Solomon Started a GDC Event: From 0 to 400 Attendees!

So we are here with Solomon Luis Richtor and we are going to be talking about a topic that not a lot of folks discuss but this has to do with starting your own GDC event and Solomon I know you have basically founded the product live ops and now growth symposium event third year running at GDC it's been a very strong event and I think like this year there's been I I thought we could with the audit talk about how these events come, you know, come into existence in the story of this event. I can also talk to you about some of the events that I have thrown over the last five years at GDC which I've given up on. But maybe we'll start with this. So in general there are obviously there's GDC and then there's all the GDC stuff but then generally there are like external to GDC different events that are being thrown by different sponsors and different kinds of things happening whether it's dinners or things of that nature. Could you talk to us about this event that you

started I guess three years ago this is going to be the third year. Why? How did it come about? and then we can walk through the whole process for other folks who want to start their own GDC event and what that would take.
Yeah, I think the genesis of this was kind of getting to a place first I had to get to a place where I had a little bit of ground swell in network effects just in terms of like my relationships in the gaming community, right? And I think that like
I talk about that all the time like I don't think I'm on the service provider and tooling side. I worked at Lean Plum, then I worked at Clever Tab, now my own consultancy. I don't think you earn the right to bring a product to market or a service to market until you build these genuine relationships and games. It's really unique in that way.
Mhm.
And so I kind of reached that point and a friend of mine actually, relationships again, right, my friend Tim Wong Hong, sorry, who came from who was at AWS and

was my client over at EA for years when I was at LeanPlum. um kind of came to me with this idea and it was based on a hypothesis. The hypothesis was that product operations or really product leadership, product management and particularly live ops was an underserved audience at not just GDC, not to pick on GDC, but just events in general. There just wasn't a lot of content around it. And Tim was my was my friend and that's why we had the opportunity. But, you know, you ran like a formal almost like an RFP process with other providers who were kind of pitching for the business and myself and my colleague Jasper at the time at Clevertap who was running marketing. Now he's over at Appsflyer. We built this, you know, really nice compelling case for it, right? And we validated what Tim's hypothesis was. We looked at the GDC content and there just was not a lot about product or live ops. It was like 10%. So just to like bring this to a more specific and practical

level for people in the audience, it sounds like what you're saying is that you started with what you felt was a market need that there wasn't enough content being delivered around
product and live ops and so as an extension to GDC that you felt like you could fill a gap from a content perspective but then the reason why you would do it and previously working on the vendor side whether it's at lean plum or clevertap you want to build relationships. And so by starting this GDC event, you could create a platform where people could meet and you can like be able to develop relationships with whether it's the speakers or the or the folks that are attending the event. Is that is that right?
Yeah. It's like I think it dawned on me really early that it's about it's an event technically, but it's really what we're doing is we're creating a community, right? Right. And get community is so big in games. And so we create I think through the first event we created that community. A bunch of dope happened super serendipitously. And now you know now we've kind of we built a community

around the event the event itself as a brand. But I think it was you know fast forward to 2026. I think it had a big influence on the market particularly on like on other events and other people who you know realize that live ops is a topic and that can stand on its own that they could latch on to.
Okay. And so when you're first getting this thing off the ground, I guess coming from the vendor side, you've got a little bit of budget, but like for other folks who are thinking about putting events together, and I could talk about my own experience as well, putting together an event, not from the vendor side, but just as something that I thought was fun. So, how did this first start? So, you've got the idea, you and Tim are like, "Hey, product live ops, whatever, symposium." And then what's step one to like getting this thing off the ground?
So I'll go even a little bit further back and not to involve you too much in the story of this, but you're a big part of this, right? I think it goes all the way back to that first dinner that we threw in Seattle in like early 2023. I

think it was around games forum and we did that. you came up, you were like the kind of the featured speaker. And that's when it kind of dawned on me that it's about this is about creating a community and like it's about, you know, you obviously there's people in the in the industry like you and others that are really wellknown and are like natural connectors, right? And so whether somebody has a big budget or not, works at a big company or not, those are the people you should find, right? And I see it happening on LinkedIn all the time. I've seen new entrance into the market who like literally they've been in games or on this, you know, service provider side for less than a year. But because I think it's such a small-nit community in our space, particularly in mobile, you can find these people who have pretty big broadcasting platforms and big audiences and build those relationships and I think accelerate the process. And you were kind of the beginning of that, right? You know, at at that dinner. Yeah. Yeah. And of course you were involved in the first symposium as well

