YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Waldron

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64
first
2021-09-16
most recent
2021-09-16
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Even though we all have mobile devices now and we didn't a decade ago, and even though we're on multiple social services that connect us in all these ways, we're not actually playing games with our friends. We're usually playing them by ourselves. They usually are a game, the company that created it had to solve this needle in a haystack problem. They were wondering, how do I find the person who wants to play this game? And then when they find you, they kind of assume your friends aren't also going to want to play. It's not really designed for that experience. This model has been so successful that it's stolen all the attention from all the great game developers. And so we thought, well, it's obvious that people want to play games with their friends, actually. It's a little bit like Amazon's strategy. I mean, you should just have the lowest prices and best selection. There's nothing brilliant about that. People want to play games with their friends.”

    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. “Years and Frank and the team have done an amazing job with it. So I've been really interested in this idea of how do we create better social experiences? It's always been my focus. And when I think about PlayCo, now what we've noticed is that there's a huge games market 20 times bigger maybe than it was back when Zynga was creating these games on Facebook. What's interesting is the way that you win in that market is by being incredibly good at performance marketing and by being incredibly good at performance marketing, you need to understand your customer and build them the best game and beat all the other games that you're competing with for that same customer. It's great because people are getting better games than ever and there's so much competition for the user. They're getting great product. The problem with it is it doesn't really lend itself.”

    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. “Land in the game with us without having to actually go and do the work of organizing that to happen, which now we kind of take this for granted, but 14 years ago was wild. People were showing up that I knew and they were landing on the same table as me and it was magic. Immediately became clear that that was something we could go and do to all sorts of games. And so we set off to go and make it happen across all sorts of genres. And we discovered new business models along the way. we sort of invested and grew the company to a lot of different games that were exciting to a lot of different people and that were very different from the model of the games that were created up until that time. So it was sort of before there was a word for freemium and all this stuff, we had to figure out a way to grow a game, run it as a service, and how do we monetize it sort of from first principles. And so that was the story of Zinga. Now like the company has a new management team, it's running incredibly well. And I've got nothing to do with the last seven years.”

    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. “Wanted to make it easier to play games with my friends. So interestingly enough, my first app on the platform that I put out immediately when they released it was an app to find your friends on the Nintendo Wii so you could play games online with them. Nintendo didn't have a service for this, so I just built a simple app to do it on Facebook. And that's when Mark Pinkis reached out to me, who was an investor in Facebook and had been thinking about building apps on the platform and said, hey, why don't we build some different apps together? And we start off thinking of a few different ideas. But eventually landed on poker because we thought college students love poker. And by combining the sort of Facebook social graph with poker, we're probably going to be able to make something that's easier to play and more fun with friends. And that was a very, very simple idea, but it worked very well. And we realized after we put it out and we started seeing friends.”

    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. “So, from a young age, I was tinkering on computers. I think there's nothing super original about that part of my story. What I will say was I was lucky, though, because I went to university right around the time that Facebook was opening up their access to the rest of universities that weren't Ivy Leak. I was able to access a service probably the first year that it was allowed to be accessed as a freshman in university in my school. And I spent a bunch of time on it and I had grown up with my space and trying to hack into the MySpace pages by building these things when MySpace didn't have a platform. You could go and you could write some JavaScript that would take over the page and then create your own reskinned MySpace page. And I was trying to build social networking apps before there were APIs for social networking apps. So when Facebook released a platform and I understood this significance of that because I was a user of it, I got really excited and I built something the first day. So they put out the platform and I”

    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. “Reimagining how we take what we're already doing and the emergent behavior we're seeing. People are trying to play these games, they're playing poker, they're having poker night, they're playing board games on Zoom. How do you take this emergent behavior and really make it easy to do and then bring it to the next level? That's what we're thinking about.”

    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. “And puts you together with the people that you care about in that place, the amount of possibilities for a game to go in and explore that space is huge. And when it comes to audio, when I think about what's a natural interface for social communications, there's nothing really more natural than your voice. I'm really excited about understanding that is like another way of making games more accessible. The more we can start understanding the context of what people are saying and how, the more we can start using that to control the software in a way where people don't need to use the keyboard, they don't need to use a mouse, and maybe they don't need to use touch. Not only does it allow for sort of these new gameplay experiences, I also think it allows them to live in more places. So if we create games that can be controlled by audio, well, then that can be a game maybe you play with your AirPods on. Maybe it's a game that plays in Zoom. Maybe it's a game you can play while you're listening to music on Spotify. Who knows? But I think there's sort of an interesting line of thinking here, which is just.”

