Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50]

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

My guest today is Justin Waldron, co-founder and President of Playco. Justin is a pioneer of the social gaming industry after he co-founded Zynga at age 19, and he has continued to build games ever since. In our conversation, we cover how Justin sees the future of gaming as social platforms evolve, how gaming may be the next tool for content creation, and how Playco has approached aligning incentives for game creators and players. As talk of the metaverse becomes more mainstream, it’s fascinating to hear directly from those around it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Justin Waldron.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing, and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience.   See why brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Klaviyo to grow their business. For a free trial, check out klaviyo.com/founders. -----   This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta has built software that makes it easier to get and maintain your SOC 2, HIPAA or ISO 27001 reports at a fraction of the typical cost. Founder’s Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1k off coupon at vanta.com/patrick.    -----   Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:47] - [First question] - His thoughts on the metaverse and why it’s so interesting [00:06:07] - The ways hardware and software will shape the future of digital worlds [00:08:23] - Examples of how these digital experiences might look in the years to come [00:10:45] - His background, history, and his life before founding Playco [00:16:31] - Ways content creates human interactions and its role in user retention [00:18:43] - How successful social media platforms encourage user interaction  [00:20:51] - Games becoming a way to create content and being a creation tool [00:23:06] - This history of user-generated content for pre-existing games [00:27:32] - Defining what instant gaming is and how it’s different from traditional gaming [00:30:24] - The technological problems and hurdles in creating games that load instantly [00:34:00] - Parallels between instant gaming and cloud-powered processing [00:36:43] - What types of games are most desirable for games shared via links [00:38:58] - The feel of this model working in real-time and the project that’s furthest along [00:41:37] - Lessons learned about working with and structuring partnerships with social media and content creation giants [00:45:06] - Ways in which social network platforms are evolving [00:48:04] - Playco’s business model and smart approaches to generating revenue [00:50:28] - The role NFTs might play in instant gaming and making crypto mainstream [00:53:03] - Crypto wallets and building one in house versus using a 3rd party wallet [00:54:17] - What the best case scenario will look like for Playco in a decade from now [01:00:44] - Other companies to go check out that leverage and empower individuals 

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your security so you can focus on growing your business. Foundersfield Guide listeners can redeem a $1,000 off coupon at Vanta.com forward slash Patrick. That's vanta.com forward slash Patrick. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Founders Field Guide. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founders Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunsi

Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy asset management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest today is Justin Waldron, co-founder and president of Playco. Justin is a pioneer of the social gaming industry after he co-founded Zinga at age 19 and he has continued to build games ever since. In our conversation, we cover how Justin sees the future of gaming as a social platform's evolve, how gaming may be the next tool for content creation, and how Playco has approached aligning incentives for game creators and players.

As talk of the Metaverse becomes more mainstream, it's fascinating to hear directly from those around it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Justin Walden. So Justin, you have built some of the most interesting companies in the world past and present and also operating in the gaming space where I'm personally so fascinated because of the way in which it allows people to interact. Now across the globe, across a whole number of different platforms, and it gives you a window into how people are behaving online. That's pretty unique. So I can't wait to go all over the place with you today. I was thinking about the right

place to start. And before we hit record, you mentioned something that maybe is an interesting on-ramp, which is this concept, very popular concept these days of the metaverse, which we think of as some sort of new digital world where we all have some digital representation and can do everything we want with all the people we want. I think you have a slightly different conception of how we might get from where we are today to that sci-fi future. Maybe you can begin by outlining what you think is happening and why it's so interesting. If you think about the way that things started off online, we started representing each other with text. And when we started in the chat rooms that we had over a decade ago, and we moved toward images to represent our avatar, and then we moved towards

social networks where we started being able to add all this context, who are your friends, what are hobbies, what do you like to do. Now we're representing ourselves with video, live video and audio over the internet. And we keep upgrading, bringing our real selves online. While I see that there's this one movement happening on the side of the metaverse, which is creating a world that's so compelling, everybody wants to move to it, pack up their bags, leave the real world and go to the new virtual world. I think that what we've actually been doing is slowly migrating ourselves in pieces into this virtual space without realizing it. And because it's happening gradually, we look at ourselves on Zoom and it feels so natural. But we're actually in these virtual rooms

together and we don't really think about it. And so one of the questions we've been thinking about at Playco is what does it mean to be in these new virtual spaces and what types of things are people going to want to do there? If we're at video now, what is it next year and what is it the year after that? And we think that these spaces will continue to be augmented in ways that improve our ability to interact. So to your earlier point, one of the most interesting things on the internet is every time we create a new way to interact, we get a lot of unexpected effects out of it. And so video and audio, live streaming and communications, I think we're just starting to see how that's opening up industries globally everywhere over the last few years. And I think that

what's next is if we can make it easier to reach out and touch and interact with each other. And so video has this sort of flat nature to it. And as we start to augment it and we start creating ways to play, we can actually do things that we wouldn't be able to do in real life. And so we see this as a canvas, an empty room. And our job is to imagine like what toys would people want in this room. And if electronic arts mission was to see if a computer can make you cry, what can we do now that these people are together in this space? How can we have a game facilitate feelings between people and create new ways of actually connecting. I think there's another way to approach to Metaverse where a few years from now,

we're on a video chat service, and it looks nothing like the video chat service we're on today because it's so augmented from the pieces that we've added to it, the sort of older video-only, audio-only version of it just seems completely foreign to us. It's happened so gradual that we never realized we were moving there all along. One of the things that I think is really interesting about where we might be going Metaverse-wise is hardware versus software. The dominant vision of the metaverse is kind of ready player one, where the guy's wearing oculus and he's in a haptic feedback suit and he's on an Omni Treadmill and we literally try to dump our physical body and brain into this new space. I think you may have a different conception of how this might play out,

where hardware and intense feedback from hardware may not be necessary. Maybe it'll come too. But just say a little bit about how you think about the vision of this software-wise versus hardware-wise. I think that there's a lot to be said for increasing the fidelity of experience with technology. And, you know, I'm excited about virtual reality. I'm very excited about augmented reality and the glasses that we might get where we can look around a world and have all this information at our fingertips. What I'm starting to realize is because we already live in this world where we're spending all of our time in this video and we can already augment this video software world, we already have the ability to create that HUD today. And I think that this is something that just

