How Three Engineers No One Wanted to Fund Built a $XXXM Company

So we were on a safari um in that trip. So we had gone to South Africa then we had come to Mauritius and then this was this part was in Mauritius part and the South Africa part was I I literally had to put a patch whilst elephants were literally over there. I I put a we put a patch in to just randomly restart the service to give us time to sort of figure out what [ __ ] is going on here. That that was that was stressful.
And that didn't cause any interruptions in service to the game because there many servers handling traffic for that game. Um,
but they didn't know behind the scene. But like the place of
they just so commit coming in from Zimbabwe.
They don't see any. They don't see any.
We don't let them see the [laughter]
see any of this.
Yeah. Otherwise, they would block it really quick.
Yeah, that was Yeah, that was insane. Most infrastructure companies in gaming are invisible. That's by design, but every now and then one comes along that quietly becomes the backbone of an entire generation of games. And I think

Heroic Labs is that kind of a company. But the real interesting part is the story behind the company because typically they don't unfold in a straight way. There's a usually moments of doubt when the whole things feel like it could collapse. So heroic collapse has been here for 10 years. Was there a moment when you thought you were not going to make it?
Probably the switch to open source is the most existentially perilous I guess but there's many many small moments along the way
and that's an interesting part. So switch to an open source. So typically SAS companies are not open source. Can you talk more about that?
Yeah. So when we started we weren't open source either. We modeled ourselves after a company that was another Y cominator company from a previous batch company called Pars that had been acquired at one stage by Facebook and they built tech that made it a lot easier for mobile developers to build apps that would scale on their

infrastructure and we thought that we would distribute our tech in a similar way, right? We'd spent a little bit of time leading up to that point trying to be a game studio. And then as we built up our tech, we thought that we could be better serving to an industry by building that tech in a way that could help every studio. So we shifted to that approach. We followed that model. But what we found was that when you live in a category of core infrastructure, that's how we think of what we do. Your successful failure is intrinsically linked to the successful failure of the studio themselves, right? A bit like database tech. Whereas with most SAS businesses, they tend to sit in an anciliary capacity to the core infrastructure of the company like email sending or text messaging or page of duty for alerting. But when you are that intrinsic to the success of the studio itself, we realized we needed to shift our distribution model. So we became open source. That's that was a huge

decision to make and we lost customers while doing it.
Why was it so dangerous to switch to open source?
We weren't sure I think cuz we were the very first one in this space if it would have worked or not if you were just giving away the secret source essentially for free. And there's different ways that you could think about open companies. different sort of revenue models like would be more heavy on a sort of a red hat model where it's like support related and personnel like high on personnel or would it be open core or would it be like feature gated like how are we going to cut the cookie as it were we traveled as part of the research that's going this way to find out if the model that we had in mind would work or not and there are stories that you know we went to various customers to figure out where exactly we should share shape the open source offering and how we could distribute it out. But I think ultimately we came to a conclusion that it has to be open source

and the main driver for it needs to be around adoption of the tech. That's the only way it can thrive on its own and it has to be a separate thing almost from heroic. So you changed your business model which is of course a huge thing. You mentioned Y Combinator. So can you walk me through the timeline like you start the company as three backend engineers very fundable combination there's Y combinator and there's a switch of a business model so walk me through till you go to Y combinator okay so we knew each other from university we studied together we studied computer science we were as you mentioned engineers and we went out into industry we did what all good graduates do is we worked you know we were all Londonbased so We worked in fintech in London, but we would catch up with each other all the time. Most days in the week, we'd meet for lunch and
talk bad about bankers
and tech and watch what the tech industry was doing. And we were just

excited to figure out what we could build together. And that's what led us to look at game studios and gaming as a whole. We got into an accelerator program before Y Cominator, one in London. It wasn't a very good accelerator program. We struggled with the way that they approached what you should be doing to create a great product to fit a market. I think it's one of our final attempts at getting into an accelerator program.
We weren't really sold on the sort of the European way of thinking about
Yeah. about business plans and you know thinking about fundraising through these investor networks that were kind of tax efficient vehicles for high net worth individuals. But you would watch the American system where they were, you know, raising capital from people that truly believed in making that technology work at least at the the angel level and getting product market fit.
It sort of doesn't align in the sort of the tax efficient investor with the company success. Whereas the US side of

things because it's the sort of the money from that person coming in
or that company coming in, it sort of aligns directly with the success of the company. So the difference being like European investors for them this is financial vehicle as a part of their diversified portfolio and in the US it's like
I believe in this this could be the next big thing I'm going to back you could go big that's what it felt like
we also worried in a kind of a purely number sense that it would hamstring us our view at the time was
European investors demanded a much higher percentage for a much lower amount of investment sounds super European
and we we worried that based on the road map we were kind of trying to figure out ahead of us in a SAS model we knew be a fairly long road we knew we'd probably need multiple rounds of investment this was based on our plan at the time
and we worried that giving away too much too early would prevent us from following through on that
so we applied Andre and Mo you know

pushed me to make sure that we applied to a couple more programs we applied to Y cominator as part of it then We got invited to interview. So Mo and I flew out
in Yeah. to San Jose and then interviewed at Mountain View at the Y cominator office. We did the interview. We did two interviews. We got in into the summer 2015 batch and then moving couple of years after that. So we came out of the program and that's when we gained a pool of customers but realized or at least believed that we were providing our technology in the wrong way to the market. Yeah. So that's why we took this large gambit of uh shifting into open source.
I think Chris jumped over some funny stuff cuz Mo was smiling like what happened like you fly to San Jose?
No, I mean we we stayed in Airbnb for three. stay in the Airbnb. But I mean honestly I think Mishka the story of actually even going to that that one week alone was eye opening for us because the the place that we randomly chose to stay in this Airbnb

a dude from Google was also staying and these two other guys were staying I think James and Matt.
Yeah, James and Matt I think the names were
I think they were 17 and 19.
How old were you?
23 24
old guy.
No, but I wasn't the third company. [laughter] This was the third company
and their their third company.
Their third company they done they done Minecraft hosting business that had gone really well
and then they did a conferencing for Minecraft.
Yeah. They ran a conferencing business that they took over.
I'm not doing Minecraft. I apologize for the memory [laughter] of it.
But they were they were lovely guys. Yeah.
Lovely love. I mean the memory has stuck kids.
Yeah. But lovely guys. And and the the third business was actually
streaming platform, right?
Streaming platform going against Twitch. This is before Twitch was bought by Amazon.
They also tried to get into YC and whatnot. And and we were like like holy Jesus Christ. Like these guys like 17 or 19 this like super super clever and

super humble guys.
What happened is like in like two or three years this you know the company grew and grew and grew and they sold to Microsoft Beamer and then became Mixer. Yeah.
Beam Pro or Beam something like that. [clears throat] It became Mixer. Yeah.
Yeah. became mixer and that was just like six days in California for us and that was like one encounter and then the people that we met during the interviews you know Justin Khan, Jessica Livingston Fston
just left impressions on us that that even if he didn't get to YC it was going to have experience just
like next level
just different to Europe Europe way of thinking that we're like okay
to be fair different to anything we'd ever done before as well. Yeah,
you know, it was just just such a different experience for us all.
And by that that time, you left your jobs in the fintech sector.
Yeah, we had done. Just before that, we'd left our jobs to give it everything that we could, like give it the real push that it needed, live off savings for as long as we could and try to be ramen profitable as fast as we could.

