Product Managing Game Studio Culture with Seth Sivak (ex-World of Warcraft Boston Studio Head)

[Music] Welcome everybody to the Deconstructive Fun podcast. I'm your host Mishki Katkov and today I'm honored to have Seth Civac on the podcast. Seth, welcome. Yeah, excited to do this. Well, Seth, you I I'll just go through your career quickly so that you don't have to, but please add some color. So, you started off as a gameplay engineer at Conduit Labs that was acquired by Zingga in the early boom of of Facebook games. You rose to an executive producer status at Zingga, then left Zingga, founded Proletariat, Inc., stayed in the trenches of about a decade, and then Proletariat was acquired by Blizzard, where you served as head of Boston Studio for World of Warcraft. the t-shirt that you are wearing at the moment. And currently you are doing what most executives do when they leave highlevel positions for one to two years

due to obvious reasons consulting and advising as well as writing the boss battles blog about facing the hard challenges in leadership product and entrepreneurship. Seth, what did I miss? No, that's right. The only the only thing I would say is like we I didn't technically leave Zingga on my own choice. that was a they uh they actually did a round of layoffs where they closed the Boston studio. We were about 65 people at the time. Um and it was really interesting. It was like we had actually just hired we had like three or four new product managers that we hired that were in San Francisco getting trained and they closed the studio. So I had to call those people. So I was I was one of the I was like one of the most senior leaders at the Blizzard or at the Zinga Boston studio. And so I was responsible for actually doing a lot of the phone calls to people who didn't come in that day. Like and we had brand new hires that were like at home getting furniture delivered and I had to call them and be like, "Hey, come get your laptop." That's so brutal. Yeah. And they did a it was it this was

across the board. I mean, in in 2012, they did they did like a huge round of layoffs. They closed a bunch of the satellite studios. And this was like 9 months after the IPO. And so it was when the floor was really starting to fall out of Facebook games, right? And like, you know, and it was it was like Zinga had not made the strong pivot to mobile. I was working on a mobile project at the time inside of Zinga, but but yeah, and then we we basically I uh that you know for the next week or two I spent a ton of time with the members of the Zinga Boston team helping with resumes and trying to connect them to to to places to get roles. But during that entire time, myself and the four other founders of Proletariat, we were also meeting every afternoon and we were like, "Hey, we we had had a couple of conversations before this on maybe we should leave and go do our own thing." And it was because this like Heyday and Clash of Clans had just come out and it was like you can build mobile games with a much smaller team because these teams inside of Zinga were getting huge. Like they were these massive like behemoths to build these

like huge games. Um we're like what if the five of us or four of us left and and started something. But the timing was never perfect. It was like I just got promoted so I didn't want to leave. And then and then uh and then it just so happened that we had three months of severance all of us that we could stretch to be six months. And so we didn't pay ourselves. We basically said if after 6 months we don't have healthcare, we'll all go get jobs. And so we were really open and honest like meeting every day and we fully incorporated I think 14 days after the layoffs. Um and so that's what we ended up doing. That's awesome. I mean, you know, it's not awesome to be let go, but most of the people, not most, I think third of the people listening to this podcast have gone through some kind of a layoff. But um but I like how you've treated that as an opportunity rather than something else. I've been reading your blog. So that blog is it only on LinkedIn or is it on other platforms? Uh it's on Substack as well um and just my my own personal website. Not that anyone goes to it, but yeah. So I I kind of post it in a couple of different places. Um this I have this quote, so I want to

ask you about this. So it says, "Startups live or die by focus. In the early stages, it's easy to convince yourself that culture is something you'll figure out later. After the product launches, after the next round closes, after you hire just a few more people, but culture happens by design or by default, it starts forming the moment your team does. So, I wanted to ask like is a startup obsessing is is startup obsessing over culture and distracting themselves from the harder question such as product market fit. Do you see that happening or do you would you argue counter to that that you have to focus on a culture first and rest comes in as a consequence almost? Well, so I think you know I mean one of one of the fun challenges with this is I think you probably know like like this from your experience as well. There's plenty of there's plenty of exceptions on all sides. Like you can look at super successful companies that maybe have like not great cultures and they have to

go in and retrofit and fix them later. You can look at companies that you think have great cultures that never make it, right? The team's like, you know, jamming on all cylinders. They're creating good stuff, but it just never works. And this is a whole other conversation on like, you know, building as many opportunities to get lucky as possible because that's really how this works. Um, staying alive long enough to get lucky. But I think the the reality is like the decisions you're making, whether you're thinking about them intentionally or not, do impact what you know, I think the ways in which you would reach something like product market fit. So even making a conscious decision to not talk about culture creates culture, right? Like that's a there's a choice there that you're making. And part of what I've been sort of thinking about and and given a lot of space now that I've been out of the proletariat, my proletariat experience for for almost two years is is I I've been able to look back at a bunch of this and and it's really interesting to see how many mistakes were made along the way and like what I would do. I've been thinking about like if I want to go

start a company again like what would I do differently which I'm sure that like every every entrepreneur goes through once they finish a finish the full entrepreneurial cycle and they think about would they want to go do it again and so I well of course like product market fit is the most important thing like we live in you know most most of us live in a capitalist system and it's like required for this thing to stay alive but I do think that there are decisions you make on culture who who you hire you pay those kinds of things which maybe don't necessarily seem like the chest beating here are core values on a website that are important for you know and and I don't think it takes that much time to have a conscious thoughtful decisions on why you're doing these things. How would you define culture? I think about culture as two key pieces. One is a shared aspiration and that's a combination of your like mission, vision, core values and that's really like where are we where are we headed and then there's the the norms and the behaviors of how you get there and that's the norms and behaviors are often

the like those are the unwritten rules when people talk about like the unwritten rules of culture like that's how how do we communicate what do we incentivize what do we punish like what's not acceptable here what is acceptable here and and that often goes beyond what people write down as what they you know almost universally when I talk to teams sometimes and I and I hear like hey how's everything going like what are some of your challenges and recently I've been working with a couple of teams on the production side that just need some help and advice and I always ask them like you know like are how are you at hitting deadlines and everyone's bad at this and the question is like why like is it because you're not incentivizing people to hit deadlines are you not punishing people if they miss them like what what is it that is causing this issue and all of those go into what is your culture around deadlines because if you don't have a team that enforces deadlines. What does that mean for you as a culture? Like are you okay with that? The rabbit hole that I got myself into as well as a first-time founder was reading a lot of books about culture and that steered me away from what is the most important thing which is the product market fit and then also

retrospectively looking at a lot on different companies that were successful that are known for good culture. for example, they start off with finding actually the uh the product market fit, being successful, being profitably, scaling, and then focusing back on culture. So my question around this is like how do you know when your efforts are actually shaping the culture and those efforts are landing or you're just doing this mental jousting, writing PowerPoint decks and these declarations and and you know, values and missions early on. That's that's kind of like for you and for LinkedIn. Today's podcast is brought to you by Absfly, inviting you to dive into their new firstofits-kind report, the state of creative optimization 2025 edition. It's not about how to make creatives. It's about understanding what makes users actually stop scrolling and what emotional and psychological triggers drive performance. Based on over a million creative variations and nearly