sort of popped up on us and we didn't realize the moment we're spending more time communicating over video than we are walking around in the world with these augmented reality glasses we're waiting for is the moment that the opportunity to create that kind of experience has arrived without us ever realizing it. I think that's really powerful and I think it doesn't require any behavior or change from us. It's frictionless. We just need to keep using the services we're using and they're going to keep expanding in this direction. These thesis are compatible, right? I think there's room for this super in-depth fantasy-like experience that has all these interesting things you can never do in real life. But there's also room to create this metaverse, which is basically

a much better version of real life online. And that's the one we're very excited about, because it's very much grounded in the social interactions that people really care about. We think we can do it in a way that doesn't require you to make the investment of packing up and moving to Mars, basically. I think like a lot of these virtual worlds kind of become the digital equivalent of getting on the rocket and going to Mars, we're just asking you to let us add more fun to your space. That's a trend that it starts off probably with simple things, but over time could get pretty interesting. What's an idea just to stretch people's imaginations when you say it could get more interesting? What's a simple idea in this conception of a heads-up display or something on existing

technology like what we're doing here with Zoom? And what would be something out there and interesting to use your word. Audio is an interface and video is an interface. It's not just a way of representing what's there. And so we've already seen all the super interesting work that's going on with lenses on Snapchat and on Facebook and other platforms. And we've already seen what we can do with AI when it comes to image editing. And we're starting to see this head into video.

We're seeing that sort of in pre-recorded clips. We're seeing it as a single player experience where we're taking a picture of ourselves with a selfie. that's going to start becoming the experiences we can share together. And then when you start plugging the APIs into that, and when you start actually imagining what it could mean to have a multiplayer version of this type of power to create these experiences that can augment the visual reality around you,

quite a limitless canvas there. It's hard to predict what it might be, but you can imagine we will be able to represent and change the world around you in a way that puts you in different places and puts you together with the people that you care about in that place. The amount of possibilities for a game to go and explore that space is huge. And when it comes to audio, when I think about what's a natural interface for social communications, there's nothing really more natural than your voice.

I'm really excited about understanding that is like another way of making games more accessible. The more we can start understanding the context of what people are saying and how, the more we can start using that to control the software in a way where people don't need to use a keyboard, they don't need to use a mouse, and maybe they don't need to use touch. Not only does it allow for these new gameplay experiences, I also think it allows them to live in more places. So if we create games that can be controlled by audio, well, then that can be a game. Maybe you play with your AirPods on. Maybe it's a game that plays in Zoom. Maybe it's a game you can play while you're listening to music on Spotify. Who knows? But I think there's sort of an interesting

line of thinking here, which is just reimagining how we take what we're already doing and the emergent behavior we're seeing. People are trying to play these games. They're playing poker. They're having poker night. They're playing board games on Zoom. How do you take this emergent behavior and really make it easy to do? And then bring it to the next level. That's what we're thinking about. It's very cool to think about the relative constraint of the mouse and keyboard that we've all lived with for a long time and that there may be different modalities of input that then unlock really cool experiences on the other side. That's fun. As you think about now the history that you've lived, this is probably the appropriate point to tell your story a little bit.

Starting with maybe Zinga, I think you're 18 or 19 or something at the start of your journey. Classic technology college dropout story. Tell your thumbnail version of your history up until the start of Placo. I'm going to spend obviously a ton of time exploring what you're doing today. But give us your background in history so that people understand where you're coming from. So from a young age, I was tinkering on computers. I think there's nothing super original about that part of my story. What I will say was I was lucky, though, because I went to university right around the time that Facebook was opening up their access to the rest of universities that weren't Ivy League.

I was able to access a service probably the first year that it was allowed to be accessed as a freshman in university in my school. And I spent a bunch of time on it. And I had grown up with Myspace and trying to hack into the MySpace pages by building these things. When MySpace didn't have a platform, you could go and you could write some JavaScript that would take. over the page and then create your own re-skinned MySpace page. And I was trying to build social networking apps before there were APIs for social networking apps. So when Facebook released a platform, and I understood the significance of that because I was a user of it, I got really excited. And I built something the first day. So they put out the platform and I wanted to make it easier to play games

with my friends. So interestingly enough, my first app on the platform that I put out immediately when they released it, was an app to find your friends on the Nintendo Wii so you could play games online with them. Nintendo didn't have a service for this, so I just built a simple app to do it on Facebook. And that's when Mark Pinkus reached out to me, who was an investor in Facebook, and had been thinking about building apps on the platform and said, hey, why don't we build some different apps together? And we started off thinking of a few different ideas. But eventually landed on poker because we thought college students love poker. And by combining the sort of Facebook social graph with poker,

we're probably going to be able to make something that's easier to play and more fun with friends. And that was a very, very simple idea, but it worked very well. And we realized after we put it out, and we started seeing friends land in the game with us without having to actually go and do the work of organizing that to happen, which now we kind of take this for granted, but 14 years ago was wild.

people were showing up that I knew and they were landing on the same table as me and it was magic. Immediately became clear that that was something we could go and do to all sorts of games. And so we set off to go and make it happen across all sorts of genres and we discovered new business models along the way and we sort of invested and grew the company to a lot of different games that were exciting to a lot of different people and that were very different from the model of the games that were created up until that time. So it was sort of before there was a word for freemium and all this stuff, we had to figure out a way to grow a game, run it as a service, and how do we monetize it, sort of from first principles. And so that was the story of Zinga. Now, like, the company has a new management team. It's run incredibly well. And I've got nothing to do with the last seven years. And Frank and the team have done an amazing job with it. So I've been really interested in this idea of how do we create better social experiences? It's always been my focus. And when I think about play Now, what we've noticed is that there's a huge games market, 20 times bigger maybe than it was back when Zingo was creating these games on Facebook.

