The BILLION User Goldmine: Gaming with AI + Telegram (DEEP DIVE)

I mean honestly like I don't want to sound hyperbolic but I really view this as as an extinction level event and that's both good and bad. And so I think that there are studios being born today that are AI native from day one and they are absolutely going to eat the lunch of kind of legacy studios who don't make that transition. And that for me is going to be the vast majority of studios. I'd be surprised if it's 90 95% of especially the bigger studios that are just so slow to adopt anything. You know, if you think of the legacy publishers that most of them still haven't even succeeded in mobile freeto play. Simon, welcome. So, Goat Gaming seems to be pioneering some bold ideas around agentic AI and Telegrambased gaming. And so for those who might be unfamiliar with what Agentic means, I I know it's a key buzzword that a lot of people are talking about. Could you explain what Goat Gaming does and then specifically how it's different from

other gaming platforms? Sure. So Go Gaming is an ecosystem of games on Telegram. So we have eight games today. We're adding new games like super regularly. And Go Gaming itself is uh yeah a platform where players compete and win prizes. So you can think of something almost like skills but a lot more casual. So players come in, they pay an entry fee to various different games and then depending how they place on the leaderboard or uh whether they win PVP, they can win kind of real world prizes or or tokens. And is this skill-based gaming or is this chance based gaming or what what is it like specifically? Uh we focus on skill-based gaming. Yeah. We don't want to operate a casino. So you know we have something like um our top performing game. This is funny. So last year we had a team running experiments on UEFM. So we set up an AI pipeline where we could ship a new game a week in Fortnite. Um and so at one point I think we we shipped like 37 maps 37 weeks. And one of the games

that performed best was this waifu themed game called Waifu Tycoon. Uh it was one of the top games on UFN last year and we took that and we made a card battler inspired by that. And so that's currently on go gaming. It's called Waifu Clash. and white for Clash is uh is doing really well and so players go headto-head in these kind of different games that we've created for them and compete to win basically. And just so I fully kind of understand your business, it kind of sounds like the way that you're describing it, it sounds like skills on Telegram. Is that essentially what it is? Oh yeah, that's uh that's one way to look at it. Yeah. Okay. And then maybe if you could help us understand the agentic piece as far as where does the AI come in? Yeah. So look, like we have a what I'd call a somewhat crypton native product. So you know, having a token also helps get users in um and gives them various different incentives. The web community is also super into AI agents. So as a

team, we've been playing with this tech now for close to a year. And so we started building out an offering that we called the Alpha Goats. And the vision for the Alpha Goats is there would be a collection of, you know, AI agents that players could collect, configure, and then have them battle one another to win prizes. And we create a series of games specifically just designed for AI agents. Um, and then players could have their agents go off and compete basically and maybe perform kind of routine tasks for them. Um, one of the other things we're thinking about is how nonowners of the agents can also benefit from it with an ecosystem as well. be it kind of having a stake in their performance and whatever. So, it's uh we're exploring new gameplay paradigms with that. It's kind of interesting as well because once you let players start to train them, you start getting a lot of like interesting emerging behaviors that you hadn't necessarily considered. Yeah. So, could you kind of step us through a like a more concrete example as far as a specific game and then you're able to kind of collect these

agents and then how they would battle for you? Like what what would that specifically look like? Yeah, I'm going to have to keep it somewhat high level because we haven't divulged everything yet. Um, so these are still in development. I think the V1 is going live probably in the next two or three weeks. Um, but essentially say you collect an agent. Your agent has a distinct personality. You can either via prompting or via playing with sliders, tell it what areas you want it to specialize in. Over time, it will learn and it will improve. uh you can accelerate that learning if you want by microtransactions. Um and then we have a library of games and they will compete across various different games and their performance in these games would depend and vary based on the uh training that you've given them. And so certain types of training will lend themselves to certain games and then you can either watch them play real time or you can see kind of the results later and then kind of tweak their their learnings based on

that. It'll also you can also have it just auto optimize if that's what you want. My guess is that most players will actually gravitate towards that. But for those that want to be more manual, then you can kind of learn over time and tweak them. And uh maybe we can have situations where you can have various AI agents collaborating on shared objectives as well. Like it's it's just interesting to see where this leads from a gameplay design perspective, right? So maybe the way that the audience should be thinking about this and for anyone in the audience who's a game developer is that when we talk about AI, we talk about for example a lot of impacts when it comes to development. For example, the the ability to reduce development costs either through generative types of things or or through having AI eventually write code for you, things of that nature. And then on the user experience side, I think the bulk of the focus has been on things like AI NP and PCs for example. But I think what you're saying is that another potential

