gaming
(106)
Indy Khabra and the art of seeing beyond the ball
A Canadian hockey fan took a career in audience data into the gaming business. At Livewire, Indy Khabra is working on a deceptively practical question: how does a brand earn a place where people come to play?
AJ Shewki and the View From Outside the Headset
Before millions of players recorded their virtual lives, AJ “Dr Doom” Shewki wanted people watching at home to understand the game. His years building LIV reveal how much work goes into making a camera feel ordinary.
Pony Ma and the art of starting over
He helped turn a desktop messenger into Tencent. Then he backed the teams that built its mobile future. For Ma Huateng, staying useful has meant giving the next idea room to grow.
Charlie Baillie and the art of joining the game
Before co-founding Ampverse, Charlie Baillie worked in music and advertising. His next audience came with its own rules, local heroes and a well-developed ability to ignore a sales pitch.
Olya Caliujnaia and the business of keeping play alive
She helped build games, then built Sanlo to help their makers finance the next move. Olya Caliujnaia’s career follows the work that happens after a good idea meets a difficult system.
Hannes Wallin’s case for leaving things out
A mouse mat paid for an early advertisement. A snowflake helped inspire a brand. Hannes Wallin built Fractal Design by paying attention to small things, then handed over the CEO role to focus on the company’s future.
Jennifer Stephens Acree and the art of a useful conversation
She learned communications on Capitol Hill and at Yahoo, then built JSA+Partners around candid advice. After the Los Angeles fires, Jennifer Stephens Acree put those relationships to work for businesses trying to begin again.
Herman Narula and the problem of making worlds matter
His family built in bricks and mortar. Herman Narula chose virtual worlds, raised $502 million in one funding round, and discovered that getting people into a world is only the beginning.
Uri Marchand and the art of leaving room for other people
Overwolf began with a gamer’s small annoyance and a founder’s rather large to-do list. Uri Marchand’s next move was to let other people do the building - and help them get paid.
Min-Liang Tan and the business of wanting a better mouse
A Singapore law graduate built Razer around the things he wanted to play with. Two decades later, Min-Liang Tan is testing how far that instinct can travel - from gaming mice to an AI companion on your desk.
Yves Guillemot and the business of starting over
Five brothers turned a Breton family business into Ubisoft. Forty years later, Yves Guillemot is testing whether the instincts that built a games publisher can help him remake it.
David Baszucki and the classroom that got out of hand
Before Roblox, David Baszucki made software for physics lessons. The students had other plans - and their improvisations helped point him toward a world built by its players.
Ferdinand Gutierrez wanted the Knicks. He built a different kind of team.
A New York sports fan took his advertising career to Asia, then helped build Ampverse. His wager: gaming teams need stories, local roots and a business that lasts beyond the next win.
Ege Kaan Duman and the art of letting other people build
A Rhodes Scholar, poet, and Orca co-founder follows a stubborn question from Oxford to Minecraft: how much work should stand between an idea and the people who want to try it?
Ryan DeLuca and the $20,000 address
Before Bodybuilding.com became a business approaching $500 million in annual revenue, it was a costly domain and a garage operation in Idaho. Ryan DeLuca built a place for people to gather, tried retirement, and came back with a virtual world.
YuChiang Cheng and the business of getting people through the door
A burrito conversation helped launch World Golf Tour. Two decades later, YuChiang Cheng is running Hero Bread, still asking how a good product becomes part of somebody’s ordinary day.
Austin Evans Built a Career by Opening the Box
A childhood wish to take apart a thrift-store computer became a channel with millions of viewers. The more interesting build may be the company, crew, and curious world around it.
Kevin Ramsey Learned the Internet Wanted More Than a Hoodie
He started with a Hunger Games world inside Minecraft. Now he helps internet creators turn attention into objects people can hold, wear, read, and play.
Jake Adams Stayed Quiet While Genies Changed Its Face
The Genies co-founder built a career behind the curtain as his company moved from cartoon doubles to digital fashion to AI characters. The product kept changing; the operating wager did not.
Jason Citron Kept Building Games. The Conversation Kept Winning.
Twice, Jason Citron set out to make a game. Twice, the useful thing turned out to be the room where players talked. That recurring mistake became a career, a company, and a new piece of internet furniture.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy Built the Room Before the Party Arrived
Before Discord connected millions of players, its CTO was a teenager wiring together forums, voice chat and friendships for a Final Fantasy XI guild. The scale changed. The problem did not.
Tang Binsen and the Price of Learning to Go Slowly
A programmer won his first fortune with code, made another in games, then discovered that bottled drinks obey a harsher clock. Tang Binsen's second act is a study in ambition, inventory and the difficult art of becoming patient.
Shahar Sorek Has Lived Several Careers. Now He Is Betting on the Players.
The five-time taekwondo champion became an actor, a studio founder and, eventually, Overwolf’s CMO. His latest act is helping players turn the urge to change a game into a profession.
Akash Nigam Bet on Avatars Before AI Learned to Speak
A failed chat app, a rejected exit and a stubborn interest in how people express themselves led Akash Nigam to spend nearly a decade building digital characters. Now Genies is trying to give artificial intelligence a face, a wardrobe and somewhere to play.
Joe Schaeppi Is Teaching Machines to Ask a Better Question: Why?
Before Solsten could model an audience, its founder had to connect psychotherapy, powder days, Fortune 500 UX and one consequential cold email. The result is a career-long argument for looking past the click to the person making it.
Bradley Ross Turned the Twitch Chat Into the Controller
After learning the language of metrics at EA and Zynga, Bradley Ross built Captain.tv around a social idea: a livestream audience should be able to play, not merely watch.
Jennifer Weissman Bets on the Thrill, Not the Jackpot
The CMO of PENN Entertainment has spent a career learning what actually pulls people back to the casino floor - and the app - and it is not what most people assume.
Wilson Spearman
Wilson Spearman is the co-founder and CEO of CreativeMode (YC S24), an AI-powered, no-code platform that lets anyone build Minecraft mods without writing code. An MIT computer science graduate who worked on AI cloud infrastructure at Crusoe and procurement tools at Settle, he now leads a small San Francisco team that has helped players create hundreds of thousands of mods - by the company's account, more Minecraft mods in nine months than in the game's previous seventeen years combined. When he is not shipping software, he is an aspiring ski mountaineer chasing alpine glacier routes.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
Justin Sacks
Justin Sacks is the co-founder and CEO of Nexus, an Austin-based platform that helps live service video games build and run 'Support-a-Creator' programs at scale. After 15 years in gaming as a competitive player, content creator, and business development lead, he now builds the infrastructure that pays creators for driving discovery, engagement, and in-game sales for titles like Sonic Rumble, Bloons TD, and Town of Salem.