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Justin Waldron

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2021-09-16

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2021-09-16

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1. “Thanks for having me. This is really great. I'm excited to finally listen to myself on this. I've been listening to the podcast for a long time. It's a pleasure.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Maybe not specifically creators, but in terms of levers, a huge supporter of Lambda School from the early days as well with Austin and what he's figured out with education. It's the same thing. It's how do we get people a leg up that otherwise didn't have access to it? I mean, figuring out a business model and using technology in a way that could then give them technology to go become part of the software economy is exactly what I'm talking about. And even more recently, it hasn't been announced yet an investment I just made into a company called Pledge, which is figuring out how to let anyone run a donation fundraiser online. You may have seen like Facebook has your birthday. You can run a fundraiser for a cause you care about. That takes a lot of work to build that feature. In Facebook can afford to build it. That should exist everywhere. I mean, there's so many social platforms and there's so many companies that want to do good and give leverage to their users to do good. So for a company to go build the APIs.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yeah, in my investing, which we didn't even Not as interesting as what I'm trying to build, but technology as a lever is just such an important thing, a lever for communication, a lever for connection, and a lever for productivity. I think Steve Jobs said a bicycle for the mind. I think this idea of giving everyone the leverage that I've received by pure luck from technology is something that I just want to go and do. What gets me excited about the creator economy is you have all these people that you've empowered by technology that they were creative before, but they didn't have the tools to go and actually make a living out of it. And I get really excited about like, what's going to happen when we give people more tools and give more people the lever? So, yeah, I'm really excited about if we can have any role in doing that with games. To me, it's tremendously exciting.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “How much, even those things I was doing back then, I'm still excited about now. It was really cool to have something show up on my doorstep like that one day. So that's probably it.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Visual basic and thousand dollar coding software that I also had no way of getting as a somebody who wasn't even a teenager yet. And all these things just kept falling in my lap and I just had the patience to bang my head against the wall and try to figure it out. And for me, the ability to have access to these things was a real privilege and opened me up to what I used to get excited about when I had Visual Basic was I was using AOL Instant Messenger and with all my friends and we were on this thing and we were spending time in the space. And for us it was like we were living in the future because it was mostly young people that were so plugged into this chat at the time on AOL. And the immediate thing was I want to make something in this. How do I make something in this? And then spend a bunch of time trying to figure out again no official APIs, but how do I go and make a game that maybe we can play in the chat room on AOL Instant Messenger? And it's just funny how along the way when I look back, it's like it's.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “So, I'm not sure exactly who did it when I was very young. I got a computer like many people who were in the industry. In my case, my family was not in a position to buy a computer the time I received one, but my mom worked in IT at the hospital. And somebody told her to take home a computer, an old computer from the hospital that was essentially broken, and that even a public hospital had no use for anymore. And by having her take home the computer for free and allowing me to use it, it really just changed her trajectory my whole life. I don't know who did that, but I think that that was just something that was really amazing to have done. And when I think about luck and the things I have to be grateful for, and especially the fact that I didn't pay it, man, I could feel totally okay to break it. That was something that was really cool. It was the first of many sort of free pieces of technology that ended up falling in my lap. There were printers. There was software that was”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Of these public spaces where people are having trouble finding common ground, there's a lot of things we all love. We all love pizza. So, you know, you can put two people who disagree with each other violently on one social space together. And if maybe, maybe if we trick them into playing a game together where they really enjoy each other's time and then suddenly reveal to them that they're on opposite ends of the political spectrum, we can help make people realize the humanness in all of us. So I get excited about these things. It's less sort of the to your earlier point, the hardware that we're sort of plugging ourselves into and more about how do we just keep evolving people toward a better humanity.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Actions, if that makes sense. So just like people realized, hey, sending a sticker and a message can say a lot more than some set of words, they'll start to also realize that certain interactions in these games can also bring much more meaning than anything that can be said by words. And I think that we can be in a position to help people connect in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. There are a lot of people to get back to the pizza. I think we want an excuse to spend time and go back and forth with the people we care about. And games can be that excuse and they can help us be better at doing what we really want to do. It's hard to remember to pick up the phone and call your mom, but you should be able to pick up a game with her that helps you remember to do what you really set out to do, which is to keep in touch with the people you care about. And I also hope that we can have games that can help steer conversation a little bit.”