gameplay modality or just kind of way in which players could play is by having AI that you kind of control in some way. So you're more like a general in to some degree. And and so to the extent that the technology is coming soon where these kinds of behaviors where you're able to kind of direct actions that could then become potentially emergent because you've got different kinds of uh AI with different personalities and capabilities and depending on what they have they can do different things. And so, um, and so for our audience, you you can kind of remember when, you know, when when ID first came out with like 3D capabilities so that you can you can have like FPS that enabled a whole genre of games. And I I guess what to to the

degree that it's possible what what you it sounds like what you're saying is hey look there might be a possibility here where you've got the ability to manage control upgrade a different kind of like RPG or simulation uh army control whatever experience where uh you can kind of take it to the next level. And one of the things that we've seen is we've seen idol games where you're kind of controlling behaviors be very popular. So this could potentially be the next step in that evolution. Is would I characterize am I characterizing that in the right way in terms of how you're thinking about it? I would say so. I think there's also two things to call out. So yeah, you know, I had one person say, well, isn't this just the game playing for you? I was like, bro, like you played any of the sports management games? They've been doing this for like 25 years, you know. I'm a huge Football Manager player. You don't you've never controlled the players of Football Manager and that's

not the game. So, in a way, like this is quote unquote very new, but actually it's also kind of been established for a long time, too. And the other thing is like I just want to double click on what you said about emergent behavior. So, I was recently, so I have a you know, being a gaming CEO, I have friends who are other gaming CEOs and I was recently playing a friend's game. Uh I won't name the game because it's not not out yet. uh and they have something similar in their game where their characters uh the players characters essentially AI agents and I saw a very interesting interaction with these two agents that I would never have predicted where you know one agent wanted to establish a romantic relationship with another one um and asked them out but then was very awkward about it and then asked another AI agent to come to the date with them and then we were like we said we prompted it like why don't you just tell your friend to not come on the date and so he did and then the agent or something. I didn't want to come anyway, like what you wasting my time. But you get these kind of like weird quirky

outcomes that feel very human that no one programmed, right? And always surprise you. And so I think those moments of delight uh and those kind of experiences can be very compulsive. You know, I've seen you were talking about NPCs, right? I've been I've been watching people playing Enzoy since they launched. So like when you see a game like that that I think the role of both NPCs and AI agents could be very interesting those kind of genres too. Yeah. And may maybe the the other kind of interesting aspect of your business is really around the the Telegram side and maybe we could dive into that a little bit. So operating I assume entirely within Telegram. You you've got a bunch of these games that people will need to buy into and then they they play these skills based games. And so could you talk to us a little bit more in terms of well may maybe starting with why did you choose Telegram? What was it specifically about Telegram that that attracted you to um to to build games

for that platform? And then with this specific approach around skills-based gaming for Telegram. Yeah. So starting with Telegram, right? Distribution is destiny. There are close to a billion monthly active users in on Telegram who are pretty starved for quality content in all honesty. Um there's a handful of games there that do very well, but you know, this takes me back to the early days of of Facebook. like I was around in 2007, 2008, 2009 when these games was being built started to take off. It was a very similar dynamic where you had this, you know, massive captive audience that spending a lot of time on there every day, but actually were very limited in terms of entertainment options. And so you had games like uh Farm Bomb and Singer Poker and Mafia Wars all taking off to us like it seemed like an obvious parallel. Um even down to how social and how easy it is to kind of share these games and scale them. And so just from a distribution perspective,

it made the most sense. I mean going back to something I mentioned earlier like our product you know has has a crypto native angle and anyone that's in crypto is also on telegram. So if you wanted to target those you know whales with kind of larger balances within the space it was an easier way to reach them which is kind of contrary to what people think of when they think of telegram. And then on the skills angle, look, you know, going back to talking about how the, you know, audience is is cryptonative. Like we had a game called Mighty Action Heroes, which was our first web 3 game. There was one mode that we added to that where players went head-to-head and they paid an entry fee and then the winner would win the prize pot. And there just the numbers for that mode were just off the charts. You know, we're seeing like um day one retention over 80% for anyone that played that mode. I was like like the users uh web3 users are you know are financially motivated and this is like a very clear hook has very like strong product market fit. So it was a no-brainer from that perspective and and it's worked out very

