From a Double Exit to Double Loop Games, Serial Gaming Entrepreneur Emily Greer

we were lucky in that Jeff Bezos had run across us as part of some like Amazon like due diligence thing and like looking at the market and thought we were an interesting company and just called read and said I'd be interested in investing and he this was at the beginning of 2008 and we were like okay yes Jeff Bezos you could invest um we sort of like we don't we didn't need the money at that point but we extended our round at us at a higher valuation and took about 3 million from from Jeff Bezos which is really important because that was what like got us through the financial crash welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2

and plants vs zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and player data for the world's most ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders [Music] today's episode is with Emily Greer co-founder and CEO of double Loop games building meaningful and Charming experiences for anyone that likes to play games regardless of whether they self-identify as Gamers previously Emily cut her teeth over 13 years as coo then CEO of congregate a leading browser then

mobile publisher behind hundreds of indie games played by tens of millions of players she's seen it all through the platform shifts from PC to Facebook to mobile raised capital from Jeff Bezos and Reed Hoffman at a time when Silicon Valley VCS had little interesting games and in a rare feed exited her company not once but twice to GameStop the modern times group all to start again with her new startup double Loop through the challenging pandemic years on to our conversation with Emily well welcome to Founders podcast Emily this one's long in the works we've both known you for a while now super excited to hear really your long career in games across multiple companies you founded but maybe to go go all the way back to the beginning maybe you can share a little bit about how we actually got into games uh and decided to start you know building companies and games yeah blame lies

my brother he had you know we grew up playing games together like our our mom was like very into computers and had we had like an apple II and then like the original 1984 Mac and we were like the house where you know a bunch of boys and me clustered around a computer to play like you know Ultima and like early bird Urban Games Etc and then what happened my brother and I went to college we stopped sharing a computer he dropped out of out of uh University to become a games programmer and worked on Ultima 7 and I stopped yeah and I stopped playing games very much except that I became like a classic Casual Gamer and had you know Bejeweled on my flip phone and like played like on Pogo and various other other places so we had this sort of like split and I got into catalogs and e-commerce so

essentially I did data science in UA before it was called either of those things and and I had to deal with Cobalt databases and learned LTV prediction methods that had been handed down from like L.L bean in the 1960s which are still actually completely relevant to what we're doing today but I got after about 10 years of that I got a little bored and my brother wanted to alleviate and start a company and he had the idea for congregate and I would like I opened open platform with like community and chat and really fair terms to developers and open distribution and I started helping him with his business plan because I knew a lot more he was an engineer I knew a lot more about you know financials and marketing and just a general things and then you know I was like this is a good idea this is more fun than what I'm doing I don't know a lot about games but I do know how to run a company and like more than Jim did and

so I volunteered as co-founder and that was how I got into games I really got into a startup more than I got into games but then all of that like childhood early love of games just came like rushing back when I got to do it all day so and you know building a platform and you know early congregate we were getting or not just early congregate for years and years we were getting you know 1500 new games uploaded per month a thousand fifteen hundred games wow wow and had millions of players and for somebody who's like a data person there is no better way to learn about games and that's just every genre all the data everything that I could want to look at was just this marvelous unrecreatable introduction into the game industry itself that's wonderful I remember playing congregate games at my high school computer lab but um you know now obviously the landscape's quite different on the

distribution side maybe you can just lay the groundwork a little bit for readers you know at the time when you started this and you know kind of the scale of what does it mean to have thousands of games being uploaded like where else would people even go to find games to play at the time so in 2006 the main part of the game industry was completely dominated by packaged Goods retail distribution you know getting your box into GameStop and you know Walmart Etc and for an independent developer that was the only Avenue was you get a deal from a publisher like Activision or broderbund or you know whoever and the terms were pretty awful because they were you know the only way you you could get there so they would fund you but they would own all IP they you got a Rel you know a tiny percentage of the Rev share and um you know not much freedom and that

was actually a really important part of why we started congregate Jim my brother had had a studio um had founded a studio previously in the in the late 90s in Austin they actually had a successful game it was well critically successful game published by Activision called netstorm Islands at War and they uh got what was the equivalent uh would now be the equivalent of like an 85 90 Metacritic score in terms of reviews and sold less than 10 000 copies because Activision decided to promote Command and Conquer instead and didn't do the marketing they they promised so the CNet later named it the number one game of all time that nobody bought um based on the combination of like uh high qual high a height of the the critic scores and like total like nothing uh in terms of the sales and the