What's interesting is the way that you win in that market is by being incredibly good at performance marketing. And by being incredibly good at performance marketing, you need to understand your customer and build them the best game and beat all the other games that you're competing with for that same customer. It's great because people are getting better games than ever. and there's so much competition for the user, they're getting great product. The problem with it is it doesn't really lend itself to creating games that you play with your friends,

even though we all have mobile devices now and we didn't a decade ago. And even though we're on multiple social services that connect us in all these ways, we're not actually playing games with our friends. We're usually playing them by ourselves. They usually are a game. The company that created it

had to solve this needle in a haystack problem They were wondering, how do I find the person who wants to play this game? And then when they find you, they kind of assume your friends aren't also going to want to play. It's not really designed for that experience. This model has been so successful that it's stolen all the attention from all the great game developers. And so we thought, well, it's obvious that people want to play games with their friends, actually. It's a little bit like Amazon's strategy. I mean, you should just have the lowest prices and best selection.

There's nothing brilliant about that. People want to play games to their friends, and people want to play with the people they care about. That's something that it's even beyond human. It's just like a biological mammalian need. It's actually surprisingly difficult to do, given how successful games are right now. And so we started to study why is that? What are the technology solutions we need to create so that it's frictionless? What are the places these games could live such that they would be able to be played easily between,

friends and family coworkers. And then we realized the reason knowing what had done it is because it was very difficult to do. And so we set out to go put together a team and raise enough money to go after it seriously. When we first talked, you had this really interesting observation about what ultimately would drive, I'm thinking with my business hat on now, great long-term enduring business outcomes for the company behind these sorts of games. And you talked a lot about how on the right time scale, you need to rely on the interaction between users that you're facilitating in order for something to be enduring. People have to stick around and the sort of content, if you will, is not so much the game you're building, but the ways in which it facilitates people interacting.

Can you talk about that insight, why it's so important, maybe why that drives social networks and their success as well? I think this is just a really key insight that in the digital world, ultimately it comes back to people in their interactions, the medium versus the message. There's something interesting there, which is, I think if you look at something like Zinga Poker today, the game is 14 years old, and it's still the largest free poker service online because it's the best. There's a lot of great people that have worked on it, and it's a great poker out. I'm not saying it's not great, but it isn't the best.

Just like many of the social networks we use are not the best, but they are where our friends are, and they are where our coworkers are. They are where we can find the people that we need to communicate with. And so we all know that network effects are very powerful. When it comes to games, I think this idea of how do you get the people you care about together in a game so that they can play together? The fact that it's not a focus means that many games are actually in a situation where they do need to keep creating new content to keep all the players excited and happy to play the game. What I've seen work really well is if you can get the right group of people playing a game, game together, they can kind of create endless content for each other, right?

Humans are, with the right design for a game, better at creating endless interesting content to the people they understand the best, the people they're close with, than any game designer could ever be. And it's also more scalable. So we try to think of these games that we're creating much more like a social network than a game to take all the best lessons from scaled social network and apply it to thinking of how you would create a game. So it's a marriage of the two.

say more about what that means. If you're modeling more on social networks to emphasize fun ways in which people can interact, what lessons can we take from the success of the big winners in this space? What do they do consistently well that you and others could emulate when trying to create conditions like what you're talking about? Well, a simple one is making it easy to create and share content. If you think about what was one of the great things about Instagram that led to its success, they made everybody into a great photographer. And these simple filters that now are part of every app we use, they were mostly unique to Instagram at that time.

And they made every photo look better. And it was an important time to do that because the iPhone camera wasn't very good. When we were sharing these photos coming from our iPhone camera, when Instagram was just getting started, they looked bad compared to the photos that were being shared by everybody's legitimate digital cameras at that time on Facebook. And by putting these filters on them, suddenly it was sort of dressing them up in a way that fixed quality issues that the cameras

had at the time. And so it really was a way of making mobile go a few generations forward in terms of the way it looked that helped people want to share these photos more on these services. And they made it super easy. And I think you see that pattern over and over. I would say TikTok has done an amazing job and making it easy to create video content that's super compelling. And they've really tapped into this idea of it being about the meme.

everybody wants to recreate the meme. So just make that as easy as possible. Allow them to remix it. I think great games can create that content easily as a byproduct of you playing. So a great game doesn't ask you to fill a blank canvas. A great game will motivate you to do certain things that you're excited about and you're having fun and you get into a flow state. And then before you know it, you've painted a beautiful picture and you want to share it.

And I think that that's where the overlap is. in some ways, how do you make it so easy to create that you don't even realize you're doing it? And then you're so proud of whatever you made that of course you're going to share it. It's great. So that's definitely one of the biggest things that we're focused on. Say a bit more about how you think you can do that as a game company. So maybe now is the appropriate time to introduce the concept of instant gaming, which is a sort of a category that you all have created and will become very popular. What is an example of a game that does everything you just described?

We have a lot of stuff coming. Games where this will be more apparent and some of it I'm more allowed to talk about than others. But we're very excited about this idea of meme creation. I'd like to see some game soon allow you to react to the game you're playing in a way that feels just like the way we react to video content. And what I mean by that is we're seeing support for video editing tools that let you take somebody else's video and take the music

and take the captions and the formatting and the editing and make your own video that looks like that. I think we're going to start to see that applied to games in a way where I'm playing the game, and I can share with that and edit it into my video and create my own content where the game content becomes part of the video content, and my video content might become part of the game,

and the lines start to blur. This is way out there. This will make more sense once we release something that shows you it. Suffice to say, I think people are looking to create interesting content. So games can be a tool to create more interesting content. The easiest way of looking at, they can become part of the editing suite because you may be able to make content in a game that you wouldn't be able to make very easily if you were to just sit in sort of a video editing

program. Games can be a tool to creation is the way I would think about it. And you've seen games where you have to build your farm or build your space and then you're proud to show it off. I think that's something that's interesting to a lot of people. I think it doesn't fit the new metaphor of creating interesting bits of content that you want to share onto these networks, which would become less profile-centric and more information or content-centric. The farm is a great metaphor for the profile. You visit people's farms. We visited people's profiles.

