Elite Game Developers Podcast

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 Jörgen Larsson, the Founder and CEO of Stillfront Group. Jörgen has been an entrepreneur in gaming for a few decades. He has seen all the angles and aspects to creating value in gaming, and how to build long lasting value in the ever-changing market of video games. We'll now hear more from Jörgen himself.

In August of 2020, I did a webinar with the UK’s Department for International Trade as part of a virtual Northern Powerhouse trade mission to gamescom and devcom, on the topic of Best practices for video pitching. In this lecture, I talk to Northern Powerhouse delegates about how you can get the most out of the pitching video call, what kind of setup you should have and most importantly, how to have an organic discussion with your call participants. For new video ad creatives, check out https://getigc.com

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.