studio ended up going under because they wanted to make a sequel Activision didn't want to make the sequel but also didn't want to release the rights for them to take it someplace else and they didn't want to start from scratch match and they just ended up folding and that was very much the landscape there was a separate landscape that had been burbling which was the in the Casual space you know as the internet took hold and became broad where uh the 1999 try and buy so there were these portals like big fish and you know Yahoo games it's you know Etc where you could buy puzzle games and hidden object games and there was this great sort of flowering for people particularly PopCap was one of the the winners but there were a bunch of other where you could you know there was this sort of direct sale to players that wasn't getting routed through retail stores and all of that Hassle and you could make smaller games and you could make different kinds of games and

then just burbling was kind of the was flash games and browser games right when we started so mid-2000s that technology had really broke broken through so previous to that it just took a lot of tech and a lot of know how to make a game at all and then you know Adobe with flash really put tools in the hands of sort of everybody in the world and you didn't need to go to college and study programming you didn't need to live near an existing Game Center to get into games if you were a random teenager in Argentina or Indonesia or you know Duluth Minnesota and you were really determined you could figure out how to make a game with the help of the internet and forums and then release it so those were people making games for love and they had no idea of how to to make money on them or have any expectation of them and there was this

like viral growth of flash games because you could see a website that had a game on it and look at the HTML and grab the Swift and then any random person could put up a website and steal those Swift files and put it up and so suddenly there was like a thousand Anonymous flash gaming sites that were sort of all identical that were all stealing games that people had put up people were learning from that and copying from that and it turned into this like great flowery ecosystem of creativity that harnessed kind of it's the real first Indie ecosystem and the first one that really democratized game development to kind of the entire world so you know flash games you know previously like game development was very much concentrated in like the the you know the strongholds of you know us Canada

Japan you know China Korea and uh UK and this was you know really any bit anybody anywhere in the world could have a hit and that's the ecosystem system that congregate came into but people were having hits where they weren't making money and so my brother you know from his experience of really painful experience of building a failed Studio wanted to bridge these worlds that he was seeing of you know more professional game development and more like sort of Indie totally amateur game development and allow them to sort of fuse into a better more healthier ecosystem where people could really make money on their games and retain the IP rights because that was something on both ends you know whether you were making a game published by a big publisher or whether you were having your flash game stolen off of Newgrounds you know you weren't making any money and you didn't control the

future of your game and he was seeing the possibilities of of changing that and yeah I was gonna I'd say it came along for the ride but obviously like I was a really important part of building it but it was completely you know his initial vision from having been a game developer um and then seeing what was happening on the web that really drove congregate and sounds like you guys kind of swap roles over time and you became CEO maybe you can share a little bit about how that kind of decision came about yeah part of the that story is just like is a lot about you know siblings and sibling Dynamics and you know what we're we're interested in we grew up moving a lot and like living in a bunch of foreign countries and I've I've heard from other people who've had that experience that like your family's become really close and particular siblings become really close because you're just like the friend that moves around with you so we've always been especially close and with a particular Dynamic where he gets

me to do things that I wouldn't otherwise do like he's sort of always pushing the boundaries and I stop him from doing really stupid um we both listen to each other and you know our lives are are are better as a result so when we when we started um that was I mean even you hearing me describe how I became co-founder was kind of that Dynamic and then and he was you know he had a great strong engineering background and I had more like you know product and marketing and so in the early days of the company that engineering side and that knowledge of games and games development was you know really important and what was was sort of driving the company but as we got bigger and over time you know several things happen one is I learned a lot about games and became you know kind of equivalently as knowledgeable about games and then running the company

became much more about running the company right and all of the you know management and dealing with parent companies and also in particular free to play like free to play is very much a data-driven kind of optimization game and that is very much played both to my strengths as a background and my sort of interests and and tastes as a as a as a person Jim wanted to loves building platforms and he'd also spent you know had a whole career building games before congregate so he was really excited by by the platform part and as the platform is mature and we are part of a parent company and it was more free to play Etc it just wasn't as interesting to him anymore and it was very much that first year first two years it was you know

it's like 75 him 25 me after that it was like 50 50 for a while and then it was like 75 me 25 percent him and he and it was like we got to a point where it's like yeah he's just not as we had exited to GameStop he wasn't as passionate about it anymore and it was time for him to he he wanted to to move on and and and be excited about things just moving back a tiny bit how long did it take for you all to build the initial platform and then what was the sort of marketing strategy to I'm sure there were lots of people trying to build platforms and again this was a you know burgeoning space how did you all kind of come up ahead of all that I don't know actually that there were that many people building anything that similar to what we were looking at there were people who were building really simple Flash game websites and there were people who were building like communication platforms um but what we were building actually I don't think other people were one thing

