroic labs and make some serious cheese with your [Music] liveops well let's pivot to a little bit of a different discipline that you and I kind of both entered I certainly didn't have on my bingo card being a podcaster as a career opportunity for me after being a marketing leader in the games industry for such a long time so how did you decide to give this like content creator a shot and and what role do you think it plays in this journey of yours in the game industry well this is another thing that I could similar to you I never saw coming and it was something that kind of just fell into my lap to make a long story shorter

essentially when I was beginning at bigcraft novic had actually reached out to me to write something and I ended up writing this piece on gods Unchained which was a very popular article Gods Unchained by the way is a trading card game on immutable X web 3 trading card game and ended up going on the show with the old podcast host and that episode did well the written piece did well and then there happened to be a gap in the podcast post slate because one someone left and basically navic asked me to take their place and so I thought about it for a long time I was in business school and I was thinking you know maybe I don't really want to commit to this sounds like a lot of work but I ended up saying yes because I thought it would be interesting to understand and have empathy for what it means to be a content creator which is such a big part of the games industry twitch streamers YouTube creators Tik tokers whatever you may call them and I've learned like so many lessons from podcasting I think that the first is obviously just curiosity into so many pieces of technology and people and games and

business approaches across the industry I spend about 2 to three hours prepping for each episode and so again going back to my concept of principal effective labor hours it means that I'm working an extra like three to four hours on something is in games completely outside of my work and I learn a lot from it yep but I think that there's like some key lessons that I've learned from podcasting have been across communication specifically listening and steering as well as content creation like we like I said and and also selling which I think is also a really important skill that I think a lot of people undervalue and people think that like oh sales orgs are just this but like try to sell something it's hard right try to raise money it's hard and so from the communication side I think it really helped me level up a lot of my active listening muscles so being able to think about what I'm going to ask next while listening to somebody else it's helped for moderation it's helped for even just being in meeting being like I know what I'm going to say next but I'm still listening to you you know trying to

steer the conversation helping it stay on track also helpful for meetings and learning how to like kind of use mirroring skills for communication which is really important for helping someone feel comfortable so if you're acting like this and I'm marrying you then it's just a human natural behavior to like get comfortable with somebody else on the content creation side like how to build a show slate how to keep track of what's going on in the market and empathy for the content treadmill process which as you and I know when you have to ship episodes like every week or every two weeks you're like damn like cool when I have something to say but kind of the worst when I don't have anything to say but I still got to ship something right and that's the way that twitch streamers are that's the way that YouTube people are it's not as easy as people expect and then on the selling front like how to convince someone to come on air requires tailoring your pitch to what they want to talk about I personally think I use a lot of those skills during the fundraising process you have to convince people to say like hey my show is great but this is what you could get out of it this is why it would be good for you or your company and you know like let's be collaborative and think about what's interesting to

you I want you to have fun during this conversation I would say those are the core lessons that I have kind of learned from podcasting no I love it I think it applies really well to what we do in work I think you're right I think you hit on a lot of key things about what is it I just enjoy the idea the curiosity like you said I enjoy getting to talk to really smart people about things in our industry that are impactful you know every week when we do twig you know we get to that Monday Tuesday we typically record on Wednesdays and I'm like like what am I going to say like what article do I want to talk about what do I think is important and why on Earth would these people want to hear my perspective I mean that kind of goes through my head but then I think about wait you know each of us brings a discipline our experience and I think you do this as well is you bring your own experience in your own perspective and the ability to highlight different things that the audience is going to find useful in their life I think is why

I really enjoy doing this and I always learn a lot from your podcast and I can tell how much work you put into it I wish I put in I mean I I guess I put in as much work as you do but it is super clear and evident so thank Youk for for your homework because I every time you have a podcast I'm like I know that you've done your homework and that this has an implication for us in the industry and so I try to emulate that as well and so that's again where I think like you know we're a lot alike I wanted to you mentioned bitc tell me a little bit about your journey to also being a VC so so now you've had inside AAA company experience you have content creation you know you you've kind of dabbled in in that field of play and then you had VC experience too girl oh my God okay what what tell me about this yeah well as I mentioned I had kind of like an itch for VC even when I was in undergrad I was a venture capital concentration studied it primarily as my