well like we have users that have been playing pretty much every day for for a year now. And can you help describe some of the uh some some of the characteristics of the platform like what do you have in terms of whether it's distribution or Facebook used to have you know viral notifications and things of that nature but when when you think about telegram as a platform I mean I use telegram but I'm not very familiar with the gaming aspect of it but are you able to drive players there is there a marketing distribution or other kinds of features that make Telegram good for gaming? Well, I mean, Telegram is very easy to grow social referrals because everyone has a contact list in Telegram, right? And so, if you incentivize the right behaviors like you can get people to bring their friends in. Um, also like Telegram does have native ad networks just like Facebook does. Okay, that will serve ads to kind of non if you're a subscriber, a premium user of Telegram, you don't see the ads, but free users do

see them. Um, so and you can also serve ads outside of Telegram that then direct into Telegram by deep link. So if there's specific territories or types of audiences that you want to target for your bot and you think that they are, you know, with confidence you can find them outside of Telegram, then you can just target a deep link, right? And then how about monetization? Does Telegram have a native uh monetization platform of some kind like Yeah. So, Telegram has a native monetization that goes through the app stores. So, you know, you buy the inapp currency which is stars and you can purchase by that. Some other some apps also just use direct crypto payments because everyone outside the US has a telegram wallet. They have announced they're bringing telegram wallet to the US this year with the uh you know regulatory changes that taken place over the last few months. Right. But if you're buying these credits on Telegram, are you also paying the app store fees? So if users pay by Telegram

stars, that's correct. You pay the app store fees. If they pay by crypto, then there's no app store fee to pay. I see. And what percentage of your audience is paying through app store versus crypto? or if if you can't say that then what what what would you guess would be the general split? I won't speak specifically about our app but if you look more broadly because a lot of this data is on chain um my you know my anecdotal evidence is that typically it's like 4x in favor of crypto so like 80% crypto 20% right stars and you think that's because you could avoid the fees in that case I don't know I don't think it's that um I think it's because users are just have these wallets wallet balances and just comfortable just spending more money with crypto. That's all it comes down to. When you see something priced in dollars versus, I don't know, like 100 ton versus uh $3, $400, like it just feels different. Like

people don't think of it the same way. I mean, you've always seen this with with the web 3 space like, you know, people spending thousands of dollars on JPEGs, but you know, not wanting to, I don't know, pay for guaca, Chipotle, or whatever. And maybe the other question I could ask is so you've been developing for Telegram. What about is is it all just good news? Is is it a great platform or I mean typically there's at least some challenges developing on certain platforms as well. Yeah, I mean Telegram has it has its challenges, right? So um the audience is incredibly diverse which which actually poses a unique set of challenges. like we have users who monetize very well from Vietnam to Japan to to UK. Um and then we also have large volumes in in developing countries and like who are you focusing on? Like who's the primary audience here? How you making sure you don't alienate specific segments? Like I've never had a an

audience as diverse as the ones we have on our Telegram app. I think scaling an app today is a little bit harder than last year when there was a lot of attention on Telegram gaming more generally. there's a lot of people like farming nocoin and hamster combat. So, you have to work a bit harder, but it's still still very viable. Um, and also just knowing how to monetize these users. And you know, one of the things that worked for us is the very first purchase you do in group gaming is very cheap, like sub 10 cents. And once you convert people, then like they're already engaged, they're in, and then you can kind of keep them playing. Oh, cool. Okay. And I think, you know, so I I'm an old school guy in terms of gaming. I I remember the old Facebook days and I remember when it seemed like Zuck just all of a sudden decided he didn't like gaming and then gaming on Facebook canvas became, you know, completely unviable and especially with with credits. So in in terms of like platform risk, what what is your

philosophy or how are you thinking about platform risk on Telegram? Like let's say I mean I I I don't know who that that Russian guy is the famous you know guy. Yeah. But if he decided to change his mind one day and say ah you know I don't like games on telegram. How are you think how are you thinking about that risk? Yeah I mean look platform risk is something we always think about just like you. I'm an old guy so I've been around a long time and I've been on the receiving end of platform risk more than once. You know we were we were an early Apple Arcade developer. We don't do Apple Arcade games anymore. So I think that tells a story but right um yeah look so this is something we we keep in mind um I would say that due to the way the telegram apps are developed it's an HTML 5 app so it's very easy to port to browser we could do that in a couple of weeks if we really wanted to it's just a question of focus and then there are other messaging apps out there you have line uh you have kaca obviously

