We just raised $100M - here's what's next with Ian Proulx, CEO of 1047 Games

hey and welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me so you're the um i mean as as people heard already in the intro you're the ceo of 1047 games and and if 1047 games doesn't tell anything to anybody then i'm sure split gate will so your your first title i mean well there's our 1047th title yeah yeah yeah so so the but your first title really came out of the canon i mean it's a shooter that can be described something as a halo meets portal you got 10 million downloads in first month in open beta and this is not on mobile like in mobile this would be big but you're not even on mobile so this was uh on steam as well as on the consoles and swiftly after the game received such a you know huge welcoming

uh you communicated that the game will remain an open beta for foreseeable future so how did you manage to first of all i mean the question that everybody is thinking about is like how did you manage to have such a massive launch for a shooter from a studio that hasn't done shooters before nor are you an activision or bungie or you know you don't have the the big marketing models behind you and why are you not launching globally yeah good questions um so i guess to answer the like how did this happen i mean it's it's a combination of a number of things so um so we actually did a soft launch in may of 2019 uh which some people know some people don't um and that launch went um it didn't go so well uh we we kind of had this big influx of users and this big drop pretty much immediately um i think what was unique about how we went about this was our our thought process going into this was never that we're going to have the perfect game on day one it was always we're going to do

a soft launch because that is the way that we're going to learn and i would rather spend money marketing a product that is you know well optimized available on more than one platform you know has good metrics right i'd rather spend money marketing that than spend money kind of the traditional way of in your first few weeks you have no idea if the game is actually good you know he's going to do well um and so we we learned a ton um from the soft launch two and a half years ago a lot of that especially we learned about new user experience right like that was the number one glaring issue we had because i mean the game it's it's significantly more polished it's got more features it's got more maps uh but it's still the same core gameplay um you know two and a half years ago the game was still very very fun but what we learned is there's so much more to making a successful game especially in free-to-play than having a fun game um and all of those different learnings about new user experience right

retention monetization like there's no way we could have learned that especially as a new studio right as you pointed out like this is our first game we couldn't have learned that if we didn't do this first launch um so you know to a lot of people it looks like this overnight success of launching a beta and just blowing up out of nowhere to us it's like well we've been working on this for years we've been learning for years and the big belief for the last two and a half years was as soon as we get over the hump we should start to see fast growth um and what i mean by that you know especially being a multiplayer game right we had uh you know our number one two and three problem all stemmed from the same issue which was not enough players um you know if you have a pvp game and you don't have enough players it you could have the best game on the planet but if people have to wait 10 minutes to get a game and it's a lopsided match where lebron james is going against a jb high school kid you know it doesn't matter how good your game is it's never going to

going to work and not to mention high ping for pretty much anybody who wasn't on us in us right um so all of those things all kind of led to us thinking like okay as soon as we roll out this beta if we can get to you know our magic number internally was like if we can get to 2 000 concurrent players we should be able to grow quickly and on day one of the beta you know and again we did no marketing we just had enough of that just a little bit of hype we had a a little bit of press right ign covered us we just had a small amount we just had enough to get over the hump basically on day one and with cross play and xbox and playstation and pc that was enough for us to on day one hit 4 000 concurrent and then it was just kind of off to the races because this game that has been kind of secretly really really getting good but just didn't have the player base to grow all of a sudden it's like bam like all of those problems are solved and

that doesn't mean that the game is perfect but it means that instantly the product not only is it better because it's just got more stuff and more polish but it actually is working like a well-oiled machine um so that was a big part of it and then i think it was just kind of you know we do we really do fill a void um you know i can't tell you the number of times we've heard how arena shooters are dead and they'll never make a comeback you know my point of view has always been well you know it's not that the world has stopped liking arena shooters right you go look at twitter there's so much love for halo an unreal tournament and quake like those are great games the reason that they haven't taken off is number one none of them have you know innovated in any meaningful way in the last 10 20 years right quake champions i think is a perfect example of a game where it's like they it's it's the same formula for 20 years ago from 20 years ago with

