From Space Ape to Duolingo via Supercell with Simon Hade

Simon, do you feel safe in Helsinki? [laughter] Man, is this really how we're going to start this? [laughter]
Just for the context, we've tried to record this podcast before. I do remember the constant sirens in London that were going on as
It wasn't constant. It was only just every time you trolled me about how dangerous London is. And I'd explain how my my kids walk to school. I've never felt unsafe. Every time I'd answer the question, some siren would go off or a blue flashing light. But the honestly, the only time I felt unsafe in London is when I'm hanging out with you. So I think it's more a Mishka problem than a London problem.
Okay. Okay. So it's my
you know when you're not there, London's perfectly safe.
Well, actually I want to like I want to jump in right into the Space A topic. So Space A was quite a company 13-year ride for you. Can you talk about how did it all start? like you had a team at Playfish and then you departed Playfish and you went out to start Space Ape.

I was a bit of a passenger in the Playfish story. Um I was at Skype prior and Skype was doing really well, but I wanted to get into mobile and and I didn't I wasn't going to get the opportunities at Skype or Skype was not going to be aggressive enough for me. And so I saw gaming as my entry into mobile. So I joined Playfish just after they've been quiet by EA. like I've been into games but like I wasn't a big gamer but that was that was the entry point because I figured they're number one number two on the Facebook number two at the time I think
and they're going to need to get into mobile I'm going to learn games and that was going to be it. Yeah, you can't take any credit for the Playfish success but what happened
or failure.
Uh yeah, I mean EA acquired the company and then a few years later um shut it down. Um but but in you know in the process they did some cool stuff and uh when it became kind of clear that the the trajectory that the business was on a bunch of us wanted to get into mobile that was really what we wanted to do and there was just an opportunity to to all leave at the same time. And so uh in

hindsight I didn't really fully appreciate how lucky I was to be in the right place at the right time cuz like hiring the first 10 employees is like the hardest thing. Everything's hard, but that's almost impossible. And and and we were really lucky to be able to start with, I think it was 12 people and only one of whom we hadn't worked with before. So, we were able to raise money almost exclusively off the back of the fact we had a complete team.
Yeah.
And we had a good story and had a had a crazy idea, but they it was the team in the end that was the value. That is the best timing when a really good company is hitting a decline and the teams that got the company to the top position, even an exit like Playfish are starting to think to start their new and maybe those teams were not the founding team. So, they're very hungry. They've seen what the success looks like. They've been through it and now they want to replicate and do it themselves in a small team. So, that was essentially the start of Playfish.
Yeah. Sorry. Totally. I think my my one twist to that is the company needs to die fast cuz like if a company gets big

and like slowly declines over a period of you don't have that kind of class of 2012 leaving and sticking together. You have kind of people drip off and it's harder. So like when you look at the big the classic kind of alumni networks, the most successful ones are from companies that like got really big really quickly and then failed really quickly and that yeah in it in in hindsight I just was in the right place the right time with that
launch pad. Awesome. So before we start talking about Space Ape football game, the Samurai Seas, the Rival Kingdoms, the Transformers, I want to hear how was the fundraising back then? 2012 fundraising 2012 for mobile pre-clash of clans.
The people who are close to the companies that were doing stuff knew it was coming. There were demos of heyday floating around days. But I remember it feeling hard at the time but when I see people fundraising now I realize actually we had a good run. We had um my my my co-founder was entrepreneur and residence at at Excel John. Great.

I had some good connections and the Playfish founders were backing us as well. So though we had a we had like a real like red carpet into it. There was some stressful points but I don't I never remember feeling any existential threat. We were making offers to people and they're rolling off. I was buying computers on my credit card and you know before we had a signed term sheet cuz I I never really had any doubt. I think I was
somewhat delusional because there like a hundred things that could have gone wrong. At the time it felt like it was so naive it didn't really feel that stressful. Fundraising now very different.
You tried to do a funding round in 2025. How would you compare those two?
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Certainly having a track record makes it easier, but there's also an element of like the more you know, the the kind of more the more problems you see. So, so, so with the benefit of a decade of connections and experience, I I everyone I think in our round I'd known for a

decade, I was good friends with, who was very familiar, which then makes it hard to negotiate some of the commercial points, but but but uh that that bit was easy. It was like more familiar. The heart of it was just the market perception of where things were going and wasn't obvious there'd ever be another off-ramp for a games company. There was those CS of if I invest in you, how on earth am I going to get 20 times return because who's going to buy you? The issues we were dealing with were more macro. But we had a again a track record and a team that was
in a product
and a and an actual and revenues too. But in some ways like revenues kills the story a bit like
pre-revenue. It's you want to be pre-revenue.
You were in pre-revenue.
Silicon Valley skits also. But yeah. Yeah. No, because once you have numbers, once you have revenue, everyone wants to know how much and it's never going to be enough. And so there's a bit of that
more rational thing made it harder to sell the dream.
But we we were in a category in music. This was for music games. I shouldn't presuppose everyone knows what's going

on here, but like spinning out a music game uh started spinning up a music game company and we had this nice moat with a lot of licensing relationships and a track record and existing revenues. And so that was kind of safe.
Yeah. which is a great story for an entrepreneur. It's great like for the team. It's not a sexy story for investors because safe generally doesn't mean 20 times 50 times return. So, so yes, so it was just different problems.
I didn't need to establish my credibility as a founder. I didn't need to establish the credibility of the team. None of that. All of that was a given. But yeah, the bigger picture macro conditions were like the
Yeah. Because then you were just about to hit the the massive growth curve. So, let's go back again 15 years to to the starting point and we're back and forth. So, stay with us. Space Ape
football game.
Call it football.
Call it football.
The best real-time predictive sports simulating app.
Unforgettable. Samurai Siege, which was essentially Clash of Clans for Android.

