Think Like A Game Designer - Carly McGinnis — Startup Scrappiness, Trusting Your Team, and the Rhythm of Leadership (#96)

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

About CarlyCarly McGinnis is the driving force behind one of the fastest-growing tabletop companies in history. As CEO of Exploding Kittens, she’s helped lead the company to over 25 million games sold and dozens of successful launches, all while keeping the promises of the most-backed crowdfund ever. Carly’s path—from surviving the Hollywood talent-agency grind to building a global game business—has given her a rare blend of resilience, humor, and no-nonsense leadership. In this episode, we discuss how she scales teams, navigates creative chaos, and builds a culture that can actually deliver on big ideas.Related episodes with Elan Lee, Creator of Exploding KittensJustin’s Ah-Ha Notes:* Slow Down to Grow Faster: Carly reminds us that speed isn’t the same as progress. When you rush just to keep moving, you create confusion, rework, and stress that ultimately slow you down. The real skill is learning to pause long enough to think clearly, set the right priorities, and avoid doing things simply for the sake of doing them. When you give yourself and your team permission to slow down, you actually create the conditions to grow faster and make better decisions.* Define “Good Enough” and Move Forward: One of Carly’s superpowers is knowing when to push and when to ship. Perfection can quietly kill momentum, especially inside a fast-scaling company. By clearly defining what “good enough” means for a project, she empowers her team to keep moving, learn in the real world, and avoid getting stuck polishing details that don’t matter. Progress comes from clarity and clarity starts with setting a bar everyone understands.* Leadership Is Repetition: Carly makes this point beautifully: leadership isn’t about a single breakthrough moment, it’s about reinforcing the fundamentals again and again. Whether it’s reminding the team of the mission, encouraging fast feedback loops, or surfacing hard conversations, the job is to repeat what matters until it becomes part of the culture’s DNA. A great leader is patient, and presents enough to help their teams grow in the right direction. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Carly McGuinness. Carly is the CEO of Exploding Kittens. Under McGinnis, Exploiting Kittins is sold over 25. million tabletop games with over 30 launch titles. She is largely responsible for growing that company, raising over $40 million in capital, growing an international business. Today's podcast is a master class in leadership and rapid scaling of a tabletop company. They've recently celebrated their 10-year anniversary after launching the crowd fund that still is to this date the most backed crowd fund in history. And it is an incredible process

to get to see what's happening behind the scenes. Now, I have two podcast episodes I've done in the past, which I will link at the show notes with Elon Lee, which is one of the creators of Exploded Kittens, and we get a lot of the details of the creative process through Elon. But Carly is the engine that runs this ship behind the scenes. She's the one that helps build the processes,

make sure that those promises that get made from a crowd fund actually get delivered to backers and growing an international corporation. this is a really fascinating deep dive into what's important. And her background is really, really interesting. She came from the entertainment space working as an assistant to an R.E. Gold type character. If you ever saw the show, Entourage and had to suffer quite a bit of abuse, learned a lot of lessons and resilience.

We see how that shows itself throughout her process of growing this company and facing the challenges, through COVID, through a variety of failed projects. We learn about her hiring process. We learn about how you define good enough and how you manage people, how you give different feedback to a leadership team, how you actually lead a team and build a company culture. We talk about the future of Exploding Kittens and what is in store for them. Spoiler alert, it might be an exploding Kittens theme park. We dig into a lot of incredible things. We have specific book recommendations, specific processes.

This was something that I really needed to hear myself. and it was clear that Carly, even as she was talking, was reminding herself of key lessons, which is one of the really important parts that I've learned over the years about leadership and Carly reinforces that so much of it is repetition and reminding yourself of the things that matter and continuing to do the things and show up the same way. That's one of the reasons why I love having these kinds of conversations because it helps reinforce the most important lessons for me and for you as a listener, right? So this is just one of those things where listening here will find gold nuggets for you,

not necessarily about the specifics of the design process but about how you can build something that lasts, how you can build the team and execute on a vision. Carly is so much fun. She's really entertaining. We have a great time during the conversation. So without any further ado, here is Carly McGuinness. Hello and welcome. I am here with Carly McGuinness.

Carly, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Hello, Justin. Thank you for having me. I am. So, you know, first of all, you know, previous guest, Alon Lee has spoken very highly about you. But that wasn't why I wanted you on the podcast. I wanted you on the podcast because we met at Jen Con and it had immediately hit it off. And your warmth and humor and personality disarmed me.

And then I realized who you were. And I was like, okay, this is going to be a great, great guess. I want to dig in. So you've grown probably the fastest growing tabletop game presence of any company in history, as far as I know. Certainly, I think you've got like something like 60 launch titles now with Exploding Kittens, something absurd like that. That sounds right. And that's over 10 year. You're just celebrating your 10 year kind of anniversary of the biggest or the most backed crowd fund campaign still to the state.

is that right yeah that's that's accurate okay so we're gonna dig into a lot of that stuff but i want to know about you i want to know i know you were at xbox before this but like what got you like into this field like you're not the typical game company executive uh you so what i want to know a little bit about your origin story i i want to know what makes you tick here so what bring me back as far the way back machine as you want to go okay so i started in hollywood actually um i started as an assistant um you ever seen the show entourage oh i love that show yeah back in the day okay so basically i worked for the the agent ri it was like my you know representation of what i was doing i was an assistant in hollywood so um it taught me how to be resourceful it taught me how to

just deal with multiple personalities many of them being difficult personality types and it also taught me that I did not want to be in that industry for very much longer. And so I went from working at talent agencies to meeting a guy named Alon Lee, actually. Hold on. Hold on. Wait, I want to pause. I want to pause there because there's interesting things set back. So is this like, is this like a character just like the one that in the show entourage or is this the one that the character was based on the actual guy? Okay. So I did not work. Yeah, so he is based off a real guy named Ari. I did not work for Ari, but I worked for his

fellow board member at William Morris Endeavor. Yes. So I worked for the guys running the agencies. All right. Now, I don't know how much of our audience has seen this show, but like this character, I mean, it's hilarious to watch as a as a viewer, but he is so abusive to his staff in this show. And so someone who is playing in real life, the role of staff, that sounds a little rough. There's got to

be some kind of story or some kind of thing there that's like what either a particularly ridiculous or interesting story from that moment or a little bit more about your character that put you in that position in the first place you remember the character lloyd who was his assistant yes i don't know if you remember that so that was basically what i did i would sit there answering phones you would work from you know six in the morning till sometimes midnight um almost every day And it's, you know, it's a great job out of college because it really gives you perspective on, you know, what it's like. I mean, this is like, you know, the upper echelon of this business. And on top of that, that's just who you're working for.

You're also, you know, servicing all these different A-level clients. So I got exposure to all of that. I think I won't name some names of the people I worked for. But there was a lot of, yeah, there was a lot of toxic, you know, abuse. And it was an industry, I think, that taught you resilience. And that is one of the words it describes me till to this day. So I think that I have learned so much about what I, you know, I have an assistant today. And I, I am, I feel like I'm a very nice boss because I don't want to pass on the trauma that I endured basically during the time.