is Jim had been the director of engineering at pogo.com for the three years profire that which is a casual site owned by EA that had a really sort of interesting and deep community that revolved around chat and achievements around like Bingo and Solitaire and other casual games and he you know Jim would say is that you know he looked at that and he's like I love this structure of this as a as a platform but I don't love the games and so one of the things that sped us up was in a lot of ways we were copying a bunch of pogo things and then just making it for for browser I think we started Engineering in July of 2007 and we had opened up our Alpha closed Alpha in October so it was about you know yeah and it was really like basic and it wasn't something we were gonna open up broadly but what we had

sort of you know there's a chicken in the egg um between on a platform always between audience and content um right or I mean not always audience and content but usually there's two sides that are providing things and like which comes first and we had decided that the games come first and that we were going to concentrate on attracting developers based on this revolutionary concept that they could control their games and get a share of the ad Revenue but you know there wasn't any AD Revenue right we didn't have any traffic so what we did was weekly and monthly contests based on game rating things so we were letting in small numbers of people mostly game developers to begin with and whatever game had the like top three games of the week got like prizes of like 250 and 150 and like top of the month was like you know a thousand dollars or something but

it meant that you know as soon as a good game was uploaded we were able to like send them money right and then send them money again and it built this trust so we were mostly at that point getting people's like back catalog of games but it meant that they they were building like attachment and so as soon as they released a new game they would put it on congregate first because they were going to get money there and then we also did a lot to focus on SEO and having really good SEO like search engine links we did um PR so we started getting like some in inbound links from proper um like Fox News did a piece on us and various other are things that like meant that we our search ranking was really high so when we went public by the time we went public in March of 2007 and opened up it to anybody we had you know a thousand games and if you search for that those games we were you know one of

the top three um results so we got this combination from there you know we would get on dig you know this is before Reddit was big oh yeah of course yeah and different different inbound links and we just kept you know the way I describe our you know our growth is not exactly viral it was like viral in spikes around particular games but I always called it like Katamari growth where it's about retention we were retaining players at a really high level and we were printing developers at a really high level and so we just kept kind of rolling up and every every month that the ball was bigger ball was bigger ball was bigger and yeah there were there were viral spikes in and out but that was game driven um so you know some of that was like good intentions and like I think the focus on developers focus on getting the content thinking of them as influencers that was really important

um we were thinking about SEO but there's all sorts of things that we kind of got lucky on um and sort of right place right time timing is critical when in that Journey did you raise capital or did you were you guys bootstrapping yes is the is the answer so we bootstrapped I had gotten some options from a previous company like that that previous like five months before starting congregate Jim got a settlement from the EA spouse uh lawsuit where around overtime so we both had just gotten this like kind of flush of uh extra cash um plus some money our grandmother left us and then our dad um matched whatever we were put the the money that we were putting in our dad matched so we use that to to get the product type going and um in the period that we were building the Prototype we were you know going through Silicon Valley and pitching DC's

and it was like a pretty good pitch at that time because YouTube had just sold for a billion dollars and people wanted to do games but were afraid of them so like a games platform was a was it was a pretty good pitch but then you know we were having lots of conversations and then we did we did our open Alpha TechCrunch wrote it up and within the week we had like you know four or five term sheets um and it was one of these things where it was like slow slow slow fast we ended up doing deciding to go with a a angel round LED by Reed Hoffman so that was um a sort of a you know I think 1.2 million something something like that including the money that Jim and my Gemini and my dad had put in converted in that round so we we got preferred stock um in that and then we we signed signed the like and came to agreement in November but Reed being an extremely busy and important man failed to do any

of the paperwork um so I don't think we actually like signed everything and got the paperwork especially because it involved read like dividing up like which of his friends got to put in money as well so I don't think that got signed until February but retail badly and we were starting to run short of cash on that but so Reid felt bad and we hadn't signed any paperwork and he just sent us a check like early but not that yeah so that was probably February and then you know in March we did our Public Announcement and we very very quickly had you know I think after we'd gone open Beta within a month or two we had like a million monthly uniques um so it was clearer like we were and like you know the games were were hockey sticking the traffic was hockey sticking and we didn't need the money but Reid was like this is a good moment you're

gonna you know good time for you to raise and did did it did said I'm gonna set it up with some more artificial scarcity and tell five firms they have the opportunity to give you a term sheet so that time it was just like really really quick and condensed like two weeks maybe three weeks where we pitched you know five fir firms and got offers from from all of them and then decided to go with Greylock and that was yeah that was our series a so that's one of these things that will like it was really unreal at the time and it's just kind of like this you know rare thing coming together but also it was part of like you know we probably could have gotten a better deal on our seed round from one of the other firms rather than going with Reed but we more than made up for it on our a because he could like he get you know one he gave us such great guidance and like so much Prestige plus