$2.5 billion dollars in ad spend, the insights in the report will help you develop a winning creative strategy. Check out the link in the podcast description below or go to appslire.com and search the state of creative optimization. That's appslire.com. Game devs, we know that great gameplay is what players love. But integrating metagame features like challenges, progression, rewards is crucial for retention and monetization. However, coding them is a tedious and timeconuming process. That's why top studios have turned to Hero. Hero provides a complete suite of battle tested metagame features that are quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully featured, engaging games? Check out hero today by clicking the link below. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the So I think making some of these decisions, especially some of the more

concrete ones around things like behaviors, right? Is like, okay, like we're going to start enforcing deadlines. So what we're going to do is we feel like the right thing to do is if you hit your deadline, you can take, you know, if you hit your Friday deadline early, you can take the rest of the day off. I'm just using that as an example. that's like not something but and so then I would say like check in in 3 months like because the hitting the deadline is probably not the end goal. See, I think there's the way I look at this is and and the way when I talk to teams about where they are and maybe this is going into your side of it, like imagine that we're looking at four quadrants where the the the yaxis is, you know, at the top is, you know, we're we're doing the the the right work, at the bottom is the wrong work, and then on the the x-axis on the left, we're doing we're doing work the wrong way, and on the right we're doing work the right way. Ideal situation is you're doing the right work the right way, but in my experience and like that's when your team is totally killing it, but

that's super rare. Like almost never happens because typically if you're starting to do the right work, it means that like you're still scaling. You're trying to figure out what you're doing like whatever. If you're doing the right work the wrong way, you're in the like fix it mode, but at least we're doing the right work, but like we have to catch up and we're we're doing the right thing. If you're doing the wrong work the wrong way, you're just dead. like you're just you're just in, you know, you're doing everything. The worst possible scenario, and I think this is what you're talking about, is this busyness trap where you're doing the wrong work the right way. And I think that's where people get trapped. And when you look at this, it's like, okay, well, like we're, you know, teams team's hiring really well, we're making the, you know, we're we're building stuff. We're hitting deadlines, but hitting deadlines is not the goal. like you know you still need to like make a product that makes money or like you know ship a game that gets customers happy or whatever it is. And so the problem is like teams get really stuck on this busyiness of like okay like look at this we we didn't hit a we didn't hit we didn't miss a single deadline we went

through this entire sprint and like no one you know we didn't miss a single ticket but like who cares if you don't actually get the outcome that you wanted which is usually much bigger and this is where like I think goal setting is really critical but the the you have to look at it as part of you know if we're if we're not doing the right work like then that is step one of trying to figure out what's actually going on because it doesn't matter if you're not doing the right work whether it's the right way or the wrong way. It doesn't matter. But as soon as you start to move down the path of doing the right work, you need to figure out as much as possible how to start doing it the right way. Otherwise, it's just unsustainable in most cases. Do you feel that that people just have very different perception of what culture is? It's kind of like brand like you ask 10 brand people what brand is and you'll get 12 descriptions. Yeah. I think a lot of people I mean I agree with you. I I think I think it's I look at it as a set of tools that drive

behavior of like how your team's going to operate. For me this is all about like things that are extremely actionable. like I don't really like I think they are tools because the way you talk about the culture the way you and and some of it is I guess a little bit of branding when you're thinking about hiring or finding customers because culture has not like our broader the broader world like human culture has slowly trended much more to people actually caring deeply about like identity alignment with the brand with the the products they buy the companies they work for all of those things and I think younger and younger generations continue to have that and So it becomes an important factor in in those types of pieces. But I do think that it often gets misused and I think partially it's misused because it is used as branding. But I think the other part is it's just like poorly executed. People are focusing on the wrong things. like they're not making cultural like they're not putting together cultural tools that are actionable that allow their teams to make better decisions based on this culture or they're not really executing

like they have these culture you know these you know they they put the core values on the wall but they don't use them and that I think like is is where I see most of the missteps. I think if a team focuses deeply on like it's very easy to to come up with some core values, it's very hard to like use them like on a regular basis. Well, I'll go back to to the previous question. How do you know that your effort to shape the culture is actually landing? Because I think I think that's the uh that that's the most challenging thing that I've seen is like yes there are plenty of founders they write these great visions, missions, the wise, you name it. But at the same time that that is not helping the team to execute or the team is not executing according to these lofty sentences being written. Attention app and game developers. Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top performing apps and games? With Sensor Tower, you get the

ultimate competitive edge, whether it's breaking into new markets, fine-tuning your UA strategies, or boosting monetization. Dive into data like never before. Track global trends across app stores. Analyze marketleading app purchase and inapp ad strategies. And benchmark your performance with realtime insight. The best part, Sensor Tower doesn't just deliver data. It helps you turn it into action with intuitive tools and expert analysis. It's everything you need to make smarter, faster decisions. Thousands of app and game studios, from indie creators to global giants, trust Sensor Tower to help them win. So why not you? Start your free trial today at sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com

web stores. You've seen what good looks like, but have you seen great? App charge is the direct to consumer platform backed by the likes of Supercell and built by monization pros from Moonactive, Platika, Huge Games, and others. People who know the difference. App charge powers over half a billion dollars in transaction a year for top studios optimizing every detail. Deeply personalized web store offers, custommade design, industryleading monetization features, in-game payments SDK, and more. 70% of top grossing games already have a web store, but the one scaling fastest, they're doing it with Appcharge. Learn more at appcharge.com. Yeah. Well, I think um the way we did this at proletariat is I was I was sort of notorious for these like really just quick Google forms that I would send to the leadership team and I would just like have a and so every certainly every year, but I think even more often than

that, probably every six months, I would send out like a survey to the leadership team that was basically just like, do you think your team is is living up to these core values? And then it was like on a scale of like you know I think it was like always sometimes never and so it was like very very kind of like you know only a few choices and and then we'd also ask just like do do these core values still make sense for us like are they getting us where we want to go? Um and and that was an opportunity to just talk about this and be like, "Okay, cuz there's you need to take a moment and actually say, okay, if things aren't working, so you know, when every when everything's going well, like there's no problems, you know, everyone's clicking, it's not an issue when you're doing, you know, when you're when you think you're doing the right work, you know, mostly the right way, you're in a great spot. But if if you're not, if it can be often hard to tell like are you not doing the right work or are you not doing work the right way? which one's the problem? Like

because if you're if you're doing the right work, but it's way too slow, then that still could be not success, right? Because like if your team can't execute the way it should, that could that could be an issue. And the only way to have that conversation, I think, is to look at this and be like, is this serving us? Like one, are we living up to the values or the team like the type of team that we want to have? Are we behaving the way we would like to behave? So is the issue that we're we're not behaving the right way or are we just off on what you mentioned like the product market fit question is a real challenge that is somewhat separate like I know plenty of teams who I would say like got product market fit scaled really well but had disastrous cultures morale was terrible huge attrition all the time you know like and we've seen all sorts of you see this about like the Ubers of the world and things like that top companies in the world Microsoft Apple there are huge huge issues with culture, right? And so I think that there's, you know, now some of those are like massive companies, so it's like harder to like there's tons of subcultures inside of