And I work with some really lovely people and some really, like, you know, some friends, some colleagues that you're, you're, we're still friends today because you're in these trenches and you're just trying to figure out how to, for example, I had one person that I worked for her, we sent out like thousands of greeting cards for Christmas every year. And I would be like, you know, stamping and stickering and licking, I don't what I was looking, but the lot of envelops, like, until I like had cuts on my mouth, because that's what I needed done, right? So you did anything and everything that you were asked to do that was like legal at least um i remember breaking the law so that's good um but it you did you did it all like because that was what the that was what you were asked to do and this was before the whole me too thing

so it was like well before that kind of crashed down and i think they paid their assistance much better now because there was some kind of um backlash but it was a it was a rough life yeah yeah it's interesting so i just i just recently wrote an article about this concept right of like you know, the value and work you hate, right? And that there's a, you know, like, I mean, I went, before getting into my gaming career, I was a bus boy at a Jewish deli down in Miami where I would get tipped, you know, 17 cents on the $1.69 bagel and a smear. And they would complain about everything.

And it was just like, I hated that job. But man, it gives me so much respect for servers. It gives me so much, like, whenever I face a problem in my game company, I'm just like, this is fine. Like, I'm not getting up and four in the morning and go in a, serve these people. Yeah, you can survive it. And I feel like that today.

I feel, I honestly wouldn't change how I, where I started, because it gave me so much, so much exposure to really talented people that I, you know, that are still in Los Angeles is where I live. And it also, it introduced me to Alon. And so that brings me to, from representation

to, I interviewed with Alon at, we worked for a division of Microsoft. at the time that was called Xbox Entertainment and it was in Santa Monica and it was like immersion of like tech people and Hollywood and so it was like my first interface with someone that was not in the Hollywood space which was Alon and he was I was interviewing to be his like coordinator assistant to help him with this interactive division and I first met him and he was like so soft spoken and like looked me in the face and didn't throw things at me.

and um i love how the bar was said so low it's very left look me in the eyes and don't throw things at me this is the man and he was like he was so and i was like oh i bet this guy never yelled and i've never heard him yell to this day like never heard him raise his voice ever and uh he i heard him tell the story where he like canceled all the future interviews i didn't know this by the way at the time canceled all the future interviews and hired me and so that was my introduction to him and we worked for this Xbox Entertainment Studios, which our mandate was making interactive content for the Xbox one. So we were trying to make competing with like Netflix

and like the streaming services were just kind of coming to be more popular at that point. And we worked there for like a year and a half. It wasn't that long. And then the CEO of Microsoft retired. And then the new CEO came in. And as Microsoft does it, they were kind of up and down on what they wanted to commit to.

And there was another team, I think. doing exactly what we were doing. So they ended up anyway, cutting our whole studio. And so that was the... And so your mid-project development at that point, when your budget gets cut and the whole studio gets laid off? Yeah, yeah. So basically, we got told that we could finish our projects,

but we had no new projects. And some people were left to work there a couple more months than others, but it was ultimately like, you can come into work, but, you know, we're going to shut down this studio at some point in the near future. That's interesting. So, yeah, walk me into that moment for a little bit because that, you know, the like you finish the project, then everybody gets surprised laid off is pretty common.

You get calm, you get cut laid off and the project is completely dead. Of course, happens all the time. This, this like the status of, hey, we are going to wrap this up, but we're going to let you finish what you're doing. It's actually pretty rare. I mean, to a certain extent, I mean, it sounds kind of nicer, right? Like to me, it's not a great limbo to be in, but at least you get to finish your project. Like, yeah, what was going on there?

What was that like to be in that moment? I think what was helpful about it is all of us were kind of in the same place. And so everyone was very much helping others try to figure out what came next. And I was devastated because it was one of my favorite jobs that I never had because I previously came from the other environment. The bar was set very low. Very low bar. So I was really, I was really, I was so sad. I remember crying to Alon.

I was just so upset. And I thought, like, all my self-worth is tied to this job. So, like, what am I going to do next? I can't go back to entertainment. And, yeah, I think it felt more like we were all in it together, you know, as opposed to I was just out of a job and, like, had to figure it out. And while we were coming into the office, Alon and one of our other colleagues, actually, Shane Small, they were playing this card game that was called, I think they were calling it at the time,

bomb squad. And it was like a poker deck with like Sharpies written, you know, on it. And they would want me to play it. And I'm like, I can't be bothered with this. I have to look for a job. Like I have this resume I have to build and I have all these things I need to go do. And Alon was less fearful. I mean, he was, you know, felt confident in his next step. And so we played this game over and over. and then there was like a two-month period where I was like I was interning back at where I previously went and along went on this Hawaiian vacation and he met Matt Inman who's the oatmeal who he did not know it was like a mutual like serendipitous like friend group that all went to Hawaii and I remember the story of them everyone's out like boogie boarding and you know on as

you do in Hawaii or whatever you're doing on the beach whatever whatever at water activities people have and a lot of you people do out there in Hawaii you know the fun thing the lawn and Matt are sitting in the dark in the hotel room like playing what became exploding kittens actually and that was a that was Matt's um exposure to like a really really solid game and he you know had this already had this established brand to the oatmeal had a following was making some merchandise but had never made a game and he was like this game is awesome but bomb squad is a soul fullest name like don't call it that that's terrible and uh his his birth was exploding kittens because cats everybody loves cats cats are huge on the internet and let's put some irreverent

you know juxt position where they're blowing things up and so that was kind of the origin story and immediately after that alon called me and asked like do you want to come work at this card game company and i was like what no i want to go make tv and movies what are you talking about card games like how analog um but i i did i was the i think it was the second employee and my job title was um like producer or project manager or something and i was in charge of basically getting all the games made like where you know we had this kickstarter running and we had to produce i think we produced almost a million units and we didn't know that that was weird we didn't know anything. We had no idea that that was a large number. We had no idea where they

were made. We had no idea how to get them from point A to point B, but we had to learn all those steps. And then I've been here for 10 years. Okay. So now we're going to dig into this part and several other steps along the journey because this is great. Because I've got, and again, for listeners, you know, I've got two episodes with Ilan on the podcast where we dig into the the marketing and the design and the creation and the Kickstarter itself but the I want to hear digging into exactly this like the logistics and the behind the scenes and the stuff that actually makes this work because I think most people all the boring stuff no it's not boring I tell you that's why I had like this is the podcast is think like a game designer but as like applying game design and

strategy and creation to how you build a business and how you build operations I think is just as interesting as building the game itself and it's really important people understand and and again people don't you know just to get like a sense of this like a million to cut so you came in mid mid campaign of the kickstore campaign right when it ended okay so it's like oh my god we've had the biggest success ever and now we have to actually deliver right which is a really big deal and not easy to do right i mean i remember my first you know when i first launched my company and we put ascension out you know i made 10 000 units and i didn't know what i was doing and that was hard enough and a million units is insanity uh and so

what were the processes you take? Because I can imagine somebody else putting themselves in your shoes and you're like, you've never made a physical thing before. You don't know how, you know, you've moved, you know, pixels on a screen, but you haven't used, you know, moved physical matter across the planet. So what, were you like, I don't know what to do. How do you start? What do you, how do you approach a problem like that?

Well, we got a little lucky because we had, um, Alon was close friends with the guys over at Cards Against Humanity. So they had gone through a similar. experience. Their Crickstarter was much smaller than ours, but they had gone through a similar experience and Alon called them, you know, mid-campaign because he was like staring at this screen. He had like post-its all over his computer, like blocking the numbers because he was so stressed out by how was he going to do all this. So he called up, I think Ben at Cards Against Community and they actually had, you know, a woman that had helped them with basically the full

supply chain. She had helped, you know, she had helped liaise with the factories in China. She had helped spec the products. She had helped them outline how many games per case. What are the sizes of the cases? Like all these things that are very important to like moving inventory, booking the boats, getting them from point A to point B. So we kind of had quite assistance in getting from that start to where do I put it? And they also started a company that was based around Kickstarter fulfillment called Blackbox.