form of finance and I've always liked the VC industry because I think it's a really nice combination of yeah okay like let's model out this convertible preferred and like etc etc but also like artsy enough to be like yeah but we just believe and I think I love that combination of there being like it's not so growth oriented or PE oriented that it's all about the numbers and I think that was actually like I think really fun and so I had this thesis you know back when I was an undergrad that maybe I wanted to be a games investor and this was prior to a lot of the gaming funds getting established in like around the 2018 2019 era and so what I tried to do when I got to business school at GSB was test that thesis is that correct or was I just saying that because like Vince said you know you want to be at the Rock label or in the rock band are you just trying to passively put your finger on the wall of an industry by being an investor right which is what I think a lot of people say they're like oh my God

I love sports but I can't I would never play sports I can't work at the NFL so like I'll be a sports investor and so I was trying to verify like is that true now that I've worked in games let me go try gaming VC to see whether or not like this thesis of mine is is accurate and ended up grouping up with the bit craft team could not say anything more highly positive about them I think I had a great experience learning about the fundamentals of venture capital especially as applied to games and so that's kind of like what happened right and I think that from there you kind of learn about you know what does it mean to do due diligence what does it mean to take something and move it through investment committee what are the questions that VCS are asking when they're evaluating an opportunity what are the dimensions Market Dimensions portfolio Dimensions risk how do investors think about risk how to investors think about teams and opportunities and I think that that stuff is really valuable because I think a good investor as I always say is like basically like the night on the chessboard right if you play the Knight really well it's not the Queen the queen

and the King are probably your Founders right but a really good Knight on your side I think is really valuable to ACC company and so I kind of like learned a lot about like how to be valuable to to to portfolio it's actually how I found the Ruckus group so there's just that as a general actual stepping stone to some extent invested in ruckus's seed round while I was at bit craft so I wouldn't have met the current team that I'm onon without going to bit craft I think that's kind of like where I see it kind of fitting in and then you know there's some decisions obviously of you know doing when is Venture the right time and how should a business school student think about Venture in their career but that's not your question so I will pause there no but I I think what is interesting about that is you're trying out like in a sense all of these different roles in the RPG that is your life correct and what I thought was super interesting is like okay so you've always had this question in your head Rock label rock band Ruckus comes along you know business people are often seen as the villains in our industry and and

I think there is actually a pretty strong reference to this in the recent game awards which I think is a little heavy in the value that we as marketing and business people bring so how do you now that you've joined the rock band and they have accepted you how do you show them that the business folks can use your skills for good and not evil because I think this is is what I would love a lot of creators and and game makers to He Is We are not your enemies and and you can welcome Us in and we can make you better yeah yeah well I think like you're really hitting a nail on the head there I think this is something that I like learned very quickly at blizzard where I was like there is there there's just this divide between the business people and between the creative people and we are not speaking the same language we have no empathy for each other's sides to some extent and I think a lot of of that comes from experiencing

something you know there's a saying by Brian chesky he's a CEO of Airbnb and he says people with the strongest opinions about things are usually those who have never done it right and so you have these all these Gamers who've never done business you have all these business people who have never done game development you're like well we're at a Crossroads aren't we that's a lot of the reason for why I was like hey if I love games what's the thing that I haven't done I've never shipped something I would love to take something from pre-production to production to ship to live because I think how informed the what right and I also have a very deep respect for creators I myself am a failed Creator I know what it's like to screen a film and have people laugh at the wrong moments it feels [ __ ] awful I have literally shown a movie in high school to the whole class and they are laughing and I'm like wait that's not a laughing moment that's a very serious moment and it feels so awkward and you're like so upset because it's like a manifestation of you on that screen and so I think that approaching with that approach respecting the craft I think is

one of the most important lessons that a business person can learn and then try to be open-minded about like learning about how and then given the constraints of the how you have to find a way to impart business into that right so I think like something that I'm learning and and think the production seat has been so humble is like oh crap no wonder all these people at blizzard were telling me that I couldn't do this idea with my three skew model because of this engineering thing that I didn't understand and I was like but like make it so simple just give me three not two and then you get in there and you understand the complexity and you're like oh I can understand why the way and the manner that the game is hosted informs practically the kind of business model that you could potentially implent in the game and I think like that understanding is that empathy is like kind of you know one thing that I think business people could really benefit from because you can't just pitch infinite ideas especially if you're going to go operate you have to be able to actually execute it right and if you