some slight tweaks that nobody really wanted um and uh but more importantly than that uh i think is accessibility um all of these arena shooters are you know extremely high skill ceiling um which we have but it's it's too high of a barrier to entry it's it's there's no way a 12 year old fortnight kid is gonna go pick up quake and and be able to kill anything right and in our game you know our philosophy is easy to learn difficult to master you know anybody can pick it up you can be the most casual player on on earth shoot stuff have a good time but we still have that ridiculously high skill ceiling with the portals that is so so so addicting take me back to the uh the point where you first went into this what we call a closed beta or a soft launch where you first tested i think it was like a 600 000 installs that you got initially and you saw like two months ago or two years ago no two years ago the one two years ago so yeah so you got you got you know was it six hundred thousand i think it was

something like accordingly 600 000 yeah yeah now i've done my research a little bit so so um you you remember better than i do so so you come in that's that's a hefty amount of installs that's that's plenty of data to play around with plenty of players to play around with um i'm curious like how did you take those you know hits and kind of went back and started to polish like what were you seeing what was the team and and tell me about the process of polishing the early gameplay and really focusing on that versus versus other elements yeah i mean there were two um i mean i think the the first thing we were able to do is kind of take a step back and instead of just panicking and being like why are players leaving it was like yeah i mean instead of getting frustrated it was more like okay well why are they right like let's actually ask the question and try to answer it um and uh we're a very data driven company and i think that's you know what we

pretty quickly realized both from the data but also just anecdotally we'd see this you know we watch a lot of twitch streamers right we'd see this all the time where people would come in you know try a new game right and when we first launched we had no tutorial we had horrible onboarding and most importantly we had this terrible matchmaking where essentially i mean what we saw was 59 of new users would get obliterated in their first match um and you know no surprise there but if you get destroyed in a free-to-play game in your first match you're not going to play a second match you know maybe you do maybe but like probably not we saw half of those users they got obliterated right so 59 half of them wouldn't play a second game so that's 30 of our players would play 10 minutes and quit um and you know even more than that would maybe maybe they make it through the second and third game um but if you're getting destroyed you're just you're not going to stick around it's a very different experience

being a free-to-play game versus you know if you think of like the process of buying you know i think of the games i grew up playing like halo 2 right that process was you know my i asked my mom hey i want to i want this game for my birthday she drives to gamestop she buys it she then a week later gives me this box that i have to open i'm now stuck with that because you know it's one of maybe three games i got for my birthday or maybe one game um it's something that i've gone in with the expectation that i'm going to enjoy it because that's what i asked for i can't resell it uh you know i'm committed right um so i'm gonna give that game a fair chance with free to play it's very different if you're not having fun in the first few minutes like you're done um you know and most of your users are not going in with the expectation to enjoy it they're going in with the expectation of you know potentially oh it's a free-to-play game it's probably not very good um or maybe it is but but even them

you know maybe they're going in with the expectation of like oh i saw an ad or i saw somebody else playing it it looks like it could be good um but they're not going in with the expectation especially as like a no-name ip that no one's heard of to enjoy it um and so you really need to make sure that that first game is really fun so for us you know the first learning lesson was we really have to be disciplined with our matchmaking like we can't just kind of take these new users for granted like if they get poorly balanced games like that's horrible um so we you know we implemented an elo based system and that was a huge step function improvement for us um we added a tutorial that was also very important um and then you know the next thing that was huge for us was bots um yeah basically it's just it's the training wheels you need um you know if you're if it's a pvp game you know with i mean after we added the

matchmaking right way better like retention went way up um significantly better onboarding but even then we're still seeing 50 percent of our users would lose their first game and they weren't getting obliterated quite so badly but it was still a lot of those users they would lose and even if they didn't get destroyed they didn't have fun still a lot of players were quitting um and so we introduced bots so that we can guarantee okay we want all all new users should win their first three games they should be placed on really well performing maps um with modes that are simple where they can learn it instead of getting something you know just getting thrown into the fire of course so that was huge you know those two and then since then it's just been dozens if not hundreds of tiny little one percent improvements here and there um so yeah so i mean a big focus of ours uh over the last couple years has just been constantly improving that um improving retention one percent here one

