#653: Elan Lee, Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens — How to Raise Millions on Kickstarter, Deconstructing Mega-Successes, Secrets of Game Design, The Power of Positive Constraints, The Delights of Craftsmanship, and The Art of Turning Fans into Superfans

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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I also do post some questions. Now it is. cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal metal skeleton. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers from all different disciplines. Could be chess, could be military. In this case, it is games, all things gaming. My guest today is Elon Lee. You can find him on Twitter at

Elan Lee E L A N L E E. Elon is the co-creator and chief executive officer of Exploding Kittens. Maybe you've heard of it, a leading gaming and entertainment company. Under his leadership, Exploding Kittens has expanded its portfolio to nearly thirty different games, with more than twenty million games sold in more than fifty countries since its founding. In twenty fifteen. Before founding Exploding Kittens, Lee was the chief design officer at Xbox Entertainment Studios, where he led the interactive entertainment portfolio. Prior to that, he was the founder and chief creative officer. of fourth wall studios and co-founder of 42 Entertainment. He began his career at Microsoft Games Studios as a lead designer on the original Xbox. Lee has won a primetime Emmy for the series Dirty Work, Game Innovator of the Year for Exploding Kittens, a Peabody Award for the world's first alternate reality game, The Beast, and an IndyK Trailblazer Award for a distinguished career in interactive entertainment among Others.

Alan, welcome to the show. Nice to see you. Thanks. It's really good to see you too. Happy to be here. So to paint a picture for folks. Downstairs I have What should function as a dining table. Completely covered.

in games of every imaginable type and the floor is further littered. There are Dice everywhere, there are blank dice everywhere, cards, there are blank cards. So I'm in the midst of immersing myself in all things, specifically tabletop gaming. And I want to thank you because of all the games tested so far. One game has stood out. As a friend favorite.

And that is poetry for Neanderthal. And there are people out there who will catch me on Neanderthals and fine, I'll say it both ways for you. But we asked for that one, naming that. Fair enough. with you and there are other places where some of your bio has been covered in I think very, very good fashion. I recommend people listen to Think Like a Game Designer and the episode that Justin Gary

Did with you as well. But why don't we start? Because I found a video online which was you interviewing two game designers who worked on hand to hand wombat. And I found that short conversation So incredibly helpful with the nitty-gritty. Of seeing how the sausage is made. I was hoping that perhaps we could start with

Poetry for Neanderthals as a case study. From the very inception. And you could just walk us through it. Poetry for Neanderthal's, it didn't even have a name. Of course, no game has a name when you start. But that one came to me from some friends. I met Jacob and Francesca at this conference. And they came to me and they're like, okay. You're the exploding kittens guy. We got this really cool idea. What if there was a game Where

You had to learn a new language. And you're really bad at that language. You're in a foreign land, everyone speaks the language except you, and you've gotta try to get by. And they said The way that we can simulate You not speaking the correct language is you have the restriction

Every sentence you speak, every word in that sentence must be a single syllable word. And they gave me some examples. They're like, Okay, so now listen. You, Elon, you have to say I'm really hungry, I wanna go to the store, but there's a dragon at the store that's really scary and I don't know what to do. Go. And I'm like, okay, sure. Uh me want to go get food. And immediately I realized

Oh, I sound like a caveman. That's kind of fun. That's you're right, you have simulated this environment where I don't speak the right language. And so we started working together, and it took about a year of playing around. We got another designer involved, a guy named Brian Spence. And realized There's something super fun here. There is a core gameplay loop. There's something that every time people touch it, every time they play around with it. They start laughing, they start wanting to tell their friends about it. But holy crap, those sentences they are a mouthful.

And so we took the sentences down to like five or six words, still too much. We took them down to three words, still too much. Took them down to two words, still too much. And we finally realize why are we complicating this? What if the entire game was Get your friend to say this word using only single syllable words. And that was it. Once we realized that we were bringing baggage through for no reason, the game got really simple, really fun. My co-founder and business partner, Matt Inman, who's the creator of the oatmeal, he took one look at it and said, We're calling this thing Poetry for Neanderthals. And suddenly we had a game. It was really those steps in that order that led us to push that thing out the door.

And could I just maybe give a layman's take so people can envision what this game looks like. So I played it with two other friends. It was the three of us. And I I actually we did a lot of trial and error. So I think we also did some experimental work just in terms of how to optimize for three people. But imagine that you have one person who is the caveman or cave woman and they have these cards and you Flip over the card and at the top you have ghost, let's just say, as an example. That's and that will get you one point. If you can give Qs in these monosyllabic words.

Only you can see that word. No. That's right. Only you can see the word. And so you might say Dead. Man. Uh and you start it's it starts to get hard very quickly. Yeah.

Then if you get that right, now you can say the word ghost. You're allowed to say that. And so the three point Which is the three point option below that might be Ghost Town. Let's just say. And There is a hourglass that is turned over.

Which gives you, I think it's maybe sixty seconds. Something like that, to rack up as many points as possible. Usually you do this in teams. If you break the rules. And you say Something like Casper. There is somebody with an inflatable club.

Which does not hurt. who whacks you on the head with this saying, or I guess on some other body part. And so With three guys. adolescent at heart, even though this is designed I think for ages seven and up. We just got hours and hours of endless fun out of this thing. It was so much fun because you also have these ridiculous things that come up. My brother's wife, so my sister in law was trying, she had teeth.

No, no, she had mouth. Mouth was the one point word and she said teeth house. And he was like, Teeth house. Like the the stuff that comes out can be really, really funny. And it's very easy to get up and running quickly, which is what made this I think more attractive than some of the other games I bought at game shops which were very A much heavier lift. on the way in. And I want to just as a way of setting the table tell people part of the reason I was excited to have you on, and we chatted a bit before recording.

And you and I are aligned. And I'm sure quite a few things, but one is Helping people and I'll include myself in that group. To spend less time in front of screens. And uh

Games are a very easy way to do that. If you find the right games and you choose the right tool to suit your personality and those are the friends that you have. So I jumped in and gave a TED talk there for a second. So thanks for putting up with that. But hold on, let me just interject. What you just described, I mean, you're hired, that was the perfect commercial. What you just described Is A game. It's not necessarily entertaining.

But a game that allowed those three people you included to entertain each other. That's music to my ears. That means okay, success. We built a cool game there. That was the goal. We hit it. I didn't even have to be in the room to facilitate that. You just had exactly the experience I wanted you to have. I'm thrilled. Yeah. Absolute win. So let me dive into a few of the stages.

You met the game designers who you named And What led you to want to work with them because you must Both personally and as a company. I would imagine get pitched.

A lot of new games. So what was it besides the concept because ideas They're not worth as much as people like to think. So what was it? that led you to want to commit to working with them and in what capacity was that? And then what happened over that year? Was it simply that everyone had a lot of

projects they were juggling in that had to fit in the gaps. Or something else. Okay, so we gotta take a little bit of a look at sort of the anatomy of a game. And Вот так міни із

I believe the most important part of a game. Is I don't have a great term for it. I'm actually I have no training in game design, so I kinda make all this stuff Up along as I go. So bear with me. But I think you're doing fine in life with picking it up as you go. So keep keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah, we'll do. All right.

I think the essence of any game is what I at least call the the core gameplay loop. And that's the thing that you're gonna do over and over and over again. So in the case of exploding kittens The core gameplay loop is Russian roulette with a deck of cards. There's a few bad cards in there. Draw a card, hope it's not the bad one. You survive to see another day. core gameplay loop. Uno, classic game. Everybody knows Uno. Uno If I had to describe the core gameplay loop, I would say it's a lock and key mechanism. And all that means is you have a hand of cards, everyone's a key. As soon as you play a key, On top of a lock which is in the center of the board.

It becomes a new lock for the next player. That's the core gameplay loop, right? In that case, it's numbers and colors, but still it's just locks and keys and playing one converts one. So That Concepts.

Of finding a core gameplay loop. That's compelling and interesting. Is really hard. really, really hard. And the ones that I'm most attracted to when I hear them is Core gameplay loops that are not actually entertaining.

core gameplay loops that make the people you're playing with entertaining. Because I really think that's at the heart of games. When I think back to like my childhood and playing games with my brothers and sisters growing up. I don't remember any of the games. I don't think I should remember any of the games. The games are not important. It's the tool set, right? Those games are tools for me to have fun with my siblings. And I remember that fun. I remember the the laughter. I remember the secret alliances. I remember all that stuff. Because the games had really strong core gameplay loops. That allowed me to have those interactions. All right.

Big rabbit hole there, but it's a little bit more. I'll try to keep it short. Yeah, fair enough. All right. Yeah. So for poetry.

When Jacob and Francesca came to me with this concept I didn't think it was a good game. And just for clarity, were they friends? Were they out of the blue? Were they working for the company in part time or full time? So this was at a conference called Ord Camp in Chicago. It's an invite only conference, so very few people there. I show up. crazy introvert. I'm scared out of my mind to talk to people. But

There's only a hundred people there. So anybody who comes up to me and says hello I'm like, okay, there's something cool about this person, otherwise it wouldn't be there and there's nowhere to hide this. There's nowhere to hide. Nowhere. There's really nowhere to hide. So when they approached me and said, Hey, can we talk to you? I just thought I need to give everybody here the benefit of the doubt. I need to get over my shyness. I need to talk to them. And it turns out it was a great idea because What they showed me, like I said, was not a fun game. But a really interesting core gameplay loop.

This idea that communication is easy. If you reduce it down to monosyllabic words, communication becomes really challenging and you need your friend's help. To get you from that caveman talk. Back to regular English. Okay, so over that then year period of time.

What is happening Just to come back to sort of the the anatomy of the development of game. How do you refine? How do you play test? What is play testing? All that kind of stuff. One of the biggest assets that we have at our company, and thing that took me like seven years to build, is this program called the Kitty Test Pilots. And this is a group of families that have reached out to us saying, We love your games, tell us when the next one comes out. And we respond, Great, want to test some prototypes for us. And we regularly send them out very, very half-baked ideas. And we ask them just to send us feedback. So what happened over the next year? So we took that idea.

I showed it to some friends. I said, okay, what if you had to translate these sentences using only single syllable words? And what came back was Holy crap, this is cumbersome. This is so hard and there's not enough time and my turn took eight minutes and what the hell is that? And you know, we got we all this really bad feedback. But I knew that core gameplay loop was really solid. So that's when we went down to like, okay, what if the sentences were only five words long? What if we reduce the timer to two minutes, then one minute. I think the final is actually only like forty-five seconds. Don't hold me to that. Something in that range. Something, yeah, yeah.

But we started to realize I'm getting Better and better results. the fewer words they have to do at once But they want more time to do a bunch more words. So eventually we got down to Alright, let's try out two things. One. You only have to do one word at a time. Let's see if that's interesting.

And two. What does punishment mean? Because everybody laughs when you use a word with more than one syllable, but then it kinda ended. It was like setting up for a joke, but the punchline never came. And so we thought, all right, we'll put a buzzer in there, or there's a word you shout out. And I'm pretty sure it was Matt with his just perfect pitch sense of humor, said, Well, it's a caveman game, so give him a club and let them bonk each other over the head. Sure general counsel love that. Yeah. Oh man, you would not believe how lawyers hate us. Holy crap. Endless, endless conversations.

But they made us in the instructions, they made us say hit the other person over the head. Soft. Soft. They insisted on that. And so we put we changed it without asking. We put it to soft. Over the head. And uh that was our that was our version of a compromise. Anyway. When we talk about the anatomy of a game though, like we're talking about That core gameplay loop. Okay, we really got it now. One word.