there are uh there's 10 cent in China. So there are options if you want to partner with kind of more regional publishers and take it to other messaging platforms. Are are you thinking about doing that or are you going to stick to Telegram? I think for now it's a question of focus like I'd rather just be the best on Telegram rather than spread ourselves too thinly across multiple platforms with different different audiences. I think the other part here is that you know we are close to the Telegram guys. So Ton Ventures um invested in us last year in one of our token realms. So we have visibility into what's happening in the Ton. Ton is the blockchain that's connected to Telegram, the Ton ecosystem. And we know and they've been very public that gaming is the big priority for Telegram and Tom. This is how they see themselves growing and monetizing the ecosystem. So I'm not particularly concerned about them going cold on gaming. They're not they're not trying to build an ads business, which is what Facebook was doing, right? Therefore, like gaming is kind of more

additive to to their long-term vision. So, I I thought we could kind of go back and talk about the AI side. And so, when it comes to AI, I I'm wondering is are are you most excited by this kind of agentic capability or are there other things in terms of AI that you're looking at when it comes to your studio? Yeah, I mean, look, we've been very public about this. So, I first shared um like a Twitter thread detailing all the stuff we'll be doing in AI in 2023. Okay? And so, when we started making Mighty Action Heroes, I told my co-founder Ben, that I wanted every character to be unique because we wanted them to be tradable NFTTS. And he was like, well, that's 25 million 3D models. I was like, well, you know, let's figure that out. And so what we came up with was then called like you know u procedure generated content which is I mean essentially not that different to genai. And so we've been investing in the space heavily now for over three

years. Um you know we were developing the Fortnite maps at the rate of one a week last year because we wanted to battle test our our tech at scale in a live environment. Um all of the games in go gaming are built in, you know, two or three weeks using our internal AI tooling both on the engineering and the uh art side. Um what do you do in terms of AI on the engineering side? Do you actually have it, you know, develop code, do code audits or what? Yeah, so we have it develop code, we have it audit code and we're also working with AI on the automation side. So automation now is like my big focus. So anything that we can automate we are automating and be it via you know simple web- based tools like make or gum loop or even just what I've started doing more generally and I'm not a coder right like I have a music degree I just stress that um but I am somewhat technical uh technical enough to be dangerous so uh I just you know use wind surf which is a prompt

based ID and I'm just building apps just to like solve pain points in my work And everyone on the team is actually and so we you know I said this in another chat last week but we at Mighty Bear see being AI native as being you know equivalent to being uh proficient in office was in 1995 1996 it's just a prerequisite of being in the workplace and so uh we're seeing people at all levels developing really interesting tools like our you know our head of marketing right now caught up with her this morning uh She was building a a bot to help her with Twitter outreach and managing her Telegram messages, right? There just like everyone at the studio is using it throughout to make us much more efficient. You So you're you're saying that you're using AI for engineering which you've kind of described. Um we've also tried to use it for engineering but have had much less luck on the on developing code that we

could use in production relative to like code audits. Uh, but maybe I could also ask you just given your experience using AI in terms of development, using AI potentially for a new kind of player experience with the ability to, you know, manage or deploy a lot of different like AI agents in some way from a game experience perspective. What do you if you were to look out into the future and and as as you're using more of the tools and seeing more of the capabilities from AI come online, where do you think we'll be in a year or two years from now as far as like what you think would be the most disruptive or most impactful coming from AI? I mean, honestly, like I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but I really view this as as an extinction level event. And that's both good and bad. And so I think that there are studios being born today that are AI native from day one and they are absolutely going to eat

the lunch of kind of legacy studios who don't make that transition. And that for me is going to be the vast majority of studios. I'd be surprised if it's 90 95% of especially the bigger studios that are just so slow to adopt anything. You know if you think of the legacy publishers like most of them still haven't even succeeded in mobile free play. Yeah. So when you say extinction level event, what you mean is that there's going to be new studios that basically beat older studios who are complacent or who are not able to change their their uh operational processes to integrate AI more fully. Is that what you mean? Rather than like P Doom being high. Correct. So like you're going to see studios coming out that can ship content 5 10x faster. Sure. Yeah. for like a fraction of the cost. Like, you know, I'm going to pick on someone, but there was a game that came out last year that had been 12 years in development with thousands of people and hundreds of millions of euros sunk into it. 50% Metacritic. Like games

like that in this day and age with these tools like I don't think uh well, I don't think they they'll continue to exist, but I think those days are kind of over, right? So if a studio can create a AAA quality experience and you know I hear people say things like oh gamers never want to play anything that's made by AI like the average gamer doesn't care and can't tell the difference. Yeah. And maybe you can create the same level of content in a year or two years uh with 20 to 50 guys instead of 500 like what happens to the legacy business then? So I think really going forward the the thing that matters the most is going to be distribution obviously and then curation and that really is like all it's going to boil down to and maybe I could ask you more specifically in terms of your studio since you've been actively engaging with AI uh how has it changed whether it's the operational processes that you guys employ or your team structure and how do you think that