percent there and and you know you add it up and then you have that explosion that just just enough to get over that hump and it took off like a rocket ship okay so three things matchmaking tutorial and bots were the big ones how big was the team at that point when when you first entered and how long did you stay in that sort of um how do you call that face closed beta or uh we called it our mvp instead of your mvp yeah how long were you in the mvp phase before you kind of pulled it out the store uh to work on these these big features well we never took it away oh okay so it was always there yeah so the mvp was out may of 2019 and then it's just been two and a half years of constantly improving and iterating um and then most recently you know in early july we launched our beta uh it's a little confusing right we've gone from like the launched the soft launch mvp to now we're back in beta

um and we haven't actually launched yet yeah i mean it's just a branding thing right like for us i mean i think the reason we're still in beta is because um part of it was just all the servers you know we just having to scale up this quickly like we thought we had way more time but even from like a feature point of view like our um our ambitions have just gone through the roof um you know with the most recent funding it's just like the number of things everything is on the table right like everything before we're being you know a 30-person team with a tiny budget you always have to cut corners and that doesn't mean you can't make an amazing game but it just means that like there's going to have to be sacrifices made for us now it's like all of the things that we've wanted to do that it was like well we you know that's not a need to have or that's too ambitious we can't dedicate you know the entire team or else we won't get anything done other than this thing like that's all on the table and so the things that we want to

do for this when we do actually launch and call it 1.0 like we want to have a finished polished quadruple a product um and that's something that we feel like is now totally within reach got it any were 30 people when you first entered the mvp right we were probably 20 25 and now you're you're double or we're maybe 35 i actually don't even i i've been so busy with just a million things i've kind of just empowered my team i mean hiring is part of it like we're we're hoping to be a 100 person team by the end of the year by the end of this year yeah we're hoping to it's ambitious but there's there's september now just just so sort of you know well yeah aim high and then if you don't quite make it we're still in good shape 65 people by the end of september by the end of this year yeah well we'd like to i mean we'll we'll see maybe early next year but i think um you know for us um

it's about hiring the right people in leadership positions and then empowering them to go hire their teams um there's so much stuff flowing through me right now just that's the nature of a startup that's the nature of of a small team um so i'm out you know i'm recruiting the best of the best and if i can get the top marketing person in the industry the top user acquisition person the top you know revenue person there's just so many different you know we want a top executive producer right like there's just so many different roles that we need to fill right now and we have the budget to do so that um you know if i can get those top positions fast and then tell them look go hire whoever you want right build your team hire 10 people for marketing if you want to you know as long as it doesn't get in the way of productivity but we we need to ramp up fast and right now we're focused more on the long term than the short term yeah that's going to be challenging hiring so many people so quickly yeah

well we've so we've gotten up to like 35 to 35 probably now i've lost track but you know our art team is very it is a well-oiled machine um danny our art director has done an amazing job recruiting and the thing about recruiting is you get a few key hires and then you know talent attracts talent right so you get somebody we got somebody who previously worked on destiny and halo and now he's got a bunch of friends who are saying oh i want to go work with you again on this thing like um and i think you know the fact that split gate is now a recognizable ip you know that's helping with recruiting i think as soon as we announce this funding like that's going to help with recruiting a lot um and the funding gets announced when probably tuesday okay so so we can talk openly because this podcast will air just after the funding yeah yeah yeah so i assume light speed is leading the other round lightspeed is the lead and

