Elite Game Developers Podcast

Today I’m talking with Antti Hattara, the Co-Founder and CEO of Starberry Games, a mobile games company from Berlin, Germany. Antti has an extensive background in free-to-play games and he’s recently been seeing success with his own startup. We discover Antti’s learning journey and how he approaches setting expectations that are healthy for a first-time founder.

Today I’m talking with Elina Arponen, the co-founder and CEO of Quicksave, an instant messenger games company. Elina is a serial entrepreneur, and Quicksave is her second venture-backed games company.

I wanted to talk to Elina about diversity in the games industry and how has it been to run and raise funding for her company in a predominantly male industry.

With my first company, when we were doing Facebook canvas games, we built our own game server backend on AWS. We thought that we knew what we were doing, but we had painful nights when servers were down and the bills from Amazon that were really hurting our bottom line as we scaled our game. Back then, there was no SaaS option for a game server, especially made for a free-to-play game.

I’m so happy to talk to day with James Gwertzman, the co-founder of PlayFab.

Today I talk with Mariina Hallikainen, the CEO of Colossal Order, a Tampere, Finland based company that developed the hugely successful game Cities: Skylines in 2015.

Mariina was a first-time CEO when she took on the role of running the young games startup, and she has been learning everything on the job.

This is a really interesting discussion, and could not be more pleased with all the insights that Mariina shares with us.

Today I had a chat with Carl Fritjofsson, partner at venture capital firm Creandum. Creandum has invested in several games companies in the past years, including the very successful Small Giant Games.

We talk with Carl about: How should a founder approach a financing round? How does your decision making change from Pre-Seed, to Seed, to Series A? Why isn't the tech VC looking at games, when they are looking at mix of other tech related startups?

Today I talk with Nikolina Zidar, the co-founder and CEO of Unicorn Pirates, a mobile games studio that values a diverse culture for making great games for the underserved markets. Nikolina shares her journey into the games industry, how she found her company and what are the ways that all of us can support and improve diversity in the games industry.

Topics that we discuss: How do you approach the nurturing of the company culture and the values? How do you find great people who are a good fit, and are great addition to the company culture? Have you had any scary situations as an entrepreneur?

Today I am chatting with Lasse Seppanen, who was previously co-founder and CEO of PlayRaven, the developer of the Spymaster games. Lasse and his co-founders had a unique idea for a company that they wanted to build, but had to abruptly part ways with the company at the end of 2018.

Topics that we discuss: How did you find co-founders?
How do approach hiring? What advise would you give to people who are just starting out with the founding team?
Would you have done things differently if you'd known the outcome?