GDC 2008: Entrepeneurship: From Zero To Pandemic
March 20th, 2008 Posted in Business, Games, Work
Jamie’s recent blog post reminded me that I never got around to posting my notes from Josh Resnick’s talk on entrepreneurship. Jamie pointed to a great interview over at GameIndustry.biz.
Friday was the last day of GDC. I was planning on going to David Jaffe’s keynote in the morning. However, Jaffe was a no-show. Lucky for me, I went to Josh Resnick’s talk on Entrepreneurship. It was one of the best sessions the entire week for myself.
Resnick is an original founder of Pandemic Studios. A studio that is now about 10 years old. Pandemic is located in Los Angeles with a second studio in Brisbane, Australia. That is quite impressive for a decades worth of growth.
Pandemic recently partnered with BioWare and struck a deal with Elevation Partners. Elevation Partners is an equity firm that is famous for being headed by John Riccitiello of EA, Fred Anderson of Apple, and Bono of U2. Pandemic/BioWare went on to be acquired by Electronic Arts.
Resnick laid out 6 items that learned in growing the studio.
1) Build On A Solid Foundation
2) Choose The Right Partners
3) Invest In Talent
4) Create A Positive Culture
5) Run Your Studio As A Business
6) Take Calculated Risks
Although the above six items seem like common sense, Resnick backed them up with concrete examples. There were a number of real life anecdotes that were shared.
Pandemic focused on growth of the company from the start. Their first game was funded by Activision. They built their own technology and IP. There was a strategy to scale right away. They started with two teams on two different projects to mitigate the risk of a project being cancelled.
Resnick went on to mention that this is the best time to start a studio. Game development startups are going through the same renaissance period that web startups went through recently. It is very cheap to get up and running. There are many platforms that can be targeted. There are tons of new revenue models that can be employed to generate cash right away. There is also tons of cash available for startup capital. Game development is very sexy right now from the point of view of Hollywood, the music industry, media conglomerates, and venture capitalists.
At the end of the session, I asked Resnick a question about taking on venture capital. I thought his insight would be useful because of his past deal with Elevation Partners. His advice was to basically only take on venture if the source of funding understands media and entertainment.
So what did I learn? A lot of stuff I have been focusing on was validated. Resnick emphasized on building a long, stable runway. He talked about defining a vision for the company and defining roles before entering into partnerships. He also talked about how independents should focus on new platforms and revenue models.