And so they helped us shipped, I mean, hundreds, hundreds of thousands of orders. It was insane. But at one point, I remember this very clearly, we, I don't know how many boats we had, but we had, you know, thousands of boats with containers on them going all around the world. And I remember, you know, midway shipping things being like, hmm, it might be a good idea for me to write down where these units are going. like it might be at some point necessary to track that on a spreadsheet like this is clever this is clearly like someone who has no idea how to manage inventory has no concept of like where does transfer of title happen and where are the units and did the right ones get out the door and go to the right place like I mean there was so much that we didn't know um and we had we had a lot of challenges we had a boat that caught fire um we had warehouses lose the kittens actually exploded like for real it is not it is not the boat i don't think ended up sinking but they'd had to it had to pull into some kind of port and and you know there was a investigation that went on so

i promise it wasn't our response i mean wasn't because of us uh so i think that we the lesson we had is we had really good advice and help from the day one and it was all about urgency and you know working around the clock to make sure that we had the right games going wow, great time. And we delivered it on time. We actually, we, I think the date we shipped was in July and the Kixir ended in February. So we actually pulled it off, which was kind of insane. And we had a product afterward for holiday.

But it, um, thinking back to what you don't, I don't know now, it's a miracle that all of this stuff happened the way it did because it was. Well, yeah. And I mean, so, so, you know, the lesson, you know, one like, obviously, you know, reaching out to contacts and, and talking to people who've done the stuff. before or something like it before to get to learn some lessons but then also you know some of this is a lesson it seems in in as you mentioned you know kind of keyword is a resilience are just like look I don't know what I'm doing but I'm just going to go and take the next step and figure it out

okay now let's see if I could do this better and figure out the next thing and I think that's just such a key part of you know any successful entrepreneur story business story is just like I don't know what I'm doing I'm going to do the next thing and and and one of the things that, you know, Ilan prides himself on his ability to kind of like recognize talent and bring in talent. And, you know, your, your story came up in that context because it's, it's not about necessarily the specific skill set. Like, I know how to ship and manage logistics. It's this, this sort of mindset and attitude of like, all right, I'm going to get things done. And is that, is that, does that feel like, do you see that in other people that he's hired? Do you see that as a

trend is yeah it's it's probably a detriment to our company actually that we all operate that way and I think to that still to this day it's the startup mentality right it's that like you're gonna at all cost figure out how to do it even though you have no idea and then later on you discover okay it's not my job anymore to be the smartest person in the room I need to now find smarter people at at these things to replace what I'm doing but when you're in the early days yeah you have to just kind of figure it out and and learn by making mistakes and learn what worked and it's exciting. I mean, I love that part of a company because every day is new and every day there's a new

challenge. And I think we also, we still operate that way a little bit. And it's because of how Alan and I kind of built the company. It's like this fail fast mentality, which I think is super helpful early on. And then later you learn that, okay, we now need to focus and actually. need to build some process because you can't you can't grow a company like that forever um but it's uh it's the such an exciting rush honestly like i would it feels those days feel like yesterday because so much has happened but also it was so exciting yeah so i i guess i i really want to get

dig into that that that transition phase right so there's a fail fast but your your company launched massively successful out of the gate with its first product at record-setting success. So does that, in what ways did you fail? What ways, what were the things that you were failing fast and how are you recovering from those things in those early days? And then at what point did you then decide, hey, maybe this type of failure is not good anymore.

We got to operationalize and tell us. So, I mean, a little mistake that I recall, which is a big one when you're thinking about an individual product, is we learned how to write rules, which in a game is very, very critical, obviously. nobody likes to read rules. I mean, most people don't like to read rules.

So it's helpful if you can watch them or somebody knows how to play a game. But I remember the first set of rules that Alon gave me for exploiting kittens. And it was like, you know, on a note card that was like this big. And like, I think it may be front and back. And I read it and I was like,

I have a lot of questions. I have no idea how to play this alone. And so we learned over iteration after, I mean, thousands. it was like in the early days you spend so much time and focus on you know the one thing you're making so which we had to so we learned that yes a no card size we wanted them to be brief but that was not that was a little too brief um and so over the years we've learned yet you have to play test and play test and play test and i think uh we need to probably scale back a little bit in

terms of how long our rules are today but there's clearly a balance between comprehension and like is someone going to get through this much text in terms of bigger things that we've learned, just I wish I could go back to my younger self and remind myself that like to slow down is to scale faster. Like focus is so important. And it's in a in a startup and it's someone that like Alon and I, personality type, we love speed. And speed, I think feel, it's like a good.

drug. It feels like success. And when you're scrappy and agile, it's like the rush that you get. But what I've learned over the years is clarity is really how we, when we untapped scaling, it was when we got very crystal clear on what our mission was. And sometimes it came by force. Like COVID forced us to scale with our core business and in games because we had no other no other option at the time. But we tried to do, there was a point where we were trying to do puzzles and different websites to launch games and plush toys and t-shirts and like all different types of products. And some of those had moderate success. But we ended up learning is like we really need to focus on what our actual business is. Because if we don't focus on our actual

business, there someday could be no business. And so that was a good lesson, I think, as we grew over the past 10 years. And so what, how did you figure out that clarity? Was it just that you tried a bunch of different product types and a bunch of different categories and none of them had the success that the games did? And so you said that, you know what, let's just double down on games. Was that what it looked like? Yeah. I mean, it's, it happened.

There was a lot of before COVID, you know, you, we were looking at, for example, we launched a line of puzzles and we were like, we're so clever. We have all this funny art and puzzles are so easy. They're just cardboard. like it's just like games but easier there's no rule set like we can do this and uh it was a tough category to break into because it's a it's all about like the quickness that you can iterate on trends so in the puzzle business there's every couple months there's new new images that come out and that was the speed to market for us was a bit of a challenge and also we i think underestimated

we were trying to innovate this category and there was like a thing 3D puzzle line that someone was doing and someone else was building like different objects and you know there was like magic hidden within puzzles and I think everybody kind of thought like okay the puzzle business is growing because everyone's direct COVID everyone stuck at home but um I think we underestimated like the the core puzzler there's a reason why you know hot air balloons and sunsets on the beach are popular right like it's therapeutic for folks and our line was I think and funny, but didn't move the needle and we didn't have the scale to continue to push it forward. And at the time, it was a lot of work for us. Like, it's just an image, but like the

concept of what we wanted to put into it was taking a lot of bandwidth when it was taking away from games. And so there was multiple examples of that. And over time, we just learned that, you know, we got to focus on this core business we have because it's, it's big enough of a business. Yeah, there was an interesting, I don't know if this is the same for you guys. When I was talked to Peter Atkinson, the founder of Wizards of the Coast, and he had this line that really stuck with me where it was like, listen, I can't, like, even if I have a business that's making like $10 million a year, the staff I put to that should be put to

magic that's going to make a billion dollars a year. And that's not a good idea for even a profitable business line within a company, which again, for me, like, I'm, you know, I'm a small business owner, a $10 million a year thing is great. I would love that. But like for a company at your scale, it's not, you actually need to kill those things aggressively, which is a really fascinating and counterintuitive result. Yeah. I wish that we had done. I wish we killed things sooner in those days because it does. And it escalates, right? Like you think it's just you, like Alon and I are just brainstorming an idea and then we want to go concept it and then we want to have an artist do something. And then we need

to sample it. And then we need to have somebody ship the sample to us. And then now you've logistics people involved. And then you have someone that you're like, okay, it's good enough. Let's try to sell it. And then you have the sales team involved. So it kind of snowball effects across the whole company. And we, I think, learned that a little too late and have since been really laser focused and much better at thinking about what's the return on this investment and what's the effort that we're going to put into it. And sometimes you can't convince Alon. It's like he's got a creative of a day.