   2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I like to think of games living in multiple channels. We have places we message. We have places you just use our voice and we communicate. We have places where we have video and we have asynchronous channels where we do this whenever we have the time or we just have 30 and we have sometimes we want to sit down and play a game for an hour. I like to think that more and more games are going to start living across these channels. And instead of being a thing we go and visit, there'll be a thing that lives in the places where we spend our time. This multiple mode type of game is going to require like really specific design for these channels and a lot of thought going into an experimentation to prove out how it should work and the amount of channels that people use in their life right now has expanded a lot. And so this is a much more difficult thing to do than it was previously. What we'll do is bring more depth to those interactions.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “It is. And I've been working with some of these companies closely enough over the last four years that have been experimenting in crypto games that I know how much work goes into doing it right. And so if we want to get something out quickly and experiment with it, I think we'll be in a better position to partner with somebody who knows what they're doing. I think in the long run, you're right. It's going to be such an amazing opportunity for whatever company does it. I think solving the problems we're solving is a tall order. I'm excited about crypto, but definitely aware that wallets are the challenge for sure that we're probably not ready to take on until we really understand the space a bit more.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Also collect this thing and it's an NFT that's something that I haven't seen a lot of companies try it and I think will be in an interesting position to be playing with. And I would say that the way that the utility can show up in the game from the NFT could be quite powerful. It could be related to the people that you're sharing it with. And we were playing our Zoom game, and you wanted to have that celebrity join the Zoom game. You could use the NFT that you owned to bring in your favorite celebrity and the Zoom game. I don't mean the actual celebrity. I mean like some pre-recorded clips of them, but you have the right to summon them. So we can create really interesting ways for the utility behind these NFTs to be something really meaningful to people in a very practical way that could drive more casual users to the space.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Think what's really exciting is finding a way to bring crypto to the mainstream. I think there are amazing concepts out there. They take some homework to figure out by increasing the top of the funnel. It's not just that the game is more accessible, but it's also that we can get you interested in having fun before we say, oh, by the way, there's an NFT. And that's something that a lot of cryptofocus projects aren't doing right now. They're saying, welcome to this game. Where's your wallet? I think that that's okay because they've been doing an amazing job building up communities that are very, very excited about the content they're creating in the markets they're making. I wonder how much bigger could some of these markets be if we actually find a way to get people interested in something that they're playing and then start slowly unveiling the complexity of these other opportunities of playing this game now? Did you know that you can?”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “A lot of it has to do with accessibility. And that's where we're spending all of our time focused on. When it comes to being able to play these games easily, I think we're going to actually be able to do something very interesting there.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You have the audience and you have the creativity and you have the content, you should be able to make a game. We'll try to help people do that. I also think NFTs are really interesting. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that space. I know you sound like you've been thinking about Axie a lot. You've had some great people on the podcast recently. So I can't speak to it as well as they can. I've only been sitting on the sidelines as an advisor for some of these companies like Dapper, but I really think that the ability to align incentives like this is what's exciting. I get excited about this idea that we can create value for a broader set of people and that more people can share in the value that we create. I want to create games. And I think that because we can create games that live in these different channels, we'll have an opportunity to make games where if you think about one of the challenges that the industry has right now for NFT,”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Like games because I think you've got a lot of options. I don't think we have to commit and pick one. I will say that I think I'm very excited about things I'm seeing with the creator economy and how we can use games as a lever for people to earn a living. I think that that's great that games can be very profitable for the people who create them. It would be even better if we can figure out a way to make games drive a much larger and more expansive and distributed set of people creating a living. I mean, that's something that I'm personally very excited about. I invested in SubStack. I've known Chris and the team for a long time since our kick days just seeing them succeed is very inspiring to me. It makes me realize that it's something that should be cross industry. We think there's an opportunity there with games too to give people the ability to have a game in a box.