our numbers and it was like boom was he working at Greylock then uh he was not yet working he was still he's still running LinkedIn then oh okay that's what I said I forget we share investors I didn't or we I guess because you're elected or yeah yeah uh that's funny I didn't I forgot the reference check yeah they reference checked you oh thank you for saying clearly it was nice things because it ended up well yeah that's great so you foreshadow then to the GameStop you know they're being acquired by GameStop when did that come about kind of love to hear a bit about the decision behind why sell why sell at that moment and and you know if there were any other you know parties that you were particularly interested in in working with I just told the story of like our amazing hotness and then the next story is like about that gradually you know building a more substantial company and yet the hotness kind of gradually you know draining away is your you know like

you the entrepreneurial Journey yeah Journey so yeah concrete continued to do well especially in terms of traffic Revenue wise not as much we did have like a steady amount on Advertising but we had really we had believed that free to play was going to be the you know future of the games industry which you know in 2006 was not at all you know that was a minority opinion right like it just really was not here at all so we had we built out like a a platform to do free to play on congregate and had you know this uh site-wide currency called creds and you know we were you know dealing with all of the payments and then you you would buy within games but there weren't any games to take advantage of it um so we funded some games um all from like good developers who went on or most of them from good developers who went on to to success but

we didn't know what we were doing they didn't know what they were doing you know all the monetization was like focused on like cosmetics and like you know synchronous multiplayer that they weren't equipped to actually build and so so those games If Only They had pragma back then the only man had pragma yeah they were using like a like electric we were we were working with Electro server to be like the back end for those games wow wow yeah and that was like a slow slow painful thing so we launched that at the beginning of 2008 and got essentially we were making like a thousand dollars a month on in-app purchases for I think pretty oh no it was at the end of November like November 2008 and then for entire year we like it was like a thousand dollars a month or less and just totally insignificant we were making a decent amount from advertising but it was you

know not quite break even and you know very dependent on getting you know a big deal from Toyota or left for dead doing a big campaign and it was um and advertisers take forever to pay um so it would be like you know we've got 300K and receivables from you know Microsoft but it might take us nine months to get it because it's going through the agency so yeah so it was one of these things where we were doing like but our traffic kept growing so we were I mean I think by that point we you know we were 10 million monthly uniques like we had a you know we had a lot a lot of traffic expensive upkeep yeah expensive upkeep you know we were paying out quite a bit of it to developers um and then the uh financial crash happened um we were lucky in that Jeff Bezos had run across us as part of some like Amazon like due diligence thing and like

looking at the market and thought we were an interesting company and just called read and said I'd be interested in investing and he this was at the beginning of 2008 and we were like okay yes Jeff Bezos you could invest um we sort of like we don't we didn't need the money at that point we extended our round at us at a higher valuation and took about 3 million from from Jeff Bezos which is really important because that was what like God us through the financial crash so that was March 2008 World melts down you know July 2008 we're in like this kind of gradual growth mode and by end of 2000 by into so 2009 my brother is trying to like raise a b because things are get like we're okay but we're like losing a little bit every month or break even you know it was really tight and you know we could see Mobile coming like the iPhone had come out and we were

like we should figure out how to do mobile and so he you know he tried to raise a b and it was just not happening right like we you know people could look at us and say oh you've been growing like this but we want you to grow like this we you know we don't think you know it doesn't look like free to play is happening and so we got past pass pass but um and here's the magic of open platforms um somebody uploaded had made a like Indie browser MMO and they uploaded it to congregate and it suddenly we suddenly started making money on IAP and it was one of these things it was like 1000 the next month it was like 9 000 and then it was like 27 000. it was like oh oh this is the kind of game that makes money let's go out and find more games like this and recruit them so then it was also the moment when like Chinese browser games really started to think about coming to the West so we went out

and and then Facebook platform was taking off so we went out and started recruiting both Facebook games and uh Chinese browser games um to the platform and then that really started taking off but in and we were we were at break even and we were really growing again but still like Silicon Valley was not interested and um GameStop came calling and they were looking for somebody to you know help them figure out digital and um we we had the conversation especially as we were trying to raise money it's like if we raise money you know even if we succeed it's going to be this higher higher valuation are we going to be able to exit at that so we were sort of indifferent about being Acquired and what happened was that you know GameStop decided they were really interested in us and kept pursuing and they kept offering us deals and we kept saying no