and still are.
I'm not as well known as I used to be but I'll work on it. [laughter]
Okay. And so like for the symposium started. So this is year three year one. Walk us through that process. So like you you're getting a keynote speaker and like panels together. You're kind of concepting stuff like walk us through the process of what it takes to get that first one off the ground. Like I think it all starts with like a it starts with a hypothesis and then the hypothesis kind of drives the concept. I think there there needs to be a highlevel concept. The concept the running concept we've had and we always kick off the symposium with this is talking about AI. And so the first one we did when in early 2024 things were just getting started. People were just starting to use Chat GBT as an example for stuff, but there were a couple operators that we knew that were doing some pretty dope And so the concept we came up with was like how AI

is going to change games. We've ridden with that concept ever since. It's evolved since then obviously because this the approaches, the tactics, the the operations have matured. But you come with a concept. The concept then drives individual sessions, whether those are panels, fireside chats. That obviously lends to who who's appropriate, especially in front of a gaming audience. You don't want someone getting up there who can't speak to the content. The audience will sniff that out really fast. So, it's concept which feeds to content and like a framework around the different breakout topics and then speakers. And then you're basically curating and programming and working with smart folks who could tell you if an idea is not going to land or if something's irrelevant. It's a lot of curation. So that first year, how did you convince because the first event was a pretty big event, right? So how did you convince the other sponsors to come in for such a big plan when it was not yet proven?

You know, I had help the first year. I think a AWS obviously they carry weight and they have relationships and they have a they they continue to but they they have a vested interest in seeing all of their partners drive community. I mean obviously like AWS is big and bad and they can obviously they talk about infrastructure and all of the kind of the pipes that make this stuff work but I think at the time they had a mandate to go deeper into understanding line of business use cases which is hard right if you're an infrastructure company to kind of switch your mind to understanding how to speak to a product person or a CRM person or a live ops person. So they had this vested interest in like building community, building voice of the customer is what they call it kind of events and also leveraging people that had context around the messaging and products and solutions and use cases to get into those line of business conversations. So they were they were they were motivated to do it

and they brought other partners of theirs in and so they helped a lot the first time and now it's I think obviously we have the luxury of having done this four or five times. The event itself has a little bit of a brand. We can we can reasonably expect to do pretty good numbers. It's a little bit easier to have the sponsor conversation now than it was that first year where I think AWS was really helping to bring a lot of those sponsors to the table.
Okay. So year three, this is going to I think when I publish this, this will be probably Monday of or Monday or Tuesday of GDC. Talk about this year. This year was a little bit of a nailbiter. You want to talk about what happened this year and why people actually should be excited about going to the event that that you were able to pull off?
Yes. A number of things happened. Number one, my co-conspirator Tim Hong, who I conceptualized this thing with, he ended up leaving AWS. And that happened kind of midstream.
So we weren't exactly certain how that was going to affect things. Obviously it

kind of slowed down the process. Luckily after the some of the dust settled around that we we came to two conclusions. One that was Tim wanted to stay involved with the event because he feels ownership over what we built which is which is awesome. And two AWS still wanted to be involved. Right. So we didn't let that get in the way of things.
Sure.
But we did lose some cycles. Right. And
I think that we have again it's a luxury. we have the luxury of like having people were hitting me up right about a month out or whatever it was and they're like hey
are you going to do the symposium this year and I'm like yeah and I'm basically saying yeah we're going to do it don't worry again that's the brand that we built right
so things came together pretty pretty quickly and that's a testament to the community we that we built the brand that we built the kind of the expectation for the content we deliver and the events we put on all those things kind of helped us throw this thing together and what ended up There's two two big challenges to GDC this year. One is that there's other folks that are doing events like these now,

uh, who I think were very clearly inspired by what we've built. That's good. Fine. And then two, GDC is is less attended this year.
Yeah.
Right. I mean, last year we had 400 people. This year, I think we'll do numbers. I don't know if we'll quite do that. And that's because basically all of most of Europe is not coming to GDC this year for various reasons. So, we're doing our thing in spite of all that.
Yeah. And I think like the so if you think about the different kinds of GDC events and parties and things like that, I'd probably categorize them in a few different ways, right? One would be the content events, which is like what you have going on, right? where you're putting together a panel of speakers ex external to to GDC and you're and I think especially for a lot of folks like me where you know I think that I paid for GDC for almost 10 years straight and I averaged only one and a half sessions a year and so I stopped three years ago I was just like it's just not worth it but then by having an event like this