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Specific cohort of people very well in making something they really, really want. What we're doing is acknowledging that when we invite someone over for dinner to your house, you do that because inviting them over without an activity is a little weird. We're saying, wow, everybody's gathering on the internet without an activity right now. Isn't that weird? And so we have no trouble. Like we're doing a podcast. This is great. We go to work meetings. That's fine. But we struggle to just go and meet with our friends online every day because it almost feels like you need a reason. And so we solve this in the real world. And it's called pizza. Pizza is what you buy when you have no other excuse to get together because everybody likes it. We're trying to create games that can be pizza, basically. What is the excuse that gets you in a room with people you care about?”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Interaction. Video of somebody else's content does not suit itself for me having interactions with my friends in an easy way. But I hope we can do with games is make something that is both. It's engaging and we figure out the types of content that we create is something that a group of people you care about would like and they like even more because you're involved with it. And so it's less about I like this idea of thinking about it like a restaurant. If you open up a new restaurant for very specific type of cuisine in Brooklyn, you're going to do a lot of research into how many people want to eat the type of food that you are going to go and create. And you have to think about are they in the neighborhood and what do they like? What is a demographic? What are their ages? What style do they want to see in my restaurant? What should I call it? All these things matter because you're speaking to a very specific people. That's a lot what creating a game in the app store is like it's understanding a”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “You think about video, I can't speak to specifically how they're operating the companies outside of games more broadly, but I would imagine that video, watching video is mostly a solo experience. And so even though it's been a great way to increase engagement for a lot of these platforms, it's not something that's happening with friends as much. And it's something that where each person's interests and content is a little bit different, really like users actually want to see different videos. They don't necessarily want to see the same video as their friends. Because of that, I think you're right. I think in some ways, the more video succeeds when video is sort of a separate content that isn't about friends, the less social it feels. I mean, and I've seen some pretty interesting things that I think could be very successful around group watching and watch parties and these types of features and products that I hope work. I think games have more natural points where you can insert the”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “With them that can't exist outside of their platforms, well, then we're both super aligned in the types of things we can build. Rather than taking a game that we spent tens of millions of dollars on some other platform and saying, hey, now it's time to figure out how to make this grow via some channel on a social platform. We're saying, what do users on this platform want to do? And what are they already doing that if we could actually tap into it and do it better? Would they love to do even more? And then we go build that thing. Because of that, I just feel like we're in service of their customers. And so once we focus on that, it's usually pretty easy to go and build good things together.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Be a much larger reward when people figure out how to solve it. And so for us, it's just on the partnership side, like really understanding these networks and these partners are super different. And they all have something they do or many things they do that are amazing and that are special for each platform. And the people who use the platforms, they know that. We have to build content that actually taps into why people love using each of them. And so that means what we've seen is a lot of other companies that have approached these social partners is they've tried to view them as distribution channels. Their instinct has been to basically look at these different social platforms and say, wow, this seems like it could be a source of acquiring customers more cheaply. And that's just not how we look at this at all. We're in the business of creating new experiences and these platforms are in the business of putting better experiences in the hands of users. If we can create experiences.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Think for a lot of these companies, everyone's seen how big games have grown as a category. And everyone has this realization that the context that the people are using their product in could be a really powerful way to create more interesting games. And they've seen every other piece of media that they put inside their platforms have better engagement and become more interesting because of that context. The fact that games haven't at scale yet to them, it's sort of like an obvious next step. And it's interesting because if you think about how video has transformed all these networks over the last few years, if there's one thing that's more engaging than video and one thing that's more highly monetizing video, it's games. This is something that's going to be more difficult to solve because games are not as easily one size fits all as a video. But I think it's going to”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Perspective of like what feels very futuristic to me as we spend more and more of our time online with higher fidelity communication, the Zoom stuff really feels super interesting and like you feel like you're living in the future when you're using it a bit, it gets me thinking about all the things that we can expect as we get more layers of platforms on top of these tools like Zoom.