don't know how to execute it then you might not know what to execute I just feel very much that I believe that those two things are you know the same side of the coin yeah my favorite and probably most successful times for the business was when I as a marketer was part of the team you know I was a member of the leadership team my voice was a voice that was listened to by the GM just like the designer just like the producer and I feel like the one team one dream approach where business is also a part of that as well and that you know sometimes is a PM and sometimes as a finance person when you've got that one team one dream approach which sounds like what you have at Ruckus I think that can be the most successful because all of the voices are included there's an inclusivity of the different perspectives that I think make it better for everyone so is that what you are experiencing today at Ruckus like being a part of the team and having your voice heard and actually being out there

pitching and raising money too yeah the pitching part is kind of another a whole other can of worms which I was very humbling to kind of go directly from the investment side of you know being super comfortable you mostly say no and then you go the other side where you're like I just need one yes anyone and you have to tell a story you're basically going from the you know from the on from the investor side to the entrepreneur side but going back to like the the primary question which is kind of about like this Collective multiple perspective sitting around the table I do very much feel that that is the way that it is and in through that process you can impart you know why the thing that you've been saying why people say freet to-play businesses are important why people say that like live businesses do better right you can understand the motivations of either party so you can better navigate and path through the charb barus and the skilla to go to a Greek mythology example path your boat through those constraints and so it's also about like being open-minded and being like Oh hey like I want to do a leaderboard and then the CTO says well if you want to do

a leaderboard you have to understand that like this is the way that the game would have to be hosted and then you realize oh actually hosting costs money too and so if we're going to host it in this way and you want competitive Integrity you have to be pretty convinced that leaderboard is going to impact LTV retention conversion or something else to offset hosting you know there's some trade-offs right and then you start to understand and that's just like an example of like Tech and business but there's also like a my of other things there's obviously design and business and design and Tech and you know art and performance and that's also another huge impact so you realize there's all these pieces and all these people sitting around the table and I think that kind of like Collective conversation helps you basically not make decisions in the dark and I think the other important thing to kind of highlight the difference of like what it means to be a game startup is that everybody at us at because we're a startup has a vested interest in making

money right because it's not like a place like blizzard where you have something like wow that can float the cash flow right we have to think about business because we implicitly a startup that is what the point of a startup and an entrepreneurial Endeavor is and so I think that that is also it's also an environment thing right where there's a focus on you know building a brand new IP but also building a brand new IP that we hope resonates with lots of players and also allows the studio to survive and I think that mindset I think is for me very different from maybe what I experienced at blizzard where there was a lot more comfort in the fact that blizzard will be around tomorrow no matter what right yeah yeah the safety net that you have at a big AAA company versus the you know that feeling of like there's not a lot of safety net when you're at a startup also the multiple hats that you have to wear I think you know the thing that I always thought was interesting being in a big company is

you you play a very specific role on a team when you're at a startup and my startup time was similar is oh my God the hats that you have to wear and right now you're wearing a lot of hats like how has that evolution been for you to you know try on like even a producer hat which is very outside of your original competency yeah like how has that been yeah well I think what you learn is you try to make parallels the first thing I want to cave out is that production looks a lot different at every single Studio that you go to right and so you know there's development directors there's line producers there's art producers there's EPS there's lots of different types of styles but I think one of the primary production rules that I'm playing is more on like project manage management right so like here's the the Milestone plan that the game director wants to build right and now we're like okay well how do we achieve the Milestone plan how do we take resources put them against certain features and initiatives how do we scope that break that down to Sprints and then

how do we track the project over time to make sure that we're moving at the right clip and I was like hey actually upon analysis this is incredibly similar to forecasting and pacing the business I'm like okay units were up on September let me pull the curve out let me see what the units are going to land at for the quarter oh [ __ ] we're going to be short initiative to make more money something like that and it's kind of very similar right where you're kind of like trying to say like hey like this thing is on time this thing is off time and so trying to take those parallels from the skills that I already developed from something else and then applying them in a different Arena now obviously it's not exactly the same but I think that's how you help yourself learn something new and I think the multiple hats thing for me has actually been a huge Boon I love the job because turns out at a startup you literally cannot ever run out of work which is amazing it's just like an infinite amount of work which is exactly the problem that I had at blizzard when I was finished my work I would like wander around like a lost puppy looking for work and that's how I like found