you can still get access to content and things like that rather than just like meeting people at the else. So there's the content events, there's like the dinner events, lunch dinner events. I would say there are the nightclub events, which I hate, which is like the events which at some club and music's super loud and it's just like a bunch of dudes and it's just like why? [laughter] And then you have the other events where yeah, I would say like that's probably the main ones, right? And then I think like I for the last five years had been doing a dinner event at GDC, but I this is the first year I stopped doing it. And I think the issue for me is that I like mixing content and dinners, but other people don't [laughter] like that. And I just got fed up with it. So, I was like, uh, I guess it's easier to just do like an event where, you know, you get a sponsor, you you host like a happy hour or a dinner or whatever, but I don't

know what what are your favorite events at GDC?
Listen, I like them all, man. I think that like depending on where I am in the arc of the week, come Thursday when I we're done because the the symposium is a two-day event
this this year. We haven't done that before. And and shout out to our prime sponsors. We have Exola, that's our prime sponsor. They basically bought out a city block on Howard. We have AWS, of course, and we have Apps Flyer as our primes. But that's two days of content, right? So, at the end of two days of content and and you know, you're programming, it's a lot. I may want to go to a club and really and unwind. I did it last year because our event was one day last year and I went to the Fateless Stash, I think it was club event, and my buddy Sham over over at Fateless. It was basically like a party celebrating the launch of the game.
Yeah.
And that was so dope. It was so fun celebrating with my buddy. We had cigars. So, I like all the stuff. I agree with you. I think content at dinner works. You just have to have a room where that you could hear people.

We made that mistake before.
Yeah.
I think it's got to be designed well. Like last year was such a cluster for me where I just totally messed it up that I was just a little bit burned. But like
you'll be you'll be you'll be back, man. You'll be
We'll see. We'll see. So now this year I'm just doing a bunch of these small private things, right? Where you're just meeting with certain people, but I don't know. We'll see how that goes. It'll definitely be a little bit of a different GDC for me, but like yeah, the whole industry seems to be changing. Okay, so this year we've got the symposium. When is it? Just so people know and maybe it they can last minute apply because this will publish before the event.
Yeah, this is awesome. Love it. So it's two days. It's March 10th, the Tuesday and March 11th, the Wednesday. Doors open 2:30 Tuesday and around 2:30 on Wednesday as well. We got two days of content. We got We'll probably talk a little bit more about this, but I'm super excited. We got Travis Boatman from Carbonated doing the keynote. He was a part of our first ever event,

first panel. So, we love that. And I think like day one is like very focused on big picture vision for where the market is headed. Day two is supposed to be like very actionable tactical content that studio operators can take back and hopefully improve their businesses with. So, we're excited. And let me actually give a shout out to Travis because I think maybe the audience and I know this is a little bit of a different focus this year because and I think both you and I agree that if you think about the games industry today which is in massive transition transformation and so many things are going to happen. I personally believe that this year is going to be the most transformational impactful year in all of human history because of AI and also impacting the games industry. And so just a shout out because Travis in my opinion is the most sophisticated user of AI in terms of like how he's

trying to implement AI in game development. And I just think that I want to applaud you Solomon for bringing on a keynote which I think for many people would be very practical and I think important to understand because this year is going to be crazy. And so understanding some of the nuance and the color around how AI is going to impact the industry, I think is very important. And if some of the people saw some of the stuff that Travis is doing, I mean, I think your mind would be blown. And I know he showed you a little bit of a demo. I've seen some of the other stuff that he's been working on. Not only what he's been working on, I mean, I've been working on a bunch of stuff that just like continues to blow my mind every day. like wow that these things are actually possible with AI is just it's literally unbelievable. So anyway, I definitely

would encourage anyone out there listening to try and come to the event, listen to Travis. [laughter] Like you you want to hear this guy talk for sure in my opinion.
I'm so excited to see Travis speak. I mean he's an awesome speaker. He's obviously incredibly passionate about AI and I think there's like two really interest there's a lot of interesting stuff about Travis and Carbonated but there's two interesting like points I want to raise that I think kind of underscore all of it right one is that Travis was ahead of his time like and he's so he's pretty far ahead of the game now in our first ever product live symposium and the first AI product panel which we always kind of lead off with he was talking about using AI to automate localization which is something that no one was doing in or very few people were doing in in early 2024. I just came off a panel prep discussion with some large publisher