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Opens their eyes and makes them realize okay. 10 years ago there were a lot of limitations to HTML5. Now this content can definitely stand side by side with a native app for certain genres. And it's as good. We're excited about that. So in terms of graphics, I think that's a great one. When it comes to interactivity between people and what we can do with the latest ways we're communicating with each other, I think the games we put out on Zoom are super interesting. We've been seeing this emergent behavior. People want to play games in these video chat spaces. They're playing among us. They're playing poker games. They're sharing these applications. They're finding outside. And they're somehow facilitating these games. And we're just saying, okay, well, let's make that simple. Let's make it a button. And when you're in a Zoom meeting, I think that that's starting to get to our vision of showing, here's what we're doing. We're adding the interesting activities you can do in these spaces you're already in.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Are launched on a lot of different platforms right now, and they're sort of further along in different places, depending on what we're trying to prove. And for us, it's like, this is such an early space that we're trying to optimize for learning as fast as we can. So we try to release small games that we can use to prove some of the ideas that we have. And then when we think that the idea worked, we'll go and we'll keep investing more in it and figure out what the implications are and ask ourselves what's next. It's not that any of our particular games are sort of the farthest along, but we have games on Facebook. For example, we have a game called Board Masters on Facebook. If you check it out, the 3D on it is something that I think is on par with the App Store. And I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out that it's playing in the web. For us, when we show that to people who are wondering about the state of the technology and what's possible, it's something that usually opens.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Links where they want to have a contest of who had the better house that they designed. And suddenly I can put out links promoting my design and you can put out links promoting your design. And then it's become part of the game design. The possibilities are endless, but once you have people grocking this idea that the link is not something that just opens the game but has like a specific context in the game like they're used to with the web. So you're not teaching them a new metaphor. There's a lot of interesting things you can do.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “And can pass that specific information. And so when you think about it from a game perspective, someone sharing a link, the simplest form is they share you a link that brings you into the game with them. Right now, there's a lot of people playing games on live video streaming sites where they're passing around passwords and they're saying, come join me to play among us or some other game with the letters, H, Z, F, D, Y, P. And then we all send these letters around and see if we can play the game of who can type it in right the first time. Well, the simplest application of a link is you don't need to do that. I mean, and this is what Zoom is doing, they have a link and it doesn't just open Zoom. It opens Zoom with the person that you expected to meet with. That's the most basic thing, but obviously very important not to take that for granted because it doesn't happen right now in a lot of other places. In addition to that, I mean, I think it's limitless because it then becomes a lever for gameplay. And you can imagine people sending out.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “To get back to our earlier conversation about content, I think the web is a bunch of content that you can navigate with links. And games on the app store, they tend to be something you navigate in and out of through one button. You open the app or you close the app. It's not like you jump into a specific piece of content in the app. And we have push notifications, but push notifications are something that are personalized. They're not shared with other friends or family. And mostly the developers are using them as a way to just reactivate you to the central portion of the app.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Now taking that technology and going and building the killer app, like I mentioned before. Now we have that technology. What can we do with it? What game would benefit from the ability to be shared as a link anywhere in the world? That's a different question than bringing a AAA over to a mobile phone.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “What should we do with that? What can we do with that that makes that interesting beyond just loading up a mobile game in another place? We think that's where the ability to play with your friends comes in. By making it frictionless, we make it possible to connect you with your friends in a way where you can actually expect it to happen. You see how easy it is and you understand that they won't drop off at the App Store. And so you have this understanding that I can expect people to jump in and play with me and I'm not bothering them by recommending a new app. And I think that these other platforms are not necessarily as focused on that problem right now. I think they're more focused on delivering high fidelity to a wider variety of hardware. And I'm generalizing here. I actually think that the video streaming part of it, the technical part of it, will be a part of our story too. We're agnostic to this solutions to this. I think there's going to be multiple. And I think they'll be good for different types