that. So it's hard to slap a like label on all culture at Microsoft, but but I think it's it's um uh I think that's the way you have to look at it. So in order to judge it, it's it's really taking a hard look at is the the team behaving the way we want them to behave and is that the reason why we're failing? because it could be that like the team is behaving, you know, not behaving the way you would like, but that's also not the reason why your company's going to go out of business. Yeah, it's uh I don't have an answer for this naturally. That's why I'm asking you. You've spent an interesting discussion. Yeah. And and of course, I don't have an answer for for the most complex issues or more complex problem when you're talking about companies of Uber size and how do you how do you manage a culture? culture meaning like how do people behave and work at a company which is a massive question but on a on a smaller sizes I kind of go back to like after you know talking to the Kim Nordstroms of the world who wrote a lot about culture talking a lot to a lot of

executives and reading your blog I kind of feel like the basic learnings that we got from the army was actually the most easiest to understand and there everybody just taught you like when you become a leader or whether you're leading a a squad or a platoon or a company, you set the culture by setting an example. It's like how do you behave? How do you work? And that will ricochet then to your direct leadership team. And then you're changing the people based on how do you want them to behave if they're if they even if they're hitting the goals, but they're not working in the way that you want them to work. It's up to you. If you change that person, then you change the culture like you enforce it or you modify to include the type of behavior that your team members are doing. So I think that's kind of easier way to grasp and it also didn't come with presentations or decks or mugs with uh with slogans. It's very easy. It's like if you work hard, your team

will work hard. If you don't work hard, if you don't come to the office every day, your team will not come to the office every day. very simple. Yeah, I mean I I fully agree with that. I mean, I think one of the things that has drawn me to this a little bit is is again having having the chance to reflect on some of this stuff and really think about like what were the mistakes we made and didn't make and really you know across everything not just the but I think in some ways the type of team you put together the people you have I mean everyone talks about this right default answer is like why you know why was your company successful it's like we had a team right is you know and we had a great team and and you know in some cases that's like of course like like because companies are just made up of and people making decisions like like hundreds, thousands, millions of decisions over the course of of however much time. And I think, you know, I uh similar to you, I I read a ton on the subject of of culture leadership. Like I'm fascinated by the fact that we do a terrible job like training people to be leaders. It's sort of astounding. Or managers, it's like incredible

that we people just get like at companies. I've been at companies. I've been in rooms where people are like, "Hey, this person's interested in being a manager." And they're like, "Yeah, they're not a manager." And it's like what? How would you know? Like and and there's so so few companies I've seen try to give any training or any any training wheels, any guard rails as people try to go to this like thing that's not easy or intuitive. Like this is I'm not an expert in human psychology, but like that there's a ton here about like every little impact. You talked about this, right? Like what's the what's the impact of leading by example? like what's the impact of just like how you know you you I read all of these think pieces sometimes sometimes actually like sciencebacked studies on you know when should leaders speak in a meeting should they speak first or last what does that do like what you know we we we see all this stuff when they when they look at different perspectives on teams right when you have teams with diverse backgrounds like you know socioeconomic or or racial or whatever like what does that do for those teams to solve problems and you and I find a

lot of this stuff really fascinating But it is incredibly complicated to fully understand like what how all these things work. I think the only way to do it that I saw was you got to just experiment like make a change and then three months later ask the leadership team like is this the like are we doing the things that we think we need to do because at the end of the day it's impossible to measure all this stuff. Most of the reality in the way I look at like success for these teams is it's the decision-m capability of leadership and and how confident they are in making certain decisions is what drives whether or not companies are successful. And that's like when you think about it like that is such a fragile thing. And you're right, it has nothing to do with like coffee mugs or t-shirts with slogans or anything like that. And I think that is all those are to me are not I mean maybe if that is like a useful tool to you where you look at this I mean we did the core values for proletariat we like expressly tried to make them be things that weren't like you know when we started the company we were like oh you

know we had these like really lofty ones that I think did not you know it was like love and like you know and because we we want to love our game and that to me what we what we shifted to later on was like no like we are we are doubling the size of this company in nine months during co like we need actionable tools to not have our culture just rip apart at the seams. And by culture I mean just like how we worked together like we liked the way the team was working. We were firing on all cylinders. We were crushing it in our in our mind. We were doing work the right way or as close to the right way as we thought and and we were like what tools do we need to not just rip this thing completely open and then force a reset because every new person you add in like this is the storming norming forming part of team creation which I think is very real. like you you need teams. This is why it's so valuable to find founding teams that have worked together or game teams that have made multiple games together. There's this like cohesion that is very real. And so I think what we what we looked for with core values was like they should be actionable. Like you should say it in a meeting and you

shouldn't feel embarrassed to do it. So like one of our core values was decide fast and iterate. And it was because like we wanted people like and people would say that in meetings and we'd say like we should decide fast and and I I think that shows that it was successful. I think if we had core values that were about like love because we want to love our games or like you know Blizzard while I was there was going through a transition of rewriting their core values. eight core values and a lot of them I think were just kind of outdated and I think they've gotten much better but they had ones that I think just didn't make sense and it's you know and I think it just leans into some of the culture it's like you know they they had one I think I can't remember all of them but there was one that was about like having fun or something and it was like well yeah like we want to have fun but like this is a job so how do we balance that like what is that how do we communicate that to the people here and there was there was another one that was every voice matters and So the challenge with every voice matters is like every voice does matter. You want to take feedback from everyone on the team. I think that's a great goal. But if that

gets weaponized to be like, hey, I want to do this thing. You're saying my voice doesn't matter. It makes it really hard to have a huge team of people all moving in the same direction. If anyone at any time can be like, I want to go do this thing without, you know, without teamwork or working together. So those are some examples of I think some of the challenges of of doing it. But what you like in my mind it's these these should all be tools like they should be tools that you are using whether it's tools for recruiting for hiring or decision-m like that that's what this is for. Interesting. So you're treating culture very much like a product. You iterate, you test, you maybe even replace rather than treating it like gravity, something that is inescapable, invisible, intangible. Right. Absolutely right. like in in my my feeling is like and c your culture should change as your company changes and that's both like as the company grows like in terms of scale um you know number of people all of those things but I also feel like you're you should it

should potentially shift just based on like the where the industry moves like where the market moves like what what do you need to do but I mean to me like like culture is not a religion like you should change it you should iterate it you should you should bend it to be what you need it to be so I think like yes like treating it like a product is very much how we approached it at proletariat um of just like here was a set of documents here is a here is how we are going to like get the team to behave and we're just going to con and that was everything like we treated even our policies of just like we're going to try this for three months and it does it get us like a PTO policy we're going to try it for six months and see if it gets us what we want in terms of behavior and then we're going to check to see if it did and then if not we're going to change it so it's almost like a it's basically a tactical tool for your strategy because you would look at where we are as a company, where do we need to be, what do we need to do, and then culture for you is like, how are we going to do that?

Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, and I think this is where I'll give you I'll give you a tangible example of of a conversation that we had to have on the leadership level that I think is like really culturally related. So, um, you know, you're you're a small team. you're trying to you're trying to make things work. I think everyone would love to have great work life balance and then still build a small company. I don't know how to do that. So, more power to the people that do, but like we worked a lot of hours early on, a lot of hours. And we made sacrifices like like personal sacrifices to make the job work. And that that was just a reality. So, we as we were growing though, we were like, man, we're not a scrappy startup anymore. We like we need to grow up. we need to start like, you know, depending on the type of people we want to hire as we grow, like just as a company, we don't want to feel like we're grinding people into dust, that we're working like crazy hours or or whatever it is. Um, so we had this situation where we would do this thing at the end of the week where someone would just give a shout out to, you

know, someone else on the team for doing for doing a good job. And this was just the one of the things that we struggled with culturally was recognition, people feeling like they were getting recognized. Um, and I think that was just the nature of some of the personalities of the leadership team where we were we're just not a group that would tell you you're doing a great job if you're just doing your job. You know, you would really need to go above and beyond if you wanted praise. And we were just as a leadership team like not very driven by that personally. Not that there's anything wrong with that either way. It's just like that just, you know, I think that I think members of the leadership team were more driven by shame than than maybe uh the positive uh reinforcement. Yeah. It felt fake probably for you because you understood how much work there is. So, we had this situation where someone got a got a shout out, got a kudos at the end of the week for basically working all weekend to get this thing in, to get like some feature in or whatever. We talked about this and we're like, do we want to reward like one, it was actually really good that he got it in because like man, we really needed that. But two, like should he be getting public? Do we want to create a culture where people try to be the hero

and that you have to work over the weekend to get kudos here? And then if you spin that out one step further, it's like, okay, is the only way to move up to like have a you know to to to be successful at this company is to make these huge sacrifices or to do these kind of like swoop in heroic things where you're you're doing that. And like this is really painful because objectively like we're a small company. So like occasionally we do need people to you know we have to push to real extremes. We have to crunch. We have to hit deadlines you know that are very very hard deadlines. But then what does that communicate to everyone else if that's something we are publicly rewarding and so this is just really complicated like I don't know the right answer. And so what we talked about is we were basically like hey we told the whole team we sat down with the team and we were like listen we think this was really good but we want to be like not in this situation like there is still going to be the cases where it's going to be necessary to do that but this is not seen as a regular thing and it's not something we want to reward when this

happens it means that like some mistakes occurred along the way and it's not something to be celebrated so anyway just to give you an example of I think just a really complicated cultural decision on on how do you what do you incentivize and what do you reward and then what does that do to the behaviors of the team like shortterm and long term. So punishing or rewarding certain action is managing the culture as a product almost steering putting in guard rails and and steering it. But the other question that you kind of touched upon this was that the success of the company is not the same as whether the culture is good or bad. But I wanted to kind of go deeper into what is a good culture and a bad culture because these are very much based on individuals. There might be a team full of young people like let's say it's your founding team and you guys pushed over the weekend to get a feature done and that was really important because it allowed let's say you were working for hire and it allowed you to get your you know salaries paid.

That might be for you good culture because you teamed up and worked really hard and then for somebody else it might be horrific culture of crunching. Yeah. I mean, I um I don't think I I think that there's often a mistake that that I think some of the symptoms you talk about of like these teams kind of doing things that don't feel authentic to them or it's just things on coffee mugs or the first thing they do is they put up a website with super lofty goals is I think they they try to project what they think they you know other people want them to be like what you what they think a good game studio would be or a good creative culture would be because you know they went and read Creativity Inc. you know, or something like that. And so they haven't, you know, and even though if you if you read that book and you think about it, like the culture at Pixar was very bad, like like they had massive issues, right? And so I think it's, you know, I think some of the things are great like brain trust is an amazing idea, like being very open and direct with your feedback, like a lot of great ideas in there. But I think the the um you know when you

when you think about the the fact that I think the culture what makes a good culture is really about the the stakeholders. So ultimately it starts with the leadership because they're typically the first ones there. But then it's like what is you know how is this culture serving the ultimate goals for the company? And the reality is for most companies unless you're like a BC corp or how you're doing this like it's to make money right you're you're you know and if you have investors it's to return money to those investors. And so you need to think about like how is this culture serving that and then how are we all working together in a way I think that like maximizes our ability our chance for success. And so yeah I mean I think that I've been on teams where they work all the time and everybody loves it. it's like not an issue and like that was us in the early days like we had you know like we were working hard but we enjoyed every minute of it and you know yes like like but I think it attracts a certain type of person right same with I mean this is just like the most obvious example is like an inerson versus remote

team right in person forcing people to come into the office to commute it like has an impact but if you feel like your work you work better like and I think ultimately deciding what's a good culture is on the leadership team and that's why I think it's so important important for leadership teams to at least have like the bare minimum conversations about the type of team they want to build and what team they think will execute best on their strategy and what some of those behaviors would be. Um, and you know this is this is something that I think is often you know I I I guess one other quick example is like a really good mentor of mine when we were we were like do everything was going well at proletaria. This is like midway through some of the spellbreak stuff. We were we were like seeing awesome numbers in our early in some of our early like alphas. And I remember telling him like, "Hey, like we're we're working like crazy. We're being super successful objectively, but morale is like low because we're just we missed the last two deadlines. You know, we're struggling. We're hurting with the like

growth. Like the growth was just like really painful." And he and he said this to me which gave me like his his response to me was like, "Do you need good morale to be successful?" And I was like that is a like great and valid and important question because this is all about what type of leaders do you know what do the leaders want like what type of company what type of teams do the leaders want to make and is it is it a requirement no like you don't need good morale to be successful that's just the reality now you know would would I necessarily think you should have bad morale as a as a as a as a good way to be successful no I don't think it's that either but um they are they are decoupled and and I think it is um you know what what can work for one team doesn't necessarily work for another and so some of it is I think figuring it out as you're building and this is one of the things I think first-time founders really struggle with. Yeah, I think it's really important to understand the type of culture that you want as a founder and as a founding team or as a leadership team and then be a

very non-negotiable about that. So that means that sometimes you have to forego really good talent that are just not fit for your culture. And I know that every company does this on a paper, but they kind of don't have that strong culture. So for example, you know, again, I've never worked at Tesla or OpenAI and what or Nvidia. They're known for pretty brutal working culture that they work seven days a week because the CEO works seven days a week. And they're pretty clear about that. And I think it's very clear that if you apply for those positions that they are upfront with it that this is not going to be a work life balance. This is going to be your work phase of your life. And by being upfront of what type of a culture the the company has and wants to keep allows people not to feel that the the culture is bad when they enter it because they have clear expectations. Yeah. I mean I think it absolutely changes this stuff. Um, so a good friend of mine is a CEO of a game company.