Get through as many one word cards as you can, as fast as you can. You've got a few seconds to do so. And now we start to add the surroundings around the game. We need to pick really funny words that we know are going to elicit funny responses. Teeth is really great. Teeth was calculated. Teeth is not just a word that shows up in that game. We had to think, all right, what are words where when you try to describe them, you're going to start to stumble? And the places you have to go. yield really funny results and things like teeth start to show up in the game. And then we started thinking about punishment and we started thinking about the no stick, it's called, because everything in the game is just single syllables. And on and on it went until we had our core game loops surrounded by this really

beautiful kind of menagerie of Things that enhanced the experience and made it so like Okay, you can start playing this game. Every single element is gonna push you towards that core gameplay loop. The fuel running that engine, that loop running over and over again is the other players.

And once we hit that in this beautiful, elegant, fast loop. That's when we start throwing that thing in a box and pushing it out the door. Could you give a another example or two of core gameplay loop? Because on one hand It sounds like There could be a core gameplay loop that is almost like a theme, much like you might have

The Hollywood pitch of say Alien, which is Jaws in Space, right? So there's something very simple which encapsulates the melding of two ideas that make something interesting. It could also be a game mechanic, which I know much Less. About

Could you give another example of uh or two of core gameplay loop? I love dissecting games to find these. So I'll start with one of my own. So let's look at exploding kittens. I described it really briefly before as just Russian rel with a deck of cards. That's not accurate. If we want to talk about the actual core gameplay loop, what that game is

Where you get to decide where to place the bullet. And that is super important. The very first time we tested the game, it was just Here's a deck of cards, there's a few bullets in it. We didn't even know what to call at the time. Here's there's a few bullets in this deck. We're just gonna take turns drawing. Someone draws a bullet, you're dead, everybody continues on without you. That game was no fun at all. And the reason it was no fun is'cause it's us playing against the game. The game has all the burden of entertaining us. Absolutely uninteresting.

We introduced these other cards into the game called diffuse cards, and all a diffuse card did was it said, look, if you draw that bullet. Instead of dying, you can put it back in the deck anywhere you want in secret. Now we've got a game. Because now It's not actually Russian relet, it's not a random game. You have to survive me. You have to outthink me. I just put this thing somewhere in the deck and now it's your turn to go. Did I put it on top?

Maybe you don't want to draw that card. Did I put it on the bottom? Maybe you don't want to draw that card. Did I know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I didn't put it on the top? And so you skipped your turn and drew the second one down? Well maybe I knew that, right? Now suddenly the game fades away and I'm playing against you. And that's the core gameplay loop of Exploding Kittens, and I believe why it's been so successful. So we're gonna bounce all over the place, which is I guess I'm gonna I'm gonna t make it a feature and not a bug of My style of conversation.

But Let's chat if you're open to it about Kickstarter for a moment because I know a lot of people outside of games specifically will still be interested in Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general. So you I believe at one point had a fraudler email.

Print it out. And framed. And I think somewhere the limit was set, like ten thousand, and maybe it got bumped to like fifty thousand for this new bank account for things. What was your initial target for the Kickstarter campaign and where did you end up? The initial target was we were trying to raise ten thousand dollars in thirty days. And we set that alert. The bank would let us deposit a check up to fifty thousand dollars. They were being very generous.

And the check that we tried to deposit at the end of those thirty days was almost nine million dollars. Okay. I have specific questions. Around how you did things differently. And you had some very

strong advantages going in. You had your background. You had Matt and the Oatmeal and all the followers of the Oatmeal. You had a deck that was loaded in a sense, but still ended up being maybe still is the most backed in terms of number of backers Kickstarter project, or at least at the time that was the case. Still the case by a lot, actually. Okay. Yeah. In order to talk about Kickstarter. We have to talk about two things. One is alternate reality games and the other is the oatmeal.

So alternate reality games. my background being sort of trained at Microsoft and at the Xbox and and learning about communities and the appeal of games and and why we play games together. I then went off and started with some friends this company to build alternate reality games. And and all you really need to know about alternate reality games, although I could talk about them for a long time, is The central premise is

Together you are stronger. Together as a community, you can become extraordinary versions of yourselves. And The games are set up. To deliver a story.

out in the real world that is convoluted. And you have to piece it back together. It's like my mentor, Jordan Weisman, likes to call it Internet archaeology. So Archaeology is You find all the little bits and pieces of the vase.

You put it together in order to figure out what it is about that society, how that society lived, how those people lived. Ulternate reality games are the same thing. We write a beautiful story, start to finish. With a very compelling narrative. And then we break it up into little pieces and we hide those pieces.

Everywhere. In the real world, on the internet, on phone lines, fax lines, live actors, everywhere. And you, the audience, working together because you're stronger together. Go and perform that feat of archaeology. Find all the pieces, put them back together, look at your beautiful digital vase And then

Learn the story. Based on what you found. Yeah. So I built a lot of those and I was really trained over and over again, really beaten into my psyche, community first, community first. They're so much smarter than you are.

Learn to entertain a crowd. That's what this is all about. We decided to launch this Kickstarter campaign. We had this really compelling hook. We knew the game was really good. We put up the page. And the very first thing that happens is The oatmeal goes into full effect. Matt has spent at that point about a decade building an audience.

earning their trust, convincing them he does just really high quality work. And for those who don't know, could you just explain what the oatmeal At that point, what what it looked like. Yeah, so at that point the oatmeal was and still is A webpage, theoatmeal.com. And Matt has spent 10 years writing short form comedy. One panel, sometimes up to four panel comics, sometimes very few long form pieces where he tells stories about his childhood. It's a lot of social commentary, and they're hilarious. They're beautiful.

Some of them have won Eisner awards, they will make you cry. Matt is truly one of the most talented artists and comedians I've ever met. And yeah, he's a guy who's just so much smarter than I am. It's an incredible collaboration. And I got to meet him through a mutual friend. I pitch this game to him, we talked about it, he said he'd really like to help, and off we went. And when we launched the Kickstarter campaign, honestly, it was only like three weeks after I met him. Wow, that's fast. Yeah, really fast. Yeah.

We built it fast'cause we had nothing to lose. We didn't think it would be a huge success, we just thought This feels really good. We don't have to overthink this. Let's just go. Now is it fair to say that also at that point you had the game mechanics refined. And Matt was bringing in a lot of the sort of artistic comedic flair in terms of the back hair cards and the artwork. So so you're effectively adding art to

Game mechanics that were ready to go. But kind of lacked an artistic vehicle. Is that fair to say? Totally fair. There are fifty six cards in the game, and so Matt's task was Not to design the game, although we both worked hard to refine it. Matt's task was write fifty six one panel jokes.

And he did. You flip through that deck and the first thing you're gonna do is just just laugh. I mean, it's such beautiful art. Okay, so back to our story. We launched the Kickstarter campaign and Matt posts about it and he says, For the first time ever, I've done a game, I hope you like it. And millions of people showed up, literally millions of views to that Kickstarter page and our first

We got funded, we were trying to raise ten thousand dollars, we got funded in like seven minutes. I mean it was out of control. And our first day we made a million dollars, and our second day we had two million, and our third day we had three million, and it was just like This is a runaway train. We have certainly Caught lightning in a bottle. We've unleashed the full potential of the oatmeal. Here's finally a way to productize that incredible brand. Welcome exploding kittens to the world.

Yeah. But then after the first week. After the first week it fell off a cliff. And the reason is is just because Everyone who Matt could reach who was interested in this thing had taken a look, either made a purchase decision or not, and that was it. You know, the the tank was empty.

So I sat down with him and we're like, Well, we got two choices. We can either just sort of ride off into the sunset and say, We made like four million bucks. That's incredible. We're trying to raise ten thousand. Let's just take a bow and and we're done. Or we could try to push this thing a little bit and just see what else is possible on Kickstarter. And at the time, the way that Kickstarter worked, the kind of only lever you had were these things called stretch goals. And the way a stretch goal works is you say like I got this product.

I'm gonna charge you twenty bucks for it. And we're gonna try to raise ten thousand dollars. But if we raise twenty thousand dollars for free, everybody gets three more bonus cards. And if we raise fifty thousand dollars, you get a carrying case. And if we raise a hundred thousand dollars, you know, you get gold plated cards, whatever it is. That was the tool you had. Give us more money, we'll give you more shit. We decided that's gonna be the name of this podcast episode. No kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding.

When we looked at when we looked at that ecosystem with that one lever, give us more money, we'll give you more shit, we kinda thought There's gotta be something else we can do. There's gotta be something else. And I I suddenly like my eyes went wide and I realized Holy crap, I've been training for this moment my whole damn life. We need to activate the community. Instead of thinking this is, you know, crowdfunding, let's think of this as crowd. Funding.

We did stretch goals, just like everybody else. But instead of tying it to money, we tied it to Just insane shit that we could ask the backers to do. We basically said, look, we're gonna throw a party and everybody's invited. Instead of giving us more money, we're done with money. Instead Hey we got this character in our game called Taco Cat. Half Cat, half taco.

Show us a picture of a real taco cat. And if you do, if like ten people do that. We'll throw in ten extra cards. That's a stretch goal. And we have um you know what would be funny? What about give us a picture of 10 Batmans in a hot tub? Whatever the hell that means, we wanna see it. Somebody does that, we'll give you a fancy carrying case. And

We just went nuts. We wrote these challenges that were insane and funny and basically said, We just want to have fun. Please have fun with us. We're only here for another twenty days, so why don't we just celebrate the whole way through? And the audience jumped on it. They did everything we asked. They took those pictures, they wrote poems, they filmed videos, they went out on the streets, they met each other, they had parties together, they ordered pizza, like All the fun stuff because we basically said

Money doesn't matter anymore. Let's just have fun. And it was a great invitation. All right. So many places I wanna go with this, and of course you are all of all of this alternate reality training for this sudden IRL Olympics that was brought to bear in Kickstarter. That's right. The first is just to put in context the money doesn't matter comment because it seems like at the time you're around four And you made additional millions of dollars, is that because there was a pre order button?

On the page. And as buzz built, even though The tears weren't predicated on people Spending more money, you had more new orders coming in as the buzz around these challenges and so on traveled. That's exactly right. We didn't ask for more money. We just said

We're gonna use this page as mission control. This is where we're gonna put out all the new challenges. This is where we're gonna tell you what you've earned when those challenges are complete. None of those challenges, again, have anything to do with money. Bye. Because it's a Kickstarter page, there's also a back this project button right there. And so the dollars kept rolling in. Yep. I love this because you're doing what I think it is is so beautiful when it works. And I wanna ask you more about it,'cause I'm sure you have more thoughts, which is how do you turn Say casual fans into super fans, super fans into proselytizers.

And then you basically and I know this is simplified, but If you do that well. You basically don't need a PR marketing department. to the extent that you would otherwise. Now you had them doing all sorts of stuff. So pets disguised as fighter jets, real unicorn enchiladas, and it goes on and on and on. The second major question that I have is how did you track all of this stuff?

Because it seems like At least in today's social media environment, perhaps it's just more scattered now and is more centralized then, but how did you keep track of all this stuff. And I guess you don't need to keep track of all of it, because really you're saying if we get ten Batman in a tub and we get ten of those. Unlock.