then we've got insight and anthos as well um and participation from i think all of our or most of our previous investors so we've got galaxy v games um lake star human capital and well that's uh that's the uh that's everybody yeah but the only person who didn't um reinvest is one-up ventures um they typically don't they don't do their pro rata their their you know their whole i mean they typically don't do that so i don't know if you should air that i don't know that might be confidential we'll definitely cut that piece out so don't worry about it we're not going to publicly shame one of your investors for yeah so um all right i'll take a little pause so i can all right and how big was the uh the round so this is a hundred million dollar round holy congratulations yeah you can hire anybody

uh yeah and i mean the other thing is you know we've got 100 million we haven't like even i mean we haven't spent hardly any money um i mean our burn rate is nothing um you know our we raised six and a half million three months ago we raised 11 or 12 million a month ago um so we've got like 20 in the bank on top of this 100 and that's not to mention like we are making significantly more than we're spending right now um just every day off of skins and everything so we can go higher very aggressively and go get anybody we want beautiful um okay so team is growing you need ev you need you know senior leadership to to really run live services on this game um what else but how did you how did you kind of get there like when you started 1047 games you weren't a group of you know x bungee

x call of duty yeah there has to be like ton of doubters you know i i kind of know where you're coming from with this so everybody probably told you that that making a shooter is impossible right yeah yeah i mean i think i don't know i think that's bogus i think that you know when we started like we we definitely took a silicon valley startup approach right like that's what we're familiar with just being from silicon valley you know my co-founder and i started this out of stanford um so like that was the whole thought process was like we're gonna treat this like any tech startup and it happens to be a video game because that's what we're passionate about and we've got this cool idea but really at the end of the day it's just a business right it's just purely comes down to if i can you know if i spend a dollar on advertising am i making a dollar fifty back um that's really what it boils down to i mean that's an oversimplification but

like that was our point of view from the get-go as opposed to kind of the typical hit driven model of like you know we're gonna pour all of our marketing into the first couple weeks we're gonna hope it catches fire and if it does great like we knew okay there's no way we can do that model as two stanford kids right like that's just not gonna happen um and i don't think that model makes sense and and you know and now we're starting to see that actually like there's more games like fortnite apex call of duty you know everything is going in this direction um but you know four years ago thought your yeah almost five years ago when we got started you know there was no there was no fortnight right there was just everything was still the old school hidden german um and our thought process was okay we're gonna we're gonna change the way we do this um so i think you know for us it was just take it one day at a time right like it was very easy to get overwhelmed um but

you know nick is brilliant and i like to think i'm pretty good too and i feel like you took this free to play model i mean you took this free to play model and you're using it on consoles and pcs and and um console and pc steam is the same thing how come you didn't go mobile well we'd we'd like to eventually yeah i mean i think it's just a natural like i mean you know we started with the mvp on pc only because that's the easiest and then it was like okay we've we feel comfortable enough to go launch our beta um you know xbox and playstation are the natural next evolution but ultimately the goal here is you know we want to be a multi multi-game studio with multiple hits across multiple genres and multiple platforms right like split gate is the beginning and i mean there's so much more to do with split gates not only you know we want to come to everything right we want to come to

mobile switch google stadia epic games app you know mac right like i my vision is coming to everything yeah and but there's also just so much to do not only coming to everything but adding to the game and then adding new games and you know more games within the split gate universe but also games outside of the split gate universe that have nothing to do with split gate and don't even have guns right like there's there's so much we want to do with this like our vision here is not just let's take this little this really cool and awesome game and like just keep doing it it's it's yes we're to do that but there are a thousand things we want to do with this game and with this ip and not just that we want to build the next you know the next big gaming company what what does 1047 games stand for i mean like what yeah where does this come from so that was the uh that was the address of the dorm that my co-founder met yeah

all right i got it it's not the amount of games you want to do yeah no we don't want to do that many games no bro um yeah so 10 47 so the dorm um so it was my senior year and nick's junior year um there it used to be a frat house actually and then they they actually kicked the frat off campus and they like renovated it and turned it into like a really nice dorm and it didn't have a name it was just 1047 just named after the address because it was like well it used to be this rat and now it's just 10 47. and uh we got selected i mean you know you you draw for your dorm that was one of the like sought after ones that we ended up getting just kind of luck of the draw um and that's where nick and i met um so we we aren't good at coming up with names