of games. But we're very focused on”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “There's a lot of work on game streaming lately. I would definitely put streaming platforms like Stadia in the same bucket in terms of the problems we're trying to solve. I think some of those platforms, I think they've been focused on solving this problem for existing native content. When you solve this problem for existing native content, you might take a game that's a triple A game that was built for console and make it suddenly playable on low-end devices because it's streaming. The developer who spent four years building that AAA game for that high-end console may have not envisioned this game being played on a mobile device. And not only that, but they may have never been able to go through the design exercise of thinking about all the possibilities that could happen if this game was now instantly accessible anywhere on the web. And so I think where we take it another level further is, okay, we have the ability to load these games instantly.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “It, I think companies haven't really invested a ton of it into it at a commercial level because you need to have the business model that lets you go and put R&D into doing that so that you can actually build something really big and scalable. We've seen a lot of great work by open source developers, but we haven't seen a company actually go and take something and build it as robust as these other game engines were getting in other places. And so that's what we're aiming to do.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Of games, we think we've been able to hit the bar. And that's interesting because people play it and we don't want them to know the difference. We don't want them to think, oh, this is a web page. And so it can be lower quality. We want a game to load up and we want them to love it. And for them, they've all experienced games in their phone at this point. So the bar is, does this look as good as what I'm used to playing or not? And so that's a pretty high bar to clear. And so the technology is really around understanding there's a huge amount of fragmentation in the web browsers and what technologies are available and how they can utilize the hardware and all the sort of things you'd have to understand to create a native game engine for the app store, except for optimize around this goal of how do I make it load as fast as possible and be and operate the way that the web expects a web page to. There are some frameworks. There's a lot of great open source projects who have thought about this problem and people have made a lot of progress.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “How do I make this game load in one second? And Google and Facebook and these companies that have been on the web, they spend so much energy and effort making that happen for these web pages, right? Google, every millisecond, they can shave off their average load time as more people doing successful searches. And that's what we're trying to do for games. It's almost you're optimizing for something that's almost in direct contention with what the App Store game engines have been optimizing for, which is this very, very large high quality files and assets. And so being able to build something that actually loads the page instantaneously and then streams in the assets as needed and feels and looks at a quality at part with the App Store is very challenging. We're not there yet where we can point at every genre and say this looks as good as the App Store. But for many different genres,”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Last 10 years on mobile development have been very focused on building game engines that push more pixels on the hardware that you're given. And so if you look at native development, Unity has done an amazing job at giving people better graphics, better physics. These types of improvements in Unreal Engine has done the same. And so there hasn't been much investment in creating a game that you can load up instantly. And the reason is because the business on the App Store is so huge that no one's really focused on solving that problem. On the App Store, it's not really a problem. Once you have someone committed to downloading the app, they'll usually wait and you probably want to make it smaller, but still many game developers will make it hundreds of megabytes and require you to download Wi-Fi if you really want to play the game, you might even put up with it. They've already lost everybody who hasn't tapped that button and wasn't willing to put up with that friction. And so there's not really anybody focused on.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “This happened outside of memes. But I think of part of what's made Zoom successful, you give somebody a link and you're going to end up in a room talking with that person. And I think before Zoom came along, Were ways to video chat in those communication platforms, but there wasn't something so simple and so reliable and so multi-platform as sharing a link with the people that you wanted to chat with. And so we're trying to recreate that level of ease with games. And we think that once you do, then you get the same sort of ability to meet that we're seeing in other places.