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In this episode, I have a chat with Anton Gauffin, the founder and CEO of Huuuge Games. Anton has been an entrepreneur in gaming for two decades now and has seen pretty much everything, all the ups, and downs. In recent news, Huuuge Games announced that they will soon go public in an initial public offering on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In this episode, we talk about leadership, company mission, and vision and Anton has grown to lead a 600 employee company.

In this episode, I'm talking about the company cap table. What it means to manage a cap table when you're starting off with just the founders. And when you start growing and building a company, bringing on more employees, bringing on investors, who are incentivized with equity in the company. So we're going to cover a lot of topics regarding how you can manage and model your cap table.

In this episode, I'm talking with Shanti Bergel, Managing Director at Transcend Fund. Transcend is an early stage venture capital firm focused on games and digital entertainment. Shanti has a long career in gaming and has been working in free-to-play for almost twenty years. We talk about Shanti's approach to investing and how he evaluates companies for an investment.

Today I'm talking with Lars Jörnow, partner at EQT Ventures. Half VC, half start-up. EQT Ventures is a multi-stage VC with €1.2bn across two funds to help fuel European tech start-ups to become global winners. Lars started his career in gaming at King over ten years and eventually transitioned into VC in 2015. Since then, he's invested in companies like Small Giant Games, Popcore, Traplight and Reworks. We'll now hear more Lars himself.

In November of 2020, I did a webinar called “Early-Stage Success in Mobile Gaming,” where I talked to Skunkworks Games Co-Founder and CEO James Cramer. This webinar is a real case study in how Skunkworks raised its angel rounds and how they built the pathway to success in mobile games while raising very little.

Today I'm talking with Sean Kauppinen from Hiber World. We talk about Sean's experience in gaming from three decades, how he's seen startups grow and what mistakes have come along the way. We also talk about Hiber and what the company is doing in the gaming user generated content space.

On September of 2020, I did the keynote at the IGDA Leadership Day. This was an online event, organized by the International Game Developers Association. In this keynote, I talked about my view on leadership: what is leadership, and how game entrepreneurs and founders could take notice from examples, from history, on what it takes to be a leader.

In October of 2020, I hosted a panel on Gaming Investments and M&A. The panel consists of Anton Gorodetsky and Sergei Evdokimov from InvestGame.net, Micha Katz from Aream & Co, and Miska Katkoff from Deconstructor of Fun. The participants talked about the topics of the current state of M&A in games, these M&A strategies, fundraising in gaming and shed some light on future predictions.

Today I'm talking with Salone Sehgal, General Partner at Lumikai Fund, which is the first seed stage gaming fund focusing on the Indian market. Salone has a career in banking and finance, which she left to found a gaming startup. Later on, she joined London Venture Partners, where she was until recently. In this episode, we talk about Salone's experiences in gaming, how the Indian market is evolving and how she's developing her invessting skills.

In August of 2020, I did a webinar with Julia Palatovska, the Co-founder and CEO of Dorian on the topic of how to raise a seed round from VCs in gaming. Previously, Julia was an investor at London Venture Partners, and before LVP, Julia was Head of Biz Dev at G5 Games. In August, Julia announced Dorian's seed round of $3.35m.

Today I'm talking with Thor Gunnarsson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Mainframe Industries. Thor and his team started Mainframe in 2019, to build a cloud-based MMO game that you could play on any device. They've attracted lots of interest from investors and are now in full development mode. With Thor, we talk about his founder journey, how technology is playing a role in game development and what the future of cloud gaming could look like.

I did a webinar in August of 2020 titled “Audience-first game development”, where my guest was Mitchell Smallman, Co-founder and Chief Product from Netspeak Games, based out of London UK. We talked about game development where you’ve first made a decision on an audience that you’re game will target, and not the other way around.

Today I'm talking with Jens Hilgers, who is an investor and serial entrepreneur, and well known for his work in the esports industry. As a day job, Jens is the Founder Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, a VC firm focusing on early-stage investments for gaming, esports, and interactive media. With Jens, we talk about entrepreneurship, fundraising and how gaming and esports will evolve in the coming years.

In April of 2020, I did a webinar on the topic of Teams and team building in gaming. I went through how you'd start off building a founding team and I cover the example of myself putting together my founding team back in 2012. Then I'll talk about the dream team in gaming, what that means and how new founders should think about the hiring, to build the best team that builds the best games.

Today I'm talking with Gigi Levy-Weiss, the managing partner of NFX, a seed-stage and Series A venture firm. Before starting NFX, Gigi was a founder and one of the companies he founded was Playtika. Since early in his career, Gigi has worked in gaming and with gaming companies, and he has a lot of interesting insights into funding and company building.

In May of 2020, I did a webinar on the topic of Company Culture In Gaming. I went through the top ten tools for building a strong company culture. Things like trust, values, rituals and the pact between the employer and employee. Then I cover the behaviors, surfacing problems and hiring for a culture. I talk about a bottoms-up culture, how to react to hard times and how to keep a curiosity to improve the culture. This episode is sponsored by IronSource.

Today I'm talking with Shaun Rutland, the Co-Founder and CEO of Hutch, a racing games company from London, UK. Their titles include games like Rebel Racing, F1 Manager and Top Drives. When founding Hutch, Shaun and his co-founders wanted to create a special company that would give the power and creativity to their staff. Will now hear more from Shaun himself.

In June 2020, I did a webinar with Jussi Autio, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Resistance Games. Jussi approached us with the idea of providing his knowledge on projecting sales in PC games so that the fans of Elite Game Developers could benefit from Jussi’s extensive understanding. Jussi's template can be found at https://elitegamedevelopers.com/pcgame

Today I'm talking with Matt Frenchman, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sugar, a game financing company from London, UK. Matt was previously an investment banker, and in the recent years, he's been building Sugar, a user acquisition financing company for games. In this episode, we talk with Matt about how he's been learning how gaming works, and how he can change dept financing for games. I can tell you that the ROAS of this episode is off the charts! Check out Sugar at https://www.add-sugar.io/

In May 2020, I did a webinar with free-to-play consultant Nick Murray, where we talked about the ways that developers can create long-term engagement for their players, and to keep them playing the games from months and years to come. We specifically talk about what is long-term engagement, why it matters and how developers in hybrid casual can take learnings from midcore.