Exactly. We tracked it very, very poorly. We had a two sort arguably three person team at that point. What does arguably three person mean? Yeah, well some friends of mine would sort of drift in and drift out in their spare time. I'll tell you, I learned something amazing. We had a Gmail account associated with Kickstarter page and There is a apparently there's a limit. If a Gmail account receives a certain number of emails over a a particular amount of time, that Gmail account gets shut down. Oh no. It turns out that number is ten thousand per second. Oh wow.

And we hit that track. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. So you do you just assume you're like, all right, we're not gonna read ten thousand a second. We assume there's some Batman's in a tub in there, so fuck it. We were planning on being able to deliver anyways. Let's just Let's do it. All right. So you asked the question, how do you convert those casual fans into super fans? The way you do that. is you don't make those assumptions. You actually do need to read through those emails because The conversion process

is shining a light on. Yeah, totally. Totally. Right, you have to send out an an update that says Look what you did. Yeah. And you have to have the pictures right there. And like

The first draft of that update said Look what happened, and we realized Whoa that's the wrong message. It has to say. Look what you did. Nothing to do with us, nothing to do with just facts. You, you, spotlight on you. And that's when people start to convert because they're like

Alternate reality training. We are more powerful together. We are a community. Let's all keep working together. You've learned a lot and I'm sure that the approach you take to distributing your games has changed over time since once you establish yourself. It's like once you're guns and roses and you've you've had appetite for destruction, like the the way you approach things is a little different, right? But I've read you elsewhere.

worn which I thought was very astute. So I'll mention it here and then I'd love for you to f to maybe flesh it out a bit. Warn people about stretch goals where for instance they're like we're going to give a t shirt and it's like well wait a second. How much experience do you have with manufacturing fulfillment, SKUs, multiple sizes? And if you have a tabletop game, it's hard enough to learn how to be in the tabletop business if you're new. Let alone. Deciding you're gonna have

Also a t shirt business to try to figure out, not to mention the distraction cost. Are there any other best practices slash pitfalls that you would warn against? I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but there was a time about like two or three years ago when I looked at the top ten Kickstarter campaigns of all time. And we were You know, we're always in that list somewhere. People are constantly beating our record. They haven't beat our number of backers, but certainly made more money than we have. And I looked at the top ten.

And of those ten, We were the only company still in business. Wow. And it's because when that much money comes in. Before that much money comes in to earn that much money, there is this incredible temptation to branch out. and to become a t-shirt company and send out poster and say we're gonna hand autograph every single instance of this thing.

It's such a mistake. You are being backed to focus on fulfilling one item. Just do that. Just stop stop trying to like give people more party favors. Sto trying to be more popular. Like the way you make those friends is by fulfilling the promise you made to those people. And it's very rare that people adhere to that. It's such a shame. So I I'm going to just I've been so excited to talk to you, man. I really appreciate you making the time. And despite despite my caveat at the beginning before we started recording, which is I think I'm having an allergic reaction. I'm I'm actually slowly like pulling it together, going from my zombification earlier to semi coherent. So thank you. I want to give you pleasure.

Credit where credit is due. There are many ways I could do that, but top ten to still be in the top ten of all time. is remarkable for a lot of reasons. One of which is As Kickstarter gains in popularity, It is not an apples to apples comparison. In the same way that if you look at say the top

one hundred box office earners of all time from a film perspective, it's very hard to compare something from the fifties or sixties with, say, nineteen ninety, because of Theater penetration. Inflation. That's a thing. Prices go up. So it's astonishing that you guys have had that degree of longevity and part of why

I think You have been And this is speculation, but part of why I think you have been so successful and not just once but multiple times is you're very good at applying positive constraints.

So I would love to know For instance, as a company, it's one thing to go from A successful project to fulfilling that project and a lot of people are killed just in that process. It's quite another to build out a company that then

expands, raises funding, takes on private equity and has done everything that you guys have done, which is It's very rare. What are some of the constraints? Because if I look at your games, right, I look at the form factor, the size. There's thought put into maybe the maximum size. I don't know. Then I look at the complexity and I'm like, okay, we're not dealing with like metal figurines. So how do you think about the parameters that you place on your games.

Oh, there's so much to talk about here. Let's do it. One of them. All right.

You open a game box. And I'm gonna break that down into Two parts. There's the game components and then there's the box itself. First, let's talk about the box itself because it's this ridiculous conundrum. If you were to go and buy a new iPhone. That box is beautiful. They spend like ten or twenty or fifty dollars building that hard cardboard box and it's beautifully printed and it's glossy. And you know what you do? You take out the iPhone and you throw the box away. Yep.

My margins on my box are so tiny that I need to spend four cents, five cents building that box and you're gonna take the game out and then you're gonna play it and you're gonna put it back in that box and that box has to survive twenty years. It's insane. It is so hard to do. And so the first thing to talk about is First we have to understand play patterns. We have to understand how the audience actually uses this product and Most games will spend, they'll they'll stay within their margins. They'll say, Well, we can only spend four cents on the box, so we're gonna build it. We know the thing's gonna disintegrate, but

So be it. We don't have that approach at all. We lose money on every box and that's cool. We're okay with that. Because we know this is a lifelong commitment we're making to you. Now just to be clear, when you say a box, this is the packaging surrounding the game. You're not saying on every game. Exactly right. We break it down by, you know, there's a certain amount of budget allocated to each component and the box is one of those. Now let's look at the actual components in the box. And I had to learn about all this stuff. I had no idea that there was such thing as

card thickness or or weight of different cardboard components. Did you know there's a catalog of sand timers that you can look through? They're not all the same. Forget like how much time passes through them, but like the quality of the sand, the quality of the plastic. It does it have one layer or two layers? Are they multiple multiple colors? Have you dyed the sand? All this stuff. And we look at all of it and our mantra is a company. Is

Opening that box. Has to be a delay. Everything you touch in there. Has to feel beautiful. It has to feel like someone loved this thing. Because we're about to ask those players for a lot. We're about to say

Put down your phone, holy crap. Put down your phone. Read like Fifteen minutes worth of instructions. That's a huge ask. Fifteen minutes. And explain it to everybody else at the table. And then try playing the game and you're probably gonna screw it up and read them again and then try it again. The dropout rate is enormous, but if they feel like Someone really cares about this thing. Someone really devoted time.

maybe it'll give us more of a chance. And so that's the biggest constraint we place. Okay, just put the budget aside for a second. Know that what everybody else does does not really apply here. We need to make a beautiful product. We need to make Something that people fall in love with as much as we are in love with it. And and that's the translation. Our love will equal theirs. I

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Tim. I So question about size. Not to get too personal. No. So I would imagine that with the components, their materials cost. And that could be just a volume question, right? Like how much of X material you are using.

The games that I have seen Produced by exploding kittens. have all seemed easy to travel with. I don't know if that is a side effect of other Design principles or if that is sort of a first principle. Do you have games that are

Much larger. We do. We've tried a bunch of things. So When we talk about size, there's a few things to keep in mind. Travel is huge. We know people want to be able to transport these things from place to place, bring it to a party, bring it to a family reunion, you know, that stuff is super important. But

When we put a box on a shelf, we're fighting with all the other games on that shelf. And if you think of a box as a billboard, the biggest billboard's gonna win. So Having a smaller box is not necessarily advantageous there. But now let me pitch the flip side of that, which is we gotta ship these things from the manufacturing plant to a warehouse.

And How many boxes can you fit in what's called a shipper? On a pallet and then in a container. Exactly. Right. So all of that matters a lot. So it's this very delicate balance. What we've started doing. Because we prefer smaller boxes, we've started doing deals with retailers like Target and Walmart to say, look, we're gonna give you a smaller box, but let us build

These are called shippers. They're big cardboard frames that sit on the shelf and then the game sits inside of it. So we're trying to get the best of both worlds, right? Big billboard, lots of presence on the shelf, but the game is actually really small and convenient. You can take it with you anywhere. Do you guys and I should know this, but I don't. How do your sales channels break down? And we can edit this out if you don't want to talk about it, but I'm I'm curious. In the beginning you had D to C, D to C, D to C, right? Direct to consumer, you're shipping, you're handling all of that. As you become more popular, And particularly given the Ease of use of your games. the doors open up to using distributors and getting placement at places like Walmart, Target, et cetera. What does that look like now for you guys? What did it look like for the first three or four games? And what does it look like now?

So the first three or four games were a hundred percent D to C. All we did was sold the game ourselves. That's what Kickstarter basically was, right? Then we moved into Amazon, and Amazon very quickly eclipsed our ability to sell our own game. And then the retailers Retailers went through this incredible shift. They're like, Hey Our game sections used to have like four games. It used to be like we've got Connect Four and Monopoly, and that's about it.

And they said Let's actually build a real game section. And they reached out to us and said what's it gonna take to get you on the shelf? And we said Anchor tenant. Yeah, right. Seriously. We were talking about school at the right time. Yeah. It's a big deal. We It was huge. It was huge. And so we got to kind of build the games departments with them and to say, Yeah. But you gotta teach us everything, right? We don't even know we don't know what a shelf is. We don't know what we don't know what price to ask for, we don't know anything.

And they worked with us and we built it together and it was really awesome. And now I can't give you a retailer by retailer breakdown, but I will say that retail accounts for about sixty percent of our business now. What is the remaining forty percent? It's a mix between Online.

Hobby International And direct to consumer. What is hobby? Oh sorry, yeah, I had to learn this too.

I mean I I know the word, but Yeah, yeah, right, right. So hobby is this generic term that covers a lot of things. It basically means a store The primarily sells games. So if you think of uh kind of mom and pop game stores They're typically where you're gonna go to buy more hardcore games, like more strategy games, but they're starting to really get into party games, so they they have a lot of interest in us. Okay, but While we can sell directly to Target and Walmart.

There's hundreds of thousands of hobby stores, so you have to work through a middle manager to deal with those. Yeah, a distributor of some type. Yep. Yep. Okay. So This is going to strip away the company for a second,'cause I'm curious. Okay. Okay. Let's just say there's something like Iron Chef for Table top games.

If you want if you want that, you can run with it. I'll take my customer fifteen percent. But so so so it's like the unveiling of the components, let's just say. Which would be some constraints. I'm not gonna give you specific ones, but let's just say you yourself kinda locked in a room like old school Japanese manga artists, this would happen. Like the publishers would be like you need to finish X number of issues. Like we're gonna keep you fed, but you're gonna be in a room until you finish, which is very intense. Yeah, right. But but let's just say that you had A week to design a game.

You were allowed to have some play testers come in for like the second half of the week. How would Generous of you thank you. You're welcome. How I'm a very lenient, lenient dictator. I'm known as the thoughtful warden. Uh how would you personally approach it? Like you can have pen and paper and all of the mock up materials that you need. Yeah. How would you go about it? First of all, you don't need much more than pen and paper, honestly. That's it. So The way I would go about it is I would say

Okay. Given this maybe these blank cards and these sharpie pens, which I travel around with everywhere. Like that is all my bag is filled with. Blank cards you mean like a playing Yeah, like poker cards. Yeah. But blank white on both sides. Where where do you get those? Amazon. And I order I literally I order them by the palate at this point. It's nuts. Because they're so cool, right? Like you need to design a game, you got the cards. You need dice. I don't have dice. Great, I'll take six cards, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, shuffle them up, draw a card, hey you got a dice, right? Like they're everything. They're absolutely everything.

So The first thing I would look for is what can I do with these very simple components that creates a core gameplay loop that I'm excited about. I can rattle off twelve of those in an hour. That's that's honestly not the hard part. twelve different gameplay loops that you're familiar with. That I'm excited about. Okay.