myself in a bunch of director's offices but like here you know in a startup where there's so few resources and there's so many things to do you have such an opportunity to expose yourself to something different and I've really found that to be a ton of fun because you kind of get to play roles across operations Finance Business Development legal strategy culture communication and you're kind of flexing into places that yeah you might not know how to do everything but I think this is also kind of going to mentors and also the podcast right I've been able to learn about a lot of things that I didn't know how to do off the shelf from the people that I've surrounded myself with and had conversations with so although I might not be the expert I'm like I know somebody who is the expert let me go talk to them about how they would approach this problem and then think about how that would work on my team bring that back to the group evaluate it and say like hey is this the right approach should we make tiny tweaks to it Etc so I I love what you're highlighting which number one is there's always something you can take from your background even if it's not a direct

onetoone and you can figure out how to apply that framework to something new and I think you gave a great example of being able to do that I think you also mentioned you have to flex your style and it reminded me you know you and I had this conversation that was really interesting on a twig episode that I did a couple of months ago I shared some of my challenges I tend to have a bit of a direct approach and I tend to in some cas that has been called especially being a woman has been called being aggressive or you know words that would if I were a man it would probably would be a little bit different clearly you're passionate clearly you're proactive and you're going after things and it's has to be a part of what makes people successful in the startup is exactly what you're highlighting is the ability to go after these things and I you know I I see a little of myself in you as as we talk through this you know the direct approach that really passionate approach something that is not often expected or

often appreciated by everyone that we work with especially when it comes from a woman and I think a lot of it comes from our Sports background too I mean when you're raised to do Sports it is like you know I don't ever believe in yelling at people but that competitive like let's go let's win let's do this so what has been your experience I mean we're now of like a little bit of a different generation maybe it's more accepted maybe it isn't but what's been your experience in how your style has manifested with others how do you kind of reach across the generation gap what's been your experience and what advice might you have I think the number one piece of advice that I have again and this is kind of like maybe a theme or a through line of this episode is empathy so get educated on how you're impacting others and how they potentially see your behavior because only once you understand and believe that you have

work to do or that you need to change or that you understand why somebody is reacting the way they are reacting to you from only there like can you get better and I think like I recently read creativity Inc by Ed catwall and in that he says there's something to the tune of like people don't improve by understanding what their strengths are people like improve by understanding like where their biggest gaps and weaknesses are and I think that a lot of people believe that an athlete's strength you know and this is why like athletes get recruited to go to Banking and blah blah blah blah is because they work so hard right and I believe that you can learn work ethic from a lot of things but I think that the fundamental strength of being an athlete is actually being incredibly coachable you walk in to practice every day expecting to get totally [ __ ] on by your coach and you have to accept that unless you're like Neymar you're just like such a rock star that like you can get away with doing anything most athletes show up every day being really open-minded today your stroke wasn't good today you didn't perform very well like today you rock

the boat and you're down to starboard right and this is just rowing examples but there's a million in all sports and so I think like that's the number one thing that I would say is get educated and be open-minded about like what it's like to be on a different team and I think for myself right like one of my first Endeavors of being on a entirely Dev team though I did have a kind of mini experience with that I uh worked on product management and the economy for a small Sandbox game called astroneer it was made by a studio called system a software CU they sold a devolver so like that was kind of like a mini Prelude but you kind of start to learn hey like this is the way a development team would prefer to be communicated with and you kind of have to be willing to to flex your style and shift and shift those things I actually think that this experience is something that you cannot learn in a classroom you can't go to business school to learn these things you can't study anything to learn this and it might be actually one of the most uncomfortable things that someone has to deal with in their professional career because a lot of the more recent maybe

gen Z and I'm not trying to make sweeping generalizations here but a lot of people just like want to be themselves right which is great everybody should be themselves but you shouldn't think about it as not being yourself you should think about it as like this is the culture there's like norms and habits and behaviors here and if we want to move as a unit and we want this boat to be balanced you have to row in line right to go the fastest you can go and don't think about it as like not being myself but think about like how can I as Member One of eight of this boat blend with the stroke I think that's kind of like at least the high level thought process that I've kind of coached myself through to be clear it's not always super [Music] easy step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach in Revenue exola provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition

