LILA #1: Why Did We Start LILA Games?

hey everybody what's up we are here the three co-founders of leela games myself joe kim paul lydon and avinash pandey what's up guys so it's our first podcast kicking things off and i thought we could just talk about why did we as co-founders want to start this company and i think that we all have our own personal reasons for wanting to kind of start a new company and i thought we could kind of go through some of those reasons so let's start there what are we doing what are we trying to build all right we're trying to build a hardcore shooter game for mobile yeah that is very ambitious and it's really different so different that people who hear about it want to invest in it people who learn about it want to join and designers that hear about it are like excited to get on this team so it's that's about as much i think i can go into a podcast i don't know if you

think that's enough or what it's basically a mobile shooter game right and what was your other question uh why did you want to start a company like a new company instead of just joining some other company yeah you know i was thinking about that and we were even talking a little bit before the you press record on this podcast here and you know i did go on a walk and try to figure out some things to say and i was like wondering like man am i going to say anything truly worth it and um i think that the biggest reason why i really want to start a company is because i feel like well there's a couple things a couple things but i think the biggest one is i feel like i just want to make something really good like when i i there's a lot my time i wanted in my life i wanted to make a bunch of money it didn't work out there's times where i wanted to have more control over over over like a product or a team didn't necessarily work out there's things that i've wanted

throughout my career but one thing that still gets me is holding a game that i didn't build that's really good thinking dude i could have made this you know what i'm saying yeah and you know i feel like okay if i'm so good if i'm such a good free to play the game designer because i wanted to be a great free to play game designer and when you're free to play game designer there's a lot of different kind of guys and girls right they say i'm hyper casual or you know i'm more of a i'm more of a whale designer i'm like i'm uh i know social i'm dope i'm good like we choose our classes and we claim to be good but there's a lot of fear there so if you really had 100 control would you really make a good product and why haven't you made a good product yet and what happened to your last product why didn't that succeed let's look at what you've shipped where is it at so for me i've always felt like i want to be a great game designer i want to be a great game designer but then boom

a new app comes out designed by somebody in some other country didn't think of it it's skyrocketing through the through the chop charts and everyone loves it i'm thinking man i want that so i feel that way about product like some people feel that way about cars you know they'll see a nice car and they'll say god that's nice and they want a loud car they want it so they want to rev it really loud at a red light it pisses everyone off but they love it that's what excites me about these things that's like i basically want to roll up next to supercell in my badass car and be like wow wow i'd be like you aren't the only one around here you know what i'm saying you were not alone like what you thought you had it all you thought you had it all figured out huh you thought you had everything figured out and then just like trying to go toe-to-toe them you know like the other day i tried to race a tesla my car was like six years old and i saw this guy next to me at tesla and i gave him a little a little chin up i was like what's up dude you're trying to do this hella burn

me because my car's old i don't even know why i did that but uh yeah i think it's similar to that feeling right and um i know that you have a lot of deep reasons to want to start a company from like learning org and i have purpose too like i shared similar you know i want purpose i want to be proud but i think most of all i'm super excited about building competitive stuff and then rolling it on the showcase for people to who and on stuff like that i'm really i really love that that's my biggest why at the moment but it could change but that's my biggest why right now in in avinash for you and as our cto why did you want to co-found this company together so for me it was not to co-found a company rather than being really excited about uh building what we are trying to build here so paul has already given you a bit about what we are trying to build um so my background has always been into building new games building

new things just to make sure that i am learning my learning is not stopping and whenever you know whatever games i have built in past they have actually made me a better engineer so i always think like you know hands-on experience is always better than being a person who kind of manages things so that's why my interest has never been like oh build a company where you know i can have 100 people or 200 people team but rather build a game and whoever is needed to build that game that that is kind of my angle towards actually starting this company so i'm really excited about the game which we are trying to build and like the people who are we are going to build with so that's also one of the uh most important part for me so i really enjoy working with you uh the the skill set which you bring in this game which we are trying to build the deep understanding of design with paul brings and then you know uh whatever skills i can bring to kind of make this game successful and then launch it where people we can see people playing this game so that's kind of my why

and without talking about the game too much so it sounds like for both of you is really kind of more around the the product and for you avinash maybe more about trying to learn in game skills and so maybe i could first talk a little bit about the product as well in terms of like one of the things that paul didn't mention but is kind of relevant from our background in terms of like paul having worked at machine zone and fun plus and and when we met at fun plus working on this game called king of avalon that these types of games these 4x games and when we were originally designing this game we called it the game of war of shooters and by that we didn't mean that there was march battle we didn't mean like what you would normally think about a 4x march battle game but really there are the elements that we're trying to bring from a forex to a shooter is this notion about deep emotion right and so like these