Yeah.
And Andre, you didn't go to Menllo, was it Menllo Park or where were you?
Uh, Mountain View.
Mountain View. I would have at the time the timeline was too short for me to get a visa.
Oh, got it.
So, I was there for the actual YC batch, but the interview was too quick after application.
Yeah, he was on remote video with the laptop. They carried me on a laptop.
Yeah, that was part of the interview process
on a VGA. [laughter]
Yeah, the early teleresence.
Tell me about like how do you get to Y Combinator? Like what are the interviews like and tell me about Y Combinator?
Okay. [snorts] So the interview process itself, usually one interview, we had two. We found out afterwards why we had a second interview. The second interview was because they thought different group members, partners would be better fit for mentoring us. So we' actually interviewed twice, essentially the same interview twice with two sets of group partners.
That was why we had been asked to stay back and interview again. But uh

generally it's one interview and then leading up to that it's application online. It's not a difficult application online and you get, you know, shortlisted, invited to interview. Everything gets covered to take you out there and interview and then you'll get told same day whether or not you make it.
And how long is the interview?
Gosh, the day for us was hours and hours and hours because there was a large gap between when we had to reinter. But I think the whole thing is an hours worth of time in the interview itself.
No,
it was the buildup.
The buildup was quite a while though. I mean, look, we were like almost like in this state of like
highly caffeinated, excited,
jetlagged,
excited, jet-lagged, anxious.
It was really odd. But the first interview were like five people in the room with us and they asked us quite condensed questions.
Was it about the business or about you personally?
Both really. Um, both. I'm not sure they they want to know that you have a good understanding of the business that you're going to go into, the market you're going to go into, but I also

think they just want to get to know you because I think their philosophy is that a strong founder or a strong set of founders will find their way anyway.
Exactly. Exactly. That's what I would kind of assume because you're such an early stage.
So they're companies there that had like teams of 30 people
and had revenue and this was multiple million in already some of them.
Why are they in Y cominator? I think the network
the network I guess access to investors in the US
those were also I think one of them was an Australian company I think they might want to have a holding in the US or food in the US
so we did that interview at the first stage and then we got told to go home or to wait you get a phone call if you're in or an email if you're not in
yeah yeah
same day but like we were like 11:00 and the whole started from like 8:00 or 9 or something like that so
Oh so from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Yeah. Yeah. It been a long day. It's been a long day.
So, we were observing like people were coming in and they were all leaving and then we were like I think the first group were like, "No, no, you guys got to wait." And we're like, "Okay, Chris,

what's happening here?" We got told to wait and then we didn't get told how long.
So, we're like, "Should we go get food? Can we go get coffee?" We waited. We waited until 5 6:00 p.m.
Wow.
Yeah. And then we got told, "Okay, guys, everyone left." And and we were like, "Okay, waiting. It's your turn. We go in and right in front of us is Jessica and Justin and Jeff and like Jeff is like tired like you can imagine like the entire day he's been interviewing people and the questions begin and there are like very thought of very very good question about the business about us about our chemistry how we know each other that was was about my memory at this point is about 20 25 minutes but I think maybe Chris is right
I I can't remember it's not like Shark Tank No, no, no. It's not like Tank or Dragon's Den or any of that stuff. No, no, no. Not like that at all. Yeah. Yeah.
And then we left. We went to see Matt and James at home and then we got a

phone call that, you know, you guys are in. We didn't think we were going to make it.
Then you fly back, pick up Andre and then fly. We had a few weeks, I think.
Yeah. And then we had to be there.
Yeah.
We had like Yeah. A few weeks. And then that night that we got a phone call, Chris and I just sat down looking for Airbnbs to rent for the following month before.
Did you celebrate it?
Not big really. We were just feel like guys who don't celebrate much [laughter] like next.
We've done a lot. We've done a lot of celebration. We've done a lot of celebration.
But but at that moment, I think it was more like, okay, we better get this figured out because it's not like any of us knew anybody in the US and we can just bunk in until we figured out our way. It was like, we got to find somewhere to live otherwise we won't have anywhere. Why cominator doesn't help with that?
Not really. No, no. We just jumped on Airbnb and we found somewhere. Yeah,
we got very lucky that we
got really lucky.
The guys, they were the first time Airbnb, so we got a good deal from them. Nice, lovely people. They ended [snorts] up I think one of them was working on what we know and know as Amazon Echo

like a sound engineer there
at the time. Yeah.
Like like even
2015, summer of 2015. Yeah.
Like booming techie tech.
Moved to US in 2014. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. That was like a peak peak. Yeah, it was it was a fun space to be in that time.
Felt like everything was just going at
like a light speed.
Yeah, optimistic.
Yeah, optimism. Mass optimism. Yeah,
optimistic.
Yeah, that's true. So, uh tell me something crazy about Y Combinator like like what was it like? How long is Y Combinator and what are the most memorable things you have?
Three months is the program.
Three months. Months. We moved it for 3 months.
We left everything behind. That's all. And then we stay in this place. We we cooked, clean, worked on the idea together.
We kind of put ourselves in I think a lot of startups do that go into the program. You put yourself in this strange bubble, you know, because you've taken yourself away from everything that's normal life. You spend vast amount of hours of the day and night

either working through problems for what you're trying to build or create or trying to reach out to sell or whatever it might be because you've got this timeline. You got this deadline to demo day, right? And that demo day moment is a make orb breakak moment for the startup for your business. And so we put ourselves in this huge like intense working bubble for 3 months. We only really gave ourselves what was it? One weekend in the end.
One weekend
in the middle of it all.
We worked 6 and a half days a week. So 8 a.m. 8 9:00 a.m. to about 10:00 11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and then a half day on Sunday.
I wouldn't say that we did it because we intended to do it that way. It's just you're trying to get stuff done.
We were caught up in this this sounds like a Turkish work week. Yeah, we were just trying we were just in this like focus to try and figure everything out. Yeah, definitely. And of course, like once we were in the batch

and we were doing the the dinners at Mountain View,
every Tuesday
there'd be the Tuesday evening there'd be there'd be group dinners. We'd have group sessions as well where we would speak to the group partners and get advice and give other startups in our in our group advice on things that they might might be struggling with. We just felt so far behind everybody else because like you said we we had started to build a product. We had a basic website but we had not much else. Whereas we suddenly found ourselves in a batch where most of the others in the group had revenue already. They might be larger teams. Our mental state at the time was everyone is so far ahead.
Objectively that was not true.
There were many more. They were even further behind than us. Some that completely pivoted to an entirely different business. no connection to what they'd gone into YC with. So, objectively, we weren't
that far behind, but it felt that way.
So, adrenaline was up like 3 months straight.
Yeah.
Just cortisol [laughter] on the
most definitely the stress hormone. Yeah.