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[Music] performance you know the my goal is to become like a universal translator you know to in the words of the great Star Trek which oh we'll hit on that later or dakoda ring right and so the idea is I took this class when I was at Disney it was called solution selling and so basically it was the dis personality test so there's four kind of key Personalities in the world and and people are generally a blend of two of them and there's an update that uses like birds to kind of give examples so the eagle is the like the leader the B bulb like let's get [ __ ] done like go go go the parrot is the hey I just I'm I'm an extrovert I like to talk a lot I think out loud and by the way I'm a combination of those two then you have the owl which is the more analytical a little bit more introverted typically like more of an engineering mindset and the dove is someone who's really concerned with the feelings how is team Health how is everybody getting along and so what you know they told us is if

you can quickly identify the person that you're talking to what kind of personality are them and then you flex your style into speaking to them and how they want to be spoken to and I think that's the most important thing is in this world of authenticity is a lot of people are like well I want to just be me and it's not exactly that you can be you but you should still respect the other person and meet them half way and how they want to be spoken to there's another great book called Never split the difference by Chris Voss he's an ex FBI hostage negotiator the book changed my life and my perspective really teaching what you're talking about tactical empathy which is how do you recognize and empathize and put yourself in somebody else's shoes so that you can really establish that communication and once I started to you I call it my Jedi Mind Tricks once I started to really adopt some of this it helped me soften my bull in a china shop edges of hey I

just want to go out there and do all the best things to okay like you got to like reach across the aisle so to speak to use almost like a political term and mentors were also really helpful to me in this journey a lot of people help me soften my edges or help me see this and because to your point I was very coachable I'm like all right I always want to be growth oriented I was able to kind of grow with that how have mentors helped you not only in this area but like in all of the different areas of your career like what role did mentorship play for you yeah mentorship for me is is huge honestly my relationship with mentorship probably begins as a child because my mother my mother's cic anesthesiologist she very much was a working woman her whole life was interviewed to be like the vice chair of medicine at like you know universities Etc I had a nanny Growing Up So my mother was very much also like my career Mentor I first saw saw her as like an adviser and then saw her as a mother and that's really

switched up over time but I think I felt like my parents very much were my mentors and how to behave in academics how to behave in sports like and a lot of the underlying values that I think have helped guide me today I think come from parents which I think I guess you could think see of as a form of mentorship and so I'm very thankful to have had those experiences because it obviously shapes a lot of who you are and and how you show up but I think mentorship is also so so important because you need to surround you become like the PE the average of the people that you surround yourself with and so I think of very much of surrounding myself with mentors who are going to not just support me but also be like yo you're actually wrong in this if you should be way more confident than you are about something and I think that I picked up these mentors who I'm so grateful for a lot of them come from my early days at blizzard but even you know some of the people that I met at the E3 story that I told you about and it's kind of come full circle where like here's this person that I cold emailed and then we kept on recolliding and recolliding and

recolliding and now this person is and I are kind of like in the same you know kind of thought leadership bracket and so I think that it's really important to surround yourself with those people because you can learn a lot from the mistakes that they've made or the approaches that they have taken because you're just one person you can't think of every idea on in the universe and sometimes you know someone saying hey this is the way that I thought about it what would work for you is a really valuable thing to have and and I think it's also like you said before like it also helps make you want to pay it forward and I think in a mentor relationship you want to make sure that not only are you learning from the mentor but that Mentor is learning from you right about how to Mentor better or even like something that you can teach them about like the maybe what it's like to work at as a different age or as or gain empathy for working with other women or you know explaining how you saw something that impacted you as a woman and that person may not have seen it that way at all but you're like but this is the way that I felt and this is the way that lots of other women feel just as an FYI I think it goes both ways to

your point which is now that I'm a little bit more advanced in my career I'm actually reaching out to a lot of younger folks because I want to keep my finger on the pulse and learn from them about you know areas that I might have blind spots in also for career advice you know I have to still be C humble and I've reached out to a lot of people in my industry and I you know especially when I went on a Consulting journey I was like I called everyone that I knew and luckily because I had always had good relationships with people everyone took my call and I'm like what are my superpowers like what do you think I'm really good at how do you think I could add value as a consultant I don't know and I don't think I could have done any of it without that feedback and I think what's important for people to know is make sure that you are maintaining those relationships along your journey because you never know when you're going to need to pick up the phone and ask for help I think we're all very confident we're all