But I think we're seeing it's really about how do you go and create this very interesting meme? And I think if there is any science behind creating a great meme, then there must be designs that we can do to help people make them. We're just really focused on what are the game designs that might produce interesting memes. Maybe you could give us a bit of a history lesson on, I don't know what the right term is, modding or game design, user game design. Obviously, everyone now is familiar with Roblox or Minecraft, like these simple ideas that it's a very basic core platform and you can set up build whatever you want on top of it. So they give you the building blocks,

the Lego pieces, you do your thing. In your mind, what are the key milestones in that timeline, historically. I think a lot of the most interesting games that we've seen, maybe even the most popular games in the world, were modifications by users of some other existing game or platform. Give us a little history lesson here because I think it does matter for where we're going with games. That's actually totally true. So I think a lot of the great platforms of games started off as a single game that executed so well in a certain genre. People had the hunger to go and make something like it. And then they said, okay, well, allow somebody to modify the code. And they didn't say, we're going to build a platform now.

They just said, sure, you can add your own maps. And then people said, well, I have this map. And now I want to add this feature. And they're like, okay, well, you can script things in this little walled off area. And then it kept growing and growing and growing. And before you know it, you have the Unreal Engine. You have the Half-Life Engine and you have all these amazing game engines that started off with just a great game that people felt they loved so much

that they just wanted to make their own part of it. And so the players in the community, pulled the platform out of the company. I think that that's something that's fascinated me. What I really think it speaks to is if you create a killer product in a new category that feels brand new and you have a bunch of people that love it, that's when the best platform opportunities come about. So everyone wants to get to the end game of the platform because it's a great business.

But at least in consumer software and especially in games, I think the best path to doing that has been to go and create something new in different and great. And then slowly turn it into the platform as people give you the cue that they want to. In terms of the history on it, honestly, like, I can speak to my personal history with these games. I mean, I grew up playing the Starcraft. Of course, the modding on StarCraft was huge and everything Blizzard was doing to support BattleNet. It was like way ahead of its time forming online communities. And then again, with Valve and Half-Life and Counter-Strike and these things were huge. I think more recently, I've been inspired by not the gaming community, but what I'm

seeing in SaaS, and this drive toward no code. I've always felt like the modding community and even the game platforms are leaving so many creators out by requiring code. And when I think about it, there are a lot of different things you can make. You can make rules to create almost any sort of game. There are actually a much smaller set of games that people really enjoy to play that we know about. Just like there are a limited amount of web pages people are looking to create, you can use that to go and create a platform for no code that can serve. Someone who wants to make a restaurant page probably looks like one of these five. Someone who wants to make a page to promote the photography business probably wants to use one of these templates. And I think that while certain

engines have focused on the power of the engine, very few companies have focused on making it super easy to create games. And so one of the things we realized is when we were building the technology and the partnerships with social platforms to make instant game work, we wanted to make this to connect to you to your friends and your family and your coworkers, people you care about. And we noticed along the way that this was the same problem that you had to solve to let creators connect with their fans. And we started getting really excited in conversations with creators about giving them basically a white label game creation for certain categories of games where they don't need to know how to code. And I think if we've seen anything from other platforms

where there's been a ton of innovation lately about allowing more people to create games, we're very excited about the idea of allowing creators to create games who already have audiences without code. We're at the very beginning of that. We're just releasing product on it now. it's going to be a really big trend. What happens to this creator ecosystem when you're also able to take software that monetizes as well as games and give that to them as a tool

to be not only creative, but to monetize their fans? We now need to really define instant gaming and exactly what that means to you, why you think it's so interesting. And then I want to talk a lot about how that relates to someone on an existing network. You don't have to build new rails

and has a big audience in that network. let's say it's a TikTok star or something, and how PlayCo or a company like yours can enable this concept. So what is an instant game just to find that term? The way we think about instant games is they're a game that you can play instantly. And what that means to us is that you don't need to go download a game in the app store. You can play this game as soon as you tap it. And that this game can take advantage of the context in which you're playing it

to also give you very quick access to your friends and your family and your contacts in a way that helps you play with them without having to do any setup. And so we don't need account creation. That part is instant. We don't need you to give us permission to access your contacts. Ideally, this is something where you're coming in and we can make the whole experience frictionless for you to have these interactions with the people you care about. So the idea around instant, it's not just about downloads. I think it started there, but it really, We've extended it to just basically, how do we give people an experience immediately with the people in the space that they're in? If this is a live video space, they want the game to be playable with everybody in the room.

If it's on a social network, they want to be able to send the messages to their friends on the messengers that they use. And they want to be able to play the game in that same space. And that brings a set of opportunities that are just related to this idea that we're only willing to sort of engage with so many applications at once. we got our phones, some of us 10 years ago at this point, there was a lot of people telling you about their favorite app. I can still remember people sliding the phone across the table to me and saying, have you tried this app? And that hasn't happened in a long time.

We've settled into the apps we like. And some of us are still discovering apps, but we're not really sharing them with people the way that we used to. It's kind of a burden. There's account creation. There's downloads. It can be a high friction experience. And we think that when you remove that friction,

you can actually facilitate people getting in the room together and experiencing it. And I think that this isn't unique to games. We've seen this happen outside of games. When I think of part of what's made Zoom successful, you give somebody a link and you're going to end up in a room talking with that person. And I think before Zoom came around and really solved that very, very simple problem, most other video communication platforms had not. There were ways to video chat in those communication platforms.

But there wasn't something so simple and so reliable. and so multi-platform as sharing a link with the people that you wanted to chat with. And so we're trying to recreate that level of ease with games. And we think that once you do, then you get the same sort of ability to meet that we're seeing in other places. Say a bit about the technology required. So I like the idea of something that's like frictionless and simple and instant from the user's perspective and that that abstracts away or masks a lot of deep technical complexity. But I'm really interested in that technical complexity too.

