YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Citron

lines on the record: 119
first: 2022-03-07
most recent: 2022-03-07
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

“Yeah, it was kind of a similar story to what happened with Aurora Faint. Like, you know, we got iPad editor's choice. We got a lot of people downloaded it in that first week.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we ended up then hiring actually up to about 18 people to build the game. And it took us about two and a half years, I think, because that was early, maybe actually it was a year and a half. You're right. Wow. To build it and launch it. But we worked hard, but we didn't crunch a lot. We had pretty good work-life harmony. Had a lot of fun doing it, but we just tried to be smart about it and took a long view on building a great place to work.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were like three of us left, and it was Andy, this fellow that I've mentioned a few times, he ended up joining up, and then Brandon that first guy that I hired. And we were sitting around thinking, do we even want to go do this? Or should we just kind of close up shop and go get jobs somewhere else? Yeah. And we ended up deciding that we didn't want to go get jobs somewhere else and we wanted to take a shot at building our own games company because if we could make a great place to work and collaborate with people that we respected, that would actually be kind of an end in and of itself and good things would probably happen. We all had difficult experiences working in the games industry. So that was actually the moment we renamed the company to hammer and chisel. To really honor the craft of making something.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's complicated making games, but it's interesting because for the first six months of the company, we were kind of noodling around on different prototypes and different ideas. We had like a tower defense concept, a couple different kind of concepts. And then after about six months, we kind of had this interesting moment where I decided we should reinvent this MOBA concept on tablets because I believed that it was a real, it's a really great game design and I thought it would be huge on mobile. But like a couple of the people at the company time didn't agree. And so actually two people ended up quitting and I had to let one person go because they didn't want to work on it. They thought it was a bad idea. I mean, they were kind of right, but it was an interesting formative moment for us because”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a lot to learn. So that's what the game is. So we basically took one of the game modes from League of Legends and we said, how could we reimagine this for like a 12 inch piece of glass, where you're playing on a tablet? And so we came up with a new kind of touch mechanics. You could draw, you know, you could draw a squiggly line and like the fire would like follow the line that you drew. So like we had a lot of interesting. Interaction design that we did to try and really create like a mobile native experience. Offer something different.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's like you and two other friends against three other people. But I have to give credit. Like we didn't invent this. This game. Was already really popularized on PC by something called League of Legends. And so.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like playing soccer, but instead of a ball going into a goal, it's like Dragons and fireballs and stuff”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Fate's Forever is a three versus three real time multiplayer game, the genre is called massively online battle arena or moba.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of had a hunch of the space to explore, but I didn't have a specific idea. You know, I knew that I wanted to build a game that was real-time, multiplayer, that allowed you to spend time with your friends and have these really fun experiences to create memories together. And then that would also plant the right kind of seeds to be able to build that communication service that we wanted to build on top of the game.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the initial place that I started was, I was like, I need an artist. Like, I'm a software engineer who kind of understands product and game design, but I'm not an artist. So I need an artist to make any progress. And so called up some of my friends from the games industry to see, you know, is anyone interested? What are people doing? And I started looking online to find like great talent. And there was this website, I think it was called cgub.com, like computer graphicshub.com, where artists would like put up their portfolios. So I just kind of started going down these portfolios and sending messages to people who looked like they had really awesome work. And then ultimately really hit it off with one guy who was just incredible. His name is Brandon. Actually, I flew to Texas to meet with him. And he ended up being the first person to join the company. He's actually still with us today. It's pretty cool.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I described it as we're going to build a new kind of gaming ecosystem on like the next generation of computing devices. And it's going to be a combination of things. It's going to be games. It's going to be a communication service. And then it's going to be a distribution mechanism.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. But instead of open faint, where it was primarily a service that we sold to developers who then put it in their games for their users. This time, I was like, I want to go direct to consumers and have a direct relationship with the game players. And then eventually make it into its own app.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'd be team based real time gameplay. And then use the game to kind of bootstrap the communication network and then use that to launch additional titles and eventually build a distribution business for games.