So, you were first on Android and Clash of Clans didn't exist on Android back then.
Yeah. I mean, it's more than that. We we chose our innovation budget very intentionally. We wanted to innovate in distribution back then. Unity was not obvious by the way. So we we were building the thing in Unity so we can be on Android and iOS simultaneously and actually beat Supercell to Android. But also we from a product perspective we really wanted to laser in on the top 1% of players. So so we felt like um Supercell was not a knock on them. It was the right strategy for them. They were not focusing on those top high value spenders at that point. They were going very broad as they should have. But so we saw an opportunity to just carve off that segment and tail the game spec specifically for them. Big investment in content and live ops and competitions. And our catchphrase was the clans actually clash cuz at the time there was no no clan wars, all that stuff. So we were just squarely positioning for this very narrow but high value segment. And so we put all our product innovation there. And we in distribution we were like we're in unity and we had some crazy distribution plans

that didn't play out. But that was the that was the play. Smart differentiation to be honest
cuz most of the time people think as a winner and they just copy it. Yeah. Exactly. And then they wonder how come they can get no traction.
Yeah.
And you made not only was it the same game but with Samuris which is what somebody would do but you actually had a very smart distribution innovation. Not distribution innovation but distribution differences that made it viable. And it was like one of the few successful Clash of Clans.
Yeah. I think it was us and and IGG were like of that generation. 50 Lords. Yeah. Of 50 or so Clash of Clans clones that came out.
Even Zingga did exactly your game.
Oh my There's a new one. Yeah. And yeah, there only two really that that survived from that genre. And I think because IGG really innovated in the RPG mechanics and also like nailed nailed nailed China obviously and and we made a a version that really appealed to the highv value like high spenders. So we got very good at monetizing. So, let's move on from

Samurai Siege to Rival Kingdoms. So, you really doubled down on this specific midcore genre of build and battle.
Rival Kingdoms was high quality production,
broadly appealing fantasy themes, lots of different innovations in terms of how the core product works. It really felt and played quite differently.
Why do you say broadly appealing? Just curious. I think the theme was appealing and more broadly because it just was that core fantasy theme. I don't find samuris appealing at all for example, but they're like Vikings. It's like kind of a niche.
Yeah. So, I think you're like closet game nerd biases coming out here because I think the the the postmortem on Rival Kingdoms, it was it was critically acclaimed. It was beautiful. The graphics were amazing. It had a lot of like really deep deep deep systems, but the theme was the problem with it because it was this dark fantasy sort of Dark Souls inspired theme. And when you put that against the sort of bubblegum like highly rendered cutesy art style,

it is just more niche. And as game developers, it's really hard to comprehend, especially back then when it felt like there's unlimited people getting their first iPhone every day. And yeah, we went we went way too dark, way too nerdy. And so when we launched it, we had editor's choice. We had a big splash. One of my most respected gaming influencers tweeted like how beautiful it was. I was like, "Your tweet really,
I was just sucking up to you now." But but yeah, it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It was critically acclaimed, but it couldn't market it. And
we raised a series C off the back of it primarily to chase the marketing and scale it. And I don't know, we spent maybe five million and then we just hit the $25 CPI ceiling and and and uh yeah, just couldn't scale the marketing and because of theme choices
and you sold it by launching Transformers.
So that was Yeah. So we clocked that in soft launch, but we were like pot committed at this point. We weren't going to cancel the game. It was clearly

going to be incremental, so we had to give it a go.
But in soft launch, we crocked that this was going to be a problem. We just didn't know how big And I think it was like Initial Capital, they put us in touch with Hasbro, said, "Hey, they want someone to make a Transformers build a battle game." Like thought about it for 15 seconds. Yeah.
So that's exactly what we're after. And and that was actually the most successful game from that period.
Like partly because of the IP solved some problems, but by then we just got good at systems design. And so with Samurai Siege, we'd really just like copied a lot of the core mechanics and then added content managed systems where we can DJ the crowd without really thinking too much about systems design of the endgame.
Rival Kingdoms, we tried to design these systems and they were pretty good, but the theme held it back. With Transformers, we had then a lot of learnings from Rival Kingdoms. We knew how to meter out the content. We brought in some people from Kabam and like these other sort of live ops specialists who

were able to look at our content life cycle and be really intentional about you know putting the bots out in these events and then 3 months later they're in these events and so that this the whole thing came together. The problem was we weren't the publisher. So we had Hasbro taking their cut, Backflip taking their cut. So the economics of it even though they were most our most successful game the margin of it was enough to keep us going for sure. It was good, but you know, if we published the game ourselves, it would have been a different story.
Yeah. So, doing that era of Space, the what I remember the best is your lean live ops. I remember sitting in GDC and just taking the notes as the person was talking about how you're able to launch so many new games. So what what he was talking about then is like the learnings from the Playfish era was that you had so many people working on live games back in Facebook that you didn't have the resources to start new games and that was always a challenge to load up the new games and kick it off. And then what Space Ape really perfected was having such a lean live op that um live

operated game like Samurai Siege had zero engineers. It was pure
once it once it ended that stage of it lifestyle.
Yeah. So you're able to pull out all the builders, put them on new projects while maintaining the older game by putting so many systems that are allowed artists and product managers to essentially run the game without actually having engineers committed to it. So my what my question leads to that is first of all was that the reason why you got acquired by supercell web stores you've seen what good looks like but have you seen great app charge is the direct to consumer platform backed by the likes of supercell and built by monization pros from moonactton plata huge games and others people who know the difference charge powers over half a billion dollars in transaction a year for top studios optimizing every detail detail, deeply personalized web store of offers, custommade design, industryleading monetization features, in-game payments

SDK, and more. 70% of top grossing games already have a web store, but the one scaling fastest, they're doing it with app charge. Learn more at appcharge.com. No, the no in a word. The live ops approach was I was the philosophy that we brought in. I don't know whether we ever like intentionally said we're gonna we're going to do it this way. It's just our instincts based on all of the previous projects we've done would be how do we how do we just launch a game and not drown in the tech debt and keep it fresh for players and and so we had this abstraction of content and code which is like I still see people not do this. It's crazy. Um cuz it's if you just commit to it, it unlocks so much because what you can have is people like the artists or recruiting players and they might have no game experience but they might know the player base intimately and so they can then have a series of tools where they can make the game fresh every week. They can in the

case of Samurai Siege you could change entire logic of the troops. Everything was content managed which there was a scary amount of power in those tools. We took the game down every now and then and then if someone put a semicolon in the wrong place like the but so we had to put some QA processes around it but it just gave a lot of power to people that were technical but they couldn't make games
and that that gave us a lot of flexibility players appreciated it but it also provided this amazing on-ramp for people because all of a sudden you can come in and learn a lot of the craft of game design and live ops by just jumping on these tools. And so actually some of our most seasoned product people over the years at SpaceX, they came in, they started running events, they started like using these tools and and learning what worked, what didn't, and building systems in their head how to do effectively. So we were bleeding edge at the time for that sort of thing. And when we joined Supercell in 2017, they were quite far behind on that. They're brilliant at it now, but like we were far ahead of them at the time

because we had a we had five years of squeezing blood out of a stone with this stuff and they had users like they just made beautiful games that didn't need this kind of approach and the pitch to them and the ultimately what what resonated was they wanted to get in more categories. They wanted to do more things that were different. So when we joined them actually we hard pivoted away from like making build and battle games and building out our live ops and analytics you know all of that stuff and went straight into 0ero to1 game development entering new genres taking a still a very analytical kind of like data approach but like um yeah we went we turned into a prototyping shop for 5 years and so that fa next phase was basically we're an R&D arm trying a lot of things trying to make new games and we didn't make another one of those sorts of games.
Yeah. So, you dropped your expertise.
Yes. And I think I think people like you and others like rightfully called us out at the time like hey in hindsight genre