rock stars but sometimes you need to ask for help and make sure you've got those relationships because it could be a peer it could be someone senior or someone Junior that you need to reach out to and ask for help that's been super valuable for me and it's actually you know why I love talking to you because you offer me a different perspective on things for somebody so similar in many of our way many of our things yeah and I think like that's another really interesting call out there about like asking someone else you know what your perceived strengths and weaknesses are I actually did this interesting exercise at business school I think and GSB might be a very specific Place Stanford is known for focusing a little bit more on interpersonal Dynamics and some of these like what we would call touchy Fey words versus some other business schools but in in one of the classes that I took they broke down like power into like a couple of different like subcomponents you know confidence being one of them Intelligence being another there's like a couple other dimensions and it's like seven items and then you were asked to rank you know one to seven seven being

the max one being the worst how you Faire across like confidence intellectual intelligence ambition but so there's like a couple others and then you were supposed to pick a co-pilot Pier who was also going to rank you on those dimensions and it was so interesting to watch the disparities between like how sometimes you see yourself and how someone else sees you right yeah I I think it's so important and it changes as your career advances I know I've done like strength finders I've done all of those tests and it does change a little bit as you get older and listen I know I am not high on the empathy scale which is really interesting because I deeply care about the people I work with my wife always jokes that like I'm the biggest softy and I have the biggest heart but because it work I'm just you know I want to win I want to get [ __ ] done that empathy wasn't coming through in a lot of my behavior and so something that I always have to work on is really dialing that

up and really paying attention to that and because I've done that a lot recently people don't say that they actually think I rate highly on that which is it cracks me up because I I know that I've had to really work on that is there something that you would recommend for you know the the Next Generation folks the people that are coming up like what advice might you give those folks of like how to approach from their approach to work or ways to come about like getting what they want what what's your kind of final advice Before I Let You Go my first and foremost advice especially as it pertains to video games is that I have a lot of conversations with MB and undergrads and if you have an opportunity to go do what you want to do just go do it don't be concerned about some sort of like resume thing uh having you know a bane or a BCG or a McKenzie because I think again like a lot of the reason for why I was able to accumulate so many experiences was because I kind of well skipped McKenzie for three years

right and everything and again I was very fortunate because I happened to fall into a team of a bunch of EX McKenzie people but I learned everything topical to the industry that I fundamentally already knew with utter conviction that I wanted to be a part of and so that that's the number one piece of advice like don't be scared to go do what you want I remember being like absolutely terrified of graduating and being like Oh my God I'm going to have to go into Banking and my life's going to be so Miser right but you don't don't have to be miserable just like take the B by the horns and like go make it for happen for yourself and maybe that's the second lesson is that if you want something I think don't be afraid to to chase it I think that you have to show up you have to go to the room you have to make yourself uncomfortable and that level of uncomfort could be like something different for me it was a lot of times like showing up to a party and knowing zero people and just standing there with a drink being like I have truly H someone at some point in time comes and talks to me or it could be something else right like there are things that and then you learn and build those muscles over time but I would say go and

try and expose yourself and also try to do something really substantive right you know it's one thing to get there and talk and it's another thing to get there do actions learn something have an impact on a business have an impact on a team I think that those are sort of the key lessons and also don't be afraid to ask for help or ask for work I think my boss I think originally was like stunned when cuz I would ask him I would be like hey like what else can I do how can I help you and he was just like Oh weird weird that you'd want to do that most people will say like oh I finished all my work so I must not have anything else to do so I'll wait yeah right yeah don't be afraid of of basically kind of going out in a limb because what's the worst answer that could happen someone says no I don't have anything for you go home early or go play video games or something like that it's not that big of a consequence so I'd say like those are some of the things that I would think about especially for games don't underestimate the value of mentorship and make sure you're surrounding yourself with smart people who you want

