mobile-gaming
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Stuart Lewis-Smith Put a TV Studio Inside a Bingo App
After two decades in digital entertainment, Stuart Lewis-Smith made an old game feel live again - then turned the unlikely combination of mobile gaming, television production and human banter into a platform.
Vsevolod Leonov Has Spent a Career Moving Toward the Machine Room
He learned the internet through portals, games and partnerships. Now the former Google executive is testing the economics and infrastructure of open-source AI with his own hands.
Peter Sullivan Put the Lottery in Your Pocket. Then He Took the Long Way Out.
A daily detour for his father’s lottery numbers became a 13-year lesson in product design, patient regulation and knowing when to hand over the ticket.
Junyoung Kim Is Teaching a Game Company to Wake Up Before Its Humans
Bagelcode spent a decade turning player behavior into an operating system. Now its co-founder is applying the same experimental instinct to AI agents, tiny teams, and the unruly craft of making games.
Scott Lahman Kept Betting on the Phone's Next Act
From a prescient Nokia meeting to JAMDAT's $680 million exit and textPlus's pending Truecaller deal, Lahman's career is a study in spotting the next job a phone will do - then doing the patient work to make it ordinary.
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?
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Johnny Monsarrat
Johnny Monsarrat co-invented the MMO genre at Turbine in 1994 - the studio behind Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online before Warner Bros. acquired it for $160M. Now as founder and CEO of Monsarrat, he is building Landing Party, the world's first outdoor AR roleplaying game, with 7 patents, $2.7M raised, and advisors including the former CEOs of PlayStation and Blizzard.
Jake Brooks
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
Phillip Hyun
Phillip Hyun is the CEO of Gamevice, the Simi Valley hardware company (formerly Wikipad) that builds clip-on game controllers for phones and tablets, and the co-founder and vice chairman of the esports organization Gen.G. He has spent a decade running an eight-person hardware shop that has repeatedly taken Nintendo to court over the Switch's detachable controllers, a David-and-Goliath patent fight that reached the Federal Circuit in 2026. A UC Berkeley cognitive science graduate, Hyun has built and sold companies (Enterprise Technology Group to Nexstar Broadcasting), helped launch a top-tier global esports brand, and more recently turned investor in the Italian football club Venezia FC.
Anil Dharni
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Ben Liu
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.
Sandy Thomson
Sandy Thomson is the CEO of World Golf Tour (WGT), the long-running online and mobile golf simulation that, on January 1, 2025, separated from Topgolf to operate as an independent company backed by a games-focused growth investor. A McGill computer science graduate who spent his early career programming at BioWare, Eidos Montreal and EA's Visceral Games, Thomson joined WGT/Topgolf as a lead software engineer in 2016 and rose through engineering leadership to become Studio Head of Topgolf Games before taking the top job at the spun-out WGT.
Joseph Kim
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
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.
Vickie Chen
Vickie Yanjuan Chen is the founder and CEO of Avia (AviaGames), the Silicon Valley company behind Pocket7Games - a real-money skill-based mobile gaming platform with 60M+ downloads, 450M+ monthly tournaments, and over $60M in venture funding. A 20-year gaming industry veteran who previously ran global publishing for Nasdaq-listed Changyou.com, Chen built Avia from a Mountain View garage with co-founder Ping Wang into a 400-person company that has paid out over $700M in cash prizes to players. Recognized by Forbes China as a 2022 Global Chinese Elite Top 100 Industry Leader, she is a vocal advocate for inclusive gaming and female leadership in tech.
Joshua Lu
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Babar Ahmed
Babar Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan's pioneering independent mobile game studio behind 1 billion+ downloads and global chart-toppers like Hexa Sort. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who quit a Silicon Valley circuit engineering career to return to Pakistan and build a gaming company from the ground up, he has transformed a startup funded by his father into a 150-person studio with 2 million daily active users, while also co-founding M-Labs (a game development accelerator) and serving as head of strategy at AppLovin's Lion Studios.
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.