mastery
is a is a much more predictable safer and effective ultimately way to make a games business than thinking you can tackle any problem. We made 25 games in five years that were like seriously staffed, more than a few months development, went to soft launch, not even counting like the crazy early stage stuff. And I wish we'd made half as many, you know, and continued a thread of making more of those sorts of games that we'd gotten quite good at because I think when you look at the companies that succeeded in that era, 2017 to 2021, they weren't taking these big swings trying to make billion dollar games. They're just trying to make something that they knew how to make,
make it good, make it viable, and make it better. And so we we we kind of squandered a bit of that expertise. I think that regret.
Can I want to just ask one question about the lean live ops? So I remember I remember sitting in that GDC talk. I remember taking notes and I remember being 100% in going back to my studio

and telling everybody this new gospel. Like the way we're doing this is wrong.
Space Ape figured it out. So, what we're going to do is we're going to move people out of the live game and really focus on launching a bunch of new games, which led to my studio doing four different genres. So, I've gone the same route. That's why I was giving. What were you thinking? We were doing nine.
No, you're just [laughter] better. And so, that led to my criticism by having done the same things. But the one thing that happened with the lean live ops is when we put the game on lean live ops. So moved the team of I think we had 12 people on it. We moved it to one. So built all the tools, all the systems. We tried everything to grow it. We couldn't grow it. So let's EB that the [ __ ] out of it. So basically, as you say, bleed the stone. So the revenue on that game actually dropped significantly. The ebida went up, but the game eventually declined to a point where it wasn't like feasible to

have one person. Did you have that experience
eventually, but the short-term impact when we rolled off the feature teams to work on other stuff? The games did better
because we weren't outthinking ourselves because the people on the game were usually stepping up to a more senior role. So,
they were motivated.
They had a very narrow set of guard rails that they could operate in. So they might have been able to swap out assets or change some game logic, but they weren't going to be able to make a new sort of entirely new feature.
And that that might have been frustrating at the time, but it focused their innovation.
And often what we would see is actually the games would perform better, players would be happier, the team was more motivated, obviously the profitability of it increase massively. Now there's only you can only milk that for so long. So occasionally you need a major feature, but yeah, we it it actually improved the games, I think, because because we weren't we weren't like psyching ourselves out all the time with big swings. Eventually though, I think

your takeaway from the GDC court talk was we should move everyone off onto new stuff and not build on the foundation that we've got.
That's a wrong
that was obviously the wrong takeaway and yeah, sorry.
Sorry for that.
Sorry for that. But the principle of separating your content, empowering people who are are in tune with the players to DJ the crowd, that is very solid and that's an evergreen lesson that I think a lot of studios still don't really do well because it's certainly it's hard to transition into that way of thinking. But yeah, I still stand by that as being like a good approach for games.
Yeah,
that makes sense. That that that's really smart. So essentially the key learning from that is yes do build all the tools do that allow the team to be run in a more lean way meaning that you can move some of the builders away and give it to a more junior team. But then the key point there is as you transition these people put them into a project where they can build on the past experiences the failures and the learnings from it rather than starting

from the from zero because starting something new is always feels
genius. The reason teams are so attractive to like early stage investors is because you can presume that they've gone through some stuff and learned together. And yeah, I think the same goes when you finish like if you've made three build and battle games, chances are your next build and battle game is going to be more successful than your arena shooter mobile or cart racing game. So, okay, you unlocked builders and that unlocked you to build in five different genres during five in nine different genres during the five years shipping 25 games. What led you to this craziness?
First of all, there was an assumption about the market that was wrong, which is at the time there were no shooters on mobile. There were no mobs on mobile. There were no there was no fishing game on mobile. There's like there's all these categories which if you look through the kind of archaeology of hit

games the last 30 years like there's no reason why there shouldn't be an audience for this thing. So the thinking was there's all these unexplored genres. We should go after them and that will be a bigger opportunity than milking this genre where like Clash of Clans had this dominant position. I'm not suggesting that we would ever have been a serious competitor for Clash, but what it would have done is maybe develop some skills that could be, you know, cuz uh puzzle RPGs are big. A lot of hybrid casual forex, a lot of these things built on skills that we were quite good at and the market caught up. So there was a market assumption that that the value is going to come from new stuff and so therefore we leaned in. There's also um you know, Supercell is this really amazing culture of autonomy and decentralization. And our company's named after this concept. And we really internalized that. And we spun up all these teams and gave people a lot of autonomy. And each of those people had like three resourc one developer or one artist. And as a

result, good ideas just didn't get the traction and bad ideas continued longer than they should because when that sort of decentralized kind of um incubator approach is working well, what should happen is one game team gets traction, another one's hitting a wall, the one who's hitting a wall just abandons ship and goes and jumps on the thing that's working. And no one worries about who's going to be the lead designer or who's going to do this and just like human nature doesn't work like that. So there's this inertia to kill stuff and everyone was underresourced and and as a result we nothing came out of that that period and it wasn't really until we we trimmed that down and said we're going to go after music, we're going to go after arena. We made very intentional choices that these were going to go these genres. It took a fairly serious kind of change to the culture
just focus on fewer things and I don't know whether if we' done that three

years earlier maybe we wouldn't have come up with pizza I don't know but it certainly that was like we probably could have realized that after 10 games instead of 25
so let me try to understand this correctly you get acquired by supercell because you are now able to put more resources in new games you have the similar type of a DNA and that you're become like a scout of the market for supercell just trying different things and looking at different okay and then you basically double down on that culture. What it leads to is the teams become understaffed because there's so many new starts and it takes too long for each team to ravel in their failure. So basically not moving fast enough, not getting the traction, but they're not stopping their game development because
also also too like no one really like they're failing because of external reasons. Like it it was very legit for a developer like who had a good game idea that only had one
one artist to say
I'm failing because you're not giving me another art.
It takes too long for them to realize that it's failing or

or or they don't fail. They just become zombies because they can't unlock the resources.
Yeah. because there's no central decision-m because you've given autonomy but you haven't given the resources.
I mean this is a characture of what was actually happening like we we John and I were like way more interventionist in teams than I guess the sort of the supercell mythology
but yeah fundamentally that's what it was. We're doing too spread too thin
took too long to kill stuff and didn't learn anything because when a game got killed people went on to another
completely different idea instead of r-rolling as a general rule. double clicking on this and trying to understand because Supercell playbook is not a secret. Everybody knows it. They publish it every year. But nevertheless, despite sharing this playbook, nobody is able to succeed like they are. And so it's very interesting to hear from you of like you had you were the closest to the playbook and you attempted to follow it in a similar way and these are the challenges that you encountered when trying to play under the same playbook. I think yeah I think the danger is like