That I can that I can just invent. Like it they're they're not that hard. It's like I'm gonna give you a card and I'm gonna keep a card and whoever has the highest card wins, but first we're gonna have a conversation. I'm making this up as I go. I'm gonna try to bluff you. Like I'm gonna try to get you to discard your card because you don't think there's any chance you can win and you can or still earn a little bit if I can get you to fold with right. Mm-hmm. Those are easy. I can I can come up with a ton of those, right? And again, you notice The crux of that was we're entertaining each other. The conversation is actually the game. The cards don't matter. That's just my mantra over and over and over again. So we do that. Come up with a bunch of those. And then I need another person.

I need at least one person that I can show these two, play the games with, and I only care about one question. In fact, we do all these play tests. We don't even give out surveys anymore. There's only one question we ask, which is when you finish playing the game. Did you want to play again?

And a game is done. When a hundred percent of the people say yes. And it never starts that way. It's always a whole bunch of no's. And let me tell you why, and all that stuff, but that's the only question I care about. When you finish, did you want to play again? And if I can get A little bit of positive feedback there from a person showing a bunch of concepts to and one of them they say, Oh, let's play that one again. Then you gotta start thinking about, okay, why did they want to play that again? Well, maybe they had so much fun they wanted to play again, maybe they thought they could do better the second time, kind of a sense of mastery that maybe they can achieve by playing again.

And I try to identify what that thing is, what that compelling that thing that kept pulling them back in. And double down on that. That's the thing I want to shine most in the game. Start building the surrounding components all to emphasize that thing over and over and over again. And then generously you let me have play testers at the end. I'll start showing it to them. That is the point where I've got

My components are done. My core gameplay loop is done. I've got a few of the peripheral things that are starting to get those cylinders to fire. Now let me put it through the paces and see what people think. Okay, so let's say day one. So day one, you get you get seated in your comfortable yet not too comfortable cell. You have this like you have this hamster bottle full of coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got unlimited run. And you have a table, you got your blank cards, paper. Sharpies.

What is your brainstorming, if that's the right word to use, look like, right? Is it questions? Is it drawing cards visually or otherwise is just you sitting there staring at the wall, kind of running through things, rehearsing different things in your mind? What would that look like? I think The way that I approach that is I always imagine two of me.

And I need to physically touch and hold things, right? So even if the cards are blank, I do need to like hold six cards and shuffle six cards and so if I'm holding them and I think okay Me standing in front of me. If I were to give you this thing. What conversation could we have? I think it's a lot like script writing. I start with the conflict.

What is it that's gonna drive the conversation? We can't be getting along. We can't have the same motivation. Me handing this thing to you better create a conflict that now we're gonna try to resolve. And that's really it. I think that's where all good ideas start from is like Here we are in a room Well there can be only one. So how are we gonna resolve that?

'Cause here we are staring at a bunch of blank cards. Looking at the company. It strikes me that you have Chosen lanes very well to plan and what I mean by that is You have not as far as I can tell, maybe maybe you have, so correct me if I'm wrong, but you haven't gone off into the

Incredibly complex. Two hundred dollar game that requires three hours To get the basics. down after which it requires, you know, probably twenty hours of play to get to sort of intermediate level. There are a lot of those games and a lot of the hobby shops

seem to favor those games for a lot of reasons that I think are understandable. I mean the diehards love diehard products. What other guiding principles do you have? For instance, like two player versus you need three or four players to get started. Any other elements that are integral pieces of the DNA of your design process. This is stuff I just don't think o often about. It just sort of happens. So this is awesome. All right.

When I was growing up The biggest frustration I had with games was first and foremost the instructions. Yeah. Like I just I don't have the patience to even read twenty minutes, like let alone the seven hours, right, to get into those crazy games. And so I really wanted to make games that ten year old me would really get a kick out of.

And one of the things I'm most proud of about our instructions is any of the instructions you look at. The very first thing your eyes are gonna be drawn to is this box that says, Hey Don't read these rules. Reading is the worst way to learn how to play a game. Instead, go to our website and we'll teach and we'll just walk you through it in like four minutes. And we made a video. We have a how to play video. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And we did that for every game and I insisted on it. And it's Yeah, well it's expensive, but I insist on that. Absolutely insist. Every game, don't read the instructions, even though we spent months working on the instructions.

So That's one hugely important thing to me. You should be able to pick up the game in five minutes and you shouldn't even have to read to do it. You should just sit down, watch a thing, you're done. Second thing is of course like I was talking about The game just has to be a tool set for the other players to be entertaining. I think the other ones though are

A game cannot feel Fragile. I don't mean the physical components. I mean It can't be too easy to cheat. You shouldn't ever feel motivated to outsmart the game.

The game Needs to just say look. You've already got everything you need to play. We're just going to tweak the world a little bit. What if you could only speak using single syllable words? We're not gonna involve too much. This thing will always stand up, no matter what you throw at it. That's really important as well. I have a bookshelf with literally hundreds of games and so many of them

I realized like I I accidentally broke the rules. Yeah. The game was just too fragile. I didn't mean to. I just it it just keeps happening. Yeah, and then I I think also The game should be beautiful. You should look at a game and smile. Like it should be a source of joy. These things should be dopamine engines, and part of that is you you want to hold the thing and show it to all your friends. And that's actually probably the actual final one, which is When you're done playing, your first instinct, well, after I want to play again, your second instinct, I'll say, is I'm gonna put this in my bag and take it to my buddy's house because

I'm gonna get a little bit of more joy by sharing this with someone. And the thing starts to have a life. Yeah, I'll give you a uh just anecdote on poetry for Neanderthal. My recommendation for folks, if you play this, first of all Your mileage may vary, right? I don't believe that the whole world is just comprised of of different sized Tims. That's not The case. However, my recommendation is

Don't do what I and my friends did, which is we decided we were gonna play with three people to a hundred points, but you had to win by a certain margin of points. And uh That's like not doing any exercise for six months and deciding you're gonna do the leg workout from Arnold Schwarzenegger from nineteen seventy four. We all felt it the next day. We're like, wow, some portion of our brain has not been used in that way. And we really put it under extreme duress, but I do recommend people check it out. I want to Flashback to your mention of the hundreds of games that you have.

As someone who was a super devoted D player for a long time. Which may seem I'll just explain to folks, may seem

To contradict something that I named as the appeal of a lot of your games, which is the simplicity. D, especially when I was playing And I have first edition players handbook and dungeon master's guide and so on. I still have all of my modules and campaigns and everything. is extremely in depth. But

It is also one of the best games I've ever found for co-creating a narrative and finding one another and making one another interesting and entertaining. It is I mean one of the great wonders of the world as far as I'm concerned. Would you say it enhanced your friendships with the players? I mean there there were these occasional flare ups. as you might imagine, especially if a dungeon master was in a pissy mood and decided to really damage someone who was getting on his nerves. But it was the defining Let's just call it sport.

Of that section of my childhood because I was a runt. I got the shit kicked out of me constantly at school. There were a handful of other kids who fit the same description. And we banded together, I guess much like Stranger Things, but minus the aliens and everything, to play D. And that was where we could shine. The reason I bring it up Is that I have played relatively few games. I've played a lot of the classics. I've played chess, I've played backgammon, I've played Japanese chess, I've played Go, et cetera. But Now sort of sidestepping my way nervously into the gaming world, tabletop games have exploded. There are a million different genres. And what I've heard in in some interviews, not not with you, but of game designers is you have to keep up with the times. You gotta watch where the ball is going.

And it seems like an arms race on some level, and I'm skeptical of it. Because it seems like you could end up chasing fads and you decide, Oh, Pokemon Go is really big, people are running through Central Park tripping over benches. And if you do it incorrectly, you basically just fizzle because that was a a flash in the pan, not to say that that that's true. So what I'm wondering about the hundreds of games that you have If you

were to Teach a three hour class. on the periodic table of elements for games, and you're like These are some of the canonical games or types of games that That you must be familiar with.

Just like a a chef has to know like salt. Boy all. Sweet, sour umami, some of these basics. What would Some of the

Candidates B. First of all, let me say I will admit I am a fish out of water here. I've never played D D. Literally Ever. I've never played any of those crazy 10 hour strategy games. I'm missing out on that experience. I would love to have that experience lately. I've been pretty busy. It hasn't come up

I don't even know how to talk about those, but I will say that I have played a ton of board games and a ton of card games. And there i you're right, there's a language, right? There's a core ingredient list. That's important. Alright, the first one that's become really popular right now. I'm sure there's like a a fancy industry term for it.

It's like a fill in the blank game. So think Cards against humanity. What do you mean? Joking hazard, apples to apples. And the basic structure is always the same. It's Someone else there's a writer's room somewhere.

They told a whole bunch of funny jokes, they cut'em up into pieces. And now you're going to get credit. for reassembling those jokes. That's the basic principle, right? So you have a card It's your turn, you play a card, everyone's got a hand of cards, you play your card and

I'm gonna Not to quote another game, so I'm gonna just make up a completely false game, which is what is the best thing I could wear on my head? This is a dumb example, but it illustrates the point. Everyone else has a bunch of cards. I've got banana, beach ball, turbine, et cetera. We're all gonna play a card. Whoever's turn it was is gonna vote on which one they thought was the best. That person gets a point, off we go. There's a bunch of games like that. They're very popular right now. It's an im important kind of genre. Because it's they're really funny.

The the the best ones Make you laugh. So hard you can barely breathe. Like they're just incredible. The next one Let's see, where should we go next? Okay, the next one I think is called

I'm gonna call it death building. And the idea is there's a whole bunch of cards. Each card does something very, very special and powerful. But they're all community cards at first. And you play the game by trying to remove things from the community into your own private stash so that then you can deploy them and beat the other players. Every card has a power and a weakness. You're trying to collect the best ones you can in order to obliterate everybody else.

That's also a a very popular pretty standard one. Is there a particular game if someone wanted to do a Chef's menu tasting of these different games. Is there one that comes to mind that fits it? Yeah, for that one, there's a game out there called Dominion. Yeah, very popular. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one to to start with for death building.

Okay, next is of course collectible trading card games, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, things like that. I won't go into too much detail on that because again, I must admit, I have never played any of those. I just don't know anything about them. Justin Gary who came up earlier Is a good person. to look into. I think he was the youngest ever national champion in Magic the Gathering. Amazing. Uh really knows that genre inside and out, so people can check him out.

Yeah, perfect. There's physical dexterity games. Physical or dexterity games. And the idea is like to play this game You have to do something physical. And whoever does the either the physical thing the best or m makes it so they can impede other people's physical progress will win at those kinds of games. We have one out there, it's one of my favorite games ever. It's called Throw Throw Burrito. And it's dodgeball and card games all mixed into one.

You try to collect cards while simultaneously throwing soft squishy burritos at the other players. Collect a card, gain a point, get hit with a burrito, lose a point. Trying to do both those things at once is where the chaos comes from. Let's see. I'm sure there's like a ton more that I'm missing. How about um

I'm kinda glancing over games here trying to And if there are any games where even if you can't name the genre, you're like Really, you must play this in the same way that if if if someone came to me and they said, I want to be a long form nonfiction book writer, not that I would be the most qualified teacher of all time, but I would definitely have certain books in mind where I would say, Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Here are five or six you gotta read. There's a few games I've encountered in my life. They have felt

So natural that it doesn't feel like anybody invented them. It felt like they were just all it's like two plus two equals four, right? Nobody invented that. They just kinda Realize the way to phrase it. And there's a game out there called Set. The

I believe falls perfectly into that category. I won't I'm not even gonna describe what it is because you should just go and try this game. I've played set. Yes, it's it is a very cool game. It's one of those games that I used to play this with um my sister who's sixteen years younger than me. And so when she was like ten And I was you know, twenty six. She would regularly kick my ass at that game. And it's because it activates this part of your brain that either exists or doesn't. I'm sure a lot of people are just horrible at it.