well you know 1047 games kind of works you know there's three four three there's you know what what difference does it make yeah yeah bungie what does that mean like you know i get it no i was just kind of asking because you were saying like you want to do so many games it's on different platforms i'm like this is the uh the the uh the name has a reference to this aspiration no no maybe not maybe we'll do like i don't know maybe 47. um so tell me about a couple of things i mean of course you raised a lot of money and that's you know coming in from are you currently based out of san francisco or or somewhere no so i'm i'm actually currently i'm based out of south lake tahoe um we're a remote company uh i am not in tahoe right now like i you know the whole tahoe is on fire right now unfortunately really yeah so my place is okay i'm on the nevada side but yeah like my whole like

the whole town has had to evacuate basically so i was my parents are in the bay area so i was staying with them uh i'm actually now in seattle um but yeah got it but i'll be back you know hopefully that gets figured out in the next few weeks you're fully remote you've always been fully remote yep wow interesting interesting so the code had no effect on you guys like you didn't have to learn anything new you're like oh it did so that's it didn't have an effect on like our our structure of just how we went about things what it did do is uh we actually had a funding deal that kind of that ended up not happening because of covid um so that put us in a really tough bind um we also i mean we we had to make layoffs um because of this we had to delay things because of this um so it definitely affected us um but in terms of just like the day-to-day how

we function like we didn't have to re-learn or figure out things so so we okay so we delayed the funding because in the beginning of of the whole covet people were super unsure what's going to happen next election was happening people were like is there going to be a civil war in the us we don't know and everything was up in the air and then games industry just skyrocketed yeah okay got it and then you were on the rocket so what's the uh can you talk about kind of like the other you know is there a pressure raising so much money or do you feel it more like liberating i don't i i feel very weird it's like how i'll say like there's such a mixture of emotions like that i don't think like it's just a constant combination of like overwhelmingness but also excitement and extreme stress but also like extreme like pride and just

it's just i'm all over the place right now and i'm just honestly i'm just trying to like take it one day at a time like i can't afford to worry about 50 different like just i just try not to let it affect me and it's just like okay the only thing i can do is work as hard as i can and you know do the best i can and if i do that i have faith that i will end up succeeding um and you know that split gate and 1047 games will get to an extremely ridiculous level of success um and we're not there yet i mean we're in a great spot yeah it definitely like in terms of our mentality like there's so much more we can do um so that's that is kind of the the change in mentality i think also just in terms of like um i don't know i mean it just like i said earlier it's like everything that was kind of off the table is now on the table you know the the kind of people we want to hire like we're going after them um

but it's definitely a a weird feeling to be in this spot where you're just all over the place in extreme highs and extreme lows and just like i don't know not extreme lows it's just like you know extreme pressure uh but also like feeling great so i really i'm just trying to take it one day at a time i can't really describe it yeah i mean you're describing being an entrepreneur i understand everything in the same day yeah exactly and it's being pulled and you know like all right what are we doing on the product you know what are we doing on hiring like what are we doing on marketing what are we doing on fundraising you know we've got publishers reaching out or should we talk to them you know should we do a deal with them or should we you know are we getting distracted right like should we just focus on product or should we just focus on hiring and the answer is like yes you have to do everything like so is it um i mean you haven't worked

on site ever right like you haven't have do you have experience of working in a game studio that is you know everybody's in the same place or uh no i don't i mean i so i worked at apple for a couple summers uh as an intern um i was on their games technologies team um so not really working on game but working on like you know the tech behind gaming you know sprite kit and scene kit i don't know those are still a thing or not but um so that was great i mean that was and honestly like a lot of what i've learned just in terms of like how to be a leader came from that because i i really did just have the most spectacular awesome team there um like my manager and my co-workers like we were it was an awesome unit um so i definitely think like being part of that i learned a lot about just how to create a fun culture um i mean i think apple's kind of strange right because like you have all of these isolated different teams that don't even interact