So what have been the technology challenges that you've faced and how have you overcome them? What is going on behind the scenes to make this possible? The last 10 years on mobile development have been very focused on building game engines that push more pixels on the hardware that you're given. And so if you look at native development, Unity has done an amazing job at giving people better graphics, better physics, these types of improvements. And Unreal Engine Adipik has done the same. And so there hasn't been much investment in creating a game that you can load up instantly. And the reason is because the business on the App Store is so huge that no one's really focused on solving that problem. On the App Store, it's not really a problem.

Once you have someone committed to downloading the app, they'll usually wait. And you probably want to make it smaller, but still many game developers will make it hundreds of megabytes and require you to download Wi-Fi. If you really want to play the game, you might even put up with it. they've already lost everybody who hasn't tapped that button and wasn't willing to put up with that friction. And so there's not really anybody focused on how do I make this game load in one second? And Google and Facebook and these companies that have been on the web, they spend so much energy and effort making that happen for these web pages, right? Google every millisecond they can shave off their average load time is more people doing successful searches.

And that's what we're trying to do for games. it's almost you're optimizing for something that's almost in direct contention with what the App Store game engines have been optimizing for, which is this very, very large high quality files and assets. And so being able to build something that actually loads the page instantaneously and then streams in the assets as needed and feels and looks at a quality at part with the App Store is very challenging. We're not there yet.

where we can point at every genre and say, this looks as good as the app store, but for many different genres of games, we think we've been able to hit the bar. And that's interesting because people play it. And we don't want them to know the difference. We don't want them to think, oh, this is a web page, and so it can be lower quality.

We want a game to load up and we want them to love it. And for them, they've all experienced games in their phone at this point. So the bar is, does this look as good as what I'm used to playing or not? And so that's a pretty high bar to clear. And so the technology is really around understanding there's a huge amount of fragmentation in the web browsers and what technologies are available and how they can utilize the hardware and all the sort of things you'd have to understand to create a native game engine for the App Store,

except for optimizer around this goal of how do I make it load as fast as possible and be and operate the way that the web expects a web page to. There are some frameworks. There's a lot of great open source projects who have thought about this problem. And people have made a lot of progress on it. I think companies haven't really invested a ton of it into it at a commercial level because you need to have the business model that lets you go and put the R&D into doing that so that you can actually build something really big and scalable.

We've seen a lot of great work by open source developers, but we haven't seen a company actually go and take something and build it as robust as these other game engines we're getting in other places. And so that's what we're aiming to do. Is Google Stadia or Stadia, I'm not sure it's pronounced, something that is worth considering in this conversation where there's no local action happening, it's all happening through a browser, it's basically all being streamed. What you see on the game and your input back into the game through whatever controls you're using is effectively all cloud-based. Like, is that the right way to think about what you're talking about? We're effectively moving the processing and therefore the hardware involvement off of our local devices,

off of the edge and towards something centralized and is that AWS? I'm deeply interested in literal actions that are going on here. So what's happening? There's a lot of work on games streaming lately. I would definitely put streaming platforms like Stadia in the same bucket in terms of the problems are trying to solve. I think some of those platforms, I think they've been focused on solving this problem for existing native content.

When you solve this problem for existing native content, you might take a game that's a AAA game that was built for console and make it suddenly playable on low-end devices because it's streaming. Now, the developer who spent four years building that AAA game for that high-end console may have not envisioned this game being played on a mobile device. And not only that, but they may have never been able to go through the design exercise of thinking about all the possibilities that could happen if this game was now instantly accessible anywhere on the web. And so I think where we take it another level further is, okay, we have the ability to load these games instantly. What should we do with that?

What can we do with that that that makes that interesting beyond just loading up a mobile game in another place? We think that's where the ability to play with your friends comes in. By making it frictionless, we make it possible to connect you with your friends in a way where you can actually expect it to happen. You see how easy it is and you understand that they won't drop off at the app store. And so you have this understanding that I can expect people to jump in and play with me, and I'm not bothering them by recommending a new app. And I think that these other platforms are not necessarily as focused on that problem right now. I think they're more focused on delivering high fidelity to a wider variety of hardware.

And I'm generalizing here. I actually think that the video streaming part of it, the technical part of it, will be a part of our story too. We're agnostic to the solutions to this. I think there's going to be multiple. and I think they'll be good for different types of games. But we're very focused on now taking that technology and going and building the killer app, like I mentioned before. Now we have that technology.

What can we do with it? What game would benefit from the ability to be shared as a link anywhere in the world? That's a different question than bringing a AAA over to a mobile phone. I have to ask the question then. First of all, how do you think about different kinds of games? Like, is there some sort of taxonomy to games that's interesting? And if so, which parts of that text? taxonomy fall into the most interesting bucket for link shareable games.

To get back to our earlier conversation about content, I think the web is a bunch of content that you can navigate with links. And games on the app store, they tend to be something you navigate in and out of through one button. You open the app or you close the app. It's not like you jump into a specific piece of content in the app. And we have push notifications, but push notifications are something that are personalized.

They're not shared with other friends or family. and mostly the developers are using them as a way to just reactivate you to the central portion of the app. They're not really sending you to many different places within the app. The power of a link is not just that it opens up one piece of software, it's that it opens it up with a specific context and can pass that specific information. And so when you think about it from a game perspective,

if someone's sharing a link, the simplest form is they share you a link that brings you into the game with them. Right now, there's a lot of people playing games on live video streaming sites where they're passing around passwords and they're saying, come join me to play among us or some other game with the letters H, Z, F, D, Y, P,

and then we all send these letters around and see if we can play the game of who can type it in right the first time. Well, the simplest application of a link is you don't need to do that. I mean, and this is what Zoom is doing. They have a link and it doesn't just open Zoom. It opens Zoom with the person

that you expected to meet with. That's the most basic thing, but obviously very important not to take that for granted because it doesn't happen right now in a lot of other places. In addition to that, I may think it's limitless because it then becomes a lever for gameplay. And you can imagine people sending out links where they want to have a contest of who had the better house that they designed. And suddenly I can put out links promoting my design and you can put out links promoting your design. And then it's become part of the game design.