changes in the next year or two and I I know that there's a lot of people in AI who think that It's literally the end of this year, kind of like first half of next year, where we're going to see the vast majority of impact from AI given Agentic and given the ability of AI to be able to write code that's at a much better level. But I I'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on this. I mean, for me, like it's an ongoing process. like we are for the past year and a half we've actually been adjusting our setup and our team and how we operate uh based on what we're learning and what we're seeing and what the optimal way is and you know being very candid like not everyone was fully on board with what we were doing or willing to learn the new tools and this is again why I say this is an extension of event for many studios because if you don't have a team that's open to change like it doesn't matter what tools you put in front of them if they're not using them or not in most of them they can always make the argument that oh it's just more

efficient if I just don't do it and I just do it the old way you know and over time people just get left further and further behind and so I've been pretty militant about pushing it and so is my co-founder um but we've also then had buyin from the team like our art team is super into it um we're very blessed that we have someone on the I mean we're based in Singapore right so we have many Chinese speakers on the team but we have someone on the team that's super deep into the Chinese uh AI forums and so she's bringing tools to us that like de developers in the west don't have access to every week she's like I saw this on a Chinese AI platform and then you got this guey and it's totally in Chinese and she's explaining how it works and she's combining that with our in-house tools and it's super exciting but honestly like for us it's a process of evolution. We're still figuring out what the optimal setup is. We do have a dedicated AI team and dedicated AI engineers and we have one person whose job is effectively to evangelize it throughout the org and make sure tools

are being used. You will get some resistance but once people start using it and become more familiar uh they find it hard to live without it as well. And I I thought maybe like the other thing we could talk about is just a little bit more about goat gaming in terms of the origin story. I know you have had a career more in traditional game studios. I I I believe uh you worked at like King and Ubisoft and then you founded a studio called Mighty Bear Games. Is that right? But these these were more traditional games and then you kind of shifted to skills based. But could could you like walk us back through? Yeah, sure. um how did you decide to start Goat and then from and then from from Goat Gaming in terms of like the current approach as far as skills based um on Telegram and then kind of like what's happening now with AI and does that change your future strategy at all? Of course. Yeah, these are very good questions. So yeah, my

last real job was at King. Um King had a studio in Singapore called Non-Stop Games. Ah that's right. Yeah. with Henrik from Play Venture. Henrik. Yeah. So Henrik and I go way way way back. It's like 2009, I think. Nice. But yeah, I was working with Henrik at Non-Stop and uh I think it was an unfortunate case of uh like inverse nominative determinism where non-stop stopped. Um Okay. Sorry. Could you repeat that that term again? I I that kind of went went right by me. Nominative determinism is when a name basically like predicts what what someone is going to do. So if it was non-stop games, it would never stop. So like I don't know, this guy is called a Smith and he happens to be a blacksmith or something. But yeah, like names predicting outcomes. I see. Um so yeah, anyway, non-stop uh ceased and uh I was, you know, King were very good to us. still offered me the chance to relocate to back to Europe and continue

working there. But I realized that this was a very unique moment where I had, you know, this basically the best talent that King had in Asia all available at the same time. And so I'd always wanted to start a studio. And so I left and I founded a studio with with this great team. Uh we were I would say a moderately successful web 2 studio for a number of years. So you know during 2021 we were fending off many acquisition offers. We were profitable. We had one of two of the top performing games on Apple Arcade. Um, which at that time was paying pretty well. And we had, you know, mobile free-to-play products in in early test launch that had very promising numbers. But post IDFA, I could see where the wind was blowing for studios like ours and it wasn't looking good. again like having lived through the financial crisis and seen platform shifts and seeing how you know companies can be disrupted by things that happen outside the or so we took the decision to go all in on web 3 um because I'm pretty crypto native I've been buying Bitcoin since