thinking of these things as a playbook. It's a philosophy. You've got to really have the right combination of people at the right time doing the right things and it's it's just tricky to align all that.
Nevertheless, Supercell had such a unique talent density where it works. Do you think your challenges were with the talent similar type of a talent density and as well as depth of the bench?
We had really good people and
it just the entire structure of what we were doing is just it was a different time. the market needed different things. Launching a puzzle game, for example,
now it's not enough to just make a good game, right? You also need to align with
a massive marketing budget. You need to have a corporate strategy that is acceptable or like really low margins, you know, because you're chasing something else. And so, so that all needs to align and you can't really do that in isolation. So, a lot of the things we were doing just needed more. It wasn't five people couldn't go and do it. And if they could do it, there's no reason why a startup couldn't do it better. And so I I don't think it was

like a reflection of the people or the talent.
So basically the market matured to a point where there's a specialization of entire companies rather than even game teams. Correct.
That that they're able to do certain things.
And I don't know how long Monopoly Go was in development, how much money they a lot, whatever it was. And that's that that became the benchmark. It's we're making Hollywood blockbusters now. That's that if you want to be at the top of the charts. Now, if you want to make a game that makes $50 million or $5 million, that's a different model.
What was the impact on the culture when you shifted away from this philosophy to a more structured? You said you and your co-founder got more active and you chose essentially the genres you want you need to to to focus on. Some people didn't like it, but overwhelmingly it was more sense of relief because like people want autonomy, but also sometimes they just want guardrails just like so having like the ability to work on anything is very stressful.
No champagne.

Uh we didn't do champagne, but we did we took our postmortm seriously. But usually it was relief cuz
by the time we intervened, it was obvious that we should intervene. Like one of my learnings from that period is like trust my gut earlier to do harder things but like uh yeah we didn't it was obvious when we did it that we should consolidate around fewer things that was not controversial.
Can I ask more about Supercell stuff?
You sure can't promise to answer it?
No. No. It's just I'm very curious because there's this our favorite quote are not ours. My favorite quote is from Michael Witz from Redemption Games.
Shout out to Michael Witz. He's done phenomenally well. So, this is not like knocking anybody down. He laughs about this as well. We've talked about it. So, his quote many years ago was having an investment from Supercell is like meeting Gandalf in the dark woods and having him agree to join your quest. The odds are still against you, but it's sure great to have some magic on your side. Would you agree with this quote?
Definitely can relate to it. Like, they

were a company or they are a company that we all look up to.
Yes.
And it was a big deal. like we felt like we really arrived at that point.
Did that get into your heads?
Yeah, a little bit. Like I think it also gave us swagger that they chose us, you know, and I think that I don't certainly it's that is not the cause of sort of
No, it's not a knock on supercell either. It's like it's on the contrary. It's like they chose you. They ch and and they gave us a lot of autonomy, a lot of trust, a lot of financial backing
and we maybe got overconfident in our ability like to well if we can do that then we can make a shooter and we can do this and we can do that and definitely confidence is good. Self-d delusion is very helpful at at at times in game development but yeah also can flip over and so I think yeah certainly I got a little overconfident. It it does give you a lot of confidence and it feels good and and you know
which is better than like being chronically
in it feels like you've proven something. It's like if they believe in me
and they are the best
then I must be good.

But which is definitely better than the opposite.
Yeah. The opposite is far worse. But yeah, being humble is also part of their culture too.
Exactly. And yeah, that I'm sure that played a role in
in just abandoning everything you were doing because you believe that whatever you do,
you have the capabilities because the best in the business believe in you.
And we were good. Like it wasn't it wasn't completely unfounded.
But yeah, I think that was that definitely that definitely was a factor.
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Would you consider Space Ape success or

failure? success for me would be if you're interviewing someone about so what was it like to get bought by Space A you know like it was like there's this Mark I think it was a Mark Pinkis quote the serial entrepreneur is this code word for failed entrepreneur I was like I can relate to that sometimes and yeah so in the end we did not make a a big standalone business it was a great result we achieved a lot I think generated half a billion in revenue like sold to like
better than 99.5 at least 99.5 companies.
So by any objective measure success by the measure against like this is what we set out to do in starting a company. Yeah. So it wasn't the plan, right? So there's like a lot of great people there. The legacy of what we created will continue both within Supercell and outside of Supercell. But yeah, at the end of the day, we did not make a game that that was meaningful to Supercell commercially, which is what we're trying to do. I'm asking this because
and putting it into the format of success or a failure because you started

another company.
Yes.
And so I'm trying to understand was it like that you felt like you could have done so much more.
Yeah.
And that's why you started a new company.
Yeah. We started it because we saw an opportunity to take these games that we'd made under Space Apes. Beat Star and Country Star uh are made under Supercell rather and put them in an environment where they could become serious significant businesses and spawn this sort of slate of apps and games that sort of capitalize on this momentum we had with the music industry. But along the way we discovered a few things that made that plan creaky and then and then the owl came along just at the right time. But yeah, the plan was to take those games, spin them out. Super was very supportive. We had like a solid team. We had a fair a very significant VC round and we're all set to go. And then yeah, 6 months later we're I'm wearing my Pittsburgh t-shirt and I'm all in here. But yeah,
wasn't the plan.
All right, let me let let's dive in into

next beat though.
Sure.
You take beatar, big game.
Yeah.
And you take country country star. Smaller game but better.
But better. Yes. [laughter]
Categorically. Are you still in the country music?
Yeah.
Have you moved on? Have your tastes evolved or are you still hitting?
I'm looking at that. Top 50.
Yeah. Yeah.
Top 50. Yeah. It's It's actually my gym music. I love it.
Yeah. Yeah.
But so you take the B star, Country Star, you take a team of about 20 people.
Yeah. 25.
25 people. Move into some seller in London. Superellar.
Basement. Yeah. Basement of dreams.
Basement of dreams. Aka Superellar.
How did that come about? So we were able to make good games like Beatstar grossed I a couple hundred million. Yeah. Chrome Valley had did I think 50 in his first year. So like in any other scenario these things are successful. In the context of what we were trying to achieve though they were not meeting the goals. It became very obvious that we were not going to succeed in making a Supercell scale game