He's got to go try it. So I'm not always a success, but, and that's good because that's also brought some great ideas to life. But I try to focus us as much as we can. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, put me in the room there if you can as well, right? Like this is, I think this is a perennial challenge for anybody that's trying to run a business of like, hey, there's the, let's calculate the ROI of the given business unit and try to make

the decision based on some metrics that we can track. And that's great. But also like, you know, when you're trying to innovate and you're trying to build something new and you're trying to go zero to one, you know, there's not, metrics are made up. Like, let's be honest. Like there's not a, there's not, you're just guessing, right? And so what, what, what do you, how do you navigate that? How do you decide what does your conversation with Ilan look like and what's what yeah like put me in the room as you can i think it depends on like what project we're talking about um i we have even though both of us come from some type of digital background we don't do collectively i'm talking about as a company and and the two of us we don't do that well with

digital products um at this company so and we've tried several like making our own mobile apps we ended up having to help get someone to commission those for us, adding digital components to physical games, building different kinds of websites with different features, whether it's, you know, collecting consumer data or spitting out something like code or a gift or bonus content or something. Like Alon loves to iterate with those kinds of ideas. And I think we've learned over the years that we're not that good at those things on a scale, basically. And so it depends on what the idea is. If it's a physical game and a partnership that's a new partnership, for example, like

the Tim Ferriss game that we did, or we did a game with Jeff Probst, we did a survivor license game, those were all kind of new ways of working, new ways to collaborate, but it resulted in some type of physical product that we were putting out. And those were great tests because it was a new way to bring a game to a market. And that's, well, some of the, there's always a learning hurdle with something new. Something, you know, you've not done this deal before or how is it going to work co-publishing a game or is this how, what's the approval process going to be? Those type of experiments, those are both new ideas for us. They tied back to our core business.

But when it was something that tied to a digital product, it just took, we spent a lot of money, either hiring somebody. and not being able to direct them properly. And so I would basically use that lens when I started, when we worked more together about which things to allow innovation and allow Alon's, you know, creative mind to run loose and test and learn. Or be like, okay, I need to come in and try to, you know, try to put, try to end this because it's going to result in too many internal or external resources.

And then there's also the lens of what is my team saying? You know, what is the, what is the team around us asking for? and if they are you know we have a lot of even resilience and adaptability on our team just given that most of them most of the core team had been with us for I don't know almost 10 years also so they've seen a lot of these crazy ideas we've pulled off and when they come to me and they say Kelly will say who leads my creative team this is going to I'm really worried about this like I'm worried that we're going to be able to pull this off that's when I also know okay I need to go talk to him about

this bandwidth wise is going to be hard so I don't know if that answered your question but no it does and there's no easy answer right and there's a lot of like little threads here right because like I mean you you guys have innovated on a variety of like interesting components with games

and like you know the the packaging where you put like fur on a packaging or you'll put like some kind of little burrito that you throw inside of a thing and like it's not just like make it because like you know exploded kittens to some degree is like as easy a product as you could make right it's just cards in a box and that's it but you've done you're like nope we're not going to stop there we're going to make all kinds of

weird stuff and like that so so you know you clearly are are tolerant of of some uh i would say all those games that you all those games that you mentioned the ones of you have been most successful at came to birth because one of the creatives usually it was mad or lawn um had a very clear vision and they were not trying to create something because a customer asked us to. I think that is another mistake that we've gotten into and still are into this day where we're developing for a specific retailer versus a consumer. And all of those products were some wacky idea, whether they're internal ideas or came from an external inventor, that somebody was like, ooh, I have a good idea. Like, let's put burritos in the box.

and let's show them through, you know, the front of it because we need to show the characters and what's inside. Or this game is poetry for Neanderthals. This game is taboo. But what would be really funny is if we included an inflatable bat that you have to hit each other with while you try to give guess and give clues. And I think every time we've had a home run, it's not been a forced product.

It's been something that someone was creatively inspired by and there was a champion that got it over the finish line every single time. Yeah. Yeah, no, that tracks with me. I found that, you know, the projects that I make because I think it's what the market wants or what I could sell into a mass channel have not generally been successful. But the ones that I'm like, nope, I really love this thing. And I think this would be great to typically do well.

And it's a really interesting lesson I have to kind of keep relearning. So that makes sense. It's a hard circle to, like, to, I don't know if that's the right, but it's, it's a loop that you get stuck in because you have to, when you're a company our size, you have to continue, like, iterate and make new products because they don't all work. And sometimes there are great ones and other times you're like, this could have been better, you know? Yeah. And it's a challenge of scaling. Yeah. And so there's, so let's let's, let's pick apart this and I'll give you a couple of different angles that.

seem interesting to me, right? One is the, you know, how do you build the sort of institutional resilience to that kind of like failure and learning process? And part of that, I'm sure, is that you hire for that, right? That's one side, but maybe there's more to it. Two is, you mentioned that there's a, you know, this challenge of your, you and Alon deciding to like explore an idea has all these ripple effects throughout the company and like creates these waves, right? which is something I can relate to and that like I've learned I have to be a little bit more careful as like

CEO than I am as like core game designer to like shut up and not not just share everything that comes to my head right I've got to like because if I say something it just it leads to all this disruption and I have to be very conscious about it

like so maybe there's how how do you handle that and then the third thing and you could pick any one of these or all these if they're of interest is you mentioned you're taking in the feedback from your team and getting the vibe from your team on like when something's too hard and do you have formal processes for that or like how you know how do you how do you manage your information flow down how do you manage your information flow up and how do you train resilience throughout the company or the three threads i would love to pick whichever you want

yeah i mean yes you we definitely have hired just to scale and grow and like the the structure that we're building is you know hiring people and in the beginning we hired just friends or friends of friends or, you know, we'd have a job posting, but we weren't necessarily looking for experts in the industry. I don't actually think, I can't recall hiring anybody from games until probably like five, six years in, which is, I guess, a little bit strange. And I think sometimes we had the attitude of like having no back, no, not baggage, but like historical knowledge or experience in the industry,

kind of gave us a competitive advantage because we didn't know what we didn't know. And now looking back on some of these decisions we're trying to make today, I'm like, yeah, there's a like, once you have more information, you're like, oh, no, we tried that and it failed or no, someone else did that and it didn't work. Like it really, you know, restricts you and trying to just try things because you don't know any better. So we kind of, you know, we're proud that we didn't have a lot of, I think, as industry experts. But then we got to a critical point where we needed to expand internationally or we needed some people

to actually help Alan make games and we needed some salespeople or we needed marketing people to help us figure out the social media hooks and so we ended up hiring very specifically from really amazing talent across the business to get us to the stage that we're in now. We hired this amazing gentleman

I think you might know him, Yuri who is our, like, head of international, and he helped us build out that infrastructure overseas. And today, international business is about 30% of our business from zero, you know. So it was a true learning, I think, like, when to source internally and when to source externally. I still struggle today with, like, on the creative front, especially, like, theming and art. Like, do you want people from games? Do you want people not from games? Like, there was a mix, of course, on our team.