to be like the least smart piece person in the room I think that's something else like you want to be the dumb one and you want to learn from a really smart people if you if you're looking around and you're like I'm the smartest person here probably got a problem yeah no I hear you well one little final bonus note I wanted to add you're a little bit game industry famous because you're a podcaster however to my Star Trek reference earlier you have a famous family member who is George deay who is the great Sulu from the original Star Trek he's also announcer on Howard Stern which I've loved to hear him as the announcer on Howard Stern in his social media like he so funny what's it like having a famous member of the family and I think you're going to rival him soon you're you're you're right up there Alex I don't know about I think we're very far from that I think he he's been in like his IMDb Pages quite long and he has a a voice that no one can parallel I don't think like I can just do my oh my

like impression my oh my but it's interesting because so he's my dad's Dad's cousin sorry that was some some some family tree stuff that's going on and I think it was I think honestly you know I think he's very different from a lot of like what maybe a traditional Japanese family would espouse as successful I think in America we don't see any of these things this way but I think very much even going to even the beginning of my story here I felt very fortunate to have parents who said honestly go do whatever you want because I'm first generation on my mom's side my mom's polish she was born in Gin and then essentially almost first generation on my dad's side and they're both in medicine and they felt like very much like they had to go into medicine because this was a very guaranteed way to find secure employment and they wanted to kind of give me the opportunity to go and do whatever I could do but I think that with georg's situation right you know being an actor that's not an engineer that's not a

lawyer that's not a doctor and also sexuality being different from what might be espoused as the Paragon of being a true Japanese man and I think that made things I think to some extent challenging right I think he's had a very obviously like you know if you've read his book his experiences the Japanese internment camps and then you know has made a really big impact on Asian representation on the screen which I think I'm really proud of I think that it's amazing to have him be one of the earliest famous Asian actors and now I think it's a lot different you know with K-pop and lots of other Asian representation joining Netflix shows Etc but I think I very much like respect I guess his confidence and his willingness to kind of be the be a oneof one very early in a career when there was not much of that going on oh that's amazing it's such a great story and and you said something else that really again resonated and again were so much alike is my parents also they're from the Bronx New York kind of you know Dad's dad was Irish but everyone else is like

in a sense Russian Jew well you know Jews from like the Odessa region which is outside of Ukraine again very immigrant kind of background also being Jewish you know some of the same challenges but my parents also let me do whatever I wanted to do and also kind of sawed me early on that you know I'm an OG gay I I'm part of the lgbtq community as well which is also why I really love George and George's story because it's like [ __ ] all that you know go be you go after whatever you want you can be anything you want to be and so I think you've clearly done that and so I appreciate seeing that in someone else and so I just want to thank you for sharing your story today I think it's going to be really impactful for a lot of folks in our industry to just hear from these kinds of stories and know that there are amazing people out there that are business-minded and can rock an Excel sheet but also love games and want to make games great for everyone and I I

think that's important so any final words Alex should you sign us off I feel like because you're a podcaster you need to like read us out or something no if I if I sign you off I'll be giving my novic email where can people find you where can people find you you can find me on LinkedIn Alexandra Tok um you can email me if you want at Alexander nov. which is not the podcast that we're currently on right now but I would say like I really appreciate you having me on here and I really honestly appreciate deconstructor fun and I obviously appreciate novic as well I think something that you and I and you know Crest and many many of the other show hosts and many of the people that have worked in games to this capacity it's you know it's a very young industry still but bringing kind of like business legitimacy to it I think a lot of my focus at Warren and Stanford was like educating people that the games industry was a legitimate industry like of business of actual complexity

Fascination intersection of Technology art and you know business and I think that's something maybe that I would like to sign off on thank you so much deconstructor of fund for you know being my like games business podcast that I absolutely obsessed over from such a young age and I think filling that kind of content drought which was which is amazing for you guys supporting that ecosystem and creating the slack group and and creating the newsletter I think it also really helped inspire me to understand that like this is a place where business people can have a home and I think that's awesome so maybe that's what I'll sign off on I'll sign off on yay deconstructor of fun you are an honorary member and that's the best sign off ever well Alex it was a pleasure thank you so much and see you soon everyone you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast ser your choice those stars and likes while a small action on your part mean a lot to us and help to grow the

show more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor of fund slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com SLS slack and apply to join during the games industry best professional Community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun cont content creators thanks for listening