They're very they're quite successful independent studio and he's like a real contrarian. So we have great conversations about this stuff. Um, because you know he has he has very strong feelings and has the success to back it up on all of this stuff. And so when we talk it's really interesting but he so at his company like there's no titles and and he like fervently pushes back on the idea of it and like makes it really clear as you're going through. And there is a certain type of person that cares about that. Like that is an important part of compensation for them. They feel like that's important to them building a career. And so that is a decision. It may seem like a small one, but saying like, "Hey, we don't care about titles here. There's no there's no like structure in titles and we actively push back against the idea of titles just makes there are certain people that now would look at that and be like, "Oh, that's a that would be a step back in my career." Because for me, my career is like watching my LinkedIn increase in title. I need to go from like, you know, from from associate to mid-level to senior to lead to director

or whatever. And if I don't do that, if I take a step back, I'm not willing to do that for my career. And so it just weeds out certain types of people that just wouldn't work there. And I think in some ways, you know, this is one of those challenges that startups have because often like beggars can't be choosers because you're, you know, brand new company, especially if you're a first-time founder. You have like no, you know, why would anyone trust you? You haven't raised yet. How are you attracting like but yet you're supposed to get the best talent that's out there? It's like, how do you possibly do that, right? And I think in some ways you should you should make some decisions on on you know the the the hiring side adding people to the culture is is the I think is the way it gets established. I think you know oftentimes the the being thoughtful about this and checking in like every time you double the team size. You know we started with five founders of proletar so we already had like a bigger team than normal. you know, you could feel real changes in the company when we hit 10 people, when we hit 20 people, when we hit 50 people,

when we hit 100 people, like there were major shifts. And so, I think starting to look at it that way of just, hey, let's check in on are we making the right decisions for our team? And like what are we allowing, what are we not allowing, what are we how are we talking about this, how is this, how are we thinking about how the team is acting and behaving, how are they making decisions, and are we happy with that? And even just that conversation is enough to do like a cultural check-in and to maybe make some changes because I think if you're not seeing the right decisions be made. If you're not seeing the right behaviors and you think those behaviors are leading to negatively impact the success of the company then I think you have to like you have to have the culture conversation whether or not you have product and not allowing is the hardest conversation and a lot of uh a lot of leaders myself included were not prepared to have that conversation where you basically set the rules. It's everybody wants to be loved and liked and it's very hard to to come in and say, "Hey, we don't do this. This is not okay, especially on

the areas that are not like blatantly wrong, but that you just don't want to see that happening here." And and when you interfere like that, it's not that people are like, "Oh, okay. So, that's that's clear." you you hit a lot of resistance and those are very challenging places because you kind of you know let's say tough decisions whether it is we work from the office that's a that's not like a good or bad decision it is a strong decision and there will be people who are very much upset against that decision or you would say we are apolitical no pride no Christmas no Hanukkah no you name the holiday you name well not religious not political you name a political you know know make this great again. You're mission driven. You're mission driven. Yeah, exactly. We're I forgot base camp was that type of a company and and some other ones that are clearly apolitical. You can be political outside of it or religious or whatnot, but inside the office you just do your work. Like that's a tough decision and hard to keep

up especially when the world is is in different crisises and people have very strong emotional positions and they want to bring it uh to the workplace naturally. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think yeah like absolutely the question you mentioned the the allow versus not allow I think that when I've seen and I've talked to teams and watched as like when teams don't live their culture or when you see culture erode I think it is mostly because doing what you talked about like is hard it is hard to constantly have high standards like and that's in everything like that is hey in this like so I'll give you an example from proletariat like we we had this cultural communication document that laid out like how you're supposed to use email, how you're supposed to use Slack, like and we were we were kind of militant about it. Actually, we were very militant about it. And even things like we had an industry news thread, like an industry news channel in Slack, and that structure was meant to be like the link and then any communication in the link needed to be in the thread. And people

would occasionally like new people or whatever, like whatever people make a mistake, they're not really, you know, they're using Slack on mobile, they're doing it quickly, like they don't put in the thread. multiple people would chime in and be like, hey, thread this, please. And or like, hey, you're not formatting your email properly. And that is uncomfortable. It's awkward. It's awkward to go tell someone, hey, it's like it's like telling someone their flies down, right? It's like, hey, you made you made this like tiny mistake. I don't want to embarrass you, but like you should you should fix this. But that's exhausting. And so building that into your culture so that there is a discipline around that, I think, allows you to build that up. Because the way I've seen it go the opposite way is what you mentioned which is it's not necessarily the wrong thing to let that go. It's the easy thing. And so the issue is because you're not doing the right thing and you're doing the easy thing over and over and over again. You have this slow erosion because instead of making the hard choice which was the right one, you're doing the easy one which wasn't explicitly wrong. Like it's not like someone was like ranting racist comments in Slack. They just like didn't

use the thread. But that slow erosion like will happen over time if you just continue to if you if you have a culture that is built up to do the easy thing. I think discipline is really important for some of that stuff. And so it's it's it may sound over the top, but I think it is I think a lot of those little things do end up mattering because if you make it a culture where hey it's no big deal like you made a made a little mistake just fix it. it's not a problem like we're not you know then that that spreads to other things like that spreads across from email to Slack to more important things so I I've seen this happening at the companies like when there the war in Ukraine started so people like okay Ukraine good let's support that let's let's be on this side so everybody agrees with it but then you get more and more and more different wars happening it's like okay who which team do we root now because we've we've set the president that we choose one of the sides So we had to choose now another one then let's ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch choose another one and that creates a chaos inside of the

company especially at a larger scale. So it's much easier to just focus on, you know, let's focus on ourselves. Let's not do anything extra. Let's, you know, at work we talk about work topics. Outside work topics, you can talk whatever. We're not, you know, we don't want to control the way you think or the way you act. But here we just focus on the work. So that those are the kind of elements that are that are um tricky because you start with something that you feel is good and you're doing the right thing and then it turns into a chaos over over time because you've expanded your focus. Yeah, I mean I think um the the it's I think there's no one-sizefits-all because there are some companies that are where where there are certain positions that really matter and that that they feel like deeply align with either the leadership or or the company or whatever it is. And so, you know, I think defining though clearly and then communicating that back out to your team. So what what so we we generally stayed out of everything at proletariat um until when when the

George Floyd incident happened, we felt like we had to to kind of speak up. And one thing we did is like we um you know I I was very firm in I didn't want us to just post a statement like if we're going to do this like we need to like donate real money and like make a real impact. And I personally never liked I I never liked the idea of posting stuff publicly for proletaria because in some ways then you're speaking for everyone which is not necessarily fair because maybe there are people there that have differing views on all these different topics. So, I was much more comfortable saying, you know, picking one thing and speaking for me and encouraging our team members, if you want to speak out on this, go ahead and do it. And then doing something like matching charitable donations made way more sense for me. But I think there's no one-sizefits-all for for it. But all of these things matter like like that's the problem. And this is where I think some of your your your primary kind of concern in the beginning comes up which is just like man it's so easy to get so distracted by all of these things when really like

finding product market fit is so hard. Yeah. Exactly. And like by itself like now you have to now you not only do you have to find product market fit you have to hire the best people and you have to you know and you have to have great uh work life balance and you need to speak out on all of these other you know and and yeah it's really hard. I think you have to pick and choose. You have to decide like are you you know if you're going to focus on work life balance then then you like that's that's going to be really difficult like that like I you know at least from my experience like I wasn't we weren't able to do it like we weren't able to have great work life balance while building a company the founders of proletarian and so like I which company had like which company succeeded at that I mean I'm sure there are some I bet you there are some out there I've never heard of that I've seen I've seen uh I've seen people post about the fact of like oh you know I I I can still you know spend time with my kids while building my million-dollar startup. And maybe these are just thought pieces on as a solarreneur. Sure. Sure. But maybe. But