The possibilities are endless. But once you have people crocking this idea that the link is not something that just opens the game, but has like a specific context in the game like they're used to with the web. So you're not teaching them a new metaphor. There's a lot of interesting things you can do. What have you released so far that you think is the most mature in terms of how it's being used or played? And just gives a sense for the feel of that.

I really like this link concept of just seems so obvious when you say it. Like that's the way that we'll pull people into games. Effectively what you're doing is killing every remaining friction relative to what people are used to like on the normal web to get people more involved in. interacting with each other, which is really cool. What is the furthest along thing that you've done or built so far? We are launched on a lot of different platforms right now, and they're sort of further along in different places, depending on what we're trying to prove. And for us, it's like, this is such an early space that we're trying to optimize for learning as fast as we can. So we try to

release small games that we can use to prove some of the ideas that we have. And then when we think that the idea worked, we'll go and we'll keep investing more in it and figure out what the implications are and ask ourselves what's next. It's not that any of our particular games are sort of the farthest along, but we have games on Facebook. For example, we have a game called Boardmasters on Facebook. If you check it out, the 3D on it is something that I think is on par with the app store. And I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out that it's playing in the web. For us, when we show that to people who are wondering about the state of the technology, and what's possible, it's something that usually opens their eyes and makes them realize,

okay, 10 years ago, there were a lot of limitations to say HTML5. Now, this content can definitely stand side by side with a native app for certain genres and it's as good. We're excited about that. So in terms of graphics, I think that's a great one. When it comes to interactivity between people and what we can do with the latest ways we're communicating with each other, I think the game We put out on Zoom are super interesting. We've been seeing this emergent behavior. People want to play games in these video chat spaces. They're playing among us.

They're playing poker games. They're sharing these applications. They're finding outside. And they're somehow facilitating these games. And we're just saying, okay, well, let's make that simple. Let's make it a button. And when you're in a Zoom meeting, I think that that's starting to get to our vision of showing, here's what we're doing.

We're adding the interesting activities you can do in these spaces you're already in. from the perspective of like what feels very futuristic to me as we spend more and more of our time online with higher fidelity communication, the Zoom stuff really feels super interesting. And like you feel like you're living in the future when you're using it a bit. It gets me thinking about all the things that we can expect as we get more layers of platforms on top of these tools like Zoom. One of the things that obviously makes you stand out is you're not trying to build a new space for everyone to do this.

you're leveraging existing spaces, Zoom, TikTok, Facebook, you know, all these other massive platforms that already have distribution. They already have the social graph, the data, people's profiles, et cetera. What have you learned in forming these partnerships? I'm curious about two things. One, just about what have you learned about forming partnerships, scale platforms like this? Because I think if you're right, a lot more companies are going to be able to be built on top of these platforms and partnerships matter. So we'll start there.

And then the second question I'll ask is that gives you a unique view into what happening in these platforms. A lot of people have talked about how the major ones, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, have moved from social networks really to media companies. And the power of what people see is just way more concentrated than like the top creators, like any media company. So I'd love to explore these two things, starting with partnerships. What have you learned about effectively structuring, engaging with these massive platforms? I think for a lot of these companies, everyone's seen how big games have grown as a category. And everyone has this realization that the context that the people are using their product in could be a really powerful

way to create more interesting games. And they've seen every other piece of media that they put inside their platforms have better engagement and become more interesting because of that context. The fact that games haven't at scale yet to them, it's sort of like an obvious next step. And it's interesting because if you think about how video has transformed all these networks over the last few years, if there's one thing that's more engaging than video and one thing that's highly monetizing video, it's games. This is something that's, it's going to be more difficult to solve because games are not as easily one size fits all as a video. But I think it's going to be a much larger reward when people figure out how to solve it. And so for us, it's just on the

partnership side, like really understanding these networks and these partners are super different. And they all have something they do or many things they do that are amazing and that are special for each platform. And the people who use the platforms, they know that. We have to build content that actually taps into why people love using each of them. And so that means what we've seen is a lot of other companies that have approached these social partners is they've tried to view them as distribution channels. Their instinct has been to basically look at these different social platforms and say, wow, this seems like it could be a source of acquiring customers more cheaply. And that's just not how we look at this at all.

We're in the business of creating new experiences, and these platforms are in the business of putting better experiences in the hands of users. If we can create experiences with them that can't exist outside of their platforms, well, then we're both super aligned in the types of things we can build. Rather than taking a game that we spent tens of millions of dollars on some other platform and saying, hey, now it's time to figure. out how to make this grow via some channel on a social platform, we're saying, what do users on this platform want to do? And what are they already doing that if we could actually tap into it

and do it better, would they love to do even more? And then we go build that thing. Because of that, I just feel like we're in service to their customers. And so once we focus on that, it's usually pretty easy to go and build good things together. Anything you've noticed about the ways in which the platforms themselves are evolving, meaning are they becoming basically just media companies and no longer social networks in terms of how stuff is consumed on them? Because it seems like your mission to get more people interacting with their friends is maybe counter that trend. So I'm just curious how you think about it. If you think about video, I can't speak to specifically like how they're operating the companies outside of games more broadly. But I would imagine that video, watching video,

is mostly a solo experience. And so even though it's been a great way to increase engagement for a lot of these platforms, it's not something that's happening with friends as much. And it's something that where each person's interests and content is a little bit different. Really, like users actually want to see different videos. They don't necessarily want to see the same video as their friends.