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm talking Nintendo, Sony with their PlayStation, Microsoft, Xbox. Valve has their Steam store. And so as a technologist, I'm like, I probably can build some kind of distribution mechanism or something. And I had the notion that there might be an opportunity. And so the idea was build a team based multiplayer game that had voice chat and text chat kind of built into it, kind of similar to how Aurora Faint was.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the thesis there was I studied entertainment businesses and I realized that the ones that end up being around for a long time tend to have some kind of durable advantage beyond just a single title. It's changing a bit now with games as a service, but a decade ago video game businesses that were around for a long time tended to have a distribution mechanism of their own. They could use to kind of buffer the time between making hit titles because it's a very hit driven industry.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I remember thinking maybe iPads will end up replacing how people use desktop computers. And the way that people play games on those devices are quite different than mobile devices. You tend to sit for longer amount of time. You can have deeper experiences. And the idea I had was, what if we built a gaming business that was more like traditional kind of video games but on tablets as opposed to kind of the mobile games which I had been doing before which were more kind of bite-sized pickup and play ideas?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I was sitting there thinking, like, okay, I've always wanted to start a video games company, and I could do it now. So, like, how do I want to do it? And, you know, one of the things that I'd seen over my life is when there are these new distribution channels that get created, that's opportunities for new businesses to get launched. You know, I mentioned this earlier, but Consoles and the App Store, and so sitting around in 2012, I was like, okay, where in the world is there kind of a leading edge innovation that may have some new distribution opportunities where there's less competition? So a startup has an opportunity to stand out And this was around, I think, year two or three of the iPad Early days, iPad growth was like a hockey stick.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing, right? But I got into doing this and even to this day, I do what I do because I love building things. I love creating experiences for people that make them smile. And at the time when I left, I remember sitting in my car actually crying because I thought maybe I wasn't ever going to have the opportunity to build something that mattered again.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I didn't. I mean, it's true. You know, like selling a company and having, you know, for good economic outcome is phenomenal. It was life-changing for myself and for a lot of the people at the company. You know, we all recognize that money is important. My dad grew up super poor in the projects in New York City. And so I think for him, he was really like, wow, this is an incredible conversation to be having. Should we sell this company?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was just expectation setting. It wasn't a clash of personalities, but ultimately there was actually a big language barrier between them and myself. And I think that contributed to some of not seeing eye to eye on it. I was fully intending to stick around for a long time. Like, I didn't build this pour my heart and soul into this company with the expectation that I was going to walk away from it.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I was all supportive, how can we build a business around this But I think that the strategy that they wanted to take to do that, I believed, would destroy the stuff that we had. And when you sell a business, you're selling it and they had the right to choose. They could choose what they wanted to do. And so.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just back up for a sec. When you sell a company, oftentimes part of the deal is you go work for them and they were buying your talent and the talent of your team. You weren't profitable, you were far from profitable. You weren't making much money, but you had tons of users. I think when you sold to Gree, you were like on 30% of the apps in the app store were using Open Faint. So a huge penetration in that market, right? But they had to figure out presumably how to make it a revenue generating product. Is that where the clash of ideas came from?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were also competing with Apple and now Google at this point. And so given all of this dynamic, I sort of felt like it could go either way. Like we could keep doing it and it could figure it out or not. And ultimately the reason I chose to sell the company was because the arrangement we had with Gree, the acquirer, was that we would get more resources to go on and continue building the open fan and see where we can take it. Unfortunately, I very quickly realized that we actually didn't see eye to eye and they wanted to take the business to the left. I wanted to take it to the right. And so after like three or four months, you know, they asked me to step aside and basically like, we're going to take the business in this direction. And so I left.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not clear that we should sell The thought process was really kind of a combination of the opportunity we have in front of us and how much risk we felt. Was in that opportunity. And then the financials that everyone in the team would get, including myself, and sort of how that might change people's lives. And ultimately, because of where we were with the business, like we had strong user growth. We hadn't quite figured out how to make money. And the market was changing a lot. You know, free to play games, games were starting to become popular. And free-to-play games kind of had less of a need for open faint.