Cuz you were just thinking that you're going to go on a stage and bomb in front of all the tech
essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially,
they be like, "Why are you guys even here?"
Yeah. In front of all these, you know, titans of industry that you only hear about.
They're like, "Well,
you know, time to go back to fintech." Yeah, [laughter] it's like that was basically the fear
pretty much. Yeah,
back to and I think also remember time zones cuz you know all our family members were in London at a time. So time zones to catch up with girlfriends and family that allowed us sort of the latter part of the day to just focus on the business
9 10 a.m. afterwards you know it's it's late in the UK at that time made us be able to focus but also allowed us to just take one weekend away. I think Chris is now well now wife joined us for that weekend and then we went to
Lake Tahoe.
Nice.
Uh [snorts] we rented a car and we went there.
We stayed at a cabin where there was electrical fencing to prevent bears from getting in.
Sounds about right.
Yeah, which is about right. But we

didn't know that that was about right.
So we we're like urban people from London. Like we don't talk about bears in London.
The most is like a cuddly creature [laughter]
that eats honey.
Eats honey. Exactly. To be fair, we probably would have gone on on, you know, two night break in the desert if we had to. We were just so exhausted by that.
It was just to do something different. Yeah. We needed a change.
How many weeks was that in
when you allowed yourself to take a break
month before the end? I think
a month before like
seven days a week where you be like we've deserved a weekend.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's a lie. We also went to a cinema once and we watched two movies back to back.
Back to back. What were the movies?
The Accountant was one of them. The accountant with Ben Affleck
and the Deep Horizon, the one about
the one about the oil rig
with Mark Wberg. Oh
yeah. [clears throat] Oh yeah. Yeah, I've seen the clip.
Yeah,
that one first and like whatever was on.
Yeah. You're [clears throat] like we need some more action.
The thing is we we we really found American cinemas. Those seats are

perfect for sleep.
Oh yeah. So we just slept through it
a little bit.
You didn't miss anything. I [laughter] mean
so yeah. But no, the Lake Tahoe trip was was a welcome rest bite, but it was a bit eventful. Um,
eventful.
So, yeah, we booked a boat out onto the lake. Weather wasn't great for it.
3 months we were there. It didn't rain once and for that one weekend and went to Lake Town. I I don't know how,
but it is far away. Like, let's be honest. Like, these are different climates. One is in the mountain. Yeah. So, you went to a totally different location. Just to be clear, you weren't in Mountain View. Like,
how come the weather here is so different? [laughter]
No, we we thought it's going to be like summer time. It's still going to be fine. So, we rented the boat out and you know,
weather was not great. It was quite choppy on the water.
Yeah. It became quite choppy. And we had this person with us, this this lady.
Yeah. One of the staff, she was driving most of the time. She gave us a opportunity to drive if we wanted to.

Yeah. And we thought, you know, this why not just, you know, drive a boat at this point.
Yeah. It's a lake. It's a lake.
Drive around. What? You're not going to fall off there.
Yeah.
So, yeah. So, uh what was I
Andre drove a little bit and then I took on and then uh I was like
it's a slow boat, right? Not like a fast motor bike.
It was It was
I mean, you could put the speed on the speed boat. You could put the speed on, but we were not supposed to, right? You were in the middle of driving at one point
and Yeah. Chris was taking shots off us or something.
Caught some kind of wave and it threw me to the side of the boat and I dislocated my knee.
Fun.
Yeah. So I was in quite a bit of pain.
Yeah.
You didn't cry or didn't say anything. You were
just just in shock. [laughter]
Just shock.
And so we uh we made our way back to shore.
No, the boat died.
The boat died. The boat died because because the dead man switch had been knocked out of it, but we didn't know that.
The staff member, I can't remember her name, but she had to call another boat

out to get to us.
That took about 2 hours.
So, okay. So you're there. You're lying in the uh on the floor.
It was not quite the weekend the way we were looking for. Yeah.
The boat died.
The boat died and raining and it became quite stormy. So it was like the boat was like going rocking quite hard
and you'll be like this is one way to go.
Yeah. This is one way to experience [laughter] a weekend away.
Um so we got back to shore
eventually and then the guys basically carried me.
Yeah. carried me back to the cabin. I couldn't get comfortable, obviously.
Yeah. I mean, look, the bone was like right here.
Yeah. Knee was just
was was completely out of alignment.
Like your leg was broken. Let's put it that way.
Yeah. It was It was in a bad way.
There's no way you could put any pressure on like you could.
And the thing is I I I couldn't fit it back together. So,
you tried to fit it back together.
I tried to I couldn't. And then Andre and Mo. So Andre, so there was a there

was this bench as you have in the in this.
Did you watch even a YouTube video how to put knee back on?
It wasn't really the time of jumping to YouTube for stuff like this, but we probably should have done. Yeah,
probably should have just gotten medical help.
First option and then the second one is YouTube. [laughter]
That's true.
I sat behind Chris, locked him in. So I hugged him from behind, locked him in, and I was like, Andre, like grab his foot, the one that's this, and pull it. and Andre.
I wasn't pulling hard enough. I was afraid to pull too hard to do more damage and in the end we switched places and we basically grabbed one end of Chris each and a little piece of cloth to like bite on
and you didn't call medical help at any point.
This sounds like something out of a movie, but this actually happened. It's actually making me feel quite awkward remembering it to be honest.
So So wait, you didn't call medical help at any point? No.
It' be like we got this Chris bite on this cloth piece. [laughter]
They could standing. two back. No problem. She was worried.

She was very worried. So then we saw places and I pulled and then it clicks and then like Chris like kind of like gets knocked out of the pain out of the relief of it.
Yeah.
And then the knee blew up and then we put ice and what?
Ice and ibuprofen. And
we went to find your knee braces.
We did find your knee braces actually.
And were you able to walk?
Eventually. Yeah. I I had to suffer through gags about not being able to run fast enough if the bears got us.
So I suffered through that weekend.
We were on positives.
Yeah. Yeah. Positives were they would make it.
So okay. So you perform a pretty difficult medical procedure without
without a medical license. No. Yeah.
Or anesthesia.
I've done it before in in fairness.
Okay. So you
I've done it like six or seven times.
That's what we thought. Okay. Let's switch around because Mo's done it before.
Oh. But it's nice of him to let you go first.
Never to me rookie. Why? Why did he let me go first?
Cuz I was like, I'm going to hold him because I know he's going to be in a lot of pain. So just Andre like it's just

pulling a straight line. He's going to he's going to pack it like
Yeah. Just pull his knee in a straight line.
Yeah. Like how hard can it be? Okay. But it's nice that you you let Andre go first.
And so got some experience. Yeah.
So you basically are crippled now and there's one week left. That was a nice little break that you had. The only break. We had what just over 3 weeks after that?
Just over 3 weeks to YC demo day.
And you were able to walk or
I was able to walk. I was able to walk. Uh
just walk it off.
I just did basically over time walk it off. Yeah. To be honest with you,
I was good enough for demo day.
You were limping the first like two weeks.
Yeah. Yeah.
Um but but the pain was there. You couldn't like sort of lift his leg to put on the other leg. That was that was gone. And then we came back 3 weeks after we came back from you had a surgery. Mhm.
Long story really, but I ended up having a bucket tear so of the miniscus of
miniscus. It's not bad.
It's not the worst, but yeah, I had to have a little up on it in the end,
but that was Y Combinator.
So, and then the the final presentation. How did that go at Y Combinator?