but I think, you know, I I I think that that's part of the challenge though is like you your most important job as a leader is allocating resources. And that can be both money or time. And so that's why like my what I advocate for is like I think by saying don't I don't think you should spend like a ton of time making merch and and um uh and you know mugs and everything else for your company. Um uh you know we we rarely we rarely did merch at proletar. We like push back pretty harshly on it. But I on the other side of it, I think there is if you don't have some of these discussions, if you don't consciously talk about some of the decisions you're making, one, you could have different leaders be making different decisions, which I think can be a bit chaotic for the culture you're establishing. You can also not have a team that you want. Like maybe maybe one team's making hiring decisions one way and one team's making hiring decisions the other way and you don't notice right away because you're small and they're somewhat separate. But then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, this is a problem." Like we have we have

director level people in one team that have 15 years of experience. We have director level people on another team that have two years of experience and like now this is a problem. Now we may lose our great talent 15-year directors because they're like like I want to be a VP and you're like no. And so those and ultimately it's it's a the two key things I think are how the team works together and who you can get on the team. Even I mean even easier example that I've I've seen happen is you are building a team for a mobile product and let's say that's a high quality mobile product and you're bringing in talent for double from double A and AAA studios their ways of working is drastically different than yours and then you start seeing essentially a separation of the team and and different ways of building a product that wasn't there when you started and you're kind of listen you might be even listening to the the people coming in from the big studios And it kind of

makes sense. Oh, you worked at Blizzard. Oh, you worked at Activision. You must know about this. But they actually worked on totally different phase of the product in a total different platform in a total different stages. So, so those type of a decisions are can be very harmful in mid to long term because you're bringing in people with a absolutely different ways of working and different ways of looking what's good and what's not because they're just not used to the platform. Well, that that's why I mean Yeah. Yeah, I mean this is this is one of the areas that I think is is incredibly important. I mean our experience so we were really scaling proletariat is basically 2020 and we went from like 45 or 50 people to like 130 by the end of 2020. It was crazy and this is during COVID. Yeah. So we we went full remote in March and and so then started doing it all remote. This is why I think like this is another area that I think teams don't think about. It's, you know, when you're really small, there's like, oh, like as the CEO, you should like, you know, take

your new employee out to lunch when you're 10 or 15 people, you know, in the first in the first month. And it's like, you know, you, you know, and when you get bigger, you know, every every new hire that came in, you'll sit down, you'll do like new employee orientation. And I think so much of that misses the mark. Like what is the cultural onboarding? Because what you're talking about is like these people from double or triple AAA or for whatever c whatever culture they just came from have a thought on the way work should be done from what they just went through and then there's often so little direct like maybe you get a buddy as you're onboarding or whatever it is but like what is the cultural onboarding to train people about how you work at this company. And so that's one of the things that we like some of the stuff that we focused on in making the kind of core culture docs we had which was like we had this cultural communication document which was like this is how we write email at proletariat this is how we do meetings at proletariat this is how we use slack at proletariat and the expectation is you will do it this way and that wasn't saying that we weren't open to new ideas we absolutely were

there were people that would come in and be like hey at Riot we did things this way we think it's really helpful like we should add this so of course like iterate on it like you would a product but put in the work to culturally onboard these people because you know it's so funny when people you know get someone of like oh we hired this you know CMO from AAA but then they don't know how to do marketing and mobile and it's like well there's a skill gap question of did you hire the wrong one but then also did you do anything to train them on like how different it is to be shipping every single Tuesday you know in a mobile game versus shipping every every six years in AAA and there's a bunch of just the way things work and I think like the the if teams spent a little bit more time because often they're spending the time anyway but they're spending the time getting to know someone or taking them out to lunch which those things are all important but when you think about like what's in an onboarding new employee orientation is often like all HR stuff but where is the actual like this is here are some of the norms and behaviors we expect here's what you can expect if you know here's

how we talk to each other and we we go into detail in ours where it's like you know we started this before when we were when we were in person So it was like, hey, if someone has their headphones on, send them a Slack first. Don't walk over to their desk because like we valued heads down work cuz we had a large open office and it was distracting. And so, but like knowing that if you come from a culture where, hey, everything's a meeting. We talk things out in every meeting. We want long meetings, but like that's not the way we do things here. Here we want agendas. We want no surprises in meetings. We want them to be really tight. and then train people on how to work here in this culture. And I think it doesn't have to be a ton of effort to do this, but I think you'll save a bunch of heartburn and time really being like, "Hey, there's a cultural onboarding here when you come to our company. We are going to do we do things a bit differently and we're going to train you on how to do that so that you don't bump into these embarrassing things where you walk in and your fly is down and we have to tell you, you know, like that kind of thing.

You get over it really quickly and people can integrate really fast. I I 100% agree with you on on a point that having a documented culture when you begin scaling really rapidly is essential because that allows you to have written rules on how to behave. It's more that just spending that time and writing the culture early on where you're not, you know, when you're five, 10, 15, 20, maybe under 30 people is is really I feel like at that point your example and the example of your leadership team should be the one that that drives the culture. But I wanted to ask you another question and that is about can you copy a culture? because I've seen culture being copied very successfully. Like Supercell is a great example of literally copying Netflix's culture deck and just going through it. I think they've been very open about it and saying this is pretty much our culture. Like 80% 85% of that became Supercell culture. And then I've seen countless of companies copy Supercell's

culture. And I don't know if they've succeeded at copying the culture, but they definitely failed at being successful company. So what's your take on copying a culture? You mentioned creativity inc as well. Well well I mean I like I think you should absolutely steal so like steal stuff from these you know if you find things that really resonate with the leadership team and this is one of the things that I think is so important just to touch quickly on the fact that we don't train leaders. We don't train managers really well at all. It's just like also it doesn't just stop. Still spend a good amount of my time and even when I was still a VP at Blizzard like listening to podcasts, reading books when they came out because I just want to constantly get better as a leader and a manager and it and there are new states of the art, right? Like you know I I remember when Radical Cander came out and that was like the the soup dour um where everyone was talking about how important Radical Cander was and like again that sort of direct feedback is in Creativity Inc. which was written what 15 years before radical cander and so the you know it's just like it was a

good way of framing it was a good reminder you know I still find myself almost every other year reading like how to win friends and influence people because there's a bunch of important things in that book um uh or like high output management I probably reread every 5 years and so the I I think you should absolutely steal and and I think this is one of those things where it's not a religion like you should you should be constantly iterating on it you shouldn't stay static can be like, hey, this is the way we started at the beginning. This is this is meant to be a document that's edited. This is meant to be like something that is moved. And so I think the the you know as far as the the second part of the question like I think this is where what we spent a good amount of time discussing before around the idea of like was it is it the cultural ideas of Supercell just don't make sense today or is it that these people just didn't execute on those cultural ideas and now that's even completely separate because if they're still doing the wrong work in the supercell way right like this is the

high output management thing right which is, you know, you can do all this work. You you're you're running a breakfast factory and you you you get down to the the like highest profit, quickest time creation of a hard-boiled egg, but if the customer comes up and orders toast, like, who cares? Yeah. And so all of that work doesn't matter. And so that would be the thing that I would try to decouple is like, hey, the the the supercell culture I think was a way was put in place as a way to go and find product market fit really effectively and and it was also really determined on did they have the right people to execute on that culture. Like that's not an easy culture to make work. I think now that I thought about it as you were speaking, I think the Netflix culture copying is easier because they were very transparent of what their culture is and were actually given away the culture deck that anybody would get and you can read a book about it and as you said