    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. “Audio is an interface and video is an interface. It's not just a way of representing what's there. And so we've already seen all the super interesting work that's going on with lenses on Snapchat and not on Facebook and other platforms. And we've already seen what we can do with AI when it comes to image editing. And we're starting to see this head into video. We're seeing that sort of in pre-recorded clips. We're seeing it as a single player experience where we're taking a picture of ourselves with a selfie. That's going to start becoming the experiences we can share together. And then when you start plugging the APIs into that and when you start actually imagining what it could mean to have a multiplayer version of this type of power to create these experiences that can augment the visual reality around you quite a limitless canvas there it's hard to predict what it might be but you can imagine we will be able to represent and change the world around you in a way that puts you in different places.”

    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. “Has arrived without us ever realizing it. I think that's really powerful. And I think it doesn't require any behavior change from us. It's frictionless. We just need to keep using the services we're using and they're going to keep expanding in this direction. These theses are compatible, right? I think there's room for this super in-depth fantasy-like experience that has all these interesting things you can never do in real life, but there's also room to create this metaverse, which is basically a much better version of real life online. And that's the one we're very excited about because it's very much grounded in the social interactions that people really care about. We think we can do it in a way that doesn't require you to make the investment of packing up and moving to Mars, basically. I think like a lot of these virtual worlds kind of become the digital equivalent of getting on the rocket and going to Mars. We're just asking you to let us add more fun to your space. That's a trend that it starts off probably with simple things.”

    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. “Think that there's a lot to be said for increasing the fidelity of experience with technology. And I'm excited about virtual reality. I'm very excited about augmented reality and the glasses that we might get where we can look around the world and have all this information at our fingertips I'm starting to realize is. Because we already live in this world where we're spending all of our time in this video. We can already augment this video software world. We already have the ability to create that hug today. Think that this is something that just sort of popped up on us, and we didn't realize the moment we're spending more time. Communicating over video. We are walking around in the world with these augmented reality glasses we're waiting for is the moment that the opportunity to create that kind of experience.”

    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. “Sort of older video only, audio only version of it just seems completely foreign to us. It's happened so gradual that we never realized we were moving there all along.”

    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. “We can make it easier to reach out and touch and interact with each other. And so video has this sort of flat nature to it. And as we Start to augment it and we start creating ways to play. Can actually do things that we wouldn't be able to do in real life. And so we see this as a canvas, an empty room. And our job is to imagine what toys would people want in this room Electronic Arts' mission was to see if a computer can make you cry. What can we do Now that these people are together in this space, how can we have a game facilitate feelings between people and create new ways of actually Connecting Think there's another way to approach the metaverse where a few years from now we're on a video chat service. And it looks nothing like the video chat service we're on today because it's so augmented from the pieces that we've added to it.”

    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. “It. And so one of the questions we've been thinking about at PlayCo is what does it mean to be in these new virtual spaces and what types of things are people going to want to do there? If we're at video now, what is it next year? And what is it the year after that? And we think that these spaces will continue to be augmented in ways that improve our ability to interact. So to your earlier point, one of the most interesting things on the internet is every time we create a new way to interact, we get a lot of unexpected effects out of it. And so video and audio live streaming and communications, I think we're just starting to see. That's opening up industries globally everywhere. The last few years. And I think that what's next is”

    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. “If you think about the way that things started off online, we started representing each other with text. And when we started in the chat rooms that we had over a decade ago and we moved toward images to represent our avatar and then we moved towards social networks where we started being able to add all this context, who are your friends? What are your hobbies? What do you like to do? Now we're representing ourselves with video, live video and audio over the internet. And we keep upgrading, bringing our real selves online. While I see that there's one movement happening on the side of the metaverse, which is creating a world that's so compelling everybody wants to move to it, pack up their bags, leave the real world, and go to the new virtual world. I think that what we've actually been doing is slowly migrating ourselves in pieces into this virtual space without realizing it. And because it's happening gradually, we look at ourselves on Zoom and it feels so natural. But we're actually in these virtual rooms together and we don't really think about it.”

    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