I think demo day went well. I mean, we got I think it was 13 or or 14 meetings out of it because what happens is investors who register interest, who've seen your pitch on the day can basically request to schedule meetings. So, we had a quite a good amount of investor interest. We just were not very good as techies at pitching.
Mhm.
And so, our follow-up meetings, we struggled to sort of impart sort of the size of opportunity, shape of the market, how we were going to address bits because we were still figuring it all out. Right.
This was before the business pivot actually to open source.
Exactly. Before we
So, you actually had a wrong thesis at that point.
And also remember this was pre the Unity IPO. So
people didn't think that gaming businesses or like gaming tool business could IP.
Yeah. Because every game company at that point but game tools
it was the time when money was free and everybody was building their own internal tools.
Yeah.
Everybody worth their while.
Yeah.

I think we also experienced firsthand um how trends in investment would affect the availability of investment right when we were pitching most investors or it seemed that way to us obviously subjectively most investors were looking to invest in either biotech or weed companies
at the time. Yeah,
that's what was fashionable at the time or kind of hot.
It was that moment right?
Yeah. There were a lot of weed companies
in in Y Combinator
in the batch but also generally at that time because of the
the legislation was changing.
Yeah. The relax the relaxation of the
which is absolutely fair play but it means we were fighting for a smaller slice of available capital right
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free trial today at sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. Okay. So why cominator? It's demo day. The audience is mainly investors.
Yeah. and they look at these presentations and they earmark the companies they want to talk to. So that leads to meetings with follow-up investors because Y Commonary puts in a small amount
and then basically there's a markup as if any anybody else invests. So you get 13 meetings
y
and no hole
no follow-up. we did when we were shifting the the model to open source when we felt like it was both a large gambit biggest risk but also we thought it would make sense into way we brought the the game tech to to studios we flew back out we went out to stayed in a Airbnb in East Palo Alto no Lake Tahoe this time and
and we interview well interviewed we went to pictures with
murder capital

with many many many different uh firms then as well basically so twice ice. We've ended up spending quite a lot of time with quite a lot of investors, speaking to those investors about sort of opportunity size, market sizing. Had two really phenomenal conversations. One was with the guys at Kleiner Perkins, Bing Gordon, creative director, uh, ex-creative director of EA at the time. The other one was Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures. He was awesome. They both did this actually. sat down with us in our individual meetings and we spent like half an hour with a cup of coffee and it it felt like we were getting advice about how to win the market rather than impress me
which was quite uh refreshing actually
but they didn't turn into an investment.
So it was funny at the time Kleiner Perkins you know Bing said to us if you can win a Zinga then we'll put money into you guys. At that point that was one of the biggest gaming companies. Not actually they were going through some hard times. They were making the pivot from web to
they were making the pivot from web to

mobile first but they were still you know still phenomenally
yeah powerful you know still are a phenomenally powerful life services games company. Right.
Really I think what he was trying to allude to is if you can figure out how to win in build versus buy because you just mentioned it yourself right studios raised a ton of money. They build a team out and they build tech. Right. Um, and what he was saying is if you could provide technology in a way that would be more flexible for those teams to not build and buy instead, then we'll go in.
And what year was this?
2017. 2016.
Uh, Mark Pinkis is probably the CEO at that point for the second run. Bing Gordon, Mark Pinkas are close. So naturally, it makes sense that he would propos. Yeah. And then also because he has full visibility in that company so he can hear how that pitch went, what went decision. So basically Zingga does due diligence for him. Smart.
Yeah. So his words were if you can win a Zinga, right? And then we ended up we

moved into open source and then we we did win Zinga as a customer, right? We landed Zinger as a customer. At the time it was part of the advanced technology group, ATG group. They're experimenting with emerging games platforms and they were looking for tooling that would allow them to rapidly experiment with emerging games. And then we kind of moved from there. We're now in I don't know eight different games something like that in Zinger Studios uh across SF Graham games right which they bought which we were working with before they bought them guys at Rol a lot of different studio teams
take two mobile essentially.
Yeah. Yeah. last impression that he left us this has been as we were in the office chatting through sort of numbers chatting through where we can go again to reiterate this is preIPO of any company as such like look
the road that you guys are in and Chris remind me was the exact phrase and the road that you're in is
it's a graveyard
is this yeah skulls of the previous dead companies
game tech companies that haven't made it either from an analytics tech perspective or an ad tech perspective or

even a game back end
many shout outs That's true. [laughter]
We said,
yeah, his exact words were it's going to be a difficult journey cuz it's a graveyard.
We went in like kind of like optimistic. We just gone to open source. We're going to see Bing and then we came out like
man, it Yeah, it was good though. I I haven't forgotten. It was a good moment, but it was a
Yeah, it was I guess a grounding kind of moment.
He didn't pump you up. Yeah, he [laughter] uh but yeah, he spoke to us frankly, you know, it was like a it was a real piece of advice.
Yeah.
Which is rare from many VCs.
Yeah. They either tell you what they think you want to hear until you leave the room
or they're looking to be impressed and not have a real conversation. Yeah. And remember at this point we've had you know during the YC dinners on every Tuesday that we had the alumni would come in and talk about their own startup stories from the Airbnb guys to 23 and me and like there's a lot of Dropbox. Yeah. A lot of them came and so we had

heard the stories that you don't really hear in the media from the founders directly.
The journeys
the journeys in sort of a enclosed space in the trusted space. So knowing how some of the investors could be, how they've been treated in the past and how Bing was to us or the other folks that Chris mentioned was a refresher like it was actually really really nice of them to tell us these things in a very genuine manner. What I wanted then kind of like the question I wanted to ask is like being a founder means that you're always on and so once you start landing these deals and you're still a very small company what was it like to start scaling because like when you went to open source you essentially found a product market fit right
I would say so yeah
that was like 3 4 years after funding
3 years in I think it was
yeah three years in
so three years in after founding the company the only investment you got is essentially the uh
the y com investment Y cominator and then we [clears throat] had some early customer revenue.
So basically a tiny check

and then other than that just self-funded
took you three years. Everybody tells you well not the most important people tell you this is a graveyard. You're most likely going to die but if you land one of the biggest clients in the business you will survive. Thanks [laughter] like that kind of figures.
Yeah. Yeah. What they're essentially saying is we'll invest when you no longer need investment.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. land the biggest customer then come talk to me. So you landed the business model and now you're working with multiple different studios and as you mentioned there's there's based studios all over the world. Did that intense phase of Y cominator continue after Y cominators we were scaling or were you able to be more measured and more professional in your ways of working? I don't think it really changed for quite a while because remember when we realized we were in the wrong
our technology was distributed in the wrong way.
We ended up rebuilding it from the ground up and so when we rebuilt it from the ground up we basically put ourselves into an intense phase all over again. In

fact, part of what we were building was being built when we were in PaloAlto going to see investors again. It's almost like we'd repeated the process again for ourselves when we went out a second time. I think we just accepted we were sort of working in an atypical way, you know, just to try to make sure that we could find the right fit for studios. Yeah.
Was it 18our shifts pretty much continued for a long time, multiple years after. And so to keep that going plus to keep our personal life and wives and families members happy that we working this hard we took kind of like Tahoe trips if you want to call it that way to other parts of the world
without the injuries.
I mean they have you for medical help [laughter]
for that part also carried on a little bit.
We've worked in crazy places. Um, we've done things that not a lot of other companies would do.
Um,
cuz you can't disconnect. That's the