copy freely and then do copy, but you're copying it from the books from the management books that are quite detailed. But what happened with Supercell is people saw the company's enormous success, small headcount, and PR posts by the CEO on like once a year in a blog post, which is he'd be like, I I'm the least power of any CEO. And it's like, I don't know if that's actually true, right? That sounds really good PR speak. Exactly. And and it's and that's so so I would say like I've met many of these companies. I'm like, have you actually talked to anybody who works at Supercell? It's like, "No, but we really appreciate the blog post." I'm like, "Okay, you read four blog posts that came out throughout four four years and they they are written with the CEO and public com you know uh PR professional to to you know to sound good to read good but they're actually more of a vision pieces that are tied to reality but not might not be you know the actual

reality. they don't take the uh they don't maybe tell the full truth and the difficulties that comes through having this type of a culture like they don't talk about the bad sides they're like oh yeah it's sometimes a lot of work but like no like you have a brutal culture and you should be able to tell that so so I think the difference there is is that if you copy elements of a culture or even large portions of a culture be sure that you're getting it from a clear source whether you worked at the company or it's a management a book or you're really understanding what you're copying, but don't copy something that you don't know. You have a faint idea and really what you're trying to do is you're copying the revenue and the ebido of that company. You're thinking that, hey, this is the way how they do it. So, I'm just going to take whatever they say because they make so much money. So, that means that they this must be the right way to to do things. Well, I think there's a lot of like hidden things that you would get. I mean, when you when I when I think about and it's been a while since I've read stuff on on

Supercell's culture, but a lot of it was like keeping teams really small, empowering them to make the decisions they would need to they would need to really make and sort of like giving them the opportunity to decide like should we kill this game? Like do we just not have the confidence that we can get this game to where it needs to be? celebrating killing of a game which I never saw but for surely happened but didn't happen maybe no one I mean that that to me is like you know no one's like the yeah the celebrating failure stuff is is I mean you should I guess be happy that you you know but I can guarantee that if you look back at all those games I think if they looked back in hindsight they would realize that they actually saw signs sooner and they should have killed it sooner. Yeah. So in some ways so like I think that maybe there's good learnings from that which you know which is to be celebrated right every time you learn something if it's like tangible whether that's a team learning something or something else but I think the way to look at this in my mind is if you have a

couple of cultures that you really like say you know the Netflix culture or you look across like there's there's tons of books now on different cultures right like Zapos had some stuff for a long time they had a really weird organizational structure like Valve has their manifesto I think right and Valve is also a very weird company and now we're seeing all this stuff about Nvidia and like the way Jensen operates with like you know 80 direct reports and no one 101 ones and like no status updates and it's like is that really the way it works cuz like that that that's a good headline but like how how is the and this is why we came out of Zinga to do proletariat. Zinga had like all all of that PR stuff you could imagine, right? Like posters with the core values, every notebook had the core values and mo and and a couple of them, it's funny, I don't remember all of them, but the one that I do remember is be the CEO, which I actually thought was like a great value. It was like, hey, everyone, like you are responsible, like be the CEO and go make the change. Like be take agency and fix it. Um, and I thought

that was something that actually was embodied and you would hear that, you'd hear people say that where, you know, and sometimes it would get misused and it was like, "Oh, why did you cowboy this thing in?" It was like, "I was being the CEO." But I think in some ways though, if you're in a like like they were going for a culture that was maximum agency, moving quickly as possible to, you know, to to to to continue to accelerate and grow. And so we came out of the Zinga experience and we got a chance to look at this and be like, "Hey, we've just seen what they say the culture is, but we've also lived what it actually was." Yeah. So when we look at this, like what do we think? What are the important things here that we think worked? Like what resonated? What didn't resonate? How did this how did this all work? And so I think I would not trust a ex like a team saying they're going to replicate Supercell's culture unless they have several leaders who were at in Supercell's culture ideally early and have like lived it and can tell you what

worked and what didn't because you know Supercell has not always been you know Supercell got really big but I wouldn't say it's like been straight up and to the right like they've had plenty of missteps in terms of like the products they built and everything like that and so I would really want to hear like, hey, and this is something that I would do with some of the senior leadership when we would start to bring them in from other places is I would just ask them like what do you what would you want to keep from your team at your previous company and what would you want to change and just like hear from them like can they clearly articulate what was working and what wasn't. companies go through phases and you're absolutely right like there are people who come in at later phases and the and at that point it is a totally different company and then again people who are in the early phases live throughout like they worked in a different company and then I like how Netflix did it in their book at least they tell that they essentially let go people who are good for certain phase and they're like you were a builder you're incredibly valuable this company has now grown to a

stage where you don't like it here and it's your effort is is much better suited for a company of that size. So, here's a generous package and thank you so much for for helping us and so forth. So, yeah. Yeah, I I I 100% agree of of of really understanding of what you're copying. And when you mentioned Zinga, I thought about like the my favorite culture was the culture that we had at our Fun Plus studio. So, I think over 80% of us came from Zinga. So I left and and you know brought more and more people throughout the time and mainly Single was the uh the uh the ma biggest studio and and the only studio that I worked in San Francisco. So it was very easy to to attract talent from there and our culture was essentially counterculture of what Zinga had at that point. You know it wasn't going through the best years. It was the termless you know three different CEOs in two years and that kind of stuff. And everybody knew it and everybody left because of

that. And we just essentially were like, let's just not do it the way Zingga does it. And then the culture was beautiful. Like for example, instead of doing like these long documents on design and reviewing them in multiple ways, we're like, let's just stand in front of the whiteboard and discuss what we're going to do and then commit to commit to it and do it. And and it worked perfectly. And people were happy because they knew the alter that they hated, the back and forth, the long documents, the time you spend on planning versus the time you spend in doing. and iterating software. But those I think like that's the type of decision that even if you're not, you know, even as a small team, you know, you don't need to spend a ton of time writing up all these like culture documents and things like that, but you can just be like, hey, you know, I mean, when you think about the most some of the most extreme ones you hear about, right? It's like, you know, no PowerPoint decks at Amazon. It's only like the 5.5 whatever it is pages. Yeah. And so like but there but there's when you think about just what is the behavior that that drives like okay well so there was definitely a culture that you know at