with the structure that we had and the teams could have a lot more impact helping Supercell scale because I don't know how many people the revenue of Supercell was at the time but like other
1.5 billion
whatever it is another company any other games company with the same revenue has 10 times as many people right now that's not to say Supercell's missing a trick they shouldn't have 10 times as many people but they could they could probably have more and so they saw an opportunity to sort of like bulk up teams just do more with the existing games and saw a bunch of talented people who were like very closely culturally lined, very familiar. So that was like a solution to the scaling challenge for them. But what was not obvious is what do you do with, you know, we'd made some good games. We had a bunch of people that were really passionate about those games,
puzzle games, music games,
Chrome Valley, Beat Star, and um Transformers. And there were some specialists in there and that, you know, that wasn't obvious that they would also be able to contribute to Superol. So we had this sort of problem and yeah the idea was we take these people that are really passionate about the music games

and spin it out to a new company in partnership with Superol invested in this thing being successful. They supported the project and very very close to everyone's heart. Spin it out put in a new company and being freed of the weight of that expectations we could do things like launch a rock and metal skew. We could launch a wellness app that's based on music. we can do all these things that wouldn't necessarily make sense within the Supercell umbrella, Supercell brand, but that was where we should take the product. And so the thinking was we do that, we have a separate company, we recapitalize, raise some new money, reorientate our position with the music industry so they're more invested in in in new product development. And that was the plan. And with the Transformers game, we did a deal with China publisher. You got a one for them to take it. Chrome Valley spun art as well as an independent company. And so it was kind of a nice way of solving this problem. Take it, make it an independent company and really go after that music category,
leveraging the fact that we had users

and licenses and all this knowhow
and yeah, that was the plan.
Can you talk about the the business of music games? I'm especially interested in the licensing part because it sounds like a nightmare.
Yeah, it's a bit like Beats. If you imagine if you had an IP guy, like you work with a third party IP. Yeah, you had Hasbro, Netflix, Disney, uh, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty. And they all had to collaborate on one game and agree on the same terms. And, uh, you know, it's it's it's so complicated. So, we'd stitch together these like really defining deals. Like, no one in the history of gaming had done something like this. like closest really would be Guitar Hero way back but that wasn't free that was premium right so we had this sort of freeto-play model the whole industry aligned behind it was super complicated it wasn't cheap you know that we we we took this road of there's a way of doing music where you try and pay as little as possible you

you get some cover band in to try and sound like the originals or you use AI music or you you know there's ways of doing it that try to avoid engaging with the popular stuff and our position, we want to partner with the music industry. We we want to like build a a slate that's going to need them invested in our success because we're solving a problem for them. And so we took on all that overhead, but that overhead has challenges. So if you're like raising money or trying to sell a company and you need your publisher to agree to it like that, now you've got some third party that you can't control that you've got to include in the mix. If you've got a third party license, often those licenses have change of control protections so that you can't just transfer the game to some scrub team that will do bad things with the IP. So, so there's like a lot of controls when you have these sort of IP integrations and and there's a lot of money tied up in all that. So, it's just super complicated. So, when we were spinning

out pizza, we had 72 external stakeholders.
Wow. between the publishers and labels and independent management companies, that sort of thing. We had two VCs and a bunch of angels in the round. We had obviously Supercell because we needed to do it on terms that they were comfortable with. And then we had the 25 employees. So like the number of stakeholders, single points of failure in this whole setup was insane. And I was very optimistic. We were pushing forward with that. Plus, not to me, we had to make a game. We had to like operate the live games, make new games, make new apps. So like we had all of that stuff that you also is risky and actually like that I was very confident on that like we've got a at some point we should like just open source our rock and metal designs for the sequel for beatar was like it was amazing. It solved all of the problems of beat star. It was like very exciting. We had a couple of big artist IPs that we were working with uh and we had a really cool wellness meditation thing. So we had this like killer slate, absolutely

killer slate. And it just got to the point where
every week [clears throat] I was coming in and discovering a new problem
and
that's not related to building a game.
Nothing nothing to build a game. That's stressful and difficult as well, but that wasn't existential to me. And so we just got to the point where like there wasn't one thing that kind of made me feel that it wasn't going to happen or was going to be difficult. But it's just every week I just kind of like
death by a thousand paper cuts.
Yeah. Exactly. And meanwhile, we were having these conversations with Dualingo because they have this music product. So, Dualingo is famous for having language learning obviously, but I
Yeah, you heard about it.
So, we were having conversations with them from years ago like just sharing knowledge sharing about how to work with the music industry, how to think through design issues because they had this music course in the app. And at one point, we think maybe would they invest in us? The more we talked to them, the more interesting that option became, the more kind of the more paper cuts we

got in the like the business practicalities. It just came a point where I realized that
if we didn't take their option seriously,
then I'd start having team issues, right? cuz it gets a point where like starting a company is a riskreward balance and it was getting riskier and the opportunity with Dualingo was getting more concrete and there just came a point where I thought we've got to take this seriously. We've got to we got to at least explore it and yeah and then as we started exploring it like I had this sort of checklist of reasons why it would be a bad idea. It's a single app company hundreds of people. I'm used to like having five projects going at once which gives a lot of autonomy and that sort of thing and or it's learning. we're trying to we're trying to make games, you know, so so like you know, can we do fun stuff? I'd kind of convinced myself that it would be a bad idea. And then as we engaged, flew to Pittsburgh a few times, we met a lot of team, they came over, we realized that actually like that from the outside

it might seem like that, but once I got inside and really understood what they were trying to do, the mission was, how they're structured, and how we'd work,
it just became like a real no-brainer. when you got a hit game or a thing that's going well, the universe seems to align and everything kind of accelerates and sometimes just the opposite. Every week something is going and it's feeling like you were walking through cement and we were not accelerating. So
yeah, at some point we just
told the VCs we couldn't take the money. We told the told Suicide we don't think this is going to work. We started engaging with the music partners and and uh yeah and we we pivoted to to chase this opportunity and yeah no regrets because it's amazing. We're doing some great stuff and happy to talk about Yeah, that was an excellent journey.
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What was the thesis for Dualingo to acquire Next Speed?
So, they had this music course and we had a long-standing relationship with them. Dualingo is really good at knowing when they know don't know something and so they have this program of like going and talking to people around like we just we had some meetings with some game developers yesterday where they were learning about live ops and a lot of knowledge sharing. So we were in that loop like chatting every now and then and giving some feedback on how to engage with the music industry, how to think about the design and so had this long-standing relationship and they'd launched the music course and it's a really good course does a really good job of teaching but they grocked that actually like it could probably benefit from having some sort of games DNA to come in and make it a bit more fun and think about where to take it, how to engage with the music industry, get better quality music in there, that kind of thing. So the thesis of the deal was talent acquisition. Bring this team in, graft them on to the current music team, and then we'd bring a sort of gamey way of approaching it, which would

complement the educational like stuff that they've got nailed down, and then we'd just build out the course that way. So yeah, that's what we're doing.
Is that live?
So the stuff we've been working on, not live yet. We've got some changes that will be
But music stuff is music live.
The music course is live. This is music, chess, and math. The chess course went live few months ago. The PVP, it's it's doing really well and music's been live for a while and yeah, we're making some changes to it and yeah, see you soon.
What does Duelingo understand about modern users that most game companies don't? I think there's one thing that really struck me when I I just went and shadowed a bunch of people for a few days and the relentless attention to detail for like micro optimizations
was mindblowing to me. Even at Space, if someone came along and said, "Hey, I think this feature will make us like five grand a day." Like, ah, you know, we're we're making 50 million a year.