thing with being a super tech.
Even when we were building out the team and the team was growing, we were still the most senior of core engineering, right? Even as the founders, we So most of the early tech was built by us. So the people who were fastest able to fix or change or modify or extend any piece of it to fit what a studio needed was going to be one of the three of us. And so it did mean that we were effectively always on call
and and also that that led to like very very cool scenarios like when I was in Portugal traveling I met Simon who is now one of our earlier hires that we've had
and he's been with us the entire time and we love having him and it just happened that I ended up meeting him when I was in Portugal.
We were a remote working company from the start so it gave us this deep flexibility to just be wherever we needed to be but it did also mean we never disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And so when you went out on holidays when you know at a scaling phase like you all three traveled still together like you essentially have been together for 10 years like every day we were best friends right so that that's that's

foundationally where that that is well we did travel to
Bali.
Yeah we did Bali in the Gillit islands where we did
stupidly decided to go in the middle of the Indian Ocean and yeah well he didn't say yes to that. He stood back. He was a clever guy. Yeah.
Um he still is.
No, the problem is that um they went out to see the sunrise like 4 that exactly entails.
Yeah. On a boat.
Yes.
It wasn't a boat.
It was a canoe.
It was like a canoe with a little
but in the Indian Ocean.
But it was 4 in the morning. Now I skipped that because I'd had a 2 a.m. call with a customer.
Yeah. So I was Yeah. It was that kind of that was
I had a 4:30 call. So I said I might as well just get up. So I did a 4:30 call and then we left. Like I took my passport with me. I thought are we going to go somewhere like okay some type of civilization is there that might need my passport. So I took everything out to my camera everything. They go and it was a canoe like literally like wooden pieces

of Yeah. We selling that and dark. We didn't see what we were doing.
You were waiting for the sunrise.
Yeah.
Yes. But I thought we're going to end up like it was going to be a boat and we're gonna end up in like some island and gonna have breakfast. No, no, no. We in the dark and I don't do well with sea either. We sat there. We got utterly wet
and as one does
as one does in a canoe
in a canoe. I have pictures. I say you started to see it but
it wasn't a good experience for me and uh we
Yeah, I thought that was that I thought that was how I'm going to go.
Oh, that again.
There's something with boats and it might be the case. [laughter] But Andre, they always throw you at every problem like Right.
Well, yeah, I guess so. I don't know how I can solve them drowning.
I'm sure they they try and have me fix that one as well.
He was eating on the I don't know how he
I used to do school boy rowing, so the shake of the boat, the the tilt was not a problem at all. It was I was just

hungry. It was good breakfast.
Mo was massively seasick and Chris was just There's photos of him just having breakfast in the boat. [laughter] So, so what is it like to be always on? This is kind of kind of kind of, you know, crazy for many people is that even when you get a chance to go on a beautiful vacation, take your spouses and you go to Indian Ocean and even like going to see a sunrise, you'd be like, I got a call coming up at 4:00 a.m. or 2 a.m. What's it like to be in that sort of on call life?
It's not for everyone. We made a conscious tradeoff because, as Chris said, the team was still growing. We were still the most senior engineers and had the most knowledge of basically all the areas of our products. We couldn't step away completely even for a week or two. So we were always on as you say and it was a it was a trade-off basically in some ways it was also a privilege to be able to work from anywhere but it means

if you travel away from your home time zone then suddenly calls that were at reasonable hours are not so much anymore
and you couldn't postpone them or anything and when you take the calls do you say hey I'm in
No we don't
yeah what do you say when you're like I'm in uh I'm not going to turn my camera on because uh
I with British telecom quite a bit [laughter] of British.
Look, the thing is the way we saw it and I I don't disagree with this is that we were a remote working company. The studios we worked with knew that and they knew that we would always put everything we needed to put in to solve whatever problem they were having.
So where we were when we were doing that,
we didn't believe it should matter. And we did always solve
the problem that we needed to solve
as long as the tech was working, the games were, you know, moving along smoothly, players were happy.
I think it also did influence quite a bit how we built the technology because you you have to build in a particular way where there isn't anybody else who wakes up at 3:00 in the morning to look

at the issue. It's one of one of us that will, especially when the team was smaller, but had an extreme impact on the approach to creating the resiliency. I think even even now the team is larger I think
the lessons we've learned so the buck stops with us so
we are in the trenches with the team but at the end of the day
we need to solve the problems with the customer means we get up at 3 in the morning and do it
even now but much less so obvious
much less so much less intent
I think it also did influence quite a bit how we built the technology because you you have to build in a particular way where there isn't anybody else who wakes up at 3 in the morning to look at the issue it's one of one of us that will especially when the team was smaller but had an extreme impact on the approach to creating the resiliency. Yeah. Yeah.
And so you've gone through like this period which is a you know a considerable period probably what five six maybe seven years where you were always on pivoting the business going through super stressful periods from like just very intense working period.

And you said you were friends before you started this, but what has kind of kept you together? Because the number one reason why startups fail is the founder dynamics. So, what has glued you?
We we holidayed together. Um, that meant that we could share stories together and reminisce together and sort of draw out some of the best moments that we had even on this really phenomenally intense journey. And what do each of you bring to the table? Like from the outskirts, we're looking in like if you're a fundable team, I'm looking at like three backend engineers that are, you know, essentially
three didn't really know the games industry either.
Yeah. Who don't have Well, even that could be like, yes, that's not a plus when you go into a certain industry, but that can be mitigated if somebody's coming from relevant industry or they're just very passionate about it. But essentially, your skill set is very, very similar. It's not like you have a business person then you have a tech person and you have an operations person or or something like that but you're

very similar and the question is like what do each of you bring to the table that has made this into such a complete team which from the outside would look like a team that lags certain expertise. We didn't know what we had as talents as such, right? The the sort of the the the journey of the company shaped us to be who we are to some extent. Like I didn't know how to hire until I hired and then we hired and we hired and hired. But at this stage I would say I think I'm going to say for the other guys and then I don't know you guys if you want to say it about me. I don't know how this this question has to be answered. But
I think Andre has a depth of attention to detail that I've never seen anywhere else, technical or otherwise. Both of the guys are exceptionally thoughtful, some of the best that I've ever seen. And we went through YC and we've seen some of the best founders there. And Chris is kind of like out of the box

thinker, someone who has seemingly the answers whenever the question comes up.
Yeah, I'd say that's a good sum.
I appreciate it. Yeah, the
good words. Um, as Mo said, we to begin with we
Yeah, you're right. Three engineers,
but three engineers who had no choice if they were going to make it work, figure out how to lean in one direction or the other, right? and therefore fill the gaps that would otherwise have been expected to be there from the start by an investor. Right? Mo leaned into the operations, hiring and cloud side of things. Andre leaned in as our CTO into the deeply technical side of the problem space. And I leaned into sales and customer success. Yeah. And that just it meant that we Yes. We're still engineers. I still think that's one of our greatest strengths is that all three of us are engineers at the very top of the of the structure when we're building game tech at the end of the day. Right.
We can mix in
so we can exactly we can mix in into any

conversation both the business and the technology side of it.
And it's interesting because this company is very organic like in a way that you were friends you wanted to do this you came up with this then you pivoted towards your success. often times, especially in the recent era where we had this sort of a like everybody was after VC money and VCs were the king for about like a 10-year period in in gaming and everybody was kind of modeling their business to be venture capital fundable.
Y
and so that led to almost like the pop stars approach of like I'm going to build the best pop star
team that can be funded.
Yeah. Best team that can be funded and and yours is
team that wasn't able to get funding.
Yeah. Yeah.
Which is which is interestingly enough, but it was still successful.
Yep.
I think because we went down the substance of it
rather than
you built the Yeah. You built a company.
Yeah. We became successful the only way that I think we could have become successful, right? We leaned into the product, the sales and the kind of the organic operations of the company
and the perseverance.