and then we had talked about some number at which point we would consider it sort of like what for us was like the break even between like selling and raising the next round and taking that risk and we thought you know this has been going on for like six months nine months and we thought the deal with GameStop was dead I'd been put pushing off like a vacation I hadn't taken a vacation in two years I go to Italy I land in Italy GameStop has just come through with the offer that was exactly the number that was like our break-even Point like of we would consider it and so I spent my like two weeks of vacation like doing you know 10 p.m calls with GameStop and our investment banker and at that point we did go out and do more of a process and we talked to some other other people I think we didn't get any other letters of intent but we got a verbal offer from Google that was slightly higher than GameStop but would have been for us to

become the like you know achievements and platform team for Android and they would have wanted to shut congregate down and we weren't interested in that we wanted to keep building congregate and one thing that was specifically interesting to us about GameStop was actually the fact that they were a retailer and didn't understand um what we were we were doing as well Jim likes to say that he is he's a quit EA twice without ever being hired because he was at origin when EA bought origin and at Pogo when EA bought Pogo and he had a real fear of getting bought by you know EA or Microsoft or one of these and just being part of like rolling reorg after rolling reorg and you know thought that we didn't fit into any other org and they were sort of committed to you know continuing on the brand and like letting us operate and build the business and that turned out to be true so we never made a decision

to accept GameStop we just kept not saying no and then you get to This Moment Like We I we always thought that the deal was going to fall apart like something was going to come up and then we got to this moment where you know we're in the lawyer's offices you know and it's like okay I guess we're we're never actually saying no I guess it's now a yes so I don't think I ever really said yes until like I signed my name to the paperwork and it's one of these things like I have really mixed feelings about it because we did you know it was one of these things where it was it was a good good but not 10x outcome for all of our well for our seed round it was 10x for our you know later rounds it was you know a good multiple into the family between me and my my dad and my brother was a you know the that kind of life-changing money that gives you long-term security and it ended up being a pretty good home for congregate we continued to to grow and build the business and I worked there for another seven years but you know the iip

business was just taking off then and I think you know given another six months another 12 months we could have like we would have been able to raise and we you know after GameStop bought us we doubled pretty much every year that you know for seven you know seven years so and you know maybe we could have could have sold for more maybe you know maybe there's things that could have happened like I don't think it was a bad outcome at all I don't regret it but I also think that there's you know big opportunities that we that we didn't necessarily tackle because we were part of GameStop you know in particular one of my biggest regrets is that we'd always meant to do paid downloadables right and this was when steam was still relatively young like and it was hard to get on the platform and when GameStop bought us that was part of our plan was that we wanted to do it but then they

bought impulse and they didn't want to fund us doing that versus mobile because um they already had you know people working on and they didn't want our divisions um competing and you know we wanted to do mobile like we didn't fight that hard we wanted to do mobile and um we did have a lot of concerns about you know security of open uploads and how is all of our free traffic gonna you know transfer to premium games but I also look at that and think you know my God we were in a really really privileged position compete in the PC market and steam as of 2009 2010 before they opened up and they have such a dominant Monopoly position we might well have failed but we had an opportunity that we didn't take advantage of in part because we sold to GameStop and that is like one of the biggest waters I have I'm curious if any of your investors have particularly

strong input on whether to sell or not or it was mostly just up to you guys it was up to us um you know it was so we were in the fund that had LinkedIn and Facebook um so like it was clear like we were not gonna make a difference to the outcome either way right like this fund was gonna be like this is fun in the history of funds regardless of what we did and you know so you know they were they were supportive and they were supportive of us um going with GameStop over that that higher offer because ultimately for them it would have been a few million dollars again in a fund where it would not make a difference and this was you know was going to be what we you know what we wanted better outcome for our like better situation for our employees and particularly you know part of it for us was you know the developers like we had like large numbers of developers who were making their living off of congregate and we definitely felt a

responsibility not to just shut that down out of nowhere because you know Google offered us a little bit more yeah I mean it seems like Reid Hoffman Jeff Bezos I mean you guys probably like the one of the few companies that have two billionaires Angel and best or like whatever you call it Angel Investing I guess I don't know if it's an angel at that point but yeah so it was officially it was the business's private fund like I don't even know he did that stuff but that's and then and then Greylock having you know obviously the great reputation they do and then the obviously the uh the amount of Maus you guys were driving it seems like the the raise would have been something that you could have could have done but I mean 2008 was a very different Market yeah she doesn't think it was crazy uh yeah yeah it was so it was that it was the 2000 like 2009 2010 oh the other thing to remember is this is during like the Heyday of Facebook right so all of the energy and all of the money was going