But it's always an interesting conundrum for me because we're trying to be different. I think I forgot the rest of your question. No, so you talked about hiring and resilient, you know, in the context of sort of resilience of growing the company. But I also, I think it's worth staying here. And then we'll get to the other parts about I'm not communicating up and down the But for this, like, hiring and scaling has always been fascinated to me. So how many people does, how big is your company now?

We have about 70 people today. Yeah, distributed across the country and some international. And so the, you know, hire smart friends, hire and filter for people you know are resilient. And this is another one of the advantages of like, you know, work you hate is the, yeah, you mentioned it. but I didn't reemphasize it, that, like, you find the people that you can rely on. Like, I, my, my first, my first, like, game design job was at Upper Deck in San Diego, and, like, there was a lot of problems with that company.

Like, now legally documented problems, like, very, like, very bad situation for a lot of reasons. But I learned the people that I could rely on that when the shit was hitting the fan, these are the people who really care about making a good product. These are people who are not just going to cover their ass, but actually, like, you could rely on to get things done and move forward. And those were exactly the people I hired when I started by company. Those were exactly the people I partnered with down the road. And so there's a lot of value there.

So that's like the kind of low-hanging fruit like requiring, you know, recruiting. And you know them, you validated them, you've added them, that you've got a relationship. But then once you're scaling beyond the friends and friends of friends, like I've never, I have single digit people I've hired that didn't come from that network. that have worked out successfully. Like, it's very hard. So how do you succeed at that scale?

Like, what happens there? I mean, we have a more rigorous, I would say it's not super rigorous, but we have a more rigorous hiring process now. I'm a really big, we are big fans of Patrick Lencioni over here. So I don't know if you've ever read any of his leadership books. But he has several that coach you on how to interview, how to do like extreme referencing. And so I think.

It depends on the role, but the attributes he talks about in some of these books are more soft skills than they are hard skills. And I find that you can usually do a pretty good job of sussing out somebody's hard skills through, you know, can they technically do the job through some kind of case study or tests that you want to give them when you're hiring, but or through extreme referencing, like making sure that you're asking the right questions, check. beyond the references that they're giving. But the soft skills are much harder to get through in a 30-minute, hour, two-hour, whatever interview. And so we have all these, like, different questions that we have listed in documents that basically are trying to get us to determining is somebody smart, not intelligent from like an IQ standpoint, from like a people like EQ standpoint like is this person an asshole sorry can I say that word yeah yeah yeah yeah this person jerk um and so smart hungry and humble are the three words that we're looking

for and we want to have all three of those um and once we started looking at hiring from that lens it also allowed us to look internally and be like okay are these like the values that we're attributing when we're reviewing people for performance. We want to make sure that you're not just good at your job, but that you are a decent person and an enjoyable person to work with. This is a team for a reason. It's not about a singular individual. And so I think that really helped us figure out the type of culture and the type of leadership and the type of people we wanted on our team. And it might sound basic, but it's really, really hard to find. It's really hard to suss out. And I try to every year or two, like reiterate it with my team on like the qualities

that we're looking for. Because sometimes you're just like, this person's great. They have their resume. It's got all of these things. They've got CPG. They've got big company. They've got startup. They've got it all. And that is not enough for me. That is not enough because one toxic person disrupts the entire company. It is 100% true. I've seen it time and time again. And so I'd rather have someone has less experience, honestly, for the job, but is like a better teammate than somebody who checks all the boxes. And yeah, I think at some point you realize, you know, we had we had an accounting team for a while that was like Alon's personal, you know, finance person. Like they're not, they're not as equipped to managing millions of

of units of inventory throughout the world and how to track it and the depreciation value and overstock and all of that. So eventually you kind of learn the hard way through either audits or whatever financial ups and downs. But like, you know, you really got to clean up some areas and make sure that you're hiring the right expertise. So yeah, I don't know if I can tell you like what stage is the good stage to stop hiring friends and start hiring experts. But I can say that the, you probably will learn, you'll probably learn the answer too late. Okay.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I think you should feel the pain of, like, you know, of hiring, you know, before you, like, have to go down that road. Like, I always feel like, you know, you want to be like, I want to be like 10% understaffed at any given time. Like, I'd rather, like, be in a world where we all have to, like, push to make things happen than a world where, you know,

we're overstaffed or overhead starts to become more of an issue where you're just like, you know, yeah. So there's a certain degree, you know, where I think that's important. And, you know, this is from running a company where I've made the mistake on the other side and, you know, overhead didn't keep up. And that's not a good place to be. Yeah. So, so I just before I move on from this topic, because I had not heard of Patrick Lencioni,

but I'm intrigued if there was a book or starting point or something from that person or a key lesson from them that you would just leave us with so I can, the audience can follow up. My favorite book by Patrick Lincione is the ideal team player. So that's where they talk about the different attributes of team dynamics. There's another really good book that he writes called Death by Meeting, I'm sure we've all been there. Which just talks about like the types of meetings. I mean, especially during COVID and after COVID, I feel like every company has got this like, you know remnants of all of these little meetings that we had and we still do given like this hybrid world that we're working in and are those meetings generating the outcome that is desired

most of the time they're not most of the time one person's talking the whole time and everyone else is emailing or whatever they're doing and it's not driving the business for it so um he's the reason i like lencioni is they're really short the books that he writes are short and they're all fables. So there's some fake story that he tells you. And it just helps you remember like, you're like, oh, that guy, that Ted guy. He was a jerk in that book. And so like you learn the lesson. So it's not just a heavy dialogue script that's like, feels textbooky. And that's one of my big fan of his. Great. Okay, cool. Thank you. I like, yeah, having new, new rabbit holes to dive down myself. Okay. So then the other, the other threads I left you that we could go

down. If not, I'm going to jump to Netflix is how you manage your communication or lack or preventing the kind of the infection of random idea from you or Alon, you know, rippling through the company or how do you manage that? Or vice versa, how do you best ensure that you still take the pulse of a company, right? Because once you grow, you know, you're 20 people, maybe even as many as 30. Like, you kind of know everybody you can kind of get a sense of what's going on one you're 70 that's way out the window so how do you manage you know learning when there's a there's there's problems in the company or people aren't happy with something and how you manage that up so either either up or down communication if you've got anything there then we'll talk about that or we can move on to

netflix stuff um so the up or down communication i think the you know taking the pulse of the company and like how do you know whatever there's a problem there's not a problem. I think that's probably an easier one for me. I think it's all about the people under you. Like there's a leadership team that surrounds me and took me a long time to figure out that I don't need to do everything myself.

I am proud of the fact that I started, you know, as a producer and then built my way up to all these other rules. So I did almost every job, not that I was an expert in them, but I started in supply chain production to sales to some creative element to market. was really bad at that, to accounting and finance was also terrible at that, to some people or HR roles. And I think it made me learn a lot about what I don't want to do individually,

but also how to find the right people to do those jobs. And it took me a little time to figure out that I really don't need to do them all myself. Like the job is about, you know, delegation and empowering the team around you. And for someone like me who is a tried and two perfectionist and I'm not saying that that's a good thing necessarily at all. It really, I think, holds a lot of leaders back from growth. You fear that everything has to be, like, everything has to be perfect. And it's not about being perfection. It's not being about being perfect.

It's about moving forward and making sure the team knows what good enough looks like. Like, we're in a startup environment. We don't have time for everything to be spell checked in emails, for example. Let's try to make sure the rules are spell checked and not spell accommodate wrong, which I'll never forget was our spelling error in the front of Exploding Gitt in the box years ago when we made a million units. We missed an M. But it's about building the team around you and trusting them to understand when to elevate things. And it sounds so basic and so simple, but it is so difficult to do and to do well and then to live. by that script, right?

