electronic-arts
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Jason Bunge Is Teaching Old Toys New Tricks
After selling software, houses, video games and virtual worlds, Jason Bunge landed at Hasbro with a precise brief: find the center of gravity in brands people have loved for generations - then give every fan a reason to keep playing.
Chip Lange Has Spent Three Decades Making Games Easier to Enter
From a Sega test bench to EA Sports, Origin and HiDef, Chip Lange has kept returning to one practical question: how do you invite more people into play - and give them a reason to stay?
Derek Andersen
Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a global entrepreneurial community that has reached more than a million people across 120+ countries, and the co-founder and CEO of Bevy, the enterprise community-events software that grew out of it. A former Electronic Arts game producer, he left in 2009 to build his own products, failed repeatedly, and turned a once-a-month meetup in his garage into a worldwide network and a company serving customers like Google, Salesforce, and Snowflake. He now also hosts Divot, a weekly podcast of long-form conversations with founders, creators, athletes, and visionaries.
Steve Arnold
Steve Arnold is the CEO of E-Line Media, the video game developer and publisher behind the BAFTA- and Peabody-winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Beyond Blue, and the upcoming Never Alone 2 and Neighborhoods. He has been making games professionally since 2003, starting at Electronic Arts, where he rose from production intern on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series to Executive Producer working across EA Partners and the Origin store, with credits on Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Alice: Madness Returns. In May 2014 he joined Oculus, becoming Head of Oculus Studios in June 2016 and running the company's first-party and partner content slate through November 2019, a period covering Lone Echo, Robo Recall, The Climb, Chronos and Journey of the Gods, with partnerships spanning Epic, Insomniac, Ubisoft, Marvel and Lucasfilm. He then founded his own studio, Imagination Games, and ToyChest.AI, an early-stage venture using computer vision to let ordinary physical toys unlock content in games without special hardware. At E-Line he now leads a studio whose work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has reached more than 25 million players.
Michael Martinez
Michael Martinez is the CEO and co-founder of FunCraft, a San Francisco-based mobile game studio he launched in 2019 with longtime collaborator Jason McGuirk. A Zynga and Electronic Arts veteran who previously founded Juicebox Games, Martinez built FunCraft around a deliberately unglamorous bet: making casual word and puzzle games that become daily rituals rather than chasing trends. With a fully remote team of roughly 15-21 people, the studio crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue in its first five years on the strength of titles like Wordgrams, Word Yatzy and Merge Kingdoms. Martinez is a vocal skeptic of gaming hype cycles, publicly stepping back from Web3 with the line that blockchain was 'a solution in search of a problem,' and an evangelist for testing everything and embracing the unsexy.
Susan Kuo
Susan Kuo is the Co-Founder and COO of Singular, a marketing intelligence platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California that unifies marketing analytics and attribution for the world's top performance marketers. A veteran of mobile ad tech and gaming, she previously built go-to-market strategy from the ground up as SVP of Sales & Business Development at Onavo (acquired by Facebook in 2013), and held senior roles at InMobi, Booyah, Gaia Online, and Electronic Arts. Since co-founding Singular in 2014 alongside Gadi Eliashiv and Eran Friedman, she has led global partnerships and business development while also championing diversity in tech through THRIVE, a community platform she founded to connect and empower women in growth marketing.
Mitch Lasky
Mitch Lasky is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital and one of the most successful gaming investors in venture capital history. A Harvard-educated IP lawyer turned game studio executive, he rose through Activision and took mobile gaming startup JAMDAT public before selling it to EA for $680M. At Benchmark he backed Riot Games (~$7M early investment, now $20B+), Snap (led Series A at $70M valuation, IPO'd at $24B), Discord, and dozens of other landmark gaming and consumer internet companies. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree, LAFC co-owner, and host of the GameCraft podcast, Lasky's career is a master class in recognizing non-obvious founders before the market does.