um but like the team i was on in some ways it felt like a startup i mean it didn't exactly because you're part of this giant machine but at the same time it's like i'm on a team of 10 or 12 people and we're all a unit and we've got our manager and like everything above the manager i was never really exposed to right so as far as i was concerned it was like being part of a 12 person startup with you know the manager being the ceo yeah and the brand being apple yeah yeah that little thing um what i'm trying to ask is like it's like um because this is something that we've gone through in our company and and we like everybody who works at our company has worked at a studio before and then when kovit was i mean we were coming to the studio during the kobe time and then with you know the variant this and variant that and we kind of had to you know hunker down for a while and now we're back to the studio

it feels so much better to be on site so i'm kind of curious like how did you build that culture with everybody being remote like are you guys all in the us all in the same time zone like how remote are you yeah uh the core team um i guess most of the core team except for one person are are in the us um we i mean it's tricky um i think like the important thing is like doing video calls regularly to try to maintain that just kind of schedule and like personal relations and playing the game together and just engaging outside of just like this is your assignment type of thing that's what you have to work on right i think also like for the core team like we at least prior to cobid we would do a lot of off sites um so the i mean tahoe is obviously a great place to to visit and whether it's yeah great place to live but but even if

you know it's a velcro tourist destination right like yeah i know we've done we've done that a few times where i just have like the entire core team come over and spend a week there and it's just a blast every time um and i think everybody likes each other which is great um and i hope that we're able to maintain that forever um that's kind of the tricky thing now is like we have to scale up so quickly yeah we don't want to hire the wrong people so so that's the thing like how are you scaling up and you know even if you would sk if even when you scale up and everybody is on site that's usually the the trickiest part for organization growth because that's when the culture starts shifting especially in your situation where you're talking about bringing super veterans in who have honestly they will shape the culture because they are coming from certain place they will tell you how things are done you'd say all right i believe in you you do you

and i trust you and then that person shifts the culture ten percent to some direction then the another leader then and now you're all remote so you can't really get the yeah once it changes it doesn't change back exactly i mean i i don't have the answer right like i just do the best you can right like i uh i'm vetting people as much as i can um i think you know the only thing i'm looking at is like i have to hire the right leaders um instead of hiring kind of the troops um you know i i don't have to go hire somebody who's a low-level marketing person right so my my view is like i really have to get that top marketing position that guy has to just i mean it's a gut thing at the end of the day right like we want somebody who's experienced and yeah but that person will come in from a big company they will come in from activision they will come in from bungie they will come in from

microsoft you name it like some of the other top companies because they work and they will bring their own culture so maybe i'm kind of asking like are you thinking about perhaps you know setting up a studio somewhere close by tahoe yeah yeah i think um i don't think we're ever going to tell someone like ethan our director of engineering you know he lives in michigan i'm never going to tell ethan hey sorry you've been working for years doing a great job like pack up and move across the country i'm not going to have that conversation but i do think we'd like to get a couple of offices right like i personally i don't know when we're going to do this we're too busy right now i think getting an office in tahoe and an office in the bay area maybe would be great and then just give people flexibility um you know to me like the the best solution is you set these offices up like a we work almost right where it's like come in when you

feel like it and i think especially with tahoe like we're going to have a lot of people in the bay area probably so maybe they're working there most of the time but tahoe is an awesome place to visit so you know maybe we structure something where people can come up and we'll cover their costs to stay for the week i don't know i mean you know these are conversations we're having now um about but like we're not we're not ready to actually do anything about it um we're just there's we're being pulled in 50 directions right i understand i understand but those are those are like some of the other questions that that i definitely have and and i've i don't know many full remote companies to be honest i know i know a few but they they didn't start fully remote and they did scale up while being fully remote and has seemingly worked for them like one of them being super evil mega corp it's also from from bay area so you know they've done in you know they they shifted their culture and everything around it to to function that way but they didn't start