Why would we bother with stuff like that? Or we we I don't think we spend any time really optimizing our push notifications. All those little things,
the widgets,
the widget, all like the the dual team is just like this extremely welloiled operational machine and over the years they recognize that all these little things like any individual thing might not be a game changer. Rarely they are, but they compound. So if you make a change now, that's going to that's just going to compound. The next one's going to compound. And a lot of their growth um you know 50 million DAU right now again I think there were 10 not that long ago and a big part of that is down to this sort of machine that they have for relentless optimization attention to detail and that sort of thing. So that that is something that I think a lot of game developers don't really
value because for the last decade there's been this presumption that if you're not working on the next thing the next big feature the next new game then like what are you doing?
Yeah. And we calculate ROI for individual almost tasks rather than what

is the compound ROI on all these quality of life improvements.
Yeah. And that's not true of everyone, but it's more true than say a single app company, right? And and uh now the market shifted to like really reward digging in on legacy IP way more than new product. And so I think that way of thinking, if you've got a 5-year-old game or a 10-y old game, that way of thinking that Duo is really good at I think could be I think the games industry could learn a lot for that for those sorts of like I don't think if you're making a new game, you probably haven't got a lot to learn from from Duo. Maybe you should be gamifying an app, but but I think that's a yeah, that relentless optimization is really impressive to see because I it was so foreign to me. Like I couldn't imagine how it could all work and I also couldn't imagine how a team could have autonomy within this world cuz the trade-off of that is it's very very organized very precise but what really

flipped
the whole narrative for me like I understood that like this is really impressive but I aspire one day to be able to do this and operate like this but I don't see what like what can we do here? Yeah. and we sat in on this product review for the chess feature and a couple of senior people went off and made this thing, right? And I was seeing really the first time the senior leadership team had reviewed it and the product was pretty well baked and we weren't looking at a green lighting meeting. This was like, "Hey, we're going to launch this thing. What do you think?" You know, kind of kind of vibe. And they were talking about all the like the pros and cons of different ways to do PvP. And and what I realized is actually like although there's this massive machinery that's relentlessly optimizing the core product, teams have autonomy, a lot of scope for creativity, and actually not that dissimilar to the way a game might operate. And that was where I saw how we could fit in. So we're plugging in the music course
based out of London.
Based out of London,
shout out to London.

Shout out to London. Safest safest city in the world. according to Mish Kickoff and and yeah, it's that was what flipped it to me like seeing that that the company structured in a way that features can have ownership in the way that if you're making a new game, you'd have ownership o of it. And so obviously there's a lot of different processes and different ways of thinking about it. Obviously, they're very missiondriven. So, so you know, to the extent there's gaming elements in there, it's all in the service of
getting a billion people learning something useful. And so the so that's a different way of thinking. But yeah, don't have to worry about distribution. Don't have to worry about monetization. I just need to make something that's fun. People that would thrive in this.
And maybe on's a bit bit disillusioned with having to like
grind out the C CPI LTV decay curves
LTV cohort data every time every make some fun stuff. All right. In an environment where I've got no problem with the games industry at all, a big user, but like it's also doing real good. like teaching people stuff like not a bad thing.
Not a bad thing. Not a bad thing. And

yeah, that that's what flipped it. It was just really exciting, really smart people, really motivated and I knew all that, but what I didn't know is that we could get like real autonomy within that machinery.
How did the team buy this?
There were a few of us that were leading the charge and we realized it maybe a month before the team. So, we had this awkward moment where like I'd seen this thing and like I just couldn't describe it
and like yeah, this will work. Trust me, they're like us but American
but different but different and but it's going to work. Trust me. and and the team was like a bit skeptical and there was a bit of whiplash, a bit of disappointment. But then what we did is we just stopped the line on existing projects said hey let's do this task let's make a design make a prototype of what we would do if we were running the music course and so we spent a month doing that
stopping the business as usual told the VCs we're doing it that was like a point of no return because you can't say
and they took it well
they took it well they're good but but they took it well but they have a job to

do they're deploying people's money and the second you tell your VC actually I'm entertaining
like selling I couldn't go to these guys and say, "Hey, we're thinking of selling." And by the way, if that doesn't work, then yeah, we're going to be
50. You're our second best option, just so you know.
So, we never like technically burnt the ships. I'm sure we could have figured something out, but for all intents and purposes, we did. So, the team
just dug into it. Okay, imagine we've we own this thing. What would we do?
No. and they really got into it because the process of looking at that course and trying to make it more fun and bring game mechanics into it. That's a classic problem they're used to solving. It's just instead of little characters popping in, they were like using the characters that existed. Instead of building a trophy road, we had to use the path that's already, you know, saga map.
Yeah. So, they had the guardrails. And back to the live ops comment earlier,
actually, when you put guardrails in, a lot of the times that takes a pressure off. creativity. And by the end of that process of doing this like test,

everyone was all in to the point where if the deal hadn't happened, it actually would have been quite hard to sort of like shift back into the next big mindset. And so, so we just went on this journey where it just was not obvious from the outside at all that there could be a fit. like I understand there's tremendous respect what they've achieved and the streak thing's amazing and the numbers are all amazing but it's very hard for a small games team to like how would I plug into that I bring but yeah by the end of the project we saw it they liked our take like we missed the mark on a few things but they were like actually yeah this is this could work we could give you the scope that you need to like scratch those creative issues then it was just a case of paperwork and
due diligences and all that boring stuff What was the digital? So talent acquisition digital is meeting the people, seeing the work,
deciding that you can work with them and yeah, which is more straightforward than than reviewing 72 licensing contracts.
You mentioned the allure of moving to apps by saying that this is something