2015 anyway we had people on the team that have been mining Ethereum so actually we knew gaming and kind of crypto nice yeah it's pretty unusual um and so yeah we went all in on that Mighty Action Heroes did Okay, but the thing we really ran into is just scaling a web three game is just really hard because web two players are just not interested and the web 3 audience is is quite small. It's very small um and generally actually quite extractive. And so what we did is we realized that we had this one game mode, Mighty Action Heroes, which was a skill gaming game mode essentially which like massively outperformed like the rest of the product. We realized that that was one thing that, you know, we're very good at creating kind of exciting PVP experiences and we knew that the audience we had was super into the kind of skill gaming element. Um, and then we were like, okay, so we ran into this challenge scaling Mighty Action Heroes on iOS and Android, like what is the easiest way that we could reach a billion consumers? And it was pretty

obvious to me that that would be Telegram. Also, like we were starting to see the first proof points for Telegram. So some of our some of our investors actually were pretty early to Telegram and were like sharing some of the data they were seeing from the ecosystem. We were seeing Kisen just as it was starting to take off. Um we were you know very early to some of the trends there. And so we decided at the very beginning of last year that we would go kind of all in on Telegram and rather than focusing one year or two years building these big games, we would take what we had been doing in UFN and shipping new games every two to three weeks on Telegram and then you find one that works, you can really double down on it. But that was actually a very good outcome for us. Um, Go Gaming launched, I think, July, August of last year, and has now hit, I think, five and a half million users and has over a 100 million onchain events as well. So, no complaints about how that's worked out, but this is really only the beginning. So, I is there a strong tie

between because it's it sounds like there's some relationship between crypto and Telegram. to get a game to go viral or or or to be distributed in a in a major way, does there need to be a crypto angle or is it similar? You you're just you you said there was like an ad network on Telegram. Are you able to just um you know like buy a bunch of users, check your metrics and depending on you know you you you'd be you'd be buying against rorowaz similar to if you were buying on on you know just just a regular uh game on iOS or Google app store. Is that how it works? That's correct. Yeah. So the reason we look we lean into crypto angle is that having your own token lets you do a number of things around use acquisition and engagement but it provides you with a powerful lever but you can totally have a game that doesn't have any crypto integrated at all doesn't use the native wallet you can run ads for any sort of product on telegram it has an ad network and you're just paying uh you know you set your

parameters and you just evaluate how the rorowass evolves over time maybe I could also just ask you about I don't I don't know much about crypto. Um I I think I was interested more in the NFT angle in the past, but I I never really got around to it. Um what what is I I know crypto seems like it's still big in Asia. Like if you're in Korea or Japan, people are still talking a lot about crypto. It it's not you don't get a lot of people talking about crypto in terms of like traditional western studios as as much as they used to. What is the current state of crypto gaming? Is is it you know maybe you can just characterize it for me. I think crypto gaming is going through a tough period because okay there was a lot of hope placed on these projects that they would you know drive mass adoption of of crypto across you know people that are not in the space today uh and so valuations reflected that and that hasn't happened yet so there haven't been games that really crossed over to the mainstream

right I think off the grid is people's great hope because it has a lot of like uh digital assets that players can trade in its own kind of native token but no I mean that hasn't yet. So, crypto gaming more broadly is in a tough spot. But then there are bright sparks. There are, you know, projects like go um there's a project called Boinkers. So, B O I N K E R S on Telegram, which is doing very well. Uh it was an A16Z speedrun product. Um you know, they're constantly the top grossing apps on Telegram. Um you've had Kazen, which did phenomenally well. I would say actually the only games that doing really well in crypto gaming today are all on Telegram because that's where the attention is. That's where you can actually reach normal people that are not also, you know, very deep in the space. Maybe we could actually go through a specific example because I I think I read that one of your games got like 5 million users uh through some kind of viral referral campaigns or things of that nature.

Could could you just like walk us through like if let's let's say you were advising someone on launching a game on Telegram, what what would that look like? Uh the the the kind of steps you would take, the kind of things you would do to help promote growth for that game. Yeah. I mean, look, it's basically just social gaming. So, you need to have solid referral mechanics, solid leaderboards, things where players can collaborate on shared objectives. like anything that worked in Facebook gaming will work here. Um there's also the element of gifting. So they added something called Telegram gifts which is quite interesting. They're going to be fleshing more out on that. It's going to be people essentially giving themsel giving each other NFTTS. Um but I think within the context of Telegram and our social network that makes a lot of sense. I'm very interested to see how that shapes out over the next few months. I was looking at this is publicly available. I was looking at an old uh a dashboard that someone built that tracks it and I think they've done over $35 million in volume in like the last three months. So there is like and

this is from you know an ecosystem that is very underserved. These features not very well surfaced in telegram but there's so many people there that even if the user experience becomes 5 10% better you can see like massive growth. And is anyone tracking like the you know for example for mobile games you've got sensor tower or these other data services app magic and these other services that track uh the kind of revenue and the kind of success of mobile apps and games uh on IO iOS app store and Google play but on telegram is is there an equivalent thing like that? There are yeah there are some sites like TG stats that basically scrape the telegram API and try and build a picture what's going on. They have very mixed reliability. So I wouldn't say the tools today are as good as anything like sensor tower or um I was going to say app pan but doesn't exist anymore. Sensor app bann became data.ai which