kinds of games have mechanics design in them that causes very deep emotion in the players and also in terms of the social elements that there are social designs that everybody says they have social in their game but it's not just about having chat it's not just about having a guild but it's really about designing things in a way where social makes a lot of makes has deeper integration and makes more sense and is more engaging and finally it's about the monetization where you know that's something that paul studied for most of his careers how do you monetize games in a way that makes sense right so that's kind of what we're trying to develop at the product level and again i won't go into the specific design because paul's put a lot of time and effort into that we'll reveal that as as he wants to reveal it reveal it as as our lead game designer

and uh cco but i think for me the and just to get into the reason why i wanted to start lila games is is paul and avinash kind of we're alluding to is like for me i having spent like five years in publishing and having the opportunity to visit so many studios kind of look under the hood of how they're operating and even from my experience my last experience on the dev side working at fun plus what i found were so many mistakes and so many avoidable mistakes being made and just in terms of the organizational structure and the approach that was being brought to bear in terms of the operating model and how things were being done i just wanted a different kind of organization one that you know we say is a learning organization but you know when i say that it sounds so trite and we've had a number of occasions where we

talk about a learning organization and people basically roll their eyes and they laugh hahaha yeah yeah whatever yeah we do that too but no you don't and most companies don't and so what we really wanted to do is have that right kind of culture to enable a learning organization where it's safe to make mistakes where you are honest in your retrospectives where you have direct communication and where you are actively trying to improve every process and that's something that we're doing right now like paul's developed a new system in terms of like how do you does a game design spec as it exists today does that make sense we're given all the new technology given all of the latest ways of thinking about mobile game design is there a better way and we think there is in terms of how we think about our management focus and how we do product management there are so many different things

even how we do recruiting right we're actually adding a video and a to all of our job descriptions for example when we're in when we're doing recruiting so that people can actually hear a video about the specific job from their from the person who they would be reporting to right just more information more context even little things like that when you think about job descriptions and how nobody does things like that or nobody even defines the process on the jd that even those tiny things and even if you have like 10 small things that you improve and this is something that you know we we all as co-founders read this book called atomic habits together and one thing we talk about is yeah if you have like if you improve 10 different things 10 to 15 all of a sudden you've got massive advantage over competitors and things like that so for me i'm sorry i'm getting super long-winded here but two things one this concept of a

learning organization which i've been talking about and secondly a global organization we're going all in on india we believe in india we think that the the types of employees we can hire in india are neglected despite being incredibly talented and having a high desire to learn but someday assuming we're successful in india we do want to try and build out globally and have a truly global type of organization that's something we're not really thinking about probably for the next five ten years who knows how long but first you know first things first is our attempt to build a learning organization our attempt to build a really really ambitious product and hopefully hopefully achieve success yeah you know i was thinking when you're talking about the uh by the way it's actually really good what you're saying just wanted to say that real quick um when i hear the response to like

either from an investor or an advisor or an outsider party about your idea of this thing called eater calling a learning org yeah i think that most of the time these these kind of these people are kind of detached from actually making the product so like not that they haven't made a lot of progress in their life but it's been a while since they opened up base camp asana jira right you know what i'm saying yeah and as soon as we start sharing what we're changing or like little marginal stuff that we've done they'll want screenshots of it they want to see why it's cool you know i was showing somebody my new design doc technique at first they said it'd take forever i said this they said do not do this this takes forever and afterwards they were like actually you know i'm just actually all about getting stuff done fast but if i had the time i think i would do it like that but uh you know you should send me a screenshot of that real quick if you don't like stuff you know i started to really like it you know but i think what's cool is the most companies that worked at it's like this

is the game design document we use confluence that's it end the story big old brick put that in your bag that's it compliments this is it jira we use jira is it working it's what we use you know i'm saying so i like the idea of being in a fresh start and not only just being fresh start but being a part of an organization that tries to maintain that fresh start attitude that if we recently switched to monday and we love monday.com but if it doesn't work we're gonna find something better right and it's marginal but at high level it sounds like why don't you guys just focus on the product i mean what is all this new innovative learning stuff but at a marginal level it's actually pretty useful and yeah i'm enjoying it process so far yeah one of the things i was thinking about like the feedback which we have got while talking to uh investors and even during interviews uh one of the candidates they asked like you know why are you

trying to build such a big ambitious game and that too uh in india like where you will find so many challenges of hiring people who have done something like this so my thought and my kind of understanding of learning organization is that like skills are sometimes overrated and this is something very new which i was talking to from my friends is uh you if how do you take up on a challenge which has never been done by you or people around you like do you not do it or do you do you find the best approach of doing it so of course like if you try to do something which has never been done you won't find any resources on that so what you can do is always you should be good at breaking down the problems to the smallest level and then you know you anybody can work on that so if you can do a really good job of making sure that you know that atomic step per day that marginal gain per day which takes you closer to that uh solution to that product which you