that actually feels beneficial to users. I know what you mean. It's not that the games are not beneficial. Of course, they are. Entertainment is beneficial in its own sense, but there's something about learning apps where it's the other part that it scratches like you're doing something you could consider good. Somebody's learning music, somebody's learning chess. I don't know if chess is a game, but and oh, it's about thinking learning the language.
I think so. The big turning point for chess internally was like yes, it was a game and dueling is not in the business of making games, right? But kids who learn chess are way more likely or way more adept at then learning maths and learning languages. Chess is training your brain in a way just like music trains your brain in a certain way that then makes it easy to learn other stuff. And so that was really the thing that flipped it from hey this is a game to actually this is a game that will help you learn stuff and actually like learning chess is also a a skill in itself but learning League of Legends is also a skill but not sure learning League of Legends helps you learn
physicality between being a smart person

and good at chess but maybe not like good in Fortnite and good at
Actually no I take that back because I think probably there there's yeah you're learning stuff playing those arena games as well like you're learning teamwork work. You're learning strategy. So there's
sorry
slurs.
You're learning. You're learning how to swear and abuse people in different languages. But no, but there's Yeah. So there's I don't know how we got onto that, but I think there's two schools of people there. There's people that are genuinely on a mission to just help the world. The more people learning interesting things, spending more time, even if it's maybe not the best way to learn, like you teaching me how to speak Finnish or Russia is probably going to be more effective. Yeah. But it's not accessible because I only get to do a podcast with you every five years. But I so we can reach a lot more people. They can be learning and you can go all the way through to getting accredited to apply to universities and that sort of thing. And is it much better for doing that than doom scrolling? So there's a definitely missiondriven element, but there's also a kind of like

uh if you're in the business of like growth, there's things you can do in this environment that you couldn't get away with in game. the distribution somewhat easier, right? Because you can talk about what you're doing, there's this intrinsic motivation, the notifications, like if the barbarian started abusing you for not coming back and and donating your dragons, that notification is probably going to get deprecated, but like you can get away with it when you're learning. So, there's just a lot of things that that are now easier because you've got this
value to humanity that you're bringing that you could communicate. That's not to say games are not valued, but like it just it's just a different way. And so yeah, if you're gamifying a running app or gamifying a skill learning thing, it's just a different way of applying the same sort of foundational skill. So that's really interesting.
Games have social pressure. You need to come back or your guild will kick you out.
Yes.
Yeah. And and Dualingo has some of that and maybe it should have more, you know, there. So um because like I know we've

got the family plan like the streaks that I keep up with my kids. Yeah,
that's a real motivator. If I wasn't working there, I'd probably like drop out of the habit, but my daughter's got a 1300 day streak or
1500 day streak
in what?
She's doing Spanish.
Wow.
If I drop out on my friend quest with her, there'll be hell to pay.
Are you doing Spanish, too?
No, I'm doing Portuguese, math, music, chess.
Why are you doing Portuguese?
I don't know. I just like going to like going
planning to move to Portugal. [laughter]
I I had to pick one. But yeah, I wasn't a big I wasn't a big Julian gear user before, but my daughter was. I kind of understood it. I was on a 100 day streak when the deal closed. So I started
I started getting serious and then [laughter]
let's talk a little bit about you like in the end like what's the price of being a founder in terms of economical and emotional price? What do you conceive it to be?
I don't know. Like in order to figure out what that price is, I need to be able to imagine an alternative reality.

It's like the difference between
getting paid and not getting paid. Let's say your beginning years of Space Ape.
Yeah. I didn't draw a salary for five, four or five years.
That's a price.
We had a house. So we like luckily got in and bought a house in the mid 2000s and so I was able to sell that and we lived off the profits of that. Yeah. So and and then when we saw join supercell I started to get a salary.
Mhm.
Um but even then five or six years in I probably wouldn't have been make had that much more in my bank account than if I'd continued on the kind of climbing the big corporation. But certainly like the later transactions and everything was more impactful. But I don't know. I just can't. People like ask me all the time I want to start a company and I'm thinking about it. What do you think? And my answer is always if you're asking that question, you already know the answer. The only time you should possibly start ever start a company is when you're so obsessed about it that

you're unemployable
cuz you like spend your whole time just like thinking about this other thing and your employer won't let you do it and you've just got to do it. And if you don't have that level of obsession, it's not going to work. And so I was definitely that camp. So like the idea of maybe not doing that, I can't even comprehend it because I just had to do it and there was no option. But yeah, it's it's it it's very taxing for like
two or three periods were like really like breakdown burnout phases and I don't think I would have got that if it was a regular job but maybe I don't know
really but yeah possibly.
Tell me about having a job now.
Like a lot of people think about going from this sort of entrepreneurial roller coaster to steady job as being that's more relaxing now you can put your feet up. And I don't know if I feel that at all. I think it's a different kind of stress because obvious we've come in with high expectations. Most of the people that came in with me I've worked with for 7 10 years. So I care deeply about that. I care deeply

about making sure we're successful. I'm bought into the duo mission, everything. So it's it's a different kind of stress. Um but the stress of having to convince someone to bail us out because we need money next week, that's gone. So that's different. But
to just stress about execution.
Yeah, it's Yeah, it's it's just different. So yeah, I don't think there's a price to the entrepreneurial thing because I can't imagine I would have ever done anything else because I was basically
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Yeah. Yeah. I don't like the sort of re alternative history thinking.

You're kind of carefree.
I wouldn't say that in that sense. [laughter] I mean,
but um Oh, I was going to say something.
Carefree is an absolutely wrong way to put it. You're more like you just don't spend time thinking about the alternative reality.
Yeah. And it is what it is.
And that's helpful because I think a lot of people do. Yeah. They worry, oh, what if we' done this and what if this happened? And
make the right choice. And you keep asking yourself that for four years straight. That's kind
And I guess you can get into that loop as an employee as well. Should I have should I have gone to that for that promotion? Should I have switched jobs? Someone else has caused this thing that's holding me back. So all of those things could exist in either. But yeah, definitely there's less existential kind of dread. as an employee for sure.
How do you how does uh you or how do you see founders nor other founders operate in a corporate giant?
So it doesn't always work for sure.
Why it doesn't work? I don't know whether I can generalize but like some examples of where it doesn't work is I can just make things

happen as a as a founder. You know I can tell you to do something. And when you're
pivot the company new genre project and and and now I have a one direct report now. So I can't even tell the people in the music team really what to do. I can I need to influence I need we've got four or five different departments around the company that have to interface with. So you got to build relationships with that. So it's more it's just a different game and some people
can hide behind that. I no longer have the final say on what can happen. So, there's an adjustment like that. There's another adjustment, especially if they're like strict earnouts, which are very like I've been through a couple of companies that had strict earnout targets and that can get really toxic because if you're not if you need something from the company that's bought you, you're failing to hit those targets. It's just so easy to just then switch into like, well, they're the enemy. They're holding me back. They're idiots.
They're not giving me my money.
They're not giving me my money. They're not letting me make them money.