merged with sensor tower. So that yeah what's the uh there's the other one that's much cheaper. I can't remember but yeah not as good. Yeah magic. Sorry, last one. Uh, yeah, there's nothing that's really equivalent to those yet. But look, the the gaming ecosystem Telegram is barely a year old. Like there's a lot of like you should think of this as mobile circa like 2010. Sorry, 2011 maybe. Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah. And so uh I I'd probably now just uh want to ask you a little bit more about So you've been in business now. uh you started your company and you also started you mentioned you were in Singapore. I'd love to hear a little bit more about like the operational side of your business, you know, why did you choose Singapore? Um what was it like initially getting your company off the ground? Like who are your co-founders? That kind of thing. If you know uh Sure. I I think other startup founders would um be interested in in kind of like that initial startup journey.

Yeah. So look, you know, um, a lot of people are going through this now, but when non-stop closed, you know, I had a choice of whether to stay with the company and relocate or or stay where I was. And I would love to say that we chose Singapore because of some great insight or uh we had some thesis or something like that. That's not strictly true. Like it's just that everyone was available in the same time at the same place. And this is, you know, going back to 2016, 2017, like remote working was just nowhere near as common. Like the consensus was that it just doesn't work. I'd say that's actually still holds true for some people. Some people not very good fit for it. But yeah, like uh the the prevailing logic was that everyone needed to be in the same place. Um so we were all in Singapore, which is why we picked it. And then around that we developed a thesis which was like look, we have a lot of exposure to what's happening in Asia. we think that we can take some of these emerging Asian trends and repackage them for more mainstream

western consumers. And so that was always actually might be best thesis from day one. And I would argue even with what we're doing the telegram today that hasn't really changed like we take a lot of very complex experiences we try and repackage them in a very simple way and then try and take what we're seeing in this part of the world you know like you know India had mobile premier league which was also like a world a big leader in skill gaming and actually much bigger influence on us than skills so we're looking at what's happening in India and Asia more broadly uh and then reapplying it you know I I was working at Ken with some very talented people. You know, we were talking about Henrik earlier. So, he advised me early on. He was like, you need to get strong technical co-founder yourself as a product person and then maybe like a backend guy and and someone else. And so, like we ended up with four founders initially. Um, of the nine, sorry, the eight people we had on the first day of the company's operation, four are still with us today.

So like nine years on like we're still 50% of the original late is still here. Um but over time you know the four founders there's two of us left now. I think that's quite normal over nine years. Like one just wasn't really a good fit for what we're doing and we we discovered that pretty early on and the other one left after eight years. And so again that's kind of okay. I think one of the things you you you know I think one of the things you internalize is that people have like a tour of duty quite often and for some people that'll be a year and other people will stay much longer and some people stay till the end and like um that's all right and yeah so we set the studio up um we were supposed to get funding right out the gate but um there were various I mean I won't be too specific but there were various things that happened outside of our control uh around uh non competes that made our early funding that we'd been verbally promised not materialize which kind of left me in a tricky situation because I had to fund uh eight

people's salaries uh basically out my savings along with with the other co-founders um but we did manage to get the company off the ground back then in 2016 back in 2017 no one wanted to fund a gaming studio in Asia they were like what are you doing why are you not in America when you just moved back to Europe you know you've I've got two European passports. I could live anywhere in Europe, but I won't just go back there. And so, we were within two weeks of running out of cash. We had over 150 rejections. And actually, our very first lead investor was Rocket Internet, which is not someone you would think of as like someone that backs gaming companies. For those who don't know, Rocket Internet is is quite notorious in the US because they basically clone US businesses and then rush them to market, then try and flip them. They're the guys that tried to basically um you know clone Airbnb in Europe and then sell it back to them and pour loads of money at them and whatever like it's a very famous incident in Airbnb's history. Anyway, they're no longer on our cap table, but they were our very first investor and they backed

us and uh we had to really scrape and fly around the world and do whatever it takes to bring in people that are willing to take a bet on the studio in Singapore because it was so unsexy then. Now everyone is like this is amazing. You're in Singapore. It's so future forward. It's so easy to do business there. It's got a great tax rate. There's loads of talent and you get access to all of Asia and the West. Like, yeah, this makes a ton of sense. But back then, like, people didn't appreciate that. And so, I guess what I would say to anyone is that if you stick it out hard enough and you're willing to suffer and you're willing to keep getting punched in the face with rejections, like you will eventually like get things up and running and get the support you need. But you do have to be willing to just endure constant rejection like 150 rejections for the first round. Last time we raised money, it took us like six weeks. Yeah. Go. Yeah. It sounds like you have an actual real entrepreneur story because I I think that during during the age of excess, right? We we had a lot of people in like the 2020s and you know uh till