towards um you know social gaming startups right and we weren't that I would argue we were something better because we were our own platform um but we were not the flavor of the month right um to buy every other second yeah yeah I mean and but I do think if we'd like you know another sick as I said another six months another nine months we could have we could have raised both the environment got better you know our free to play story became a real story and we could have done it and maybe it would not be steam and you know it would not be you know kind of steam with like epic and itch it would be a more you know dual system probably not um you know they did have you know some pretty good games that's that valve company yeah yeah but I I I just yeah that is my single biggest regret and and that's including the fact that I said no to Minecraft so oh wow yeah uh so

um when Notch was in early development of Minecraft he was like thinking about distribution and he approached us about having a free version on congregate but it was gonna be like he didn't want to use our currency and payments he just wanted to do it as a CPA deal and we would have had to do like like a bunch of engineering to support it because it was like a Java applet Etc and you know we had this whole discussion and I have an email that is me saying the final no I don't think this is worth it and I don't think that it would have been company changing just because it was like you know the free version CPA I feel like solid on the reasons that I said no and I will say there's like it was also like an early version so it was like before there were creeps there was a you know it was just like the still the sandbox thing and we thought it was really cool and we had a very intense

discussion of whether this was worth you know breaking all of our like platform rolls over and yeah I said the final now and so um uh for years years uh at congregate when as part of the employee orientation I had a deck that I took people through and I had a copy of that like screenshot of that email in there to be like you could never make a bit like a bigger screw up than me so don't be a fan you know and we're still a successful company don't be afraid of like failure and judgment you know just go for it so so yeah so I said no to Minecraft and it's not even my biggest regret I remember those early Notch days he was seemingly convinced like just like Superman just it was really impressive yeah you stayed at GameStop for seven years which is I guess longer than most or many people do after you know whatever the standard four years what what kind of made you stick around a little longer yeah our earn outs ran for three years so I

stayed four years past my earn out so that's um substantial I mean GameStop was paying me quite well so it was not volunteer work it was not volunteer uh to be clear but a big part of it was there were two things um so one is that we had gone in and pitched we had done our initial like mobile strategy that didn't work and then gone in just and then uh I really wanted to push to do publishing because I thought that you know that relationship with the developer that that need was there it just wasn't like we just couldn't be a platform on mobile because Apple and Google weren't gonna allow it so but we could have that like relationship and we pitched GameStop on doing it and they committed to it and um my earn up earn out finished right around the time we were launching that and I really wanted to see that through like I'd made that commitment built the team team Etc and then it did really well so part of it was that that desire

to build the business another part of it was like I was building a new business like that publishing business was kind of a brand new business on top of of congregate so I had that sort of like that interest and the learning and the building as part of it and overall at that in that period uh in GameStop we had gotten we did get reorged but we'd gotten reorged under a boss I really liked um who really trusted us and was just like tell me what you need I'll explain the corporate politics and get you it and then otherwise you know here's the parameters you can work in and then just go do your thing so it really really still felt like my company and yeah I was part of GameStop but it felt like my company and I felt that control what ended up happening was that you know there's a kind of a sweet spot in terms of being in part of a big company where you're like doing well enough that they

are not trying to fix the problem but you're not so big that you really matter to the quarterly results and we were in that sweet spot for for a long time because like GameStop loved being able to say congregate's grown 100 200 year on year but you know within a 10 billion dollar company it wasn't mattering but if you dub we doubled enough and they started shrinking enough that those things eventually collided and that's when it stopped feeling you know one I was really worried about what was going to happen started to really worry about what was going to happen to GameStop and what would happen to concrete within that you know they didn't really understand UA and payback and so things would happen like and I at this point nobody at Gamestop is like that I knew was there so I'm going to be a little Indiscreet but they you know you know they had a really bad quarter the same quarter that we launched like three hit games games and asked us to turn off our

all of our UA spend for the final two months of the year so that they could make their numbers and there was nothing I could do and it really hurt those games that launched that year really badly um and it was sort of like okay it's time to leave it's time to get concrete out and we got congregate bot out by MTG which is you know a good good home for it but then I'm you know by then I was like okay I'm now in my second my second public company yeah um and I and I really start you know I think concrete at that point got to be it was like about 120 people and you know I really missed building things I really missed the smaller team I really missed that smaller earlier stage and just decided that it you know I I wasn't gonna start I I didn't want to go work for another company I just didn't feel like I would care about it as much as something I started myself so it wasn't until I had an idea of something that I

really wanted to do and something that I really wanted to to build that I was ready to leave congregate so that's that's part of what happened and maybe before we jump into obviously the last few years in double Lube just one more question I mean did you go into that second exit you know was MTG did you try to do anything differently during that sales process or structuring kind of the deal in a way you know that it might end up slightly differently at MTG or what was that process like it was a real maybe you had no control because GameStop wanted to sell so yeah I had some control but it was like a three parties it was a really it was a three-party negotiation because it had to be something that GameStop wanted to do and they initially didn't want to sell us so that really affected the process is they wanted to spin us out and get a 40 owner and a bunch of new capital in and separate that out and that was a really really complicated deal to try and get done and what ended up happening is that you know