that way and and kind of like remembering even visiting them you know when they were back in san mateo and like uh you know on the upstairs of phil's coffee fully remote now i didn't even know that yeah they are they are they are so so kind of visiting them and kind of you know seeing you know that startupy vibe when everybody's working in that dodgy office and really like working on their first game and kind of gelling in that that's seems very powerful and when they grew they opened up their own bigger studio where they had the esports corner and all that kind of stuff and people would come in and it would you know there's a there's a different culture when you have that uh that location and then kind of thinking even us like when we have two locations we have two different cultures with two locations even though we're one company like when i would go to berlin it's very different than it is in in here in helsinki so so that that's why i'm kind of asking uh how he thought about it and definitely we'll be curious to hear about that in a year how it's gone i was gonna say i'd be curious to get your thoughts on it i

mean yeah i well if you ask me i would i would go for for physical locations like when you said a couple of different locations yeah i think i i don't i'm i'm agreeing with you that it doesn't make any sense to put in one hq at certain point and say hey everybody has to be in this city like that's you know that's a little bit that's 2018 right like like open up many options but i feel like it's truly invaluable for people to kind of gel a little bit especially when you're working on games like shooters where you have people coming in and playing together and really doing that you know 0.1 improvements and sitting together and yelling and talking and like when you have the designer together with the engineer uh together with the executive producer together with the technical director and they can have that conversation they can go out for a beer next morning come come come back and do something amazing so i think those are quite valuable so i would i would suggest multiple locations and look you have over 100 million dollars

in in the bank you are profitable so it definitely makes sense to to uh to perhaps like start with what you said like wework type of opportunities that where you don't have to build a full new studio with your own decorations and like that but but just offer offer opportunities for people in different clusters to be together yeah no the truth the one tricky thing about uh like gaming is you really need a desktop right so like it kind of makes it difficult to go back and forth i mean obviously you can use perforce or github yeah um yeah yeah yeah that's true especially with the other programs we've been pretty lucky with uh with you know the laptops these days we do use the other the heavy razors and we also have the uh the what do you call them like you uh the docks yeah so it makes your computer even even stronger but of course programmers are always at the office they have their towers there

so you can't really do anything an artist the same thing with the wacko boards like they can't move around so so that's that that's that's yeah that's that's true uh i wanted to ask you about your company sort of values and missions have you guys talked about those and and um is that a thing or are you just super focused on the product i yeah i mean we're super focused on the product um i mean i think a big part of the driving factor here is like we have i mean our mission is to bring back the glory days of arena shooters right like that's how i look at this um but i don't think that's that's not neces that's the mission right now that's not the mission of it's a product vision yeah yeah i mean i think for us it's more just like we want to build a massive company we want to do it the right way with a great culture i mean you read about some of these other companies i won't name names but obviously there's been issues at some of the other big gaming companies like we we really don't

want to do that obvi i mean obviously i don't think they wanted to do that yeah yeah i mean it's just something we're mindful of like we need to grow quickly we're gonna make some wrong hires and it's just like how can we do the best we can um to scale this thing up quickly and make awesome games do you think it makes sense to now that you've reached the point where you don't have to you know i mean you still have to think about the product every day but you also reach the point where you're now scaling up so do you think it makes sense to kind of maybe update the mission a little bit because what you just told me in the beginning is different than than the company mission like arena shooter bringing back the warrior day seems to be the mission for the split gate but as you said the company wants to be around different genres multiple different games and just success overall uh but yeah yeah but yeah i mean we should yeah they're gonna because as you start bringing people in they're like so hey

