When Michael Dawson joined Pocket Gems as Chief Business Officer in 2011, the studio was already two years old and cranking out casual mobile games from a San Francisco office. The app stores were young. Nobody had a playbook. And the question of what made a mobile game a game - versus a toy, a distraction, a time-filler - was completely open.
Dawson arrived with a resume that reads sideways. He studied ethics, politics, and economics at Yale. Then took two degrees at Stanford - an MS in Environment and Resources and an MBA. He consulted at Katzenbach Partners, founded and ran a startup called MyQuire, then went to OPOWER, the energy analytics company that used behavioral science to get people to use less electricity. None of that screams "mobile gaming executive." And yet it's exactly the kind of background that makes sense for someone who ended up running the business of an interactive storytelling platform.
Because what Pocket Gems eventually built with Episode is not, at its core, a video game. It's a publishing platform. A network. A place where 12 million story creators upload their work, and where the studio asks not "how do we level-up the player" but "how do we keep someone inside a story." That's a behavioral science problem. A community problem. An editorial problem. It turns out the OPOWER guy was perfectly positioned.
Dawson has also served as Head of Storytelling Studio - meaning he oversees not just the business strategy but the editorial identity of what Episode publishes. That dual role puts him at the exact intersection of content and commerce that defines the platform era of gaming: not just making money from games, but building a world where creators, stories, and players form their own ecosystem.