in-app-purchases
(2)
Michael Dawson
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.
ZeroSettle
ZeroSettle is a drop-in SDK that lets mobile app developers skip Apple's 30% cut on in-app purchases by switching users to direct billing - charging just 5% + $0.50 per transaction instead. Built by two former Apple software engineers and backed by Y Combinator (W26), ZeroSettle arrived at the exact moment the Epic v. Apple ruling cracked open a $150B+ market. Setup takes 15 minutes, and developers get instant Stripe payouts, built-in tax compliance across 190+ countries, and smart conversion flows to migrate existing subscribers - all without touching App Store rules.