captain what's up where are we heading you're gonna have to put it a little bit further away and the second thing like but but i know where you're coming from because i was i had the same perception as well kind of earlier that you know let's just focus on making this game and we'll figure it out later because if the game sucks nobody gonna care about our values or about our mission right right like it's a it's a little bit of a chicken and egg but at the same time now that you have the uh that point of like okay the game has legs and now i need to hire a lot more people i would definitely push towards truly thinking about the values because the values will help you to guide the people's work towards the mission that you've set so like this is where we want to be as a company and this is how we work to get there and then it's really clear so when you make right hires or wrong hires you can easily go back to your to your values and be like hey when this is the value that we have this is what it means

this is what it doesn't mean and you're not playing according to the value so you know it's pretty clear yeah no i agree i mean it's it's just it's something we need to figure out more i think we all have a rough idea of what it is but i think like actually like getting specific on it i know it's it's but it's hard and especially because it takes uh i i know i know exactly how you feel because you're you're just thinking about the product and the success of the product and and uh but anyways like that would be that that's probably going to be interesting so yeah i mean it's tricky like i mean i so much there's so much pressure to focus on the product right now and you know oh we got to be fortnight tomorrow right but like at the same time it's like we don't have to before no right we've got time we need to build a team yes and a culture and we need to position ourselves such that like when we do launch 1.0 we're ready to you know hit the ground running and we're ready to to take this you know well beyond where we're at today

whatever that may be yeah yeah and then that's why i i know that the other value workshops and stuff like that i mean however you want to do it it will take its time and you will arrive at something that is like bland in the beginning you know we want to be you'll do the everything like players first inclusive um what else is there like holy all these kind of things and you'd be like okay now we sound like every company and they'd be like all right let's let's really think about what we want to do maybe you want to go with your with your co-founder back to your dorm and kind of think about like what was what we were really dreaming about and then and then uh then kind of kind of figure out from there because it takes its time it takes time but once you have them it's really easy to kind of relay back to your to your values and have them as a guiding principle of how we work so i really suggest uh doing that and it brings you tremendous amount of clarity as well yeah absolutely um

all right so i'm not supposed to stuck here anyway let's talk about the uh the the next phase for like like what's next for 10 47 like what are some of the the key opportunities you're after and what do you think are the biggest challenges yeah uh and sorry just to start like i do have to get going in four minutes um i think you know next phase it's there's really two things on my mind uh it's i mean honestly hiring like that's that's the most important thing right now um i mean split gate and hiring like they're they're pretty equally important um but i think for me i i am more focused on the long term than the short term like i have faith that's you know if we can build the team and get all the pieces lined up like a split gate can be the biggest game of 2022. like that's how i'm looking at it is i it doesn't need to be the biggest game of 2021 like

it's great we're in a great spot how can i position ourselves such that like when we do launch into one you know we're ready to be the biggest game so before you leave just what are the some of the key positions you're looking for so the people listening to this podcast can actually genuinely everything like you know we need more engineers we need more artists we need a head of marketing we need you know a vp of user acquisition we need a chief revenue officer we need a chief product officer chief operating officer right like all of these different executive producers right i think our team is really really good at getting from zero to one and creating an awesome fun experience but i think the kind of like live ops you know fortnight does it really well right where there's just always something new you know that is a position we need somebody who's got that expertise to just constantly be running the show right

and all the see all the c level positions and head of head of people do you have that one oh you did that too yeah we need that that would be probably one of the first because then that that person can help you with the uh with a higher literally like where we're at right now is we want to hire great people and there is no shortage of openings like i will hire like any superstar out there like i'll hire them okay i think we can end the podcast on that any superstar you hire them so to everybody listening you know you know if you have the experience and and people know who are listening to this if they have it or not connect with the end and what's the best way to connect with you i guess on linkedin probably all right i'll put in the the description notes below and if you're if you're looking for the c-suite position dm me and i'll i'll uh i'll send them to you but you have to be what 20 years in right

no no no i don't know who knows i want talented people like yeah talented people with plenty of experience all right yeah on that note ian thank you so much for making time and honestly best of luck um thank you it's gonna be very interesting to see you guys grow and and um amazing journey so far and it's only the beginning appreciate it really really appreciate you having me thank you oh it's here yeah so i'll