Zinga even when I was there on like the level of level of detail in PowerPoint decks the amount of time and effort that was spent to make them look nice and there was a real question of just like is that valuable like do we you know is that is that the type of thing we want people to be focused on and versus like hey we want you know we want to get in front of a whiteboard and we want to like tear up ideas so that's the way we want to we want to run things and and I think treating it as looking across this as a buffet and being like what how do you want to fill your plate? When I was at Zinga, some of the things that were really good is it was a very resultsoriented culture. Like it was it was actually pretty non-political. At least from where I was sitting, it felt very non-political because it was just like very empirical in terms of results. You could like very easily see what was working and what wasn't and there was like a lot driven on that. Now that has there's no right or wrong culture. It's just like something that I thought was effective at the time and so it was effective that it was very resultsoriented and it kind of you know was that created a certain culture of like hey you had accountability in terms

of like this is what this is what we care about our results and then it also had a really great culture of transparency across the product or specifically like the product or itself had great level of like knowledge sharing and a bunch of work in like training people up and getting people like some of the best I've ever seen honestly in terms of bringing people in from outside of games, ramping them up, training programs like very rigorous on how they would train them and and I thought that was really impressive. Now, there were other parts of the culture that I don't think worked, but looking at this and being able to piece together, hey, like what do we think is going to work for us in the way we all work as people and the types of things we want to do? and and you know a small team that's trying to do a supercell thing is very different than if you want to build a AAA game like you know what we were doing with with proletariat where we're getting to like hundreds of people or what I was doing previous to this at World of Warcraft where you're like 700 like you're these massive teams and so that's like those things are just like by their nature they're just very

different in terms of how they can operate because of just the things they need to do but those behaviors I think are important and starting like I think you can chip away at this pretty quickly like as things come up like you don't need to dedicate the first six months of your startup to figuring out your culture, but just each time you're like, man, we're sitting in this meeting and this, you know, the person put together a PowerPoint deck, but they said they spent two days just making it pretty. It's like, all right, no more of that. Like, we're not doing that anymore. And and so like starting to just keep this stuff in in mind, these decisions, like finding a way to to to to sort of log them to to write them down so that then everyone can now know this. you can spread it across I think is a way to be thoughtful about like why do we make this decision it's like we you know our internal discussions are about the we want to talk about the facts we don't want to talk about anything else so all we care about is the facts and the data you don't need to make it pretty you don't need to make it good-looking whatever like that's that's what we care

about in here that's we want you to spend your time like that's what communicating no pretty decks means I think in in the way it would actually play out and maybe that's what you want so Yeah. Uh I agree. And overall like I'm getting the feeling that you're very much in favor of adaptive culture like a strong and adaptive culture rather than this rigid culture that becomes a liability as you scale. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think like yeah, very much I I think it's it's I think you should be the best advice I can give on the culture side is to be thoughtful about it in terms of like when these when these moments happen to just talk about like what do we think is like what occurs here and then be adaptive but also like check in on it. If you have you know not not everything is very easy to to tell via metrics but at the end of the day people are people and your leadership team is making decisions. So those decisions are going to be driven by hey do we you know does do the

leaders think that the team is operating the way it should be whether or not it is perception is reality in a lot of these things. And so even just asking that just checking in on that periodically and being like is the culture serving what we want and and is it is it because we have the wrong culture? Is it because we have the wrong execution of the culture? Are we allowing too many things that we said we wouldn't allow? And I think those types of conversations are really valuable to just keep things on track. And and again, this doesn't guarantee success. Like that's that's the frustrating part. But I think if you're if you're not doing this, it can be I think it can be much harder to actually be successful because you're you're you know it it will you you'll face you'll pay it off eventually like the debt will build up and whether you pay that off after you hit massive product market fit and you need to kind of do a full reboot of the culture like you know an Uber story or you can handle it on the go as you're evolving is is sort of an open question I think. I wanted to ask you two more questions.

So I'll start with the uh with a harder one and that is what what's one belief about company cultures that you've changed your mind about in the past years? I know you you said you read a lot of books, read a lot of lot of podcasts. So what has changed especially during the time away from Blizzard where you're not daytoday and you can actually reflect and think? I think I've I think the biggest thing that I've sort of changed my mind on is that is that you can't directly influence the culture. Like for a long time it was like oh these are just the unwritten rules. Like it's really hard to do that. I think that I I think that's the the biggest thing that I've come around on is like no you can and you you know you now that creates its own culture in itself by like being rigorous about it the way we were with like hey here is the cultural onboarding document for the company. And so I think the the the fact that it's just, you know, because I remember when we were starting proletariat, it was like, yeah, we'll have some core values, but like culture is really just about the people you hire

and like that's true, but that's saying that you can't change it or influence it. And I think you absolutely can. Um, so I think that's the biggest thing that I've learned maybe over my time, um, is that you can have influence over it and and that it is something that, uh, is easier to influence than you might think. Last question. That is the easiest one. How did you come up with the name proletariat? That's a very Marxist term. Yeah. I mean, so there were there were kind of two reasons. One is like we happened to have one of the founders had proletariat.com as a domain name, which was nice. But also, we had, you know, we were we were talking about different names and at the time the five founders like we felt like we were the working class of the game industry. Like, you know, I I started as an engineer and designer. you know, all all of us were having, you know, we all we all got like se-level titles or VP level titles or whatever, director level titles and and but we felt like we were still the working class and like that was what we wanted, you know, and I think this was maybe a little bit of an over overreaction or response to our

experience at Zinga where it felt like in the leadup to the IPO, Zinga was just like stuffing the ranks with tons of executives that would just like pop in at times and and we were sort of like what are they doing? like they're not in the trenches. And so we felt like we we were we were the working class of the game industry and that was the um you know and that was what we we wanted to keep it that way. So even for like for the first game at Proletarian I wrote a ton of code like a lot um uh basically like a full-time engineer. After that I couldn't really I was still very involved on like the product and design sides through all of our products but I was never just like only an executive like kind of just managing people. I was always like very hands-on with the products that we made. And I think we even brought that to when we started to to get to like second and third level management tiers at like hundreds 100 people or whatever where we would embrace people that wanted to be like operating managers like they wanted to still write code half the time but also manage a couple of people and we fully like we wanted to allow people to

do that and be thoughtful on how we would approach it. That's the that's the longer answer. The short answer is like we thought it was a cool name and we had the domain name which was also helpful. But I will say I love the name but man no one could spell it. So the one funny story I'll give you is you had to get this like done in Bradstreet number in order to get an Apple developer account which was just like a proving that you're a company and they spelled our name wrong on it and it took me like weeks to get someone on the phone to eventually change it because they spelled the company Prolariat with two P's. Um and so yeah anyway well Seth it was a pleasure talking about u a difficult topic my brain held I had actually a redeye flight before my my flight was delayed I came at 3:00 a.m. yesterday. So, uh it was it was a pleasure discussing this because like there's not the right way to do things and I think you open up it really clearly and give a lot of examples and and teach

people to be to adapt their culture based on where they're going to learn from others and to manage it as a product rather than as something that is intangible, invisible and a gravity on its own. So I think uh it's a it's a really really interesting way and I think it's a very good way for many companies to think about how they built their culture so that they can scale efficiently and not lose the control of the company and not end up in a company that they founded but is now totally different than what they would like to actually work in. Yeah. No, I I appreciate the chance to talk about this. You know, I think definitely inside of the game industry, but I think overall across every organization, like I would love to see people get better as leaders and managers and create better functioning teams. And so for whatever that means to them in terms of the culture, like people to find a culture they want to work in. Um, so I'm all for trying to provide any tools any tools I can give. Um, and any of the, you know, any of the

scars that I've earned from the from the experience of of making lots of mistakes in doing this, right? Yeah. And for that, there's a link in the description for your Substack boss battles. Tough one to find on Google, by the way. I'm sure there's there's plenty of boss battles and gaming blocks, but use the link in the description below. Subscribe to Seth's blog and uh would love to have you back when you begin your next adventure. Cool. Yeah, it was awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for listening. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fund Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructorofund.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry best professional community

filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators. Thanks for listening.