Elite Game Developers Podcast

Today I'm talking with Uri Marchand, the Co-Founder and CEO of Overwolf, from Tel Aviv, Israel. Uri and his team started building tools for creators to build apps around games like League of Legends back in the early 2010s. Through the years, Uri and his team have built a company that truly enables gaming creators to create, grow and monetize their content.

Loads of new gaming studios first spend time courting with VCs, when they should actually start from the ground floor. In this podcast episode, I talk about raising funding from angel investors and how you can build your own list of angel investor leads.

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 Vladimir Funtikov, the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Mobile, from Tallinn, Estonia. Vlad and his team were one of the earliest mobile teams to strike it big on Android back in the day. The team started scaling things up quickly and through their rollercoaster ride, Vlad has learned a lot about company building. We'll now hear more from Vlad himself.

In October of 2020, I did a webinar on playtesting mobile games with Elie Mouraud from PlaytestCloud. We talked about how you can learn more about your game by focusing on the player's experience, from early on in the development, all the way to soft launching, and going live.

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.

Today I'm talking with Jason Chapman, General Partner at Konvoy Ventures. They are a seed stage fund, investing in the infrastructure technology, tools, and platforms of tomorrow's video gaming industry. With Jason, we decided to make this episode a more of a discussion, around the topic of user generated content platforms, as it's of big interest for both of us, as we've seen UGC become one of the dominating topics of 2020.

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.