about the last few years ago where it was just so easy to raise money that we didn't we didn't have like real entrepreneurs that had to go through so many rejections and really had to like fight for funding and things like that. So we're probably getting closer back to that kind of situation and it's uh it's good to good to hear that you you you actually weathered that storm and actually made it through to the other side. Um so maybe the uh the two other questions I I would have is really around your again B more around your startup journey but over these last nine years. Uh first question is like what what was the biggest challenge that you faced? You know the biggest challenges are always people challenges. You know like building a product is is easy. Like you and I have both been in this space for many years. you know exactly what it takes. Occasionally like you'll get a hiccup along the road, but like it's actually pretty straightforward. Um I

think there were many things that I didn't appreciate about running an OG early on. So I'll give you an obvious example. I used to say to people, hey look, I'm just going to keep piling work on you and you need to tell me like when you're at your limit and so then I can dial it back and you know, I just need you to tell me like what what is okay. like 99% of people are actually really bad at that. And so like you know we we pushed a lot of people too hard early on because they weren't capable of putting their hand up and by the time they put their hand up it was just too late. like either been failing at a job and lost the confidence of the team around them or you know they were angry at us and so um I think other things like we don't fully appreciate cultural differences and so like again someone who is more European or western is just more likely to vocalize when they don't agree with something they're not happy with something whereas people in Asia are more likely to go along with it like maybe when you're speaking to them face

to face but later on you find out that's not the case and So being able to maybe adjust your messaging and how you operate so that people that wouldn't normally speak up actually do or you can kind of extract from them what it is that that that they're really feeling. Um yeah, I mean we've made a lot of mistakes on personnel down the years both in how we manage and how we hire and that's consistently been the hardest thing. I think we do a pretty good job now but um it's never perfect. You're always learning. Right. And the second question I was going to ask were the biggest lessons you've learned, but would you say that those align with some of the challenges that you mentioned? Yeah. Look, and probably oversharing a bit, but one of the things I realized over the years that there were some people that were just not working out that I just persisted with because I wanted them to succeed at all costs. I was so personally invested in their success. Mh. And the minute I start losing sleep over someone's performance or how I'm going to communicate certain things to them or like why am I annoyed with them

or whatever, like it's generally a pretty good sign that like things are not going to work out. Um, and there's never once been a case where we let someone go where I didn't wish I had hadn't done sooner. Okay. All right. So, final final question for me. I I'll make it two parts, but I'd love to hear your future outlook. One, in terms of AI and AI's impact on gaming, and secondly, um, the outlook in terms of Goat Gaming, where you'd like to take the company, things of that nature. But first, I I I'd love to hear more about specifically to AI. Yeah, look, I I'm not going to make any bold predictions because I don't think anyone has any clue how this is going to shake. What I what I believe is that the workplace is going to look fundamentally different in the next even at least for us within the next three years. Yeah. It's going to be unrecognizable how we worked to how we

worked in the previous you know 40 years since computers started appearing in offices in the 80s. Mhm. Um, even down to the fact that I don't even type a lot of the time now. I dictate to an AI. Like that's 60 70% of my working hours are like speaking to an AI. Um, so I think the cost of content creation and coding uh are going to go down, you know, by orders of magnitude. Uh and that probably will mean many smaller more experimental experiences which can then be developed because you know if you're creating something incredibly niche like it's maybe not worth financial risk today but if you could put that product out in two weeks then why not try it and so you're going to see I think a lot more creativity but then a lot more noise right so the challenge will be distribution right all right and then more specifically about your company future outlook in terms of where you're going to try to take the um in any kind of specific strategic

direction you'll be going that kind of thing. Yeah, look, we're all in on messenger gaming. We think it's the best way to reach millions or hundreds of millions of consumers. And so, we're going to be building a lot more in that direction. And so, I want us to become the dominant messenger gaming company uh globally in the next five years. That's the goal. Okay, great. Well, uh thanks so much, Simon. I think that's basically all the questions that I have. Um, is there anything I I missed? Was is there anything that you you think that I should have asked you that you think it'd be helpful for the audience to know? No. Um, I think that was that was pretty comprehensive. Great. Thank you. All right. Well, in that case, thank you so much for your time and insight, Simon, and for our audience. We will catch you next time. Thanks, Simon. [Music]

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