friends who basically said they just rolled this out across their enterprise and it dawned on me it's like wow Travis was doing that three years ago, right? And now when you look at the things that Travis is building with Carbonated, you could spin out like three tech companies just out of the that he's building to run his studio and his game and production pipeline and all that kind of So, it's very very heavy awesome stuff that I think that folks need to see because I think one of the big knocks on AI is people get up and pontificate it and they don't share a lot about how it's actually being used in a practical way. So, Travis is full of that, right? And so, I'm just so excited to to not only hear what he's working on, but also get his vision for where the market's headed because obviously he's he's been skating to where the puck is going now for a very long time. And so I think listening to Travis and maybe getting some ideas for how some of these studios can modernize some of their processes or make them more efficient is a good idea. So yeah, definitely come out and check out the keynote,
right? And and maybe we could also talk

again just kind of going back to like other folks in the audience who are like, "Hey, I'd like to start my own GDC event, whether it's a dinner or a concert thing or whatever." I think where you guys have done a great job is on the marketing and just being able to get the bigger venues, get the bigger speakers and get and obviously we had like Bing Gordon last year which was very entertaining and I loved hearing him speak and Alan Adam before Alan Adam before and and like how have you approached the marketing of your event and how have you been able to get such a good draw in terms of attendance? I think it it's too it in one word it's community right so you have your own in relationships it's I I've I used to I used to rely you I mean you'll know this you'll know this right JK like I used to rely a lot more on you because I wasn't as connected and you've ran game makers for such a long time you are still very well known I don't think

there's been any drop off in people knowing you like you
I think there there's there's drop off but this is fun I I don't actually don't want to be [laughter] that Well, you are, like it or not, you are, man. People know who you are. And like, so initially, again, it goes back to like ways that other folks in the game that I've watched that have that are building their own events, building their own community brands or their own event brands. You find it you find a connector. I don't want to use the word influencer and mark in games because it's it's I don't think it's relevant, but you find a connector, somebody with a point of view who can help you accelerate that process. Yeah. I did I did that initially with you, but then like that through this natural process and just being in the market now for several years, you call on your friends, right? It's really what it is in games. And so I I think the getting good speakers, you relying heavily on relationships and then the marketing piece is really because of it's it it comes out of the I hate to use the word, but brand you've built and you only built the brand with amazing content. You can't have content or else

people are just not going to check for you. You now and now, you know, we can get going 21 days out and do numbers. Now, I don't advise everyone do that [laughter] every time. What is it? Mom used to say, the founder of Lean Plum, like we operate best with our our backs to the wall. Anyway, I'm excited about what we put together this year. And obviously I'm excited also that I think we we kicked open the doors to like a lot of other folks realizing this is a space that you can invest in, build communities in, and it's good for the overall game that we got so many people talk talking about product and live ops now,
right? And so what started as an event that was largely vendor driven, now both Tim and you are out of the companies where you had first started this event. And so where does that leave this event now? So are you still going to be driving this as like a kind of solo consultancy type of role or how do you imagine this moving forward?

I think it's always going to be a little a bit of a hybrid. I think that like through the last several years, my time at Clevertop, my time at Lean Plum, my time building this community in games,
cuz I'm a like a an enterprise sales leader guy, like that's what I've done the bulk of my career. The last few years I've turned into more of a marketer, right? Or more of a like a GTM leader, thinking about the full funnel, thinking about content, thinking about building events, all that sort of stuff, which I classify more in the realm of marketing. I think that what's happening I think the symposium will as evidenced it'll continue to live on. There will be sponsors who are integral in making that happen for maybe big stuff we do like our big tent polls. So we got a big tent you have a big tent pole right now coming up with GDC. We have a a big tent pole come and later in the summer with Gamescom. Those are the two big those are the two big tent poles. We'll probably continue to have sponsors heavily involved in those. But I see us