You have to let your team make some decisions sometimes, and you're like, well, that wasn't the one I would make, but that's how they learn just the way that I did when I was learning the space. So trust your team and let them fail. Yeah, I can relate to both how true this is and how freaking hard it is. Like I am, there are so, because you're like, you literally think they're doing the wrong thing you know better you should this is the thing you could just tell them what to do but if you do that you're crippling your team and and and every now and then it turns out they were right and you

were wrong i mean it's rare in my case obviously but every now and then they are uh but it's but it's how they learn right and then and then and then then being empowered is a is a key to you growing as a leader and you being able to like move on and handle more things and increase your your kind of zone of control and what types of things you can do. Yeah. Yeah. Do you set any, you know, are there any specific metrics or do you use like KPI's to measure performance?

Is there any like, how do you like know if they're doing a good job or a bad job or you just once you've hired them, you've got to trust them assuming things that the wheels don't come off the wagon. Yeah, I wish that was true. Sometimes, I mean, sometimes the numbers speak for themselves. So like if someone's a sales, you're like, okay, it's very visible what that you're delivering, right? but it's not just about short-term performance.

In fact, you know, you can have years where you're like, ooh, you know, this is going to be a tough next year to comp or like, am I, is this person just driving and not thinking about the long term, like we're going to have to grow this business next year. So let's think about, you know, is this the right move, whether we're going to have overstock inventory or whatever the situation is. But no, the principle that we live by and that I feel like is one of the best lessons I learned just through like professional coaching is two-way feedback. We are very, very adamant and big on, um, you know, not, uh, sweeping it under the rug. It's, it is the easiest thing to do is

just, you know, okay, well, someone made a mistake. I'm too uncomfortable to talk to them about what happened. And so, um, I'm just going to let this one slide. And then eventually something blows up and you just can't control yourself because you're so mad. We should never get to that point. That is lessons, by the way, learned from Hollywood, which was, I don't know, that there was any productive feedback in my assistant days. And, you know, you have to just learn by doing and no one's really coaching you. And that's not okay with me. We have regular one-on-ones with managers and direct reports every week.

And they're not just like, okay, how's the expense report going? Or did you deliver the sample to the retailer on time? No, it's like, how are you showing up at your job, at your communication, at your soft skills? Where do you need help? What are the growth objectives that you have? And we get into like really sticky conversations that when you first started, it feels uncomfortable. And then once you are able to have more of them, you developed a trusting relationship with the other person. And it should go both ways. Like, it's not like I'm the only one giving the feedback. Like, I can also be an asshole. So please tell me if I'm, you know, showing up below the line, which means like,

you know, you're at your worst. You're operating from fear. You, yeah, you know, you're treating someone with disrespect. Like, we all make mistakes. We all mess up. I think it's the important part is like when we can own up and apologize and own your stuff, like own the stuff that you want to grow at because, you know, I didn't get here by just knowing that I was right. all along. Like I got here from making a lot of mistakes and people telling me that I could be a jerk. And is there some specific structure to these one-on-ones? And you seem really nice to me, just so you know. I have that. But the, the, so that both, is there like a structure of the one-on-ones, like a series of questions that you ask or a specific way that

you do it to get to evoke this? How do you create this with a, you know, your, In reverse, too, it's a lot of times very hard for a direct report to give you critical feedback on your, on your, you know, on their boss or whatever. So how do you build that? What makes that work? I think it comes from leadership top down, first of all. Like the executives or the leadership team, whoever's running the company, need to, you know, live it.

They need to exhibit it and show it and talk about it. we actually hired somebody several years ago to coach everybody. So there was like a leadership level session and then there was a individual contributor session. So everybody was coached on how to have productive one-on-ones and what that looks like. And what kinds of we did, you know, we had like sample questions because it can be uncomfortable, right? And I think once you educate the whole team on how.

you expect them to show up and that this is the norm that we expect people to challenge their leaders and vice versa, it becomes more commonplace. But, you know, it's not perfect by any means. Like it's, it's almost like, you need to have a regular reminder. In fact, this is reminding me that we need to do this again this year as I'm talking to you. Yeah. Yeah. No, and this is, this is, I mean, first of all, that principle is important to emphasize for everybody that's listening, right? It's like none of this is perfect. whenever you build these processes and systems and values, they decay by default. So you have to refresh them and re-recognize when they're not serving you anymore.

Like that is a never-ending process. You know, I've been doing my company for 15 years. You guys have been doing this for 10. It doesn't change. It doesn't change. It doesn't change out of your scale, your size, or whatever. Leadership is repetition. Somebody told me that, that leadership is repetition one time.

I don't remember what book that was in. But it is such a tried and true. because you're like, sometimes I'm like, I said this. Does it know one listening to me? Like I said this thing. It's like people are doing 100 things. Like you have to repeat it over and over again because, you know, we're so busy. And with like, you know, distractions and technology, like you're listening to somebody on a Zoom meeting.

And like, you know, you missed the nuance and the details of what they're saying. So we have to repeat it over and over. I agree. Yeah. And I think that that the, I think it was Danny Meyer, the guy that created a six-jacks, I talked about that that he'll constantly create like repetitions and like mantras and like rhyming reminders and things like to get it over and over and over again. In order for something to be a value, you have to like hammer it home over and over and over and over again. So that that makes sense.

And then you said you got you had sample questions and that you had everybody coached. Was this like a specific like like a leadership or a landmark thing or is it? What is there some specific set of this or just changes? We use this woman, I forget what her company is called, but her name is Nicole Sanchez. And she was a coach, or she was a teacher for one of my employees at Berkeley. And I met her on a Zoom call. This was when we were all remote. So it was like during COVID.

And we were looking for ways to bring, you know, the team together and also teach. And so it was one of the best sessions we ever had. she gave us um i think she's i think she's still doing it um she gave us like a it's a very simple worksheet that was like asking people questions like what were some quick wins this week what are your blockers what feedback do you did i give you what feedback do you have for me and then at the very bottom of the whole worksheet i remember is a section called vacation time question mark like when are you going to take your time off because i think um us and Americans, like we live to work, you know, we're just, all we're doing is working all the

time. And if you are, you know, you need to set the expectation that like, yes, it's good to take time off. But even sometimes that's not enough for the team, especially if they're just so dedicated to a mission or to a project or whatever. So, Nicole Sanchez, she was a lifesaver and cannot recommend her more. Yeah. Great. Okay, fantastic. Thank you for that. And I really do feel like this is like a little mini leadership masterclass. We got going on here. So it's fantastic. So now I want to tie a couple other threads together here because one, you know,

you talked about really focusing in on the stuff that you're good at and letting go of puzzles and shirts and various other random prod digital games. And then you decided to make a Netflix show about with exploded kittens. So that feels like a little bit of a diversion, but it's also really cool. I mean, I have been wanting to do like a little animated series of my Game Ascension forever. I've gone down and had some conversations with different folk, but it never kind of goes anywhere. So talk me about that decision, that process, like, what made this thing come to life? Yeah.