Because of that, I think you're right. I think in some ways, the more video succeeds when video is sort of a separate content that isn't about friends, the less social it feels. I mean, and I've seen some pretty interesting things that I think could be very successful

around group watching and watch parties and these types of features and products that I hope work. I think games have more natural points where you can insert the interaction. Video of somebody else's content does not suit itself

for me having interactions with my friends in an easy way. But I hope we can do with games is make something that is both. it's engaging and we figure out the types of content that we create is something that a group of people you care about would like and they like even more because you're involved with it. And so it's less about, I like this idea of thinking about it like a restaurant. If you open up a new restaurant for a very specific type of cuisine in Brooklyn, you're going to

do a lot of research into how many people want to eat the type of food that you are going to go and create. And you have to think about are they in the neighborhood and what do they like? what is a demographic, what are their ages, what style do they want to see in my restaurant, what should I call it? All these things matter because you're speaking to a very specific group of people. That's a lot what creating a game in the app store is like. It's understanding a specific cohort of people very well and making something they really, really want. What we're doing is acknowledging that when we invite someone over for dinner to your house, you do that because

inviting them over without an activity is a little weird. We're saying, wow, everybody's gathering on the internet without an activity right now. Isn't that weird? And so we have no trouble. Like, we're doing a podcast. This is great. We go to work meetings. That's fine. But we struggle to just go and meet with our friends online every day because it almost feels like you need a reason. And so we solve this in the real world. And it's called pizza. Pizza is what you buy when you have no other excuse to get together because everybody likes it. We're trying to create games that can be pizza, basically. What is the excuse that gets you in a room with people you care about? I absolutely love that. I think it's such a simple but really insightful point. I still don't

know how Placo is going to make money. So how do you think about business model and applying everything that you've learned watching this whole world evolve for a long time and having been a part of the absolute earliest in Zinga? What do you think is the smartest business model in this space? I like games because I think you've got a lot of options. I don't think we have to commit and pick one. I will say that I think I'm very excited about things I'm seeing with the creator economy and how we can use games as a lever for people to earn a living. I think that that's great that games can be very profitable for the people who create them.

It would be even better if we can figure out a way to make games drive a much larger and more expansive and distributed set of people and creating a lot of. a living. I mean, that's something that I'm personally very excited about. I invested in substack. I've known Chris and the team for a long time since their kick days. Just seeing them succeed is very inspiring to me. It makes me realize that it's something that should be cross industry. We think there's an opportunity there with games, too, to give people the ability to have a game in a box. And if you have the audience and you have the creativity and you have the content, you should be able to make a game. We'll try to help people do that. I also think NFTs,

are really interesting. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that space. I know you sound like you've been thinking about AXE a lot. You've had some great people on the podcast recently, so I can't speak to it as well as they can. I've only been sitting on the sidelines as an advisor for some of these companies like Dapper, but I really think that the ability to align incentives like this is what's exciting. I get excited about this idea that we can create value for a broader set of people and that more people can share in the value that we create. I want to create games,

and I think that because we can create games that live in these different channels, we'll have an opportunity to make games where if you think about one of the challenges that the industry has right now for NFTs, a lot of it has to do with accessibility. And that's where we're spending all of our time focused on. when it comes to being able to play these games easily,

I think we're going to actually be able to do something very interesting there. I want to make sure I understand the opportunity that you see in NFTs, mentioned being advisor to Dapper. I'm fascinated by this space too. I think we're seeing just the early iterations of digital scarcity and why it's interesting. But my sense, based on how you've talked about PlayCo so far, is that really you're creating a top of funnel that's much bigger by reducing frictions. And we haven't talked about it explicitly,

but part of what that means is you can not only just click a link and be in a context that someone pulls you into, but you can do so for free. If you have a bigger top of funnel, a bigger universe of users, then I think NFTs become even more interesting because you can monetize with a smaller and smaller percentage of your universe that are the superfans or whatever. Just talk conceptually about whether or not you agree with that. Am I sort of on the right track? I think what's really exciting is finding a way to bring crypto to the mainstream. I think there's amazing concepts out there. They take some homework to figure out by increasing the top of the funnel. It's not just that the game is more accessible, but it's also that we can get you interested in having fun before we say,

oh, by the way, there's an NFT. And that's something that a lot of crypto-focused projects aren't doing right now. They're saying, welcome to this game. Where's your wallet? I think that that's okay, because they've been doing an amazing job building up communities that are very, very excited about the content they're creating and the markets they're making. I wonder how much bigger could some of these markets be if we actually find a way to get people interested in something that they're playing and then start slowly unveiling the complexity of these other opportunities

of playing this game now. Did you know that you can also collect this thing and it's an NFT? That's something that I haven't seen a lot. a lot of companies try you, and I think we'll be in an interesting position to be playing with. And I would say that the way that the utility can show up in the game from the NFT could be quite powerful. It could be related to the people that you're sharing it with or the people that you're in a group with. We have not secured the rights to do this. But I mean, I can imagine if you owned an NFT for a famous celebrity and we were playing our Zoom game and you wanted

to have that celebrity join the Zoom game, you could use the NFT. that you owned to bring in your favorite celebrity in the Zoom game. I don't mean the actual celebrity. I mean like some pre-recorded clips of them, but you have the right to summon them. So we can create really interesting ways for the utility behind these NFTs to be something really meaningful to people in a very practical way that could drive more casual users to the space. It sounds like then the crypto wallet becomes a really important complement to what you're building in this version of the story, meaning what you own and custody yourself, whether that's

cryptocurrencies or NFTs or whatever, that that gets read by the game natively online, and that can affect the experiences. How do you think about the importance of the wallet and whether or not you build the wallet versus partner with a rainbow or whatever the other most dominant wallet is today to make that possible? The wallet seems like it's going to become a really important layer to all of this. It is. And I've been working with some of these companies closely enough over the last four years that have been experimenting in crypto games that I know how much work goes into doing it right. And so if we want to get something out quickly and experiment with it, I think we'll be in a better position to partner with somebody who knows what they're doing. I think in the long run,

you're right. It's going to be such an amazing opportunity for whatever company does it. I think solving the problems we're solving is a tall order. And I'm excited about crypto, but definitely aware that wallets are the challenge for sure that we're probably not ready to take on until we really understand the space a bit more. If you had to put your dreamer glasses on and think forward a decade, what do you think the craziest version of games in the world looks like in the success case for Playco? If we go sort of full sci-fi here and your direction and trajectory and success is the best that it could be, what's the biggest version of that you could imagine a decade from now. I like to think of games living in multiple channels. We have places we message. We have

places you just use our voice and we communicate. We have places where we have video. We have asynchronous channels where we do this whenever we have the time where we just have three reasons and we have, sometimes we want to sit down and play a game for an hour. I like to think that more and more games are going to start living across these channels. And instead of being a thing we go and visit, there'll be a thing that lives in the places where we spend our time. And this multiple mode type of game is going to require really specific design for these channels and a lot of thought going into an experimentation to prove out how it should work. And the amount of channels that people use in their life right now has expanded a lot. And so this is a much more difficult thing to do than it was

previously. What we'll do is bring more depth to those interactions, if that makes sense. So just like people realized, hey, sending a sticker in a message can say a lot more than some set of words, they'll start to also realize that certain interactions in these games can also bring much more meaning than anything that can be said by words. And I think that we can be in a position to help people connect in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. So there are a lot of people to get back to the pizza. I think we want an excuse to spend time and go back and forth with the people we care about. And games can be that excuse.