moving to a world where it's not just tech providers and service providers sponsoring. Maybe it's game publishers.
Yeah.
Right. Is maybe it's game studios because we're at that level now in terms of the relationships and people wanting to be involved. And the one thing I'm going to do this year for sure, and we did this before, I want to have standalone events um that aren't around tent pole things that we can anchor around like GDC or whatever. we want to do an LA standalone event or maybe at a
Yeah, that that one in LA was pretty pretty dope. That was awesome.
Yeah, man. Like that that showed us that we could stand on our own merits, right? And so maybe those will be a little bit more driven by me purely as in my advisory service, but we're always going to have sponsors, right? They they help make things a lot easier.
Yeah. And I think one of the other reasons why I thought it'd be a good idea just to even talk about these kind of events on this podcast is because one of the other things that I'm starting to sense is that these kind of events are in my opinion going to become increasingly valuable. And the reason

why is because, and I've spoken to this on a number of occasions for years in terms of the attention economy and in terms of what's going to happen with AI, and we've noticed that there's just a lot more noise, a lot more slop coming out. And when you have AI and when you've got infinite content and the cost of whether it's content or spam or noise going to basically zero that the ability to address a specific audience, right, of whether it's gaming professionals or executives or whatever is in my opinion going to be increasingly valuable. So these human relationships in a world of AI where there's just so much sloth and noise and where you're fighting for attention. Again, I just think that whether it's what you're doing with product live ops and out growth symposium or for anyone else listening, I think that there's now

going to be a big opportunity here in being able to curate and host these kinds of events with a specific audience that's going to be very difficult to get to.
Yeah, I totally agree. Have you ever heard of a guy named Chris Camilo?
Name sounds really familiar. Yeah, he's a I don't know.
He's an investor guy who he's one of these guys who started 20 years ago with 20K and got into the retail market and then he built a $300 million portfolio like whatever it is, right? The guy's just super smart at predicting stuff. He understands the markets. He understands tech. He was talking about this this new kind of AI this moment that we're in
which he called a super cycle which I you know other people have said that I really like that term in particular like the last like three weeks four weeks right since like everyone started get around with openclaw built building little mini farms so they could run agents. He's talking about all this

stuff and he's like listen like a lot of like a ton of industries
are going to be incredibly disrupted and it's going to it's going to be tough for a lot of folks but he talked about moes and to your point right he saw you said relationships are a moat
right some trust is a moat there are there are very relationshipdriven businesses I think games is one of them also you've made the point before JK that just game development in general is a AI resistant thing. It's going to be hard to to full to own that end to end with AI. But to your point, it's a relationship driven business. Relationships are a moat. On the on the B2B TOC side, on the B2B side, you're going to have to continue to lean into relationships. And that's whether you're making games or you're a game tech provider. It's your relationships that are going to really, I think, win the day for you. Now, all that other stuff is efficiency and having to keep up with your competitors in an arms race. And I think other other thing that I believe

is kind of heavily discounted is the advantage of information. And this takes me back to like the early days of mobile where if you had just the slightest information advantage, it was everything, right? So like it's kind of like during the early days of Tapjoy and if you knew how to effectively leverage incentivized installs and people were deathly afraid of doing like a oh I don't know if I want to do that 100k push right now today it's like 100k push whatever but back then if you knew to do that on tapjoy on incentivize then you won and you won big and that's why distribution became so important in that small information advantage and also takes you back to how did game of war beat kingdoms of Camelot back in the day. Well, they realized, hey, look at what all these Chinese game companies are doing with these VIP, Gold Bank, all these different kinds of monetization features. And so when Game of War

launched, they first went, they looked at Kingdoms of Camelot, then they got this information about the new stuff that the Chinese companies were doing. they implemented it and then they were able to drive instead of$8 to $10 in LTV 12 to$15 in LTV and then they just swept the market and so this notion of tribes has existed for a while right it's like the old like during the renaissance of artists that all came from the same cities that hung out together that kind of shared information and so by being able to like have these small communities where and and again people are going to argue like some people believe in a zero sum world some believe in an infinite world. The kind of James Car's definition of of an infinite world. And I believe the world isn't infinite. And so if you can get that small group of people together, your contacts, fellow people in the battle trying to learning together and sharing information, then I think as a group you can be collectively successful