But it is so neat to see like a master. hit that flow state with this game and they are discovering patterns that are right there in front of everybody else. It's just they can see them and you can't. It's beautiful. It's just beautiful. Side side note. This is not gonna mean anything to most people, but In my limited anecdotal experience, I would love to know

If I were able to like have a few drinks with the creators of this game. If they find women to get into those flow states more easily, because I have, at least in my experience, seen that. And it raises all sorts of cool questions, I think. Yeah. I wonder how you would describe that skill set. Like what are the words to describe that skill? I I have no idea. But it's so beautiful to watch a master. It's just uh makes yeah, gives me like chills.

Let's see. The last one I'll I'll say is like I'm I'm trying to find the right category for something like Monopoly. Cause there's a whole genre of game where it's like resource management, resource collection. Yeah, trading. Like Like settlers of Catan and so on.

Oh, let's talk about settlers of Catan for a second. Because For me There is a a really interesting category there. That is one of the few like hardcore games I would I've played. I know a lot of people would call it not hardcore, but whatever. I once challenged a group of designers. I was like, describe to me the core gameplay loop.

of settlers of Catan. By the way, I don't know the proper way to pronounce that word. Catan. Tomato Tomato. Yeah, right, right, right. So describe to me the core gameplay of Katan. And All three of them said the same thing or variations, which was that's a game about collecting resources, spend those resources to expand the fastest.

And I thought That's not what that game is. That's not how I play that game. That game is a social game. That game is a trading game. I don't even care about the game. All I care about is my interactions and relationships with the other players, because that's how you win or lose. And it was so fascinating to see that these are really experienced game designers. We were playing a different game, like completely different. Even though we've both read the same rules. So question were they experienced gamers Maybe people don't like that term or they automatically think digital, but

Were they Experienced game players but not extremely experienced. Catan or Catan players. Because my friends who've love I'm just gonna say Catan because I'm American and like hard A's They do think of it as a trading game. And there's a lot of game theory. So for instance, there's some people who won't make a trade unless it clearly benefits them, but I have a friend who's very successful and if something doesn't clearly

significantly hamper him in the early stages, he will make a trade because of the social capital That he builds up the set of credit for later asking for a trade and he's he's very successful. That's fair. That's you're right. I I don't know that they were successful or experienced

Catan players. Yeah. Um yeah. But that's that's great. That's really astute. Yeah. I I hadn't thought about it in that context. Yeah. So we may come back to the periodic table of elements. And this is I'm becoming immersed in this world, number one, because I want to spend more time off of screens. I want to also help other people do that. And the way I'm hoping to do that is by designing a game of some type. Or collaborating with people to build a game. And I just think that's the only way for me to really

even make an attempt at trying to understand it is to roll up my sleeves. You invoked a name earlier that I want to revisit, Jordan Weisman. You called him your mentor. Who is Jordan and what are some of the Lessons you've learned or things that you have modeled. From

Your mentor. So I met Jordan Weisman at Microsoft. Jordan Weissman is one of the most famous game designers ever. He designed Battle Tech, he designed uh Crimson Skies, he des You know when you you go to like a virtual reality Center and you play.

Any of these immersive games where you're like sitting in a big robot fighting against other robots, he designed all of that and invented all of that and actually opened the first virtual reality spaces ever in history. And I met him at Microsoft. And at the time I was hired right out of college onto this Xbox group and they hired me as a producer. And I don't know anything about producing. But they hired me and I thought, Oh, cool, I I think I work in the video game. What does that even mean? Because in Hollywood producer can be a m a million things, right? Yeah, yeah, fair enough. What does it mean in this context? The person in charge of a project. They actually call it the program manager there. It's the person who's responsible for schedule and budget kind of staffing for a project. So they hired me right out of college into this role.

And the creative director for the whole studio was this guy Jordan. I'm sorry to keep interrupting. Why would they hire you right out of college? Because I was a terrible, terrible, terrible student. I failed out of many colleges, but I had some really good internships and the the star internship I got just talking my way in the front door was at Industrial Light and Magic. Yeah. Yeah, right. And so I got to work on Star Wars and I got to put that on my resume. And so when I applied at Microsoft, I basically said, Ignore my transcripts, ignore my history, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars. And they said, Sure, yeah, come on over. Is it true that you're responsible for the beautiful neck of Jar Jar Banks?

Ha I like that I like that you put in the right qualifier though. The neck. Yes. I w I did not work on Jar Jar Banks. I worked on the connective tissue on his neck that tied the CG face to the physical actor's body so that it didn't tear as he moved around. That was my job. You don't you don't want any injuries in the Star Wars universe. At least unless they're very interesting. So Alright, so you get you so you get hired, but you've done this internship. That shines through.

You get hired to be the producer. Yeah. And so they put me on the Xbox. They basically said We need six games. Here's two hundred million dollars. Don't fuck up. That was it.

You know, I'm sorry to belabor this. Hold on. Okay. So it's one thing Okay, two hundred million dollars is a lot of money. What gave them confidence that you could go from the neck of Charge our banks to managing two hundred million dollars. I mean, were there other safeguards in place? That's a lot of money. They didn't give me two hundred million dollars, they gave Jordan two hundred million dollars. I just worked for yeah yeah. So Jordan hired me. And and like

I must have been working there for two weeks where he pulled me aside and he said You're a terrible producer. Like you're just awful. And I said, Yeah, I know. And he said but like to his credit, I don't know why, he said I

think you might be a really good designer. We're gonna switch roles. I don't quite know what it is he saw in me, but he said, I'm gonna help train you and you're gonna help design games instead of produce them. We have very talented people for that far better than you. Let's try this. And he immediately just started throwing me on projects projects like Halo and saying like Go do this. Go help with this thing. And it was great. Obviously, you know, the first six games for the Xbox that came out

were great. They set the tone for what the Xbox was and I I got a ton of credit. Again, all because of Jordan, because he saw something in me and said, Go play in this arena instead. And I th maybe the best way to describe who Jordan is is

Years later, we'd started a few companies together. And right at the point when was this? This was when George W Bush had just won his second Term. Yeah. And all my friends were upset.

Like everyone kept Oh God the system is rigged, it's not fair, he shouldn't have won again, he was so bad the first like all this stuff. I don't care what your political persuasions are, but like a whole bunch of people were just complaining. And I would always ask the same question, Well, did you vote? And they would all say, Well no, it doesn't matter. Yeah. And I got so upset. I was like, I just Oh, there's just this one tool you have and you're not using your one tool.

And I sat down with Jordan. And he said, you know, this reminds me a lot. I was complaining about this thing, all my friends They're not voting and they and they still have the audacity to complain about it. And he said, Okay You know, this reminds me a lot of like the story of how the US was founded. There was a bunch of upset people and they eventually did something about it. And he said, You know what we should do? Because it's Jordan, he said, We should start a clothing company.

Yeah. Okay. And so I was like, Well, I'm not following this at all, but yes, you know what? Let's go. Let's do it. And so what we did was we started this clothing company where we made these beautiful shirts. Like it was mostly a t shirt company. We put out a whole line of t shirts. Each one was gorgeous. We hired the the best artists in the world and and just Design these shirts. But Every shirt.

had hidden inside of it a secret code or hidden message somewhere in the shirt. And sometimes it was like right on the printing you had like fold your shirt a certain way and get the graphics to line up and you could read suddenly a secret message would appear. But We use things like invisible inks. We use things like glow in the dark inks, thermal inks, right? Get your shirt hot, and suddenly a message would appear. And if you could figure out the message, you'd take it to the website, you enter in the message, and a little movie would start playing, a little two-minute clip. And it was basically a TV show. Every shirt had its own two-minute clip. They fit together like a TV show. It was episodic. And each one would end in a cliffhanger and if you want to know what happens next Awesome, go buy another shirt. And that was our business model.

How did he go from the prompt of you being upset about voting? To make the conceptual Leapfrog move to that. 'Cause like the most brilliant guy in the world, so

The story The episodic story that we were telling. Was about a band. And the band had a very oppressive

Producer. that was stealing all their money was just making a huge mess for them, and it got so bad that eventually A member of the band got murdered. Oh that is bad. Right, really bad, right? And who did it? And and that was the the crux of the story. And what we never told players of this game, this clothing based game, because this was Jordan's actual brilliant idea, was

As you progressed through this, the players figured out That this is a beat for beat. Retelling Of the founding of the United States. And every character has a historic

counterpart, right? So the bass player, Adam, was John Adams. The leader of the band. Jeff was Thomas Jefferson. And by listening to the story and piecing it all together, you're actually learning the story of the founding of the country and why they did it and what they were were rebelling against and why they were so unhappy and why they created a way for them to work their way through this system. And I'm so proud to say like Our players millions of them started canvassing their neighborhoods, showing up to rock the vote parties and they

Got like I don't remember the exact number, so bear with me, but it was hundreds of thousands of new registered voters through this clothing company. And that's really the beauty of Jordan. I can go to him with a statement like, None of my friends voted. He can say, Let's start a clothing company, and the answer is A hundred thousand more people voted next time. That's amazing.

It's so cool. So Jordan may have Some unusual hardware that enables him to do certain things. Just like Michael Jordan May have have some unusual hardwareing that allows them to jump and do certain things physically. However

There are probably certain commandments that you could Distill if you had to. So if Jordan said look, you can have Ten hours of conversation with me and then you have to teach the ten commandments of Jordan Weissman to this

Freshman class or It could be you know junior class, whatever, just let's assume they're serious. I'm not gonna ask you to name ten, but do any come to mind that are sort of quintessential? Jordan. They don't have to be commandments but they could be

Anything that comes to mind. Immediate because he just drilled them into my head. One is nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. And

Try as hard as you want to market something. Get a crowd. That's what actually matters. Another one that he still says all the time is You've got a violin, I've got a barn, let's put on a show. Don't overthink this. Just go. Just like tomorrow.

Yeah. And you'll learn a lot, and that's fine, and you'll fail, and that's fine too. Just go. Yeah, that one was man, took me forever to figure out, but so important. Now does that apply in the context of how you knew Jordan?

In the sense, and I've I've heard other people say this, that like you can think about it for five hours or you can test it for five minutes and you're gonna get the same benefit. So like that's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah, he really burned that into me. So I started the alternate reality company with Jordan and If I were in charge of that company, we would have been paralyzed. I would have been too scared to do anything. But Jordan. called up Steven Spielberg and said

We got this company, we can market your game better than anybody else in the world. You should hire us. And They did. And we had no product, we had no idea what the hell we were doing. And suddenly with Steven Spielberg, we built the world's first alternate reality game because Jordan made a phone call. Hold on. So was he like croquet partners with the Spielberg family, went to the same social club. How does that happen? Alright, so it's a little different. So Alright, so here's how this story actually rolled out.

So I was working in Microsoft doing this, you know, new designer, no idea what the hell I'm doing. And One day Steven Spielberg walks into my office. Yeah. Seriously, right? Like And he sits down and he says, I gotta talk to you.