So it definitely is a departure. I mean, being as a company founded in L.A., I think we were always on a train to try to make some kind of video content from whatever we created. And Exploding Kittens was uniquely positioned, you know, there's a lot of games, I think, with character-driven IP, but at the time, there wasn't a ton. I'm trying to think of another one off the top of my head. So we knew that there was like a world that we could build and there was like a tone and like a vibe to the to the game that we could probably try to translate or that it might be

interesting to watch. And Matt is a illustrator and online comic. And so it lended itself pretty well to like an adult animation style. Um, so it was always like a, it was always on the back of our minds. I don't, it took us a long time to get to that point. I mean, the company's 10 years old. And for the first five years, we were like, should we do this? How do we this? Matt wasn't that excited because he couldn't really think up like a storyline. And then we took on a minority investment from an L.A. private equity growth capital firm called the Churning Group back in 2019. And Peter Ternan used to run Fox. And so has, you know, is one of the most noteworthy people in the entertainment business. And he had a first look deal, I think,

at the time, or was just starting one with Netflix. And so helped us kind of put the whole structure together. He, you know, I would like to say that this was really difficult and it was to get to this point, but like once he came to into the partnership, he unlocked a lot of doors with the name and then introduced us to Greg Daniels, Parks and Rec and Mike Judge, you probably know from Silicon Valley, Beavis and Butthead, and they were starting a animation house together, production company together and so them partnered with Matt who just really wanted to get into more longer form content he'd been writing short form videos he worked on some um animation with

he worked on life of pets with illumination and some other stuff so had gotten a taste of that business had really wanted to kind of create something and so the challenge we had was like the game there's a kind of a universe but there's all these like non-sequentual jokes and characters that don't really like translate across cards basically like these cards have characters on them like Taco Cat is one of the characters or

zombie cat or caterpillan there's a lot of fruits apparently in foods that are cats foods and cats are pretty yeah I've noticed a theme in Matthew's work but yeah he's uh he's just inspired by I don't know what anthropomorphic cats I guess anyway

so he um he was trying to figure out like what world they can live together and nothing really made sense and so he basically created something new and the show was I mean I don't know how he thinks of these things like this is this is a world in which

I will never be able to do what he and Alon do with like they birth these crazy wacky ideas and I'm like where did you come up with that and it's so brilliant and it's just not a side of my brain that I have so I will stick over here to the operational boring things that you say are not boring but um are much more boring than that and he yeah he was just inspired to make something that turned our you know flat two-d thing into something that was um had a world

and character behind it and he really ran with it and i think uh the the lesson that the thing that we were at the time we were really excited i mean it's a it's fantastic to get a show on netflix right like what a triumph um to think the things that we learned are was there enough tying back into the universe i don't know how we would have done it like to you know to translate back to physical games is that doable or not um would it have helped us with marketing maybe uh and it's also you know you there's so much content i mean every day there's more stuff being released whether be in Netflix or Amazon or Paramount or whatever. So there's just so much that lives in the world.

And I think one of my questions is like should we have started with even more short form like YouTube content before going all the way to a TV series? I mean, I don't regret anything that we did. I just think it's the there's some questions on like the sequencing of when where we got to from today to then. Yeah, yeah. It's always interesting. I mean, yeah, as you mentioned, of course, getting this thing made and

having an existed all huge triumph but when you think about it from the business perspective you know that it doesn't sound like it moved the needle a ton on on physical product sales you know the question is where does that land you know and i went through this i don't remember how many years ago it was now quite a few we had ascension was a major part of a the major motion picture called the good boys uh which is a set rober produced thing and we were a huge part of that that that movie and i was like oh my god this is it this is amazing we're blowing up now We're in a theater. I got my name of the credits.

And this is going to be so cool. Like near zero impact on sense. Like, none. Like, just couldn't have mattered less. Cool. Really excited. Glad I was a part of it. And that's nothing.

Very similar, very similar experience. And, you know, this is something that takes five years to make. I don't know if it should have taken that long because there was COVID in the middle of it and think writer strikes and things like that. But yeah, it's a huge undertaking. And I think I'm still trying to figure out, like, what are the right layers? You know, you start, you build this community and they really like your product. And how do you translate that to, you know, a lifestyle brand or a consumer brand?

Or like, what are the stages and steps that you take from where you are in your core category space to becoming more broad? Yeah, it's a big challenge. But it's a fascinating problem to solve. Well, let's let's talk about that, then, because I think there's a, you know, the question of like, what do you want, right? Like what, you know, you've got, you've, you've reached a level of success that most people only dream about. You're, you're, you've conquered the world with this with crazy products that you could just create whatever the heck you want. And now and and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and there's now you, you, you want, you want, you want to be a lifestyle brand. We want to be something that's everywhere, you know, everything everywhere, you know, everything everywhere all at once. You took in investment, like a lot of investment for major players in the space and that game now, I assume that there's a board that you have to answer to in some form or another. And there's different, you know, that like you're trading some of that freedom and that creativity.

The thing that you mentioned was like the joy of a startup and the fast movement and do whatever you want for these, you know, these bindings of a variety of different types that let you scale. But like, what is it that you want? And how do you talk about this with Alon? How do you make these kinds of decisions? You could do whatever you want, but why this? Why what? You know, why next?

I think Alon's first, I remember the first email he sent me, by the way, before I even started, he said, it was like, it was titled Slat Machine. And he said, can we figure out how to make exploding kittens into a slot machine? And that was all he wanted from like the first, and we still never, we did not do it. So we failed. I feel with that. But he, it was very passionate about. It's not too late. making swan machines.

And I think from the beginning of the company, we had very big, like, ambitions to, you know, the ultimate dream, I think, was to have our own theme park. Like, not a ride in a theme park, but, like, we have our own theme park. So that's where I think we still want to go. Are we going to get there? I don't know. But, yes, you're right.

Like, you take on investment. You take on boards. And there's, you know, expectations for, more and um you have to constantly be battling with like not exploiting the brand in the wrong way you know not taking short term bad decisions just to make a buck like we're not in the business to do that at all but i think we still want to see these characters live on right i mean the world is so unique and weird and i really do feel like it's so evergreen um the uh this the the characters and like just the the stories and these one panel you know jokes that matt has

created are um universal i think in terms of demographic gender age i mean you probably don't want your five year old but looking at them but like you know there is this like touching weird but like softness about what he creates that is so relatable so i think there's i don't know exactly the right steps to get there it's something that we're still figuring out and I think right now we're exploring, like, what kind of partnerships do we want to take, whether it be video content, whether it be other categories, whether it be just expanding into different countries, right? Expleting Kittens is the company's name, but it's also the core franchise.

And so I think the element that we want to make sure we pay the most attention to, that back to my focus lesson earlier, that I think even within our own category of games, we have lost some track, some focus on is exploding kittens because it is how we, it's started the company and it is the company. And if we lose that, you know, ultimately you lose the company. And so that is our current mission and focus. And we'll still be making burritos and, you know, Neanderthals and happy salmons and whatever. But we really want to, you know, make sure we're doing justice to the brand into this this universe that we've created that's so beloved by us internally and by the community that got us here so yeah no that makes sense and i just so i have a sense of it like

what's like in terms of breakdown of like how much of the company you know current kind of sales revenue is exploded kittens and its derivatives versus other stuff yeah so exploding kittens is probably a little less than half of the overall company um And that includes not just like the original game, but we've got, you know, the zombie kittens and the clothing kittens, yeah, a lot of different expansion packs and bundles and stuff like that. And so there's a board game that just came out this season. Um, so that includes like all of that, all of that content together. Okay. And so what does what does, what does, what does, when you say you want to, you know, really focus on that brand, what does that look like then? Is that,

Does that mean it's it's growing to be 70% of the business? Does that mean it's just required, it just has a plan? Is it what is, what is, what is growing, putting focus on that mean? There's definitely some dollar goals that we have. I don't know that the, the ratio of the entire business is, I guess, necessarily, I would like the whole thing to grow. I would like it all. Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Do you want every, all bigger? But I want it all, right? Remember back to focus? This is why. Yeah, yeah. This is why it's so difficult, right? I'm like internally battling with it myself. so I think it really comes down to like honestly internal like we need one person internal that

just owns it like big companies have these brand or franchise managers we don't have that setup so we want to start by trying to like orchestrate a setup where the the team is driven by individual or internal performance goals around the brand whether that be sales by channel or by geo or by skew type or whatever but We also, going back to your Netflix question, I do feel strongly that video has something to do with it. I think that like you watch social media, right, these influencers that we follow you, right? We watch online because we're curious about the archetype or the character or what are they going to do? Are they going to get married?