They're making me fail so that they don't have to give me money.
Yeah. So that that's a trope I see a lot. And then there's also just burnout. Sometimes getting into a company and doing existence like you're just limping across the start line really and a lot of people think it's the finish line and oh it's done. I can put their feet up and then finally and then when they have to earn a new reputation with a bunch of people they don't know
like who have you started a company? you done having seen a few different environments, having a low ego, realizing that we did actually get lucky in like a long steps of the way, just being grateful for being there is like the key. And that's like really hard to do for a lot of [laughter] um um
yeah,
I don't know how I got onto that rant.
That was a good rant.
Is dualingo founder le?
Yeah. Yeah.
Is it visible in the company? It
it's extremely visible. So Luis the CEO is very very across every detail. Seven's still very influential as well and a lot of people in the leadership team have been there before it got big. So it's extremely founderled and I love

that because the way of operating I can relate to. So for me it was a real feature. I think for some people they don't like that way of working and so I think it's just it means to be effective in a founder controlled company where the like the leadership are like all across all the details you've got to attract a certain type of person who sees the sees that that's why it's success leans into it and again more junior versions of me definitely would have railed against it like so like well
but now you're 35 and you're definitely
35 no it's a big reason why successful they're also very self-aware Yeah, very very cool. So, so yeah, I really like it.
But also the people around
him like they they have the ability to channel what's going on and and they put a lot of effort in getting alignment on things, but they're all extremely talented. It's a very welloiled machine. Like it's it was a dream, but yeah, I can't imagine working for a company that's not founder led. Like
So you went from being acquired by one

industry defining company to being acquired by another industry defining company.
Yeah, I guess. Last question. By all the metrics, you're very successful as a founder.
Mhm.
How have you been able to not let the success slow you down?
Not let the success slow me down? I I don't know. How do I answer that question? What's the right answer?
I don't know. I What I mean by that, I don't want it to be like
what's what have other people say
ego. The bad way to answer this question is to make it all about yourself, about the ego. But you don't you're not that type of a person. What I'm trying to get into it and what I mean by slowing down is people feel like they've crossed the finish line and they're like, "Okay, now I don't have to do anything. Now I can do only the things that interest me. I'm going to be, you know, a hobby [snorts] working whatever."
And it feels like they f the founders who do that fill their life with a lot of things that are unhealthy.

Sure. And you've when I meet you now whether I met you like year ago, two year ago, three years ago, you're always the same person. And what I maybe the right type of a question is like how does crossing these milestones hasn't changed you as a person?
I never had a plan. I've just gone from one thing to another. All these steps that I've taken have just been following my nose. I wasn't like trying to get somewhere. I had no aspirations. So, as a result, like when when we sell or we achieve some big milestones, it's maybe not as significant to me as I think it should be because it wasn't something I dreamed of every day to go and achieve this or do that. I was just kind of like doing cool stuff that interested me. Sometimes I'd fall off that path and end up doing stuff that I was bored with or whatever. But like fundamentally, like I'm not just going from one thing to the other and then as a result these big milestones come and go a bit, which is probably not great. Like I probably should celebrate, but but like I don't know. It's like I I'm not sitting here

thinking about anything other than like the new job I've signed up for, what I'm going to do.
And if I wasn't, then I'd have to leave cuz I I can only really be obsessive about one thing at a time. Yeah. I don't I don't know. I just go from one thing to another for better or worse.
Seems like it's working.
It's working. It's all right. I do over the years though like I've got more more confident in my instincts like in the sort of later stages of Space Ape. I we haven't got a good postmortem of it all. I think that's like probably years away. Like I can probably make some nice postmortems of the middle stage at the start
is the later stage is too raw. But like when we spoke I was just coming from Pocket Gamer where I like put on the sort of crushing at founder mask but it was like I knew we were done and I couldn't really like bring myself to action that. But uh yeah, in that moment I was like this is not going to work. It's not we're not going to make something that's significant. And I probably should have done some things differently as a result of that insight. Like either actioned it or but like

doing that was tough. Like you got to
you know don't want to be the guy who's negative you know I couldn't leave and like let people down.
Of course not.
But that that my lesson was like actually that was a problem. I should have figured out how to deal with that. And that really in next beat that was helpful because I was the only one who really felt like it wasn't going to work and I was seeing these things and and
and then you had to come into the team and have the masscom. No, it's going to be all fine. I'm going to solve all these problems to keep
that would have been the default state if I hadn't gone through maybe the previous company.
I like I can't let these people down. I've got to keep going. It's actually difficult to go and say, "Hey, friends of 10 years who've given me money. I got to give it back or you can't invest in me." Because that's really hard because I I don't know whether it would have worked out differently if I had just pushed on.
Yeah.
Because me deciding it wasn't going to work as kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. So I like I just get more I got more comfortable with those sorts of like
my gut's telling me this. So, I'm just

going to go with it and there's no point in burying that because I'm worried that you're going to be upset cuz I haven't followed through or whatever. So, yeah, just definitely more confidence in the gut as a result.
I mean, I think it's you're a fascinating person. You've had a lot of success and you still don't wear it, if you will. I love your approach and that's why I like to ask these as I think you was called the founder porn questions
which is now what I'm going to call the series,
the entrepreneurial journey. Yeah, the journey question, but really it is voyerish. But what I love about this is like everybody has a different approach and there's no one prototype of a founder. You have to be like this and this is the only way you can be successful. And what I love about your answers is that there's so many ways to succeed as there are so many ways to fail. And and you kind of like being yourself is one of the ways to succeed. Not thinking about alternative realities is your way of not secondguessing. It's a good advice.

Cool. I'm glad I said something intelligent in the last hour and a half.
You're not into quantum physics.
No, clearly.
I think the and the second part is just the the journey with apps. I think that is as the market is becoming increasingly more competitive and there's increasingly more competition from Asian developers, especially Chinese. I think the the app space is becoming because it's somewhat uncharted, somewhat unoptimized compared to gaming is more interesting, impactful for people who have been making games and who are not only about making games but more about interactive media and and perhaps entertainment through that. It's a viable solution and it's also very interesting to see what you achieve and what kind of a path you carve for other game developers inside the app. though in that sense you you're like um the first one in
not fail.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right.
Cuz that will prove my thesis wrong. [laughter]
Yeah. You you're only succeeding. All

your predictions come true.
It's all about my prediction.
Yeah. Your brand needs to be protected.
So you have to succeed and we'll do everything to support that.
Yeah. Cool. And yeah, I'm sure I should be plugging some stuff that I should be
Dualingo the best learning app in the business. The owl is amazing. New courses coming in. expanding outside languages to learning chess music
and a lot of the things in there benefit from games DNA. Yeah, should be fun.
All right, thanks everybody for listening
and I forgot [laughter] through it.
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