YouSaid · the spoken record

Dylan Collins

lines on the record: 126
first: 2019-12-18
most recent: 2019-12-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't want to all the time. I think I feel like I put it out of business. That was my goal when I was like, this is not a business. This is something else. But it was thought to be that it was a really interesting way of distribution of people getting interested in it. But one depended on Facebook and everything was going mobile. That was the idea of it.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was so, as you say, totally Facebook driven. So it was like, how do I get all of my friends into this game And all those various hooks where you would send the messages or you would throw things at them or poke them on Facebook or whatever Facebook and sheep. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Jolt, we did a big Zork game, so we sort of licensed older console games and turned them into social sort of browser type.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. And it was a whole sort of an event, right? And Zynga and all that. It's like Microsoft. Exactly, right. And Zynga were sort of saying, well, hey, we're going to build a game for like $200,000 and we're going to release it in bits and pieces and we're going to iterate and iterate and iterate. So when GameStop bought us, that was...”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They use Facebook. I mean, that was their main platform, and then they shifted everything to mobile when they acquired Natural Motion. But it was fascinating because it kind of wrong-footed so much of the console games industry, which had just been focused on spending $100 million to make a game that you...”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does the future look like? Right. Talk about that, period, because that was an interesting period. Zynga sort of went up and then went down, but they had enormous farm build was obviously one of their biggest. They had a solid, not solitaire, but what was their game that was so popular?”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And figure out, like, okay, kids are going to stop walking in and physically buying games at some point. What does the future look like? Right.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, so then we started, we kind of moved from technology into the actual content. So we were creating free-to-play browser games, sort of around about the same time Zynga was starting to emerge in San Francisco. We were doing the same thing in Europe. So we were building games that people could, it was kind of shifting from these super high production value games on console to games that you could play in a browser. Yeah, exactly. Super quick, free to play everything else. So we were building that, and that ended up being acquired by GameStop, the retailer here, right.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the funny thing is, I grew up in this tiny little village in Ireland. And it was kind of considered pretty embarrassing that I hadn't become like a policeman or a fireman or a farmer or something like that. So it actually took years for my mother to be able to tell the rest of the village that I worked in technology.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One time years ago, Sergei Bryn's mother, right before Google went public, I was at a birthday party for him. And she said, I said, oh, you must be proud of your son. They're about to go public. And he was about to become a billionaire, right? And she's like, I'm very disappointed he didn't finish his PhD. She's a physicist. And I was like, oh, well, okay. You'll have to deal with your failed son.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did finish college. Sean, however, my co founder at the time didn't finish his PhD. His mother is still not forgiven me. But it kind of worked out all right.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's almost Everything is kind of community driven, right? I mean, yeah, there's some sort of siloed stuff, but I think ultimately, you know, humans like to interact with other humans. That's what I've noticed. Everyone's got an inner troll, right? I mean, and you're either expressing it through comments or you're expressing it through shooting someone in a game. Right, right, exactly.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a good call. Right, because you would essentially just play against a game. Right, right, yeah. Which is what a lot of people did. And that was the same way with apps and everything else. And now it's all multiplayer. I think there's almost no game my kid plays. It's not multiplayer.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots and lots of them. So I got a shout out sort of Bobby. I mean, that was a good acquisition that he made at the time. The games publishers didn't make, didn't do a lot of M&A. That was a good call.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right. So, this was like in, I guess, sort of the mid-2000s. And the games industry was sort of shifting from single players where you just sit down and you're kind of playing on your own to the internet getting to a point where people could play games against each other. And what's entirely common today, like Fortnite and everything else, was still pretty new back then. Absolutely. So you didn't have much developer experience and people didn't really know how to make all that stuff work. So we said, hey, let's just build some technology that just focuses on the internet connectivity piece, right? And let the game studios make all the stuff that they're really good at in terms of the visuals and the design and everything else. So basically for all the studios that were then starting to make games on Xbox and PlayStation, that would allow people to play against each other all over the world. They would take our technology and slot that in. It would provide that functionality. And yeah, so we sort of connected people around the world. And that was the start of that whole multiplayer cycle in the game.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all those other things which your son's definitely, though. Yes, they played them all. You still argue over which ones they want to buy. What's the one they have that I don't want to sell them? Grand Theft Auto, are they doing that one?”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not games themselves. So, yeah, it was the tech inside the game. So that got acquired by Activision. It's now the backbone of the Call of Duty franchise and all those other things which your son's definitely known.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. I mean, at the time, Sean, who's my co founder and I, were spending all of our time playing Counter Strike online games instead of going to lectures as is normal. And we realized that more people wanted to do this kind of thing. So we built technology to make it easier to create multiplayer games, to allow people to play against each other on Xbox or PlayStation or whatever.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're a game guy. Yeah, originally a game guy. So I built my first company in college, Trinity College, Dublin. I have a good friend of mine, Sean. We built a company called DemonWare.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's what we started building. Okay, I want to get into that in a second because I have kids and I've watched their usage. It's fascinating to watch it. Games, first starting with apps and games and going on to Minecraft and moving on to watching a lot of videos on YouTube. Now they're older, so I let them watch a lot more, but it is a difficult thing for any parent. We're going to get into that part. And also, let's talk about a little bit about you. You've had a really interesting background as an entrepreneur, sold two companies, is that right? Two companies. One, why don't you go through it? Talk about how you got to this. You're a game guy”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's huge. And not only did you have more and more kids sort of coming online and shifting the tablets and everything else, but you'd have all these privacy laws led by the US and now followed by everyone else. And it's sort of like the global kind of regulation of the Internet for kids, but literally nobody was investing in the tech to actually make that work. So that's what we started building. And sort of today, if you're a developer or a content owner and you're building an app for kids or a service for kids or whatever, the chances are you've got our technology in there powering video, making sure the ads are safe, making sure community's safe, the comments are moderated, all those sorts of things.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sort of. I mean, we started super awesome about six years ago. Fundamentally, because we saw that none of the big technology companies were building infrastructure for what the internet was going to look like in terms of it being driven by kids and the need for privacy technology that wasn't going to track them everywhere.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we better do something about that. Right. So let's talk about your background, and then we'll talk because you guys, you're shifting super awesome in a lot of ways. You're going head to head with YouTube, it seems like in that area.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really is. And now, sort of flash forward to 2019, and kids are like, I mean, almost literally half the internet. And everyone has suddenly going, oh, right, well, we better do something about that.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but Disney are a kid's company, or at least their DNA as a kid's company, right? I think when you go back to the valley and you sort of see how many kind of single people and sort of young founders without kids were building stuff and it just, it didn't occur to people. It's a homogeneous.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I guess for years Silicon Valley sort of pretended that children didn't exist. Right. Yes. I mean, you know, like you hit an age gate and ticked a box saying, yes, I'm over 13 and everyone was perfectly cool with that. Right.”
2019-12-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dylan Collins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source