MTG was in was interested in that deal and we were going down the path of that deal and then we were in the legal part of that deal and then everybody was like oh actually it would be way simpler just to do a sale so that whole process was re like I think we very likely would have ended up in a different home if it had started with GameStop is looking to sell congregate right so it was a it was a strange process and it you know it made sense for various reasons but yeah it was um it was a strange process we did have you know multiple options and I steered you know and I was steering towards MTG and it was very important to you know the acquiring companies that you know me and some other key Talent were going to sign contracts so there you know it was this like very funky three-party negotiation but yeah getting getting one company out of like getting out of a

large company has almost no parallels I don't think I learned anything useful that would be applicable towards future Acquisitions um or repeatable it was like a you know it was a one of one kind of situation I mean the next topic is extremely interesting to me because Chris and I set out to start a game Studio at one point and we ended up working on a platform and you started uh you know with a platform and now you're working on a game Studio what my brother took your Pat your path right yeah yeah yeah I guess what are the um so far I mean there's a lot there's so much to talk about here we have not a ton of time but what are the differences and similarities between these type two types of companies like you don't come from making games and now you're to making games yeah you know it's hard to say how much is like the kind of company and how much is like 15

more plus years of change in the game industry 15 plus years of change in venture capital and like the general environment and 15 plus years of change in me like I came in as like oh cool startup world right like without much confidence or kind of knowing what I wanted or how to navigate these things and doing a second startup where you're an experienced founder is a very different experience like there's all sorts of stuff random stuff that I do differently just because I know oh in an acquisition like around like our accounting and like keeping track of all of our contracts it's like oh if I'm careful about this now it'll save me like multiple days of pain later but you know I think the build building a team and working in a small team that's like 20 people or less and figuring out

strategy is actually more similar than you would think like the whole concrete experience of like launching and then having like rocket success within nine months is not you know it's not what's happening and couldn't even happen just because it takes longer than that to make games now right but the how do you build a team how do you gel a team how do you figure out strategy how do you adjust strategy to what the environment is like that's kind of the same and it feels the same and you know I really like working with like a small team in a focused way and that was one of the things that I really missed when you know we had congregated been so successful and grown for 15 years and had so many parts of different parts of businesses like I love the focus and I love being like tangible and Hands-On on product and thinking about the player and getting to make those decisions and I love getting to learn something again right like I've been in games a long time I did not know anything about art pipelines right like

never you know and now now I do right and that's fun I guess I have questions around the mobile industry because obviously there's lots of platforms you could be building on at least from everything I've gathered mobile is a is a focus of yours you know there's uh obviously a host of concerns in Mobile today including you know Discovery saturation ATT uh targeting what are your views of the industry as a whole and how you obviously you have a belief about the space in some way like what are your thoughts about the space ultimately is the most powerful and flexible gaming device that has ever existed it is um more than 50 percent of the revenue it's way more than that of audience it's as countries that are you know not yet sort of gaming hubs come online it's gonna uh it's come there and I really don't see what will replace that is it a

mature Market where it's like harder to navigate and build than it was absolutely but you know it's not like console and PC aren't saturated either to some degree they just take longer to figure out you failed right like yeah yeah you know gaming is amazing it has taken over an entertainment space it is mature people have grown up with games people spent decades with with games and the fundamental truth is that if you launch a game on any platform now you are repeating not with just what's launching you're competing with every game that's been made before and every emotional attachment people have had and you have to dislod fundamentally to get a large audience you have to dislodge people from other games to have a success that is a high bar but if you reach that bar the level of success is still really large um and I have faith in the sort of

ability of game developers to continue to build new things that are interesting build things that matter to people and figure out marketing ATT is a is is you know is a hurdle but one is Apple does realize that they made some mistakes and are trying to rectify it people are adjusting people are learning how how to do it and when the players are out there and the money to is out there we will we will figure it out and I think a lot has been blamed on 18 ATT that the credit should go more to covid growth covet hangover and that displacement that you know you need to displace people off of games that are really well live serviced well and built to be services and those are the bigger long-term challenges than the sort of the immediate marketing ones those those can be you know it makes it hard it