He says your boss, Jordan Just paid Warner Brothers I don't know. Six hundred million dollars, whatever it is, for the right to my new movie AI. And Apparently your job

is you've got to make four video games about this movie. So I thought I should sit down and chat with you about what this movie is so we could get started. That's how I met Spielberg. Jordan just s sent him to my office and said Go talk to that guy. Not the worst day. Not the worst day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, that was a weird place. It was so inspiring, so much fun, but Yeah, like stuff like that would literally happen every day. So the way that actually rolls out

Unfortunately. We built four games. We built an adventure game, we built a racing game, we built a a gladiator gladiatorial combat game. And Jordan said, look, the thing we really have to do is we need glue between these things. We need a way to take Players from one game to the other game to the other game, right? We've got this incredible narrative, but

How do you understand how they all fit together? We need the glue. And so we hired this incredible writer, a guy named Sean Stewart, to write a story. About the glue. So he wrote it. It was

You know, a tear jerker, just this incredible, incredible narrative. And Then The movie was done, we finished all the games, we went to the premiere I don't know if you remember this movie, but like The movie is about

An Android boy Who is adopted by a human family. Who eventually All this Android boy wants is to be loved. He wants his mother's affection, and eventually he is denied that. He is abandoned in the forest. No one loves him, he's left to fend for himself, he witnesses Everybody die. He in fact witnesses all of humanity go extinct and never actually achieves love.

And I don't know about you, but like I don't think anybody's walking down that movie thinking like I can't wait to play the Xbox game, right? Ha ha You're like those people who came out and they're like, I'm really depressed, but I'm not yet ready to kill myself How can I push this just a little further? Yeah. Yeah. So we went back to work and we thought we gotta it's heartbreaking, but we gotta cancel all of these games. Like we just can't make any of them. Yeah.

So we cancelled them, but We thought like Presumably when you sat down and Spielberg's like, Okay, kid, let me tell you what this movie's about. You had some insight into the storyline and the arc of this movie. So did it come as a surprise, or were you just like maybe they'll change it? Maybe the studio will be like, Steven, please, Steve Baby, we gotta change the ending. So like to what extent was it a surprise, or were you like, Hey, we're getting paid well, let's do our best. It was a surprise, but it was intentional. So this was a collaboration between Spielberg and Kubrick. Spielberg adopted a Kubrick script.

And he really didn't want a lot of people to know. what it was gonna be about or or the final implementation. So we did have the script. But it was a version like ten versions back. And so it was very, very different. But by design, like that was part of their surprise marketing was like nobody actually knows what this is until we're ready to show you. Unfortunately we were some of those people. Makes it rougher for the game designers. Yeah. Oh man. All right, so we have to cancel all the games. It was really we'd spent you know a year building these things and I was sitting down with Jordan like basically crying just like this is this is the worst. Like everything we worked on is getting canceled now. But we thought, you know, remember that glue?

That was pretty cool. And by glue, you mean sort of the narrative connective tissue. Yeah. That was woven by Sean am I remembering. Yeah. Yeah. It was again this just beautiful story. It didn't have any engine associated with it. It was just like A few hundred script pages. Of the story.

of characters that lived in the same world as AI and went through it with them. Landing. from set piece to set piece to set piece, which at the time were the Xbox games. And we thought Even if you remove the Xbox games, this is still a beautiful story, and I wonder if there is a way to put it out into the world.

And I remember I was sitting Again, like heartbroken with Jordan, we were at a sushi restaurant in Seattle. And I was saying, Oh, there's gotta be a way we can put out at least that story, at least that And his phone rang. And he looked at me and he said

What if that was the story calling us right now? And like my brain just exploded. I was just like I have no idea what that means, but it feels really significant. And so then we sat down and we started building what is now known as the first alternate reality game for Warner Brothers, for Spielberg, because we still had this contract, even like we canceled all the games, but we had to deliver something for marketing their game, their movie, excuse me. And so we decided All right, what if we take this beautiful story, cut it up into a million pieces, hide it all over the planet?

And let players reassemble it. And the finale. Of our story. is the launch of the movie, which Turned out to be called the beast. Yeah.

Amazing. What a great story. Thank you for sharing that. So fun. Yeah. You have such a broad spectrum of experience with Games and interactions of all different types. Yeah, human with component, player with player. There's such a multi factorial

Set of experience that you have. Right now. You have this company, you have Many games. If you were able to

So operate under a pen name. And make A game. It doesn't have to do at all with exploding kittens. Is there some game that you're like, God? You know.

If there were a way, if I just had the time If I could have my druders. a type of game or anything, maybe you don't want to share it, but who knows? But it's is there something you're like, God, I wish this existed in the world and I would make it if I were just in a slightly different spot. I'm gonna tell you Something I'm not allowed to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.

Because man, you set me right up for this one. Here it goes. So I have two kids. I have a a five year old and a one year old. Last year my five year old was four, and of course I tried Playing games with her. I hate. Playing games with her.

It's because the games you can buy for kids are awful. They're like the worst game. If I have to play Candyland one more fucking time. So I dread it, right? And she's having a blast. She's just she's getting attention, so she loves it and she's like, Daddy, can we play again? And I'm just like, Oh, please no. Anything, anything but play again. And I started thinking like this feels really broken. And

You know when someone like Eddie Murphy disappears for a while and then he does a bunch of kids' films and everyone's scratching their head and they're like, Why do you do a bunch of kids' films? That's not what we know'em for. Alright, I'm about to tell you that story. So I started thinking about like why are kids' games so awful. And what I realized is The model is wrong. What if the model instead It was like Pixar.

Where you know I was just gonna I knew you were gonna go to Pixar. Oh so good. Right, right. So like what if the kids could have an experience that they love and the parents could have a different experience through the same tool set that they love as well. And so for the last two years, every night with my daughter, we get out the paper and the stickers and the markers and we just make games every night. Every night. And we've we've made I don't know, twenty, thirty of these things. But a few of them. Really good. Like really good. And she helped me design them and we worked we play them all the time and now she's sharing them with her friends. I don't want to instantly your daughter's intelligence, but she's five currently, right? And I mean it's quality time, so it's not like you're like, come on, pull it together. You need you need to earn your keep around here. What does this look like? A nonprofit

But how do you interact? I think this would be helpful for parents, even if they don't care about game design. My daughter is still in that phase where like everything is about her. She has no awareness if I'm having fun or not, right? Fair enough. Yeah, I could tell you stories there too. But the interactions with her, the game design is like How do I make sure that she's being celebrated? That she is winning a game.

But for me, what's going on in the background is I cannot let her win. I have to be trying my hardest and she has to beat me anyway. Okay, that sounds hard. I mean it's like so hard. It's like severe, severe handicapping. Yeah. It's really hard. And we went through a ton of games where that wasn't the case, where I found, oh I'm letting her win again. Let's scrap this thing and try something else. And we eventually ended up with a handful of games. The All satisfy that criteria.

The I don't let her win and she wins anyway, that I'm having a blast. She's having a blast. And the best thing is like at the end of it, she says, Can we play again? And I'm like Hell yes. Ah, I'm so glad you asked. Yes, let's play again. And the part I'm not allowed to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway is This little five year old is gonna have a handful of games in retail this coming year.

That she helped design. Oh, that's so cool. That's so cool. Oh man. Getting the the dad gold star. Oh so much. When she's a teenager and she's like I hate you, Dad and you'll be like, Never forget what I did for you She's got such a skewed perspective. Like imagine if she thinks this is just normal. This is what all families do, right? You just you make games and you and you put'em and you put'em in a store. I'm just imagining she's at the bouncy castle at her friend's sixth birthday partner. Oh yeah, what are you up to? Are you having fun? Yeah, I decorated a cake. She's like, Oh, that's cute. Yeah, I have three games at Walmart. So speaking uh speaking of sales, this is gonna be an abrupt, awkward transition. Okay, but but I bookmarked something you said earlier.

that I didn't want to interrupt with at the time. But when you were talking about The first three to four years of games coming out of Exploding kittens. Direct consumer.

And then adding to Amazon. And you had a line that was something along the lines of Amazon eclipsed our ability to sell our own games. Is that because when people would search for, I'm just making this up, exploding kittens. The SEO was such that people would be taken to Kickstarter. Most people are unfamiliar with Kickstarter. Therefore the conversions would be very low, but once it's on Amazon, which also functions as its own search engine, but happens to have very good discoverability on something like Google. That it increased sales or is there something more to it?

Everything you said is true with one extra point, which is When a Kickstarter campaign closes The back this project button changes a link to a website. So now there's an extra barrier to entry. You go to the Kickstarter page, you click this thing, it takes you through to another page. From there you gotta navigate to where the purchase button is.

That was too much for people. And Amazon is just here's the buy button right here. Do you have any idea I mean this is going back to the the archives I know But it just occurred to me that probably their recommendation engine could not have hurt you.

If you like this game, you may also like Exploding Kittens. But I don't know if that was a rounding error or if it ended up adding up to significant Additive sales. Do you have any idea? I actually don't know for sure. What I know about Amazon is when we launched There were so many stories that had come out about the phenomenal success on Kickstarter.

That what worked to our advantage was here's this incredible thing. More people back this than Any other project ever. And it made all this money And you can't have it. Right. Like that was the story, right? Because there was literally no way to get it. You missed the thirty day window. And so when we finally said, Hey, it's available on Amazon We had something like twenty thousand orders in the first hour. Wow. It was just nuts because suddenly it was not. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd right? There you go.

Because the launch itself became a story that helped to Further perpetuate the sales. Right, so now we've got twenty thousand orders in an hour. Now we're at the top of all the search results on Amazon. You search for the word game. And it's all exploding kittens, right? Because the algorithm feeds on itself. So I cannot claim any credit for that. That was just that worked in our favor perfectly. All we did was just take full advantage of it and just kept leveraging it.

Okay. Exploding kittens. Lightning in a bottle. Holy shit. Now what, right? And you build this company.

Which I mean we could spend. dozens of hours just discussing the the company building process. One of my questions for you because again this is serving my interests'cause I'm curious in all of this, but you don't necessarily have to name Voldemort and the things that you

don't like although I'm curious, maybe an another time over a glass of wine or something, but With the success of Exploding Kittens, no doubt you had a lot of inbound from people who want to option it or adapt it for different uses in all sorts of different media and formats and so on. As a company.

Probably at some point there was at least a discussion of How can we Expand this franchise. Without damaging and maybe even strengthening our core business.

What might that look like? What paths of exploration have been most fruitful or enjoyable? Oh, I like this one. Okay, so we deployed the same principle after Kickstarter as during Kickstarter, which was We gotta stay focused. For the first little while all it was was we must fulfill Every single order. We made a whole bunch of promises. We thought we were shipping out, you know, a few thousand games. We have to ship out seven hundred thousand games. That was our literally our first purchase order. And it was like, okay, well, uh that's really hard.

And so we gotta first figure out logistics, we gotta figure out warehousing, we gotta figure out everything. Customer service. Fracking. Uh seriously. Like I thought we're gonna fulfill this out of my garage. I'm gonna invite a few friends over, I'll order some pizza and beers and we're done. And seven hundred thousand units is An average game will sell maybe 50,000 units a year, and we're doing 700,000 in 30 days. Like it's just nuts, absolutely nuts. So the first thing was stay focused.

