pocket-gems
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Eitan Winer
Eitan Winer is the co-founder and CEO of Maverick, a San Francisco startup that uses generative AI to send personalized videos and AI-optimized email at scale for ecommerce brands. Raised in La Paz, Bolivia and trained in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford, he spent eight years building products at mobile gaming company Pocket Gems and ran an alpaca-apparel store on Shopify before teaming up with engineer Debarshi Chaudhuri in 2021. Maverick records a merchant once, then uses lip-sync and face-sync models to generate thousands of customer-specific videos, aiming to make online shopping feel as personal as walking into a store.
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.
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.