Oh my gosh. They broke up. Oh, my gosh. Now they're having a little dog in Paris. I'm referring to somebody that I follow clearly. So anyway, so you're invested. you're invested in like their life and what they're doing similar to you know scripted content and these characters that you see that we've created that we have names for and visuals and

they've got little side quests and things so i do feel strongly that like video has something to do with um the affinity that you have for something for a character brand or whatever um it's all this narrative that we're like you know obsessed with this this this stream of content. And so I do think that there's something coming in the future, probably more on a short form basis, you know, like minutes, not, you know, hours long. And I think that is probably the next stint that we'll do with E.K., the franchise. I don't know where. I don't know when. And I'm just invested in building these worlds up to, you know, see where that takes us. I wish I had some long-term grand plan that I'm like year one is this and year two is this and

year three is this and I don't know we we have we're getting better at thinking more long-term but I also don't want to force the creative to just you know be scripted out because I feel like then we'll get less genuine content and I'm not just talking about video I'm just talking generally like the plans we're always going to make games we're always going to have you know sequels to exploding kittens coming out but um what form it takes in the future i would like it to happen more exploratory than than forced i guess sure that makes sense and um just because uh you know we're talking about video creation and content creation stuff and this has been top of mind for me is that the you know i see i see i see ai videos flooding my feed now and uh that that process is taking

over. Do you have any thoughts on how AI is influencing the future of the creative business or have you guys incorporated anything or experimented with that at all? I mean, this is a world in which, you know, I am no expert at all. I'm like, I use AI every day, but I use it as like a resource tool. Like, how, you know, did this thing do? Or I want to look up games or I want to look up, you know, information about something that I'm stuck on. we do use it. We use it for like rule vetting and, um, it actually been super helpful in getting us like a first draft of like a rule set because like you take, you know, other rules that we've written and here are the basic outlines of this game. And like, it's never something that

we use ultimately. Um, we have to like edit it and playtest it and et cetera, et cetera. But, um, I don't know. I think that's a hugely powerful tool. And I feel like I'm, you know, an imposter syndrome here trying to like answer this question. Everybody does. It's why I ask it a lot in my in my interviews these days. And I mean, I have had AI experts on the podcast before. But for the most part,

we're all struggling to figure out. And it's evolving so fast. And there's there's ethical considerations with it. But it's obviously very powerful. But it also hits walls where it's really stupid sometimes and like just trying to find that that edge is not easy. I would just like it to tell me if it's lying. Like just all me.

of you don't know the truth. Like, don't make me have to say, I'm sorry. Are you lying right now? Like, that is just. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a very, it's a big, it's a big problem. But I think, I think what I will say is like, I'm not against it. I'm very open to technology, improving our, improving our way of life and our working

conditions, 100%. And I talked to Alon actually a lot about it often because he is, you know, a technology pioneer he's the first person to use whatever the thing is that um becomes available and i always ask him like how are you using this is this ready like and some of his advice to me is like it's in it you know it's all in the prompts it's all in figuring out the exact right prompt to give it and the structure of the output you want and i think that we're going to go through a lot of probably painful learnings over the next however many years in all sorts of industries like attempting to figure out how to use it best and it's exciting but I also feel like someone smarter than me has to kind

of coach me how to how to use it correctly so that yeah well and and what I found is like that that part like the the ease of use part is just getting better and better every day like it used to be a year ago you had to be very very particular with prompting to get any kind of reasonable output and now like yes better prompting helps but it's so much better just like knowing what you want and there's a lot of like tools going on in the background so yeah it's a it's a fascinating space uh you know don't have the answers either just that's why i like to have the conversations no one it's a good question um okay so we're getting we're getting yeah we're getting towards towards the end here so i i think you know listen twice in this conversation uh you described your work as boring uh and i i don't

i want to no i think it's i think it's important to push back right because a lot of people who like you know they they look at the you know oh i'm the the creator the designer the artist, the whatever, and that's like the sexy front-facing roles. But I think, you know, it's come out over the course of this conversation. I think to anybody listening, there's like a lot of really interesting problem solving. There's a lot of interesting learning and growth and things that come from building the game of business correctly and understanding the rules of the game of business. Because you get to make it up.

It really is designing your own game, designing your own universe. And so I think for somebody else, and also frankly, if you want to get into games, right, it's a lot easier if you're willing, you're the kind of person that's willing to do this kind of work because it's less sexy on its face because it's got you know there's that that that's one of the best ways to get into the game industry right you got out of the the Hollywood assistant space to get it to this because of that of that resilience so is there um you know advice that you would have for somebody else out there that that might be suffering as an assistant right now or suffering as a busboy right now and wants to get their uh their foot in the door here like what advice would

you have for someone that maybe was just starting and wanted to kind of get uh potentially following your footsteps. So you're right. And I want to clarify, I have never been bored. So just to state it, I have never been bored in this job. And I think that's what makes it so interesting, sometimes frustrating. But it honestly is it's, it's been an amazing experience for me. Just how much knowledge I've gained and how much learning and things I never thought that I would have to learn, like VAT and how do you manage that with international sales? I don't know. Like just there's hundreds of examples.

Okay, somebody's starting off in maybe games. I think kind of, it goes back to the advice I was telling myself, which is focus. I think you don't need to make, you know, a hundred games. Like I would start with one. Like, I mean, when we when we started, it was explain. exploding kittens, and that was all we did. We focused on this one, this one product for months and months, and it was more than months, it was almost a year, just to figure out, like, how do we do this? Like, I was talking about the index card, that rule set that was on an index card. We obsessed

over that for days and days and days to the point where I was like, Alon, I need to go do something else because I can't read anymore. I'm not learning it. This says the same thing. So I think focus on focus on your game, like your passion. I was talking about the fact that we've never made a game because someone has told us you need a $9.99 card game

to fit on a retailer shop. Like that's never birthed innovation. It's always been someone has an idea, they're passionate about it, they're the champion of it, and they obsess over it, and they watch people play, and they take notes on what people are doing,

and they play it themselves hundreds and hundreds of times because it's like, this is the product you're going to put out in the world and it starts with the product like everything else will come later but ultimately you have to have a good idea you have to have a good concept or someone does and in this case it was a lot in that and then i came on board to do all of the other elements of it um and hired well across the board so i think yeah focus on you just need one to start with um and uh do that really really well and learn as much as you can

Okay, focus on one thing that you're passionate about, play test the hell out of it, learn as much as you can along the way. Those are pretty good tips, I think, whether it be for games or probably any other aspect in life, to be honest. So, Carly, thank you so much for taking the time. This was wonderful. I have a bunch of notes and follow-up reading to do here. So I got a lot of value out of it. I know my audience will. So I look forward to the next time we get to do this hopefully in person.

Thank you so much. You were wonderful. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on.

Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game

designer.com or wherever, find books or sold. You know, Thank you.