makes it less profitable but the opportunity is still there and it's the biggest Market the other part of it for me is this is my market right I don't play console games I have a like inner ear problem that makes me really sensitive to camera motion so if I play console games for more than like 30 minutes 40 minutes I really do want to puke so that's probably not great idea for me to build a business in something that literally makes me want to vomit like even if I love it it makes me want to vomit and the other part of it is that um you know I deeply believe that while I am analytical I am data driven that the best games are made not from that place they're made from a creative place they're made from a place of understanding emotion and motivations and connection to the player and I am a mobile player I play mobile games every day all the time I would do that whether I was building a studio or not and I'm

going to make better games for this audience whatever the challenges are of the market I have a better chance of success and I have a better chance of building something in this market than I do on another one and you know finally like me being like a really classic mobile player or like a woman you know inner in her 40s uh who plays mobile games like there actually aren't that many of us like in the games industry and I think that I have an advantage in this part of the market because I am that person I am that audience more of our studio is that audience typical and that is a part of it you know markets get competitive because they're great markets right and that is like the end in the end that's what I would say about mobile great no that's that's great and obviously you bring now your experience having worked on congregate and your leadership I've followed your your cultural values your leadership for a long time and and from afar and just

been you know super impressed so bringing that's all unique to that's like not even the Persona stuff that you mentioned I guess one one question that we go back to uh in terms of just like a Cornerstone question that we ask in every uh episode is um and you've mentioned a lot already so it's if you could go back to the founding of I guess it's really uh your first company and then I guess you're you're giving a second try now what kind of what is like the one piece of advice you give other founders that are working on maybe their first gaming startup don't forget to exercise like you know that first you're not the first person I was thinking exercise options but that's like such a wrong which maybe just means I need to actually go exercise yeah the you know the leap from being an employee to being a Founder is the realization that literally everything in

the end is your responsibility right and that you can't leave it and that if it doesn't get done the buck stops with you right and especially the first two years of congregate that was pretty overwhelming to me like I didn't know how to how to turn it off and especially when we were launching and scaling and growing like a rocket I could not shut off I did not sleep I like I slept barely enough like I didn't see my friends and I didn't exercise I didn't you know I'm a like amateur competitive figure skater and I like showed up at the rink after six months in my my skates were like gone because they I bet been so long I hadn't paid my locker and they'd like put it in a trash bag and taken it down to the basement and I remember being there and just like crying like tears coming down my face that like it had been I had given up so much of something that I loved and on the one hand I felt like I needed to do

that but like in retrospect I didn't like I needed to figure out how to have to work hard and have a healthier balance and ability to turn that off and figure out how to say some things don't have to happen you know like some of it was delegation some of it is just letting things go wrong when they when they go wrong and yeah I don't think I helped myself I don't think I helped congregate and even if I was working you know 12 14 hour days if I had taken you know an hour to myself every day to exercise I think I would have I would have been a better founder I would have been a better leader for me exercise is like the thing that gives me helps is the sort of shortcut to perspective and shortcut to relaxation and I really wish I'd done that joking about the exercise options the other thing actually would be um I you know is that we were pretty haphazard about how we did our early

employee options and when we went to sell and I was looking at who was getting what I felt like there's a lot of unfairness here and if I could like get out an eraser and like readjust this I would and we did you know we had done some we had fixed it a little bit like the year before we sold with some some refresher grants but part of what I did with you know um with double double Loop was be a little more conservative be more thoughtful overall about who gets what and then plan for a lot of refresher grants so that as you're going along you can really make sure that it is going it is reflecting overall controversy fusion and not just you know what mood we were in the day we made their offer I think our startups people spend so much time thinking about recruiting recruiting how you get the talent and I mean we have a talent team here at a friend who helps our companies

with that but if you actually ask our team kind of where they end up spending more time it is around retention and figuring out are you being fair in your compensation and it's something that you have to change every couple years because the company grows and things change Etc and uh yeah it's a very it's a very complex thing to do well and and if you do it well it's that really helps build your culture actually absolutely and you know back in 2006 like startups were less mature in general like there wasn't information on how to do it and we hadn't thought about HR or comp much or and it was just that's not actually honestly something I feel like I didn't agree with everything GameStop did but I learned a lot about how to think about things and like how to have process around it from them I wouldn't I wouldn't do it the way they would do it but it I also feel like I learned a lot from from being part of like of a like a large organization that's really thought about you know compensation across hundreds of thousands of employees they have the amazing retail uh I mean I I'm

always so blown away by the culture and in the stores even uh so it's an interesting uh interesting company well thank you so much for for uh joining us on the podcast I I learned a lot and uh I wish a lot of success on double Loop I'm really excited to to hear more about the games uh and and I know you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna create the next steam version of the gaming side so excited to see what that looks like this time yeah let's call it next supercell yeah there you go yeah there you go yeah yeah and we got to get you back once you can shed more light on that that's right I'd love to hear more about that be very happy too thank you [Music]