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I guess open faint started to make a little bit of money by, I think, probably by early 2011. And then basically in April of 2011, the company was sold to a Japanese social networking gamaker called GRI for $100 million, which is unbelievable. And I think anybody would have done that. But was there any, I just had a curiosity, was there anybody who said, don't do this? We can get bigger, or was everyone like, yep, let's do it, let's sell.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. I didn't. And I think there's also a difference between leadership and management. They're both skills that can be learned, but I think I was a bit of a natural leader. Like something about how I approached my work and approached the problems we were solving for our customers was inspiring to the people we were working with. But my management ability was just like so raw that I really leaned on some of the executives that we ended up hiring. Peter certainly helped teach me some things about that. But a lot of it was just trial and error and reading books. And I studied a lot as I did when I was learning programming. I was like, I'm going to learn how to build this business. So I read management books and talk to people. And I kind of got some of the basics in place. But it's really hard to do that. What do they say? Like you're building the plane as you're falling out of the sky kind of a thing and never built a plane before.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I wasn't getting mad at people. I'm definitely not the guy who gets angry, but I have really high expectations and high expectations combined with lots of technical debt and management debt. Made it difficult to make progress, and I would get frustrated.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we just, you know, because we grew so fast and everything was new, we were not focused on building a great culture. Like it was very much just like we have to solve the problems and we just were just trying to stay above water. You know, when you're building software products, like you've got to be really intentional about paying down technical debt and thinking about how you run the process around building software at scale. Because if you're not thoughtful about tool development and building code that is reusable and easily to maintain, you find yourself in situations where like everything is really hard to do. And when things get hard to do, people get stressed. And I was, I kind of lean more towards the like more, more, more. Like I have really high expectations like we got to get this done.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't easy. I made not every mistake in the book, but I made a lot of the mistakes in the book. It really was like a business school of hard knocks kind of an experience for me. I have a very clear memory of like probably around year two. I think we were maybe 70 people at the time. And Andy, my friend who is still working with me came to me and he said, you know, Jason, it kind of sucks working here. But I'm not leaving. I'm just letting you know. We need to work on making it better to work here because it's not awesome.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. Yeah, he really kind of showed me the ropes for Silicon Valley. And he had a network of some really good folks that kind of, he brought in to support the company. And he had some connections to help us get in front of some investors and navigate that a bit.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. But it was just a difficult time, I think, generally in the market. And maybe this was where not going to Stanford didn't help, you know, I don't know.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was kind of all the above. The thing about it is I really knew what I was pitching and I really believed in it. The numbers were just up and to the right. And so it was just about finding people who believed in that and who understood it. And the first investment we got was from actually another company that was working on something similar in a different market. And so they really understood it. And then later on we got a little more traditional venture capital arm of Intel actually invested. Yeah.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did you find you were 23 years old and still relatively new, but how did you find that process of going and pitching for money? Do you remember in the early days would you get nervous? Did you feel awkward? I mean, or was it, were you comfortable doing it? Was it easy?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were pitching people like it was actually very hard to raise money. You know, this was 2009. So it was a very odd time in that in this very sort of small place of Silicon Valley focusing on smartphones, it felt like opportunity was endless and that it was just this amazing new thing that was growing. But the world around us, like it was the financial crisis just was happening. It was very difficult to raise money. Raise money from a couple strategic investors, but actually no sandhill VCs invested in that company.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what the initial thing, but this was one of our. And did you, I mean, as you just attracted more and more interest from gaming companies or people building games, were investors coming to you or were you guys going out and going up and down Sandhill Road and pitching people?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, I think a few people had paid us with the initial thing. But this was one of our thought was the growth rate of it was such that it was just focus on growing and then we'll turn our attention to making money later.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we launched Open Faint, the idea was that it would kind of have like a tiered plan. So, like, initially, it would be free. And then once your game starts to get popular, we would say, okay, now pay us for this. You know, some kind of software as a service fee. But very quickly, we actually realized that that was not a great business model. And so we just made it free for initially. And we never really figured out how to make money off of it, frankly.