And they can help us be better at doing what we really want to do. It's hard to remember to pick up the phone and call your mom. But you should be able to pick up a game with her that helps you remember to do what you really set out to do, which is to keep in touch with the people you care about. And I also hope that we can have games that can help steer conversation a little bit And some of these public spaces where people are having trouble finding common ground, there's a lot of things we all love. We all love pizza.

So, you know, you can put two people who disagree with each other violently on one social space together. And if maybe, maybe if we trick them into playing a game together where they really enjoy each other's time and then suddenly reveal to them that they're on opposite ends of the political spectrum, we can help make people realize the humanness and all of us. So I get excited about these things. It's less sort of the, to your early. point, the hardware that we're sort of plugging ourselves into and more about how do we just keep evolving people toward a better humanity. Justin, this has been so fun. I love conversations where

something's going to be very different, but it seems sort of obvious that it's true. The fact that frictions are going to fall and more people are going to get access to context games, it just seems obvious and seems incredibly hard to build. So I'm excited to see what you do, but I just think a little bit like we've seen the future in our conversation today. I asked the same closing question of everybody. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? So I'm not sure exactly who did it. When I was very young, I got a computer like many people who are in the industry. In my case, my family was not in a position to buy a computer the time I received one, but my mom worked in IT at the hospital. And somebody told her to take home a computer,

an old computer from the hospital that was essentially broken and that even a public hospital had no use for anymore. And by having her take home the computer for free and allowing me to use it, it really just changed a trajectory in my whole life. I don't know who did that, but I think that that was just something that was really amazing to have done. And when I think about luck and the things I have to be grateful for, and especially the fact that I didn't pay it meant I could feel totally okay to break it. That was something that was really cool. It was the first of many sort of free pieces of technology that ended up falling in my lap. There were printers. There was software that was visual basic and $1,000 coding software that I also had no way of getting as somebody who wasn't even a teenager yet.

And all these things just kept falling in my lap. And I just had the patience to bang my head against the wall and try to figure it out. And for me, the ability to have access to these things was a real privilege and opened me up to what I used to get excited about when I had Visual Basic was I was using AOL Instant Messenger. and with all my friends, and we were on this thing, and we were spending time in this space. And for us, it was like, we were living in the future

because it was mostly young people that were so plugged into this chat at the time on AOL. And the immediate thing was, I want to make something in this. How do I make something in this? And then spend a bunch of time trying to figure out again, no official APIs, but how do I go and make a game

that maybe we can play in the chat room on AOL and Instant Messenger? And it's just funny how along the way, when I look back, it's like, it's silly how much, even those things I was doing back then, I'm still excited about now. It was really cool to have something show up on my doorstep like that one day. So that's probably it. I love that the big category in this question and the answers I get to it is some version of like an on-ramp, like kind of mana from heaven,

something that happens, an opportunity, a computer in this case, that just lets someone get plugged into a network or an ecosystem that they weren't otherwise connected to. And it would have been hard, given their starting point to do so. It's just a good reminder for all of us. The more we can provide that same on-ramp for others, I think that's the highest possible thing we could do. Yeah, in my investing, which we didn't even get a chance to talk about, it's not as interesting as what I'm trying to build. But technology is a lever is just such an important thing. A lever for communication, a lever for connection, and a lever for productivity. I think Steve Jobs said, a bicycle for the mind. I think this idea of giving everyone the leverage that I've received by pure love,

from technology is something that I just want to go and do. What gets me excited about the creator economy is you have all these people that you've empowered by technology that they were creative before, but they didn't have the tools to go and actually make a living out of it. And I'm really excited about what's going to happen when we give people more tools and give more people the lever. So yeah, I'm really excited about if we can have any role in doing that with games. To me, it's tremendously exciting. Just for fun, you mentioned substack is one investment, certainly a lever provided to say writers. Are there any other companies that you've invested in or been involved with that you just

recommend as a closing thought that people go check out in this same category of sort of empowering creators? Maybe not specifically creators, but in terms of levers, a huge supporter of Lambda school from the early days as well with Austin and what he's figured out with education. It's the same thing. It's how do we get people a leg up that otherwise didn't have access to it? I mean, figuring out a business model and using technology in a way that could then give them technology to go get become part of the software economy is exactly what I'm talking about.

And even more recently, it hasn't been announced yet, but an investment I just made into a company called Pledge, which is figuring out how to let anyone run a donation fundraiser online. You may have seen like Facebook has, it's your birthday, you can run a fundraiser for a cause you care about. That takes a lot of work to build that feature. And Facebook can afford to build it. That should exist everywhere. I mean, there's so many social platforms and there are so many companies.

that want to do good and give leverage to their users to do good. So for a company to go build the APIs where anyone can go and plug that in and enable features where people can create fundraisers, I think that that's amazing. Now you're giving the lever of technology to these organizations that really need it and to people who want to support them. So this is like a constant theme, I think, of mine and some of the stuff I've been involved with. So now we're also trying to bring it back to games.

Fantastic, Justin. and well, such a cool set of ideas to close with. So appreciate your time and can't wait to watch what you build with Playco. Thanks for having me. This is really great. I'm excited to finally listen to myself on this. I've been listening to the podcast for a long time. So it's a pleasure.

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