Yeah. We didn't really have a choice there. It's not like we thought that that was the best way. We
we didn't know what the best way was. [laughter]
We didn't have a choice.
Yeah. It was either that or nothing.
But you had a choice.
The choice is Yeah. But it's not to bail out is what you're saying. Yeah.
How come did you stay for such a long time on this mission and weren't like, you know what, guys? This is not going to work out. Most of the companies die in gaming tech. It was a good try. We had fun. Chris almost lost his leg.
They almost died in the Indian Ocean.
Yeah.
And other stories that were Anyways, we shall not [laughter] go too big. But like what kept you together because it's so easy to give up as well. And in your case, you would have given up and gone back on working or maybe started a fintech company that is way more fundable. [laughter]
Look, the way I view it is that we are almost like a tripod.
We lean on each other whether that's through the emotional roller coaster. Those were one of one of the YC fans

told us like last dinner YC was like, "Guys, whatever you do, it's an emotional roller coaster. You got to check yourselves, check each other, etc. Whether through the emotional roller coaster of building the business where every week there is some new thing that you hadn't encountered to the depressing moments like coming out of Bingo's meeting and whatnot. It's the camaraderie that we have.
We could still be friends and not be in what we've built. I think it was just naive stubbornness, right? We refused to give up until we had tried everything that we thought could work. And if we thought at that point that we can't find another way to make it work, then that would be the end of it.
Sam Oldman had mentioned that at one of the events that we'd attended at one point, someone in the crowd had asked him at the time,
when do you know when to stop?
And he said, it's simple. It's nothing to do with funding or revenue or or market fit. It's whether or not you run

out of ideas. If you can't figure out a way to make it work anymore, we have nothing left to try. Then, you know, it's time to stop. And we had not yet decided that there was nothing else left to try. It stuck with us.
Yeah,
we were stubborn. It was hard. And being three good friends was the absolute best way I think that we could have kind of gone through it. But just being three of us full stop meant that we could ride out the emotional amplitudes better. Right? When one of us was down, the other two were there to help.
It was never kind of all of us at once, if you will. There was always some source of optimism within the team.
Do you think you could have done this at later years of your life or was part of it being young?
The energy level was definitely
being young definitely helped. Yeah. And not having anything to lose as well because you haven't

cuz like what's the worst thing that can happen?
Yeah. Then you just go back into industry. You find a way to to work somewhere else or or build something else. But yeah, I think it definitely helped that we were at that point. But I don't think it changed the sense of we will find a way to make it work. I think we would have been able to do that anyway.
Yeah. Yensen Hang, CEO of Nvidia and founder Nvidia, once said that if founders knew the pain in advance, nobody would ever start a company. So if you could go back and whisper one truth in the in your younger self's ear, what would that be?
Everything takes longer.
Buy some Bitcoin.
Buy [laughter] what else?
Yeah. Um, no, I think Mo's right. It's going to take longer than you think it's going to take. Yeah,
I'd say [sighs and gasps] you're not as prepared as you think you are for the sacrifices, the missed opportunities or the tradeoffs, the delay effectively

that this will cost your life, you know,
because if you jump into this and it's successful right away, no problem. Full steam ahead.
But if like us, it takes a while, then a lot of things might be on hold.
Yeah. until you figure this out.
And you were three friends. Were there others in your peer group? They're kind of getting their life ahead and forward. They were doing the normal things. They were in they had a job. They were getting paid. They had their first apartment. They bought a car. And meanwhile,
yeah. And you'd meet up together. You'd catch up. And you'd find it hard to talk about much because the kind of things that you're trying to do not very relatable. And you can't speak to the kind of things that everyone else is doing because you're not doing them.
You're not brunching. You're not checking out this new thing. You don't have kids.
And you're not keeping up with your reading list or movies or TV shows or whatever. You're not traveling as much
about my when friends ask me about how's

know your day been
and I'm like I was wasn't I was on a call with this customer and this other customer and we fix this or like I'm hiring this person from Colombia and this and this. Like
it's hard to relate. It's not relatable.
Yeah. It's just a weird
phase
part of life that we are in. Yeah.
It's not very but at the same time earlier on
you know my wife Sherry would would talk to me about like are we doing the right thing? You know this other person who just bought their house and look how beautiful it is and and I have to continuously sort of you know it affects you.
All you can say is well we think we are.
Yeah. It's an investment and it's like it's like a rocket that you're just putting fuel in to take off.
Did it build doubt when you met people from the outside world, from the real world that are you on the right path because like now at this point you probably are married and you haven't realized your full potential and not even close. Meanwhile, your peer group is visibly on the track.
Yeah, there was a lot of doubt. Always a

lot of doubt. There's a large amount of imposttor syndrome even when it's beginning to work. And then before that there's a vast amount of doubt in whether it's the right way to spend time, right? Because you can't get that back.
I don't think the doubt ever really goes away. It's more you get better at dealing with it.
Yeah. Yeah.
There's also the doubt of whether this company is the one versus shall I go back to industry and and for me like going back to industry getting the job and whatnot. It wasn't like any future I could imagine did not include me having a job as a regular thing. You know between university to you know starting heroic we tried other ideas. It was this wasn't the first one. This is sort of like where we thought the three of us could fit together really well because we always try to build companies. We try to build products irrespective of the of the market.
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Is it easier to hang out with other founders when you're a founder?
Yes and no. It's hard to know whether when you're talking with other founders, unless you're close, how much of what's

being said is real and how much is each other bragging or trying to make each other feel better about the situation. Sometimes it's hard to sit and have a real conversation. And that's why I think the Y cominator dinners, this sort of closed hall type of experience where it was sort of put your phones away, turn everything off, just listen and this person is going to tell you their real story. You know, even when we were looking back in the day at, you know, Techrunch articles about hugely successful just acquired companies and everything reads like it's an overnight success, right? Everything reads like it took 18 months and then it just went, you know, it just skyrocketed. Yes. Hockey stick.
Yeah. Hockey stick style. And nothing when you dig into the details, it's rarely if ever like that. Yeah.
Also, I think it's hard for me at least, I don't know about the guys, to relate to other founders because we haven't raised money. So, the way you think

about running the company dayto-day and sort of the bets that you make or where you invest is different. How would heroic look like had you for example raised money from like let's say Client Perkins or any of these funds or Storm.
Storm Ventures. Yeah,
Storm. But that's a great name.
Yeah,
Storm. I've never heard, but that's an amazing name. [laughter]
Um, so I I don't know it would if it would still exist today.
I don't I don't think because we we have over time continued to find product market fit. We've never stopped finding product market fit. We don't see it as a as a tickboxing phase of a company's life cycle. So, you know, you'll find when you look look us up that we've got all these other pieces of tech products that we've built out over time that are a direct response to just being in meetings with studios and hearing what the problems are they're trying to solve that takes too much time where it shouldn't. And I'm not sure if we were on the VC train, we would have continued to do that. And therefore it's possible we

would have got acquired by some of the earlier customers that we had through you know once once we were were venture capital backed with somebody in board meetings with us you know advising us at that point.
We would have had a different view about where to draw the line or we may have been forced to draw the line in a different different spot because obviously when you take on investment you also take on someone someone having a say. But it's a minority case. You would have been influenced influence. It would have been the influence. Remember, we didn't know, right? We were naive foundable.
Malleable. Exactly. And what we ended up molding ourselves into to solve these different areas of the problem that we said earlier are things that on paper we don't look like we would be capable of solving. We're just three engineers. That's what we molded ourselves to be able to do. How would we have been molded differently with somebody somebody else in the room? And I think not having the funding makes you really focus on where your revenue is going to

come from, what your customers actually need,
get on the green
and sort of a very harsh reality you got to look at. Where is your sort of next bit of food going to come in essentially
rather than chasing the next funding round which is what VCs naturally want because you get a markup on their investment so that they can raise another funding.
You basically become a hot potato.
Yeah. So Andre, you were saying
effectively. Yes. Um yeah, the guys have fleshed out my thought much better here. It's not the direct say like it's not someone could come in and tell you do this. It's the influence you're allowing them or even kind of inviting them to exert over you. Um because you need
their continued investment effectively, right?
And you you want their expertise.
You want their expertise. We definitely would have thought
finally someone who knows more than us believes in us. I think we at that stage that's probably how we would have we would have seen it.
Yeah. We would have been honored even and therefore we would have let that
bias us even in our own kind of thoughts and decision-m where we weren't even

like seeking an external opinion. I think we would have almost like pre-influenced ourselves before we even sought advice and already kind of started by positioning ourselves in that in that way. But I think the level of in-depth thinking that we have for a product or a problem space to solve it for revenue to solve it for a customer it would probably not happen if we had outside money because we don't have to go be like okay so this person believes it must be correct and we're missing something rather than having to get to the root cause of it. That is a massive change.
So yeah I think we just wouldn't exist as as we are today or maybe even at all if we' taken investment at that stage.
Yeah. And on top of that, I would say we also would have been raising on the SAS model and making a big pivot uh would probably not have been very welcome by our investors because we're effectively scrapping the product um and the positioning that they had invested

in. And there's nothing wrong. I mean, we're saying kind of funny things about VCs, but there are just essentially two different models with VCs. The most important for them is growth and they will fund till eternity if you just keep growing. But you have to be incredibly aggressive towards growing and then again with your what the challenge became is you had to pivot your whole business model and to figure so you would have grown towards the wrong direction and ended up aqua hired.
Yeah. And then so you might have gained adoption.
Yeah.
But how would that have then translated to revenue?
Yeah. Yeah,
it would have been at some point, hey, this heroic cloud is pretty nice thing is actually essential for us. We're just going to grab this whole company
and that's about it.
And then you work for Zinga,
which is not a bad thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Love the Zinga guys.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Work there. So, [laughter]
we would have been colleagues at that point.
Well, you talked a little bit about like I mean we talked about exit right now. So what keeps you going when it's clearly easier to just cash out?

There's a next milestone, but that milestone is purely revenue motivated. And then there is at least three or four, remember I said to you, if you run out of ideas, then that's when you know you've hit your uh hit your limit. There's at least three or four things next that we have top of mind that we'll be tackling. We haven't yet decided which one next. We're actually going to figure that out in the final quarter of this year. But yeah, if we no longer had the idea that we would solve another piece of the problem space next, then we would maybe be thinking differently. But
yeah, I think milestone wise is is a good way to think about it. I think we are the stable company that anyone wants
mostly been sold and kind of disappeared from the market.
Exactly. revenue is the next milestone that we're hitting, but also expansion to other areas that we think will be quite cool to do.
Yeah, that's a I I love that approach where essentially you're just we'll build as long as we have ideas what

needs to be built and if we don't have any ideas what needs to be built, then we've done building this and then we can hand it over because why would anybody need us here since we've done what we're here for, which is building.
Yeah. And and at that point we may no longer be the right people to take it
that's what I mean it's like you give it to somebody we're more
more more in any problem space to be solved of course but it might not be we might not be capable
exactly then it becomes a sales and uh customers success company which is a very mature stable high revenue high generating or at least high generating business.
Yep. Yep. That's way better approach than like we need to hit this weird milestone that we came up with in a sea shell.
We don't much more practical.
Yeah.
We have no choice but to be.
Huh. [laughter]
I wanted to ask a question like what's the proudest thing about heroic each of you feels that that no one on the outside would ever even notice.

We've always we've been profitable every year that we've grown. But it's not about profitability purely as a milestone. It's about what that means to the people who are with us on the journey. It's the team that we've built. We are always able to look after the team, right? I'm very proud of the fact that we don't follow some kind of cycle of fire and higher and fire and higher because we haven't had to position ourselves within funding rounds and we haven't had to position ourselves along that kind of uh um pathway.
And because you've retained your customers.
Yeah, exactly. Because we've been laser focused on really deeply looking after customers. Um, so I'm super proud of the fact that the team that we have with us, we've always been able to look after and we'll continue to do so. It's a
really cool thing to be proud of.
It's funny, that's the the same thing that jumped to my mind in a more concrete way when I realized that the younger members of our team were starting to get mortgages and buy their first properties that we were able to give them that stability, the confidence

that, you know, this is not just a flash in the pan. It's not it's not going to disappear any day now. It's something they can rely on and kind of build their lives on.
Two things uh for me. One is that we don't have any churn from the customers. Um the only churn that we have is when they the customers themselves sort of die. They run out of money.
Game studios don't always work right.
Understandable churn.
Uh but as them moving away from us because of some dissatisfaction um touchwood hasn't happened yet. And the second thing is I was chatting with uh my wife um a few weeks ago and she said like a lot of companies that she's seen they don't hire friends. It's like a thing for some reason. Well, we've hired friends. We've hired our friends, we've hired their friends and in a distributed manner. Uh that helps a lot sort of get rid of the loneliness because we're all over the world. But also it brings a cohesivity together. So when we do these

all hands once a year we we we take the team for a week to a location we play mafia style games if you will.
What's that? [laughter]
Please elaborate.
Um
interrogation going up. [laughter] No, it's like, you know,
we play we play a bunch of very well-known board games that allow you to do social deduction and similar but but the memories of the games
carry on for the for the for the remaining Yeah. We sort of we have fun even you know when they last week um
a bunch of the guys came over uh Kitano and Mihalenko and uh we were reminiscing over how the game was played even like 2021 where we did the first one because there is no politics there is no bureaucracy there there's we are friends we are all professional but also very humane and very friendly with each other I think it makes working even at long hours sometimes what the guys do I think

a a lot easier to to juggle and I think that's not something that you see a lot in in a lot of different companies
to like the vibe.
Yeah, I guess I guess the vibe might be one way to put it
for a younger audience. [laughter]
Maybe
vibe and a mafia. I don't know.
It's a vibe of it. [laughter]
Yeah, maybe maybe this sounds a little bit strange like instead of being proud of some some company milestone or some product milestone or the projects we've worked on, obviously we're proud of all of that. I think for all three of us, this comes from a place of we've we've each suffered in kind of previous jobs where we were treated as resources just to be, you know, drained until there's nothing left to give or bad experiences with kind of management situations um where we weren't treated right
or some of the the promises that were made weren't kept, things like that. So, we wanted to be the very opposite of that. across the board.
Yeah. I mean, Mihal was my wedding