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it was an app too. That's right. It really was like a whole social platform for people to play games with their friends.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it put us on the map for game developers, but the interesting thing about how we built it was it wasn't just backend technology. A big part of it was that end users would have an open fane account. They would set up a username. And so, when you would go across games, all of your friends and all of that stuff would like come with you. So it actually started to generate a lot of end user awareness. Developers would start to put the logo on their app icons in the corner. So like when you were browsing the app store, you'd be able to see like, oh, this game has open faint. So like my friends will be there with me. And it got to a point where you were scrolling that app store list like every other game had our logo in the corner. It was pretty wild.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably March, April, something like that. And we launched it with 15 games. One of them was one of the biggest sort of independent developer hits at the time, a game called Pocket God. And having a really cool marquee title kind of really put us on the map for it. And it just kind of took off.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were actually five of us at that point in time. My friend Andy had joined us, and then there were two other folks. But yeah, basically we were starting over. We went file new and started coding again. And Danielle and Peter kind of did the business development and went out and started reaching out to all those people who were on that mailing list and talking to them and pitching the idea. And I was furiously coding. And we ended up launching it about three months later with 15 games.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you had to start working on this, right? Because you had at least 100 people who were interested in it and using it. And what did that mean? Was it just the two of you back starting from scratch, you and Danielle?”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, so if you had a fun kind of high score based iPhone game, if you added OpenFaint in a week, you could turn it into a competitive multiplayer game where you and I can compete for high scores. We could unlock achievements. You had a chat room. And it would also go across games. So if you had, if you and I were playing two different games, we would not have to add each other as friends again in two different places. And so it really kind of created this social layer across iPhone and Android games.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, we had to completely rebuild. We basically rebuilt all the technology from scratch to make sure that it could be really easily dropped into any iPhone or Android game”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TechCrunch covered it, and we got a couple hundred people who signed up on the mailing list. And so we actually took that mailing list and went out and raised a seed round of funding. And then we spent the next three months building and launching to launch the service.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. That's right. So we ended up setting up a webpage and basically saying if you're making a video game and you want to have drop-in multiplayer support, use our system. We called it OpenFaint. And in three days, you can take your iPhone game and make it multiplayer and people will play it more. You'll get more users and all that kind of stuff. The thing is that we actually didn't have enough time enough money in the bank to build all that stuff because while we did have it in the game, it wasn't the technology wasn't set up to be used by other titles. So we came up with this kind of wacky idea to basically check and see if people really wanted this. So we put up a web page.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we ended up Danielle, Peter and I were sitting around talking about, like, you know, is this really the end? Like, what else can we do? And I had the observation that we had built all of this stuff in our game, leaderboards, chat rooms, multiplayer capability. And I thought other developers might want to use the technology in their games. What we ended up building that.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we covered our spend for maybe one month when we launched the $8 version. I think we made like $30,000 on it. And then the next month. We made like $15,000, and the next month we made like $7,000. And by the second month, we were like, okay, this isn't working. Like all the other games in the app store are trending towards $99. And so we actually got to a point where we had about three weeks of runway left, of money left to spend to run our business. And I remember very vividly calling up my dad and being like, hey, dad, I think this startup adventure is coming to an end. Can you get my room ready? I'm going to have to move home before I get my next job. And he's like, okay. Like, all right, great”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the game was free. The big brain idea we had at the time was to follow the shareware model. If you can imagine this was before Anna purchases, free to play video games were like not really a thing. And our idea was let's make it free, get a lot of people to try it, and then in a few months we'll launch like a bigger version that's like eight bucks and then we'll upsell people from the free version. And it didn't work.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Danielle was another entrepreneur at the incubator. And Peter suggested that the two of us team up because she was working on a related game project. And I think he thought that the App Store was going to be a big thing. And so Danielle and I ended up teaming up to build Aurora Faint together. And we hired some really great artists to help us.”
2022-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Discord: Jason Citron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT