Kun
Gao

The anime section at Blockbuster Video in 2004 was three shelves wide. That was the market. Then Kun Gao and a few UC Berkeley classmates decided they were tired of scrambling for unreliable streams and built something legal instead. Within 13 years, Crunchyroll had over 13 million subscribers, 200,000 licensed videos, and a price tag Sony and AT&T were willing to argue over. The final number: $1.175 billion.

Gao stepped away from Crunchyroll's CEO role in 2018, after more than a decade of turning a college side project into the West's definitive anime streaming destination. The company he left behind was the infrastructure layer for an entire genre's global expansion. What he took with him was the blueprint: identify a community underserved by incumbents, build the plumbing before the market is obvious, then ride the wave.

The next application of that blueprint was GGWP in 2020 - an AI-powered platform tackling toxic behavior in online games. Then came Forge in 2023, and this one might be the most ambitious yet. Gao looked at the indie game landscape and saw the same structural problem he'd seen in anime: a massive, passionate community, a sea of talented creators, and no reliable infrastructure connecting the two. Game developers were at the mercy of Steam's algorithms, Discord's engagement rules, and social platforms that owned the relationship with players.

Forge changes the equation. It gives any game developer - from a two-person indie studio to a mid-size publisher - the tools to build loyalty programs, run quests and challenges, analyze player behavior, and own the direct line to their community. No code required. No gatekeepers. The platform hit 1 million registered users within its first year and generated 25 million player engagements across more than 60 partner games.

Gao didn't assemble an average founding team. His two co-founders at Forge read like a casting choice from a gaming industry origin story: Dennis "Thresh" Fong is the first professional esports player in history, a man who in 1997 beat John Carmack's high score at Quake and walked away with the DOOM creator's Ferrari as the prize. George Ng co-founded Cyence, a cyber risk modeling company acquired by Guidewire in 2017 for a reported $275 million.

The investor list is similarly deliberate. Makers Fund and BITKRAFT led the $11 million seed round in October 2023. Riot Games and Sony Innovation Fund followed as strategic backers. Among the angels: Steve Chen (YouTube co-founder), Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin (Twitch founders), Dan Dinh (TSM founder), and Marc Merrill (Riot Games founder). At Crunchyroll, Gao had assembled a similar constellation of believers. He apparently knows how to pick a room.

In March 2025, Forge launched Forge Direct - a gamified hub that lets developers build fully customizable community portals outside the walled gardens. It's a direct shot at platform dependency and rising customer acquisition costs. Gao's framing: "developers need a direct connection to their players." The product is the argument.

Over two decades of founding companies, Gao has distilled a framework he calls "7 Hidden Ways for Startups to Succeed." It's more architecture than advice. Consumer products need built-in virality - share buttons, invite mechanisms, shareable outputs. Founders should solve their own problems first: Crunchyroll came from his own frustration at not being able to find anime reliably in the US. Conversion funnels deserve obsessive optimization - button placement, CTA copy, payment flows tested and tested again.

The most interesting item on his list: ride societal and technological waves. YouTube, Twitch, and Crunchyroll all launched in the same 2004-2006 window when online video became viable. Gao was there. He's made the same bet with Forge - that the combination of rising marketing costs, platform oversaturation, and a massive indie game boom creates exactly the kind of wave he knows how to surf.

He's also candid about financing creativity. Before Crunchyroll had venture capital, the team ran on user donations, personal credit cards, and creative partnership structures. "It's better to just try something, throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks," he's said. That bias toward action - built over 20 years and three companies - is the constant in a career spent building platforms that didn't exist yet.

Gao's aspiration with Forge is clear: become the definitive loyalty and marketing infrastructure layer for game developers of any size. The Forge Direct launch signals the next chapter - not just tools within existing platforms, but owned community portals that sit outside them. It's Crunchyroll's core insight applied to games: own the direct relationship, control the experience, and let the community become the distribution.

He's speaking at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore in October 2025 - a sign that his platform ambitions extend beyond US indie studios. The same cultural instincts he's cited as an advantage in building Crunchyroll's Asian market relationships are presumably in play at Forge, where global gaming communities are a central part of the addressable market.

With 24 employees, $11 million in seed funding, and a growth trajectory that hit a million users in year one, Forge is still early. But Crunchyroll was also early once - three shelves at Blockbuster wide. Gao has a habit of making those markets much, much larger.