are trying to build then you can do a really good job of having maybe not that experienced team but you know moving really fast and that's where kind of i feel that learning organization is the way to go so like one way like you you get people who have built these kind of games who have this triple experience but that's not the case most of the time so that's where i find learning organization very relevant to what we are trying to do yeah and by the way i think that to some degree there's a book called zero to one written by this guy named peter thiel he talks about every big company needs a secret and and i think our secret is really around this notion of being able to get organizational advantage like people aren't looking for organizational advantage in the places that we're looking for it and where we're finding it right and and so it has to do with this notion i actually did an interview with this guy named tom kalinski who was the guy who kind of um like he he kind of came up with and

and helped market flintstone vitamins revive barbie man all that kind of stuff and the one thing that he talked about is like when i asked him how were you able to turn these brands around and he was like you know what it was complacency that the people at these companies doing things the same way they just don't think about doing things differently or improving and so for him and how many brands has he turned around over his career and you know and later at sega which was documented in console wars but the point is is that you know i have met so many of those companies and so many people where you know i talked to a product manager and they you know i would talk to them about pm tools and you know they're like oh yeah i'm gonna use jira i'm like well okay great um and yeah let's talk just curious what what do you find about jira that's better than it sounds like i've never tried it i'm like well you suck then right because it's this whole point complacency

they're not even trying there's tools out there that people are talking about they haven't even tried them they don't even want to invest the time to get better and so for us the kind of company that we want to build the kind of people we want to employ are people who are looking for every marginal advantage that are not complacent and i think that is to some degree our secret because you know so before we we met avinash paul and i just you know we weren't really actively fundraising but we thought okay let's kind of put together investor pitch and see what happens and we really led with like okay we're going to do all this all these improvements on organizational advantage and like people were not not having it i mean it didn't resonate at all and then we met avinash and that now we kind of then shift it to a product oriented story right it's like oh look at this great product and then it's just like you know like investment just rained down on us by the way we use the learning technique to get to

yeah and i think what joseph was saying is that i think he experimented that last week only so when he talks about tools it's like you know you you you can be good at one tool but you'll be like okay this is my comfort zone i don't want to you know go out of it and that's what i really liked you know uh being open to learning is that you should not comment unless you try so give it a try and then you discover things and that thing could be like it can make you one step closer to what you are trying to do so i really i really hope that if someone like catches this podcast and is even interested in checking out our company that i think what i what what i wish to be like transmitted or like conveyed when you talk joseph is that when i think about it for me it's like if you're an engineer if you're a pm if you're a designer there is no real there is no real practice to get better outside of just getting

projects that push you so you're kind of at the mercy of like chance and some decision on where you work like getting better is so critical as a pm let's get it as a designer and how do you do it you can't just take a get better class for most things and if there is if there is things that we don't often seek them so you know i really hope that just from my experience but anyone who works at our company they leave much better or stay and uh it really really am totally totally okay with either but i want people to truly be better at their job and leave making more money and just end up being just so much more of value valuable i think it comes down to just creating value so yes i feel like if you stay where you are if you're not learning then you're not well if you're not if you're not learning then you're not growing right you're just you're just basically you're getting worse

so let's get better and let's get some people in here who want to get better as well and let's build like the most insane product we possibly can right yeah and maybe at least the final message from me i think is that um when i think about i think when i first thought about starting this company i did a lot of thinking and there was actually this article from clayton christensen called how will you measure your life that i really studied and thought about and um actually i actually have it yeah i remember that and basically it really talked about really trying to understand like you know when you're when you're on your deathbed and when you're eating looking back on your life will you really have thought about can you think back on your life and think that it was a life well lived and a couple of quotes that i thought were really important is that one he talked about how clayton christian went to harvard business school and at some reunions like he would meet with

some of the folks from his class and he saw what happened to their lives they didn't have good marriages they even though they may have been materially successful they had other things in their lives that didn't make sense and so one of the things he wrote is that they didn't keep the purpose of their lives front and center as he decided how to spend their time talents and energy and so for me when i thought about you know should i just join another company just kind of turn the crank or should i try and work on something that is real that would really be worthy of my time and so that really weighed heavily on me in terms of like this is why i want to start another company and the other thing about clayton christensen is that he actually uh got cancer and so that made him think a lot about his life and you know i highly recommend reading this um reading this book this article it's called how will you measure your life but kind of like in the final paragraph

of this of this uh of this article that he wrote um you know he ended with with this which was where he wrote don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved worry about the individuals you have helped become better people this is my final recommendation think about the metric by which your life will be judged and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end your life will be judged as success and so for me just thinking about i have this opportunity to try and create an organization that is fundamentally better that's to me that's what got me really excited and wanted to start this company i completely agree one of the reasons uh and i feel really strongly about in this company is like whenever we come to a point where making a decision becomes really hard then we always go with the philosophy of do the right thing and i think that's one of the core philosophies like we want to create an organization where we the right doing right thing is one of

the core values of of the philosophy of the company right yeah all right guys this is our first podcast i think that's it uh if any of you or listeners out there wanna stay tuned we're not sure where we're gonna take this but we're gonna probably talk about our story in terms of lila games we'll talk about lessons we've learned and try to share that with with uh with all of you out there so please do stay tuned and there it is you