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Video space, they want the game to be playable with everybody in the room if it's on a social network. They want to be able to send the messages to their friends on the messengers that they use. And they want to be able to play the game in that same space. And that brings a set of opportunities that are just related to this idea that we're only willing to sort of engage with so many applications at once. We got our phones, some of us 10 years ago at this point. There was a lot of people telling you about their favorite app. I can still remember people sliding the phone across the table to me and saying, have you tried this app? And that hasn't happened in a long time. We've settled into the apps we like, and some of us are still discovering apps, but we're not really sharing them with people the way that we used to. It's kind of a burden. There's a contreation, there's downloads. It can be a high friction experience. And we think that when you remove that friction, you can actually facilitate people getting in the room together and experiencing it. And I think that this isn't unique to games. We've seen”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Way we think about Instant Games is they're a game that you can play instantly, and what that means to us is that you don't need to go download a game in the App Store. You can play this game as soon as you tap it. And that this game can take advantage of the context in which you're playing it to also give you very quick access to your friends and your family and your contacts in a way that helps you play with them without having to do any setup. And so we don't need account creation. That part is instant. We don't need you to give us permission to access your contacts. Ideally, this is something where you're coming in and we can make the whole experience frictionless for you to have these interactions with the people you care about. So the idea around instant, it's not just about downloads. I think it started there, but we've extended it to just basically how do we give people an experience immediately with the people in the space that they're in. If this is a live...”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “The technology and the partnerships with social platforms to make instant gaming work, we wanted to make this to connect you to your friends and your family and your coworkers, people you care about. And we noticed along the way that this was the same problem that you had to solve to let creators connect with their fans. And we started getting really excited in conversations with creators about giving them basically a white label game creation for certain categories of games where they don't need to know how to code. And I think if we've seen anything from other platforms where there's been a ton of innovation lately about allowing more people to create games, we're very excited about the idea of allowing creators to create games who already have audiences without code. We're at the very beginning of that. We're just releasing product on it now. It's going to be a really big trend. Like what happens to this creator ecosystem when you're also able to take soft”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Drive toward no code. I've always felt like the modding community and even the game platforms are leaving so many craters out by requiring code. And when I think about it, there are a lot of different things you can make. You can make rules to create almost any sort of game. There are actually a much smaller set of games that people really enjoyed to play that we know about, just like there are a limited amount of web pages people are looking to create, you can use that to go and create a platform for no code that can serve someone who wants to make a restaurant page probably looks like one of these five. Someone who wants to make a page to promote the photography business probably wants to use one of these templates. And I think that while certain engines have focused on the power of the engine, very few companies have focused on making it super easy to create games. And so one of the things we realized is when we were building”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Brand new and you have a bunch of people that love it, that's when the best platform opportunities come about. So everyone wants to get to the end game of the platform because it's a great business. But at least in consumer software and especially in games, I think the best path to doing that has been to go and create something new and different and great. And then slowly turn it into the platform as people give you the cue that they want to. In terms of the history on it, honestly, like I can speak to my personal history with these games, I mean, I grew up playing the StarCraft, of course the mod on StarCraft was huge and everything Blizzard was doing to support Battlenet was like way ahead of its time forming online communities. And then again, with Valve and Half-Life and Counter Strike and these things were huge. I think more recently, I've been inspired by not the gaming community, but what I'm seeing in SaaS and this.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “That's actually totally true. So I think a lot of the great platforms of games started off as a single game that executed so well in a certain genre. People had the hunger to go and make something like it. And then they said, okay, we'll allow somebody to modify the code. And they didn't say we're going to build a platform now. They just said, sure, you can add your own maps. And then people said, well, I have this map. And now I want to add this feature. And they're like, okay, well, you can script things in this little walled off area. And then it kept growing and growing and growing. And before you know it, you have the Unreal engine. You have the half-life engine and you have all these amazing game engines that start off with just a great game that people felt they loved so much that they just wanted to make their own part of it. And so the players in the community pulled the platform out of the company. I think that that's something that's fascinated me. When I really think it speaks to is if you create a killer product in a new category that feels”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Creating a great meme, then there must be designs that we can do to help people make them. We're just really focused on what are the game designs that might produce interesting memes.