in my opinion.
Yeah. I mean, again, it all comes back to community, man. And that's what we've we I think we've built that with the symposium. It's just on like LinkedIn like the
something there's something special about games and like how I think it's the smartest people that I've ever worked with in any vertical industry and I've worked in all of them. E-commerce, travel, hospitality, CPG, fintech, blah blah blah, media, entertainment, all great people. But I don't think I've ever worked with a group of people that were so smart but so informal and just homies. And it's just like the
Yeah. the way that we talk to each other on LinkedIn. It's unlike anything I've seen, right? And any, you know, everyone's like very corporate and stodgy and kind of uptight sports coats, you know, we're not like that. And there's something I think there's something about that. It's like you're building real friendships. I've never built such solid brand. I'm talking about like real friendships.
Yeah.
In as a as a somebody on the quoteunquote provider side than I have in games, right? And I think it's and that goes [clears throat] back to tribe community. Like I don't know. I feel

like I finally found my tribe in the games business, right? In the live ops business, in the product business. I've never I never built a game, but those are my people, and I'm here to serve those people. So,
yeah, it is to your point, it's a good industry, I would say. I mean, we do have some some bad apples and some bad people in the industry, but I would say overall,
that's the other side.
Overall though, we've got a lot of really really fantastic people in the industry. I I would say compared to other industries, it does seem more uh open-minded, more collaborative, and where you can, to your point, make very strong relationships with with folks in the industry. So,
yeah, it's funny you bring that up. I think that's the other side of like the fact, you know, how how tight tight it is is that it can get a little high schooly, but that's just humans, right? Like there's a lot of smart people with egos and you you learn to kind of navigate that on the provider side because you have to, right? But it's also like I think it makes it special, right? Because I people are people are

candid, people go at I think people go at it, call each other out sometimes and but it's all it's all just iron sharp sharpening iron at the end of the day. Makes us all better and and it makes for entertainment if nothing else. Right.
Right. So, okay. So, maybe like in closing here, do you have any advice for folks who want to start their own event? like m maybe you can tell us about some of the lessons that you've learned after three years of and and I guess five events now for the product live op symposium. What kind of advice would you give folks who are trying to start their own event and what do you personally I guess second question here to um attach to the first is just what do you personally like how do you view this for yourself in terms of personal benefit
you know so the first piece of advice I'd give an [clears throat] order is don't sell don't go which sounds counterintuitive for anyone on the

provider side and I think it's it's going to be mostly folks on service provider and game tech side who want to do these types of things.
Yeah.
Um, everyone says, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, don't sell." But no, it's like it's you really have to be you have to be aware of it. You have to be very purposeful about it. And we we set out from the very beginning with the symposium with that kind of mantra. And any anytime, you know, maybe I don't know, maybe I have I halfass an abstract or something like that and like someone else sees it and it it feels a little salesy, somebody will call it out like, "Hey, uh-uh." you know, and so we keep it very we're very very tough on ourselves around truly doing the event for the community and and like trying to create real value ad content that's going to help our audience. Obviously, it's inferred whatever it is we do and it's building relationships and it's there's a long-term buying consideration cycle and if we're giving something of value, maybe at some point we're going to do business with someone, right? So, we love that. But you have to be very mindful of that when you're curating and

programming for whatever it is you want to do, right? And in fact, so so um so mindful that you don't even sometimes you don't even want to talk about it directly, right? You want to find adjacent stuff that that kind of speaks to whatever it is that you do. And so that's the first piece of of advice I'd give. The second piece is make sure you understand it. Um and and and that's just general in gaming period. I think if like if you're a game tech provider or you're a service provider and you're trying to get into games um and maybe you have you have a reputation in other industry verticals and you think how hard could it be hard right and I'm just talking about games now specifically like you need to take the time to build those relationships and learn the space before you kind of earn the right to be out doing things out in the market. And so those are the two things. Take the time, learn, get deep on use cases, take the time to learn the space because I think the gaming industry like that really resonates with them that like someone from technically or a service provider

had took the time to do that. And don't sell make it about community and content. And then the second part to your question was like what I what I get out of it personally.
I think the relationships like like I the relationships drive me, man. Like you and I have known each other for years now. This this is stuff that means a lot to me, you know. So, apologies if I get a little uh if I get a little mushy to open up the symposium, but it could have never happened without homies like you and homies like Tim and and all the good people that have been involved. I mean, Jasper was a part of the first ever event. He came up with the symposium name. We were like, "What the hell are we going to call this thing, right?" And like, we're rocking with it forever now and now he's at another company. I'm with my own advisory service. Tim is doing his own thing, right? It transcends the companies we've been at and that's all comes back to relationship. So I look at these as lifelong relationships and and I and that's the most valuable thing that I get out of it personally. And then just also just like some of the people we've had are just legends, right? Like having