I'm so happy to say we delivered every single one of those items on time. With the exception of the orders to Russia, which is whole nother story that makes me very upset. But we got them out there. All right, I have to tell you the Russia story, because holy crap. All right. So So we didn't have many. We had like sixteen, maybe twenty orders in Russia and we ship them all out. And then we started getting these emails from our Russian backers saying I never got my game. And we're like, Wait, you definitely got your game. We got the confirmation right here. And they said, Nope, never got it. All of them. Nope, never got it. So I call up the customs There's a special name for it. Customs in Russia, essentially. All of them go through this one warehouse. And I said, Hey, I'm trying to track down these sixteen orders. What's going on?

And they said oh Yeah, those were never delivered. And I said Well, I've got the confirmation right here that they were delivered and they said, Oh, it's illegal to import games into Russia, so our policy is to destroy them and then mark them as delivered.

Oh wow. Yeah. Illegal to import games. Yeah, I don't I never figured that one out. There must have been some some very interesting political

Pissing contest going on. I mean I can't even begin to wrap my head around that one. Like of all the things to consider a threat, like a silly little kitten based card game. I will say though, I've heard many stories of first time or s yeah m in many cases first time game designers getting themselves into financial difficulties because Especially if they have a predominant overseas backer base. when games are inspected, damaged, having holes punched through them, and mean you can get yourself into a sort of a accounts receivable, accounts payable problem. It's nuts. It's such a huge problem.

People underestimate. Yeah. Shipping and insurance on that shipping is so expensive and everyone expects it to be free or nearly free. When we show people the bill, we're like, look, the game costs twenty bucks, but It costs us a hundred and fifty dollars to get that thing to you. Holy shit. And they're just like, Well I'll pay ten of it'cause that's what shipping costs. Yeah. Oh so it's really hard, especially for new game designers. Can you not that I'm recommending people do this, but

Presumably you can constrain your geographic range on Kickstarters so that you can minimize some of the complexity here. And and I say that this is former life, but I mean I've shipped hundreds of thousands Of units with my first business, real business, which was a sports nutrition company. And the stuff that you run into, right, especially if something has in this case, uh reasonably high retail price and somebody it gets shipped. Let's just take Canada as a simple example. It gets shipped to Canada. Okay, fine. You might say it only costs Well, I'm throwing this number out. I don't know what it is right now, but let's say it's thirty dollars. Okay, fine. So you figure out a way to cover that. But then it lands at their door and they say, Well, based on this price

Customer you need to pay us. This additional cost. Yeah. And then if they don't pay it at the door. They cannot accept the shipment. And now you know what you've just made? You've just made an enemy, right? Because they're like What the fuck? I already paid you for shipping and now I had to pay this additional th and it is

Endless. It's endless. I hate shipping so much. So much. So don't underestimate the challenges of of shipping, folks. You really need to plan in advance for how you're gonna handle a lot of these eventualities. Coming back to Now this could be an antiquated interview, but I was looking at some notes from a a past interview that You did. And I'm just gonna read here. Maybe it's changed, but we have a completely open door policy when it comes to new games. Designers pitch us games in person through our website, via email over Zoom every day.

And uh you mentioned you're looking for games that have a strong gameplay loop, simple enough. Et cetera, et cetera, which some of which we've discussed. Has that policy changed? That seems like you could have a tremendous amount of immature. Yeah, it had to, right? Let's just say even at that time though. What are some of the other things that you would be looking for? Because there must have been other tent poles you were looking for if you're getting a lot of unsolicited Submissions.

I made this really bad assumption. Which was that People who have game ideas Have good game ideas. And

The things that we got Through the door we're like Hey, when I was a kid, we used to play this game and I don't remember what it was called, but it involved three cards and you're trying to collect four, so let's partner up on it. And I'm just like okay. I can dismiss that one email.

But oh my god, there's like two hundred of these a day. I don't have time to do my real job and so So what we had to do was hire a very talented group of people to go out and get the games. From things like conventions and there's a bunch of inventor meetups and local meetups and things like that. They filter them, they show me Honestly not that many anymore. Maybe like ten a month.

And they already know what I'm looking for. I've I've said no to so many of them that now they understand exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. What are some of those things? It's a lot of the stuff we've discussed, honestly, the core thing that I'm always looking for is our players entertaining each other. And That's the biggest fault I find in almost everything presented to me is I made this thing. It's really beautiful. The game is working so hard to entertain the players.

And my response is always, I don't care about those kinds of games. I don't want a game to be in the spotlight. I want the players to be in the spotlight. Stop showing me games that are working this hard. It's really hard to find. It's a great example of focus and positive constraints. I just wanna underscore that, at least from my perspective as as I hear you describing this, because if you're

charter is to create great games. You're fucked. It's just so broad. How are you ever going to implement processes? And uh Follow up question would be for me. At this point, how many employees do you guys have?

About a hundred. Okay. Is it necessary to go scouting for games? Is there a cost advantage to doing that versus Just whipping those geniuses in house, feeding them Twizzlers and Coke and Yeah, that's right.

A hundred employees. Let me talk about what those employees are doing, first of all, and why we went up to a hundred, right? Yeah. Because we started with two or three, and for a while we were outsourcing everything. The the process of making a game is not only okay, we got a design, we got a PDF, here's all the art, here's the rules done, send it off to manufacturing. After that. We

outsourced everything. We outsource the company that manufactured them, we outsource the company that would then transport them from that plant to a warehouse. We outsource the sales channel, we outsource the marketing channels, we outsource just Absolutely everything. And what Matt and I decided to do Was to just We've got this incredible opportunity. What if we just tried to learn from this as much as we possibly can? What if we just try to be experts?

At everything. Just to see if we can find the failure points, hire smarter people to then fill those gaps. But Remove the reliance on external Houses. And so most of those hundred people

Are sales. Marketing, production, logistics, distribution, uh accounting, legal Nothing to do with the actual creative side. Because that we can do with a very small team.

It's all the other parts that we decide to try ourselves have failed at it. hired way smarter people and then built those teams in house. And it helps us become masters in this field. It helps us not have to do what other companies do And instead kind of blaze our own trail and figure out like Okay.

Perfect example. The exploding kittens box is pretty small. I want a huge piece of cardboard around it. If we had a bunch of external dependencies, we'd we'd fall into the same category with every other game. Nobody gets treatment like that. That's impossible. But now because we're dealing with target Walmart directly, literally calling them on the phone every day, and we deal directly with the manufacturer, and we own that cardboard stock, and we own the ink to put on that cardboard. Now we can have really interesting conversations with them about like

What if we put this thing on your shelves and and we think it'll increase sales in this way? And what if we put a little secret component in the corner and we'll do a whole marketing campaign about people finding that It's a kind of conversation that nobody gets to have in this industry. And the only reason we get to have it is because We are an en to end house. Of which very few exist in the world. So End a Hand House has a lot of vertical integration advantages, let's say.

Not risk free. Right. It takes hundred mouths to feed, amongst other things. For people who are unfamiliar, could you just give us some milestones in terms of funding and everything else because it's a rarity, as far as I can tell. I mean, it's certainly not something that I've come across a lot, and I'm relatively new to the space, but this does seem to stand out.

So I've started a bunch of startups. This is I think my fifth or sixth, and Every time the milestones are always like, Hey, we got our seed round, or you know, friends and family round and hey, we just got this retail channel, we just got this distribution deal. For this one it was really weird because For the first few years of the company, we owned a hundred percent of it. And we had no one to answer to. And we had instead of us going out saying, Please, please, please sell our game, we had people knocking on our door saying, Please, please, please let us sell your game. So the milestones were really strange. It wasn't

We accomplished this thing. It was we allowed somebody else to do the thing that they were asking for, to sell our game, to distribute our game, to market our game. It went that way for a long time. We had a bunch of people coming in saying, We want to invest in this thing. And we have this incredible luxury to say You know, money is the one thing we just don't need.

There's all kinds of stuff we do need, but money is not it. I remember one day, so this was maybe the first big milestone, one day This guy, Peter Chernen. Came to our office. I know the name. Legend in Hollywood.

And he said I really want to invest in your company. And we said, Yeah, no thanks And he said, Hold on, just hear my pitch And he said. You are at the top of your game.

You've done all the things you should be doing, you've grown as far as you should absolutely grow. But the next step is to stop being a game company and start being an intellectual property company. And what that means is T V shows and movies and theme parks And it turns out I'm probably the best in the world at those things.

And Matt and I kinda huddled up and said Yeah, that's exactly right. This is a really good point, one that we hadn't ever considered. We don't know how to grow beyond this point. We've done this as big as we can. So we took an investment from the Turnant group. And

That was a huge milestone for us, right? We had never had partners, we'd never given away anything. And suddenly we did. And I would say we spent like 12 hours fretting that decision once we signed the papers, thinking like, oh what have we done? Oh no, there's there's another chef in the kitchen. What does this mean?

Then Peter called us up and he said. Okay. If you could make a T V show Who would you want to make it with? Like who's the the the top people in the world? And both of us, like without hesitation, were like, oh, well, Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. And

Those two people are worth Googling, that's Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, the Office, Office Space, like holy crap. The absolute best people in the world. And he said, he's like, Whoa, that's a really big ask and we're like, Yeah, we know, but you asked who would be our number one choices, so there it is. He said, Okay. Cool. And he got off the phone and the next day he called us up and he said, Can you come over to my house this afternoon? Well, I really want to chat about this TV thing. And we're said sure and we went over to his house and sitting in his living room on the couch were Greg Daniels and Mike Judge. And they looked at us and they said, Peter tells us you've got this really cool game that you want to make a TV show out of, and we should be the executive producers, so can you please talk to us about it?

It's one of those Spielberg walks into your office, right? It's just these superpowers that some people have. Being able to align with them and saying, look Together. The sum is greater than the individual components. Peter's superpower is that networking. Our superpowers, we've got this really delightful IP.

Maybe this is a chocolate and peanut butter moment. Like and it really was, right? Like chocolate and peanut butter? I did say chocolate and peanut butter. Ha. Getting all European on me. Okay.

The punchline here is like now we have a Netflix show in development, and it's executive produced by Greg Daniels, Mike Judge, and Peter Chernan, and that's Holy crap, we're this little startup that started in my garage trying to raise$10,000. And now we're like at the absolute top of the game. And that doesn't happen on our own. There's no way we could have hit that on our own. That's That was a huge milestone in us realizing it's okay to give parts of this thing up. As long as we

choose really wisely, as long as it's people who share our vision and want to make this thing bigger than we could on our own. Yeah. So for people who are curious, the Trunin group is TCG. TCG dot co slash portfolio will give you an idea of some of the properties slash companies and people they've invested in. There are a lot of very good ones. And I see here Food Fifty Two, which I know. Also Meat Eater, which I know because Steven Renella took me on my first ever hunt. And I was actually I've actually I'm actually in one of the episodes where we went to Alaska together. Exploding Kittens is right next to Meat Eater. Then you have Hodinky, which I know because my friend Kevin Rose used to be the CEO. Barstool sports. And it goes on and on. Rooster Teeth, which I've actually been to their offices. I know those guys I've done them well, but I've been there. Scopely, which I've actually been looking at more closely recently. Hello Sunshine, which some people might recognize, Reese Witherspoon. They've had very nice outcomes with Hello Sunshine, and it goes on and on and on. So these guys

Much like you are good at focus. They have very particular types of companies. Now I don't know if this is public. It might be, but like how much money did you end up raising? I don't know if it's public, but I don't mind saying we raised forty million dollars at that point. Okay. Okay. So you raise forty million dollars. Now

This is a A world not specific to the trainer group, although I'm in some of the same companies. I've invested in a lot of Mostly seed stage. Or series A.

