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.
World Golf Tour (WGT) is a San Francisco-based video game company behind WGT Golf, one of the most realistic free-to-play online golf games. Using patented 3D photorealistic georeferencing built from helicopter-shot, high-definition imagery, WGT recreates real-world courses like Pebble Beach, St Andrews and Bethpage Black to within roughly an inch of vertical accuracy. Launched in open beta in 2008, it grew to tens of millions of players across browser, iOS and Android, ran virtual versions of the U.S. Open with the USGA, was acquired by Topgolf in 2016, and spun back out as an independent studio on January 1, 2025.
LILA Games is a Bengaluru-based mobile game studio founded in 2020 and building Project Black, an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. Backed by a $10M Series A from Rainfall, KRAFTON, Sequoia, BITKRAFT, and Galaxy Interactive, the team is led by former SEGA and FunPlus operators determined to prove India can ship a globally competitive shooter.
Pocket Gems is a San Francisco mobile-games studio behind hits like War Dragons and Episode - Choose Your Story. Founded in 2009 by Daniel Terry and Harlan Crystal above a pizza shop while Terry was still at Stanford, the company builds AAA-quality mobile games and a Hollywood-grade interactive storytelling platform, powered by its proprietary mobile-first Mantis Engine and backed by Sequoia Capital and Tencent.
Ben Liu is the CEO of Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based mobile entertainment company backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital. After joining as COO in 2011 and becoming CEO in 2012, he has led the company's flagship titles — the interactive storytelling platform Episode (with 25 million+ registered creators) and the real-time 3D strategy game War Dragons — while overseeing $155 million in total fundraising, mostly from Tencent. A Stanford double-degree and MBA graduate, Liu brings a rare hybrid background spanning investment banking, Disney strategy, EA mobile product management, and social gaming before betting on the mobile-first future of entertainment.
Joseph Kim is the CEO and co-founder of LILA Games, a venture-backed mobile game studio headquartered in Bengaluru, India, building Project Black - an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. With a career spanning two decades across Gaia Interactive, FunPlus (King of Avalon), Demiurge Studios, SEGA Networks, and NBCUniversal, Kim brings rare publishing-to-studio expertise to one of gaming's most competitive genres. Backed by $12.8M from BITKRAFT Ventures and top gaming angels, he's on a mission to prove India can be the next great hub for world-class game development.
Michael Dawson is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Storytelling Studio at Pocket Gems, the San Francisco mobile gaming studio behind Episode and War Dragons. With a background spanning management consulting, clean-tech startups, and entrepreneurship, Dawson joined Pocket Gems in 2011 and helped scale it into one of the most successful mobile entertainment companies in the world — overseeing products that have been downloaded over 325 million times and platforms where billions of story episodes have been read. He holds degrees from Yale (Ethics, Politics & Economics) and Stanford (MBA, MS in Environment & Resources), and has become one of the sharper strategic voices in mobile interactive storytelling.