Bing two years in a row that was pretty amazing. That was just serendipitous because he was on the lean plum board back in the day. And having Travis now and like us collectively recognizing like oo like Travis could really crush a keynote. like it's going to be so sick to see that and give him that opportunity. So yeah, I just the relationships that I built with people and being able to to to kind of rub shoulders with some of these people that I really admire who are doing really dope That's what it's all about for me.
Awesome. Yeah, I agree with you. Like when I was doing my events for GDC and other dinner events, I generally did it for for no no margin just because you want to like meet folks and be exposed to different kinds of information. And so I think that's, you know, for me that's the most important and most valuable thing you can get from these kinds of initiatives and events.
Yeah. I just it just dawned on me you were doing it as a game maker
you know so like the downstream

obviously there's benefits right um but you know the the downstream benefits for you were even further away if I'm applying my logic to it right as a service provider so yeah it's it's it's a labor of love man a lot of you know right like
it's unless you got a bunch of sponsors and stuff like that you know it's
you got to invest right a little bit and I think once you do that maybe you you build something that it has its own inertia, which is what I think we've done with the symposium. So,
right,
you know, shout out to all everyone who's involved this year. Uh, Uptick, Amplitude, Bitties, all of our primes, couldn't do it without all those fine folks. And then, of course, all of our dope speakers who most of them are really just like great friends that we've known for years, right? Who are who are going to step up and bring their perspective. So, super excited. Yeah, it kind of takes me back to like it reminds me of Ray Dallio's advice about what you should be looking for, which is two things. Meaningful work and meaningful relationships. And certainly these kind of events would hopefully help build

some of those relationships. So just in closing, we've got the product live ops growth symposium for folks who want to try and get an invitation to the event. I highly recommend folks meet us there. Check it out. I will also be moderating an AI panel. Wait, is Travis gonna be on that panel or is he
Yeah. Yeah, he's good, good, good, good.
Yeah, Travis is gonna set the set the stage for the panel.
That's good because I I know it'll be good if he's on so we can mix it up a little bit. So, that'll be good. So, yeah. So, how can they apply? I'll leave a link, but should they just go to the link and apply to go to the event?
Yeah. Yeah. Super simple. Just go to the link, apply for the event. We're getting close on capacity, but we want this thing to be packed to the gills. So, definitely head over as soon as you can. You could probably also find it on Exola's site, but the most direct route is via the link that that JK is going to share. Be sure to go put your name on there, say what you do, say what company you represent, because obviously like, and this is really important. I want to talk about this too, just really quickly.

Yeah. One thing that we've said at all symposiums is obviously we love to have folks who work at studios and we could potentially work with at some point in the future, but that's not the only criteria. We know there are a lot of people that are either consulting or people that are truly in between gigs right now because of all the stuff that's been going on in gaming
over the last few years. So, we de we definitely have a percentage of folks that we let in that are clearly in between gigs looking for new gigs because we want you to come to the event and find your next gig, right? Like we're really walking that we want people, we're trying to help the community, right? So, word of the wise out there like if you're in between gigs, don't feel like you can't apply. We'll take a look at you. We'll take a look at where you came from. We want you to come to the symposium and network and maybe find the next thing that's going to change your life or maybe find your next co-founder. Right? That's what it's all about. So definitely uh definitely apply because I think it like it takes a village and we want all types of folks there at all levels whether it's students, right? Tim's really big on the student hype. We got a bunch of Cal and

UCLA people that want to get into games coming, but we don't discriminate. We want a good blend of folks in there. That's what make it a great event.
All right, awesome. Well, with that, Sullivan, thanks so much. And for the audience, feel free to sign up and hopefully we will see you at the events. I am very excited for the AI panel. We're going to be talking impact, implication, risks. It'll be pretty pretty crazy. So definitely want to uh check it out and you want to check out Travis's keynote for sure. So
yeah, Travis keynote is going to be crazy. And the panel is operators to orchestrators, how AI is going to impact gaming, which is like a a recurring theme for us every year. we come back with crazier stuff and data points. This is the year.
This This is the year. Yeah, for sure.
Awesome. JK, thanks so much for having me, man. And you know, T minus 6 days, man. Can't wait. [laughter]
Sounds good. All right. Thanks so much, Solomon.
Take care, folks. Bye-bye.

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