officient. He works with us.
Wow.
All right. So, a whole bunch of the guys came to my wedding and that's sort of like that's the kind of friendship that we have that's sort of hidden away that you don't really hear about in the industry. Like, how can Oh, you have to always have, you know, your employees different to your you can't have a mode where they are they are friends and and they care at the end of the day. They individually they care about the products, they care about the company, they care about the customers. Yeah, there's a fear. So the the pros and cons of hiring friends like there's usually that fear if you bring in friends they first of all not might not be the best for that position but most importantly it's like very hard to manage your friends and that's the kind of like the fear and that's why people tend to say is like rather bring in people or hire people who you become friends with because they they kind of you know are taken into that position but it's not rule and clearly you've done things outside what the normal rule set is and

made it work. So, I just want to say that even though you do it, that's still not the best practice. [laughter]
Yeah. I I think Yeah, I think you're right. Look at I don't know if any of any of this would scale to if you're 500 people,
right?
But, you know, when you're 50 to 100, I think it can work. Yeah.
You know,
of course, and it's easier to hire friends and they're kind of vetted and also
So, they're all adults.
Yeah. And you're in well you'd be surprised but uh but but this is also a very homogeneous type of organization where it is a tech organization and so that helps a lot because people think the same way. Yes.
So you you are mainly engineers.
Yeah. Yeah. And remote working means that the team as a whole predominantly favor an autonomous style of working that everyone in the team knows what they're going to be picking up and working which means this idea of management and managing people can be to a lesser extent um forgone in the case of autonomy right so
it's a specialist service like experts

organization in a way
yeah I think you're right yeah
expert service so it's not like another type of let's a game studio that has a very different set of talents from artists to engineers to product people that all have very different ways of solving problems, thinking and approaching things and that creates a lot of friction.
But that's that's what you need in that environment, right? Because that diversity of thinking is what is what powers the creativity that you believe will make a studio succeed, right? So, you're right. It's a very different our place in the in the industry allows us to be more similarly natureed. Yeah. I just mentioned it so that people don't walk away like no okay hire friends start company with friends like that seems to be and then don't raise venture funding like these are all things you can do and be successful
yeah yeah for sure
but it's not the primary model no I mean we we've made it apt for the kind of tooling the kind of company we built they're all senior engineers so they are all they don't have to pretend essentially and it works homogeneous as you say
and to be fair to you know the widely

accepted model it's Not like we were some kind of rebels that thought no we have a better way.
We didn't have much choice. No.
Yeah. Actually, all of this really goes back Mishka to what we said at the very start which is that this is emerged organically. It's not as though we went into it with a particular thesis or philosophy about how we'd make it work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With a little pinch of YC advice
sometimes. Yeah.
Yeah. It's also a very engineer approach because engineers just
look at problem solve a problem one by one one by one which would be a business school approach where you
bring in a bunch of benchmarks and start building in accordingly and everything has to be referenced and that's why the VC model is that way because VCs are tend to be business people and they need references they need benchmarks
yeah there statistical modeling and yeah
yeah one one thing that stuck with me at the last dinner I see with Justin K and ran and sort of came in and I was like Mo I think Andre you you were there as well and it was like only hire when you're bleeding and so we've only hired

when we've realized okay we do need to we know what to do but we don't have the time to do it and we talked to I mean in at the very earlier stages to our friends and like okay you know what this sounds interesting and then we sort of brought them in and we work closely with each other and then that worked and I sort of tried to replicate that so hiring very very very slowly when you're bleeding is one of the keys because you're not venture funded because nobody
I mean I would say even if you are venture funded you should take that one with you hire slowly but it runs counterintuitively to what the advice is that you'll get repeatedly from your institutional capital
and also how you raise more funding because you show who you've hired so that stands as attraction and that's ex it it's a different model it's based on a hyperrowth and if you're doing a part of the hyperrowth just the hiring part that's going to be a hyper fast death [laughter]
yeah very true but But it's again different model. And if when it's your own money and you run out of money, you you don't eat,
then of course you're you're bleeding already.

Yeah. Exactly.
It's just how much you bleed.
Yeah. [laughter]
Let me go through rapid rounds and and uh and then I'll let you go. But I have two questions for each of you.
So let's start with Chris.
Okay.
Most stressful moment as a founder.
Uh pivoting, right? Um, we spent 6 months fighting each other over whether or not we should make the change, whether or not we just hadn't given enough time. And yeah, I'm glad we did, but it was a real struggle at that point. Yeah,
Andre, most underrated trait in a great co-founder.
I'm probably going to butcher the quote, and I can't remember exactly who it was. It's something like the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of optimism. Oh, [laughter] that's so
sounds like a naive person, but that's about what you need.
That's why it's underrated.
Yeah, [laughter] true.
Uh [snorts] Mo, what's one thing each of you would never want to do again?
I think start a company being cash poor.

It makes everything harder to do or just that much harder, I would say.
That's what that much more work.
Chris, hardest thing to explain to your family about your work? Oh gosh. Um, very typical working hours. Yeah. Because even when they see it happening, it's sometimes hard for them to accept that that's just part of the kind of commitment that we make to the customer base that we have. So, yeah, I think it's the unusual working hours. Even when they see it, it's hard it's hard to accept it. Sir,
Andre, the nicest thing your co-founders have said or done to you or for you?
Just existing. [laughter]
Don't put words in his mouth.
Yeah. Um, that's a tricky one because we've been through so many things and I've relied on them so so many times over the years. It's really hard to pick just one.

I think they've just always been there for me, but in a way that's it's hard to even adequately put into words that this kind of a unshakable belief that there's someone there for you when it all hits the phone.
All right, and last one. Mole, what's the one sacrifice you made for Heroic Labs that you'd never want your future kids to repeat? I think maybe not having time for myself, being able to self-reflect more, check myself, you know, being emotionally aware, etc. I think that's required in a high stressful um company to be able to be more aware of the actions and the con consequences. I would tell my kids at some whatever time if I have one I don't have any to basically be able to take you know an hour or two hours a week to themselves and just think through what was the why behind certain actions that was that they did it just self-reflect

rather than just go go
for 10 years straight.
Yeah. On on adrenaline [laughter]
and cortisol.
Yeah. Exactly. I would have said something about fixing people's legs, but uh but [laughter] not you.
Medical get a medical degree. That's a that's a good one.
Um all right. I just want to say that you guys are [ __ ] awesome. It's been uh it's been great working with you for the past what two years you've supported the constructor of fun and getting to know you as a as a founding team.
It's incredibly impressive what you've built.
Thank you. uh most of the companies we interactive not all are venturebacked and you've kind of forced this into an existence and built this amazing company that from the outside may not look like it cuz it it's like backhand tech and bass and live ops products and cloud services not very sexy but then when you look behind the cover and that's why I wanted to do this podcast is like you have an amazing story very different way

of building very sustainable way of building and a very interesting way of thinking about business and products and teams and founding and all of that. So, it's always a pleasure to have you on and I hope the uh the audience also enjoyed hearing more about what is heroic labs behind the crypto names products of Sattorii and [laughter] and Hero and all of that. So, it's a it's a real company with with really nice people who build really complicated products so that others can build games much easily.
Thank you. Thanks, Vishka. Thank you for coming.
Thank you. And thank you for listening.
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