But with that money comes Guidance, it comes health. There's certain also expectations. that they have as professional investors. So how does that

Play out. So first of all, it's important to say that$40 million is still sitting in our bank account, because we just didn't need it. So it's sitting there, but it was important to have That as a signifier. No, and just to say, it's not so much the money, but like once they have a portion of the company, their hope is at some point to have a liquidity event. Yeah.

So that was really important for me to understand is that once you take on an investor It's not a matter of if you exit the company, it's now a matter of when you will exit the company. That took me a second to understand. Okay, so I remember Now the Churning Group is on board, and now we have to have board meetings. That was a new one for us. And our very first board meeting. So one of the partners at the Turnin group is a guy named Jesse Jacobs, one of the smartest people I've ever met. And we sat down with him, we're like, here's our first board meeting, here's our presentation. And at the end of it, he said, That was the worst presentation I've ever seen.

Yeah. And we're like, Okay, well we really did our best. We uh clearly don't know what we're doing. So like to their credit We worked so closely with him after that. He's like okay, you get em mulligan We're gonna do this thing over, but like let us train you, let us work with you, let us hook you up with experts, let us show you other people's board decks, and you'll see

what a healthy company looks like because you two have been incredibly lucky. And You have to plan on that not lasting forever. And they were totally right. It was really important for us to kind of gain that new muscle and hire a new group of people. We hired our first ever accountant. We hired a a CFO. That was a very new thing for us. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You did not Okay.

So wait a second. So you're going in QuickBooks? I mean what What's going on here if you guys don't have an accountant? Yeah, well, I uh really love Google Sheets and so I literally wrote everything myself. Holy shit, man. Yeah. Yeah. That was our first five years. You must have had a lot of a lot of uh Free time for those first few years. I wouldn't call it free time. I would say I had a lot of lack of sleep. Uh That's what I'm saying. I'm I'm saying that sarcastically. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, all right. So you get your accountant.

Do you start getting systems in place? Start getting systems in place. And we start figuring out I think the Cherning Group and Jesse specifically really started to lead the charge In terms of Okay, you want to be good at everything. What does that actually mean? Who do you have to hire? What are the milestones? You say like I I remember telling them like we want to try everything and if we fail, we'll get help. That's how we'll know what we can and can't do. And they said, Great, what does failure mean? And I thought, oh shit, I haven't thought through that definition. And they they just forced discipline on our company. They didn't impose anything. They said, look, if you want to do it that way, we will support you, but you haven't even defined your terms yet. So let's start there.

And it was so helpful. It was so helpful. And God, I love those guys. Like I said, a lot of startups, a lot of investors. I have never sung an investor's praise like that before because they just held our hand. They're just like we support you, we believe in you, let's do this together. Do you provide equity incentives to employees or is it predominantly salary based?

We provide equity to all employees. Yeah. Okay. And feel free to Plead the fifth or whatever the legal is on this. Uh but I'm curious because I've A deeply interested in how startup founders navigate. Decisions like these.

What percentage of the company did they buy in their strategic investment or it it could be a range. I'm just curious what the appetite looks like because that also starts to inform the dynamics. that are at play after the investment closes. I'm specifically not allowed to say, unfortunately. Yeah, no problem.

But what I will say is What was very important to us. is any terms of any deal that we sign with anybody. we remain in complete control of the company. We're interested in help. We're not interested in having bosses. Okay. So is it fair to say they might approach it like a private equity investment?

But you want to ensure that you as equity holders are in a position to still retain Control of the company. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Well you have so you have a tiger by the tail, man. Uh I'm not gonna dig for more specifics even though I'm super, super interested personally,'cause it's kinda part of my education too. Let me ask you this. We can talk offline. That's fine. So let me let's say this, ten years from now, twenty years from now. At some point you'll be like, You know what? The seasons of my life, they are changing. My daughter now has twenty more hit games than I do. It's time to hang up my spurs.

When you have all the Skittles that money can buy And you're or just You're satisfied. Yeah. You've checked that box. Yeah What do you think you'll spend your time on? Let's just say you're no longer running

A company of this size, What do you think he'll do? I think for me The through line between all the companies I've ever started that have

Empowering a community. I love doing that through story. I really hate it when a spotlight's on me. I'm I've I just I get shy, I get I get weird and uncomfortable and But I I get Okay, my proudest moment.

So far has been I was in an airport. And the flight was canceled or it was delayed. The flight was delayed and it was so late at night that nobody could get a new flight. And so we had a this terminal Of all these grumpy people. They were just like you know.

getting on the phone, trying to find new things and getting turned down, and we all realize we just have to sit here for like four hours and it sucks. And everyone was complaining and and you could just there's this horrible negative energy. And except for this one group of kids sitting on the floor in a circle, just laughing their asses off. And I couldn't help but like go over to them and like look over the shoulders and see what they're doing. And sure enough, they were playing exploding kittens. Ha ha. And it was like This

Unbelievably beautiful moment for me. And Whenever I tell people that story, they they always ask like did you tell them who you were? And the answer is Of course not. Yeah. That's the opposite of what I want. I am so delighted. That I could give them a tool set.

to laugh with each other and have this horrible experience for them into a positive one. And I do not want any credit for that at all. I loved getting to witness that. Um We'll set aside for a moment the fact that, you know, here's this forty something year old guy staring at a bunch of teenagers at an airport, but But for me it was a very nice moment. Um when I think about what comes next, it's like I want more of that. I want more

Of tool creation. to create those like just little pockets of joy. And I have a lot of ideas on maybe how to do it, but I don't know which one is actually gonna Gonna be it. So someone in my family

Worked at a Chocolate factory. And At one point they went in loving chocolate. And at some point

They just had too much chocolate. And it developed a different connotation. So I'm curious how You have Preserved. The desire

And I don't want to say novelty. But the freshness of what you just described. In face of building a company. That leads you to think about

Games outside of having the experience of sitting on the floor with your friends. I once took a skydiving class, like a week long skydiving course. And at the end of it, I asked the instructor, I was like, Do you ever get bored of this? And he said, Do you ever get bored of having sex? And I thought I thought that's that's exactly it. Like that's how I feel about games. Like that's how I feel about this job.

It's not a thing with an expiration. It's a little dopamine factory for me and the people who get to have these experiences. I don't know how you get bored of that. That's just eternal. All right. Well, I suppose yet another vote for more games in people's lives.

So Alon, we've covered a lot of ground. We've Certainly gone in all sorts of different directions. Elon, is there anything else you would like to add? People can find exploding kittens at explodingkins.com and everywhere, of course. And there are some social links. You're slowly ratcheting back on those, which I think will be best for your mental health and longevity and pretty much everything in life. Is there Anything else that you would like to add, any requests of the audience, closing comments? Something I've been thinking.

a lot about lately is I've become enamored with partnerships. Like all the best things that we're making now. Or collaborations with somebody else way smarter than me with really interesting perspectives. We just made a g this game with um Pen Jillette from Pen and Teller, and it's Yeah, what a amazing brain. I can't believe I got access to that for a few months and got to play with him. And What I thought about

Since then Is We as a company exploding kittens have this really unique ability to say All right, smart people out there. All right, people who have built followings and built audiences.

You know it's a tough statement that you can't make on your own? I made a game. 'Cause it turns out it's really hard to do. I'm really proud.

We enable that. If you have a conversation with me and we go down the path for a few months, I can let you say that. That's been so satisfying lately. We're doing a few of those and it's just been Ah, it's so fun. It's for a guy who gets very shy in social situations, using that as like my calling card. Mm-hmm. Oh man, I am so set up for success now. I I wish I had thought of that earlier.

So there are many different types of dance partners. I mean Pendulette is amazing. He's been on the podcast I was looking at I think four hundred and five so several hundred conversations ago on the podcast, but what are your ideal Dance partners. Like what are the characteristics? It's really simple. It's people who love their audiences. And you know, maybe that sounds trite, but so many of the people that I encounter do not.

If your audience is a tool for you to gain money, if your audience is a means to an end Not interesting at all. But for those who are like I cannot help. But entertain these people. If I made nothing, I would still entertain these people. If I had no stage or audience, I would still do this exact same thing. Oh, I love those people. They speak my language. We just go on for hours.

So that's my absolute favorite. So if somebody's listening and they're like, Hey, I think that's me. Yeah. What do they do? They reach out. They write to uh let's see, what's the easiest one these days? If you write to just support at Exploding Kittens, that's like this really lovely group email that goes out to a whole bunch of people, I guarantee it'll make its way to me.

All right. You heard it here. All of those audience lovers out there. And there are some good ones. I mean there are

I will agree with you that it is not everyone. I would say it's actually probably even on the smaller side. Like if your audience Stop delivering any financial value to you today. Zero dollars. Can you derive from this audience? Would you still engage?

And I think the answer for a very high percentage is no. That's absolutely right. The love is conditional upon financial outcome. And I understand that if you are making ends meet, And having to sort of focus on

paying rent and sending your kids to school and so on. Like there are necessities in life. I understand that. However The cult of the influencer I find to be a a real Amplifier fun house. mirror tendencies in human nature. I I do think it's a very distorting Playing field in a lot of sense. Um

Not not to take this off in a Strange direction, but you're gonna start a whole nother hour here. folks need to be very cautious of is even if they start off with the most sincere of intentions If you Are not explicitly aware of

And take steps to counter The seduction of the algorithm. You will be rewarded. V vis a vis your audience. By more and more extreme caricatures of yourself.

And you will therefore get propelled. Into Becoming a mask. I've seen this with dozens of people now where they used to be fairly moderate in their views, their expression, their gesticulation, their volume.

And now they've painted themselves into a corner. Sometimes they don't even realize it. Where The personality That their audience in a sense and the platforms have shaped them to be is what they are. That's a very precarious

If you're on a platform where you do not own direct means of communicating with that audience. And if you have your organic reach throttled And suddenly seventy percent of your positive reinforcement goes away. That is a risky business financially and psychoemotionally.

Psychoemotionally especially yeah. Oh Tim, so well phrased. The reason that I've dropped off of most of social media, honestly, is Because it feels like that's a precarious place. It feels like It's so easy to be there for the wrong reasons. It's so easy to

By nature of attracting the wrong people, let them shape who you are, let them shape the products that you make. I don't see the value in it. Anymore. And I'd rather just surround myself with fun, loving, amazing people who are nurturing and help me make amazing things.

Amen. That is where I hope to focus more in the upcoming year. And I haven't had any social apps on my phone. Actually I've had one. I reinstall Twitter to be on someone's Twitter spaces, but that'll probably come off soon. Have not had any social apps on my phone for about two years now. Because I do not believe that ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of people out there Can overcome armies of data scientists.

and extremely effective algorithms with self control. I don't think it's possible. Don't be that person who's like I don't think I'll get addicted to heroin. Let me just try it a few times. Chances are you don't have you don't have an immunity bracelet. So build, build, build. All right, man. Well this this has been really lovely. So nice to connect and spend time together. Yeah, really, really enjoyed it. And I will just say to everybody listening As per usual.

We will have links to everything we discussed in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. E-L A N. There are no other guests on this podcast with that name. So if you go there and search, you will find this episode in the show notes. And until next time, just be a little bit kinder than is necessary. Build more. Talk less. Ha ha.

And have some fun, folks. Get off of screens, play some games. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. Kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.

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