highrise
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Anton Bernstein’s long way back to the playground
He went from venture capital and travel deals to building places where strangers become friends. At Pocket Worlds, Anton Bernstein keeps giving the people inside those worlds more say in what happens next.
The Company That Wants Virtual Worlds to Grow Old
Pocket Worlds began with Highrise and now owns three social games. Its wager is that the best virtual world is one people still want to visit years after the novelty fades.
Nate Kontny
Nate Kontny is a Chicago-based serial founder, engineer, and writer who went from chemical engineering at UIUC to co-founding two Y Combinator companies (Inkling W06, Cityposh S11), running Highrise as CEO for Jason Fried, writing prolifically across Medium, HuffPost, and Fast Company, and building a suite of solo products - most recently AlliHat, a Safari extension embedding Claude AI directly in the browser. Currently Staff Engineer at Fivetran (post-Census acquisition), he is known for his radical transparency about failure, his 250-words-a-day writing discipline, and a philosophy that shipping imperfect work beats endless polishing.