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “A tool to create more interesting content. The easiest way of looking at it, they can become part of the editing suite because you may be able to make content in a game that you wouldn't be able to make very easily if you were to just sit in sort of a video editing program. Games can be a tool to creation is the way I would think about it. And you've seen games where you have to build your farm or build your space and then you're proud to show it off. I think that's something that's interesting to a lot of people. I think it doesn't fit the new metaphor of creating interesting bits of content that you want to share onto these networks, which have become less profile centric and more information or content-centric. The farm is a great metaphor for the profile. You visit people's farms. We visited people's profiles. But I think we're seeing it's really about how do you go and create this very interesting meme. And I think if there is any science behind.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Have a lot of stuff coming, and it's where this will be more apparent, and some of it I'm more allowed to talk about than others. But we're very excited about this idea of meme creation. I would like to see some games soon allow you to react to the game you're playing in a way that feels just like the way we react to video content. And what I mean by that is we're seeing support for video editing tools that let you take somebody else's video and take the music and take the captions and the formatting and the editing and make your own video that looks like that. I think we're going to start to see that applied to games in a way where I'm playing the game and I can share with that and edit it into my video and create my own content where the game content becomes part of the video content and my video content might become part of the game and the lines start to blur. This is way out there. This will make more sense once we release something that shows you it. Suffice to say, I think people are looking to create interesting content. So games can be”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “I think you see that pattern over and over. I would say TikTok has done an amazing job in making it easy to create video content that's super compelling. And they've really tapped into this idea of it being about the meme. Everybody wants to recreate the meme. So just make that as easy as possible. Allow them to remix it. I think great games can create that content easily as a byproduct of you playing. So a great game doesn't ask you to fill a blank canvas. A great game will motivate you to do certain things that you're excited about and you're having fun and you get into a flow state. And then before you know it, you've painted a beautiful picture and you want to share it. And I think that that's where the overlap is in some ways. How do you make it so easy to create that you don't even realize you're doing it? And then you're so proud of whatever you made that of course you're going to share it. It's great. So that's definitely one of the biggest things that we're focused on.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Well, a simple one is making it easy to create and share content. If you think about what was one of the great things about Instagram that led to its success, they made everybody into a great photographer. And these simple filters that now are part of every app we use, they were mostly unique to Instagram at that time. And they made every photo look better. And it was an important time to do that because the iPhone camera wasn't very good when we were sharing these photos coming from our iPhone camera when Instagram was just getting started. They looked bad compared to the photos that were being shared by everybody's legitimate digital cameras at that time on Facebook and by putting these filters on them, suddenly it was sort of dressing them up in a way that fixed quality issues that the cameras had at the time. And so it really was a way of making mobile go a few generations forward in terms of the way it looked that helped people want to share these photos more on these services. And they made it super easy.”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “There's something interesting there, which is, I think, if you look at something like Zynga Poker today, the game is 14 years old, and it's still the largest free poker service online because it's the best. There's a lot of great people that have worked on it, and it's a great poker out. I'm not saying it's not great, but it isn't the best. Just like many of the social networks we use are not the best, but they are where our friends are and they are where our co-workers are. They are where we can find the people that we need to communicate with. And so we all know that network effects are very powerful when it comes to games. I think this idea of how do you get the people you care about together in a game so that they can play together, the fact that it's not a focus means that many games are actually in a situation where they do need to keep creating new content to keep all the players excited and happy to play the game. What I've seen work really well is if you can get the right”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Want to play with the people they care about that's something that's even beyond human, it's just like a biological mammalian need it's actually surprisingly difficult to do given how successful games are right now and so we started to study why is that what are the technology solutions we need to create so that it's frictionless what are the places these games could live such that they would be able to be played easily between friends and family co-workers And then we realized the reason knowing what it had done it is because it was very difficult to do and so we set out to go put together a team and raise enough money to go after it seriously”

    2021-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source