Four Types of Traction to Help you Fundraise
Using Traction in Your Pitch
In the Pre-seed, Seed and even Series A stages, showcasing traction that surpasses that exceeds market expectations is not just advantageous—it's crucial. An exceptional metric can often be the focus of your fundraising narrative, providing a concrete proof point of your company's standout performance. There is a constantly fluctuating market that investors will use to gauge specifics like if a company is ready to raise a new round and at what valuation. Investors base this market off of several factors like the state of other companies that have raised recently (current market rate) and the competition to be involved in a company’s round (deal heat).
Four Types of Traction
For most companies there are four different types of traction. Raising when you have an outlier metric on at least one of these will make the fundraise go much better. The further down this list, the more risk that has been taken off the table, so the better the outcome.
Warning: Only highlight truly outlier metrics in your pitch! It will look bad to investors if you show a slide with 2000 people in your Discord server and say, “our fans love us.” Remember, every detail you expose in your pitch invites judgment from the audience (more on that in a future post).
Demand
This encompasses indicators like your waitlist size, social media following, and community engagement metrics. Gaming and consumer companies that have tens or hundreds of thousands of rabid fans ready to throw money at them is a great signal. For B2B startups, a substantial waitlist of companies eager to use your product can significantly de-risk market size and product demand assumptions. Leverage publicly available competitive data to benchmark your performance and highlight your standout achievements in this area.
Growth/Scale
This refers to your user or customer base and, importantly, the quality of these users or customers. Demonstrating growth is a step closer to achieving product-market fit. In the consumer sector and in gaming, a large user number can be impressive, even if they don't monetize. For B2B startups, the emphasis should be on either the number of customers or the caliber the customers. While achieving outlier status in user/customer numbers before a growth round may be challenging, it can be effective.
Retention
Retention metrics offer a deeper insight into product-market fit, indicating not just initial interest but sustained engagement with your product. For consumer and game companies, early retention rates (Day 7, Day 30) are primarily used as predictors of long-term user engagement (Day 180, Day 365). I consider a strong Day 30 number to be the best possible form of traction for any game. In the B2B space, good indicators are not just lack of churn, but proof of renewal.
Revenue
The best possible traction is revenue. It is the holy grail and the major step to proving out product-market fit. If you are pre-Series A and have an outlier retention metric I would argue you may not need to raise a round at all. As mentioned before, having a small amount of revenue is not worth mentioning. It is easier to explain that while you’re making some revenue now, it is not a major focus, than it is to act like you’re excited about a few thousand dollars coming in.
What about Acquisition Cost or Session Length or …
There are a number of other metrics that teams can use to fit into their fundraising narrative. I believe the ones listed above do the best job of showing progress towards product-market fit. If you think you have a truly outlier metric that reinforces your fundraising narrative, use it.
Metric vs. Momentum
Remember that the trajectory towards achieving these outlier metrics can be just as compelling as the metrics themselves. Demonstrating consistent month-over-month growth across any of these dimensions is a strong signal to potential investors. Conversely, a declining metric can raise concerns so be careful how you position your current traction.
A Practical Guide to Improving Feedback Communication
TL;DR: Use a feedback framework to better communicate with your teams. Break your feedback into categories and set expectations for how recipients should use the feedback and how to respond. Consider a three tiered system, called DFN:
Direction (requiring action)
Feedback (requiring response)
Note (requiring no response or action)
Direction/Feedback/Note Framework
As the Proletariat team scaled I wanted to stay involved with the product and design teams. During product reviews or creative meetings I considered myself a member of the product or design teams, not the CEO of the company. My title would have more weight than intended and it often led to an offhand comment I made becoming a high priority task. That is not what I wanted. I needed a shorthand way to give feedback that would convey priority and required action or response.
The DFN framework is not something I can take credit for, but I did use it many times. I found categorizing my feedback was helpful for both the recipient and for me. I would categorize feedback like this verbally, written, and visually, like on screenshots. When providing written feedback, I would color code the categories to make it even easier to understand.
Direction
This is the most forceful category of feedback. Direction requires a change or action, typically in a specific way. When I would give direction I would always include a suggestion on the action to be taken. The recipient of direction is not required to take that suggestion but follow the direction given and make an adequate change.
Example: “This area of the map is too open, it should be more enclosed. Consider adding some additional trees and reduce the width of the path. We want the player to feel claustrophobic.”
In this example it is acceptable if the recipient comes back and says “I don’t want to add more trees, but I will create a ledge here.” If that still satisfies the goal of making the player feel claustrophobic then it worked.
It is not acceptable for the recipient to come back and say “I don’t want the player to feel claustrophobic here”. If there is a disagreement at that level, it requires a deeper conversation on the vision for this area of the game. If I was frequently giving direction to the same person it was an indicator of underlying disagreement or misalignment on the vision.
Feedback
This is the most common category of feedback I would give. This does not require a change or action, but it requires a response. I would sometimes provide a suggestion as part of this feedback, but not always. The recipient is allowed to push back on the feedback directly or to find their own way of addressing it. Either way, it requires a response and follow up.
Example: “This jump is really hard to make. Should these ledges be closer together to make it easier?”
The recipient of this feedback can simply push back on changing the distance of the jump if they think it is the right choice. However, a follow up conversation was needed for the individual to make their case. I would tend to allow people on the team the freedom to make their own calls with this category of feedback. That would change if this feedback was given by multiple people or in cases where we had data to indicate a change was needed.
Note
The last category of feedback is what I would consider coming from a player or user. This is how I felt as a player, not as a developer. Notes rarely would include suggestions and do not require a change, a response, or a follow up from the recipient. This is for the recipient to consider and internalize on their own.
Example: “There are not enough power ups in this area so I spent a lot of time frantically searching for health packs.”
This is a note because it may be intentional and what the designer wants the player to feel. It might also just be a gut reaction from a single play session. I would trust the individual to get notes from many people on the team, distill it down, and use it to help them improve their area of the game.
Final Thoughts
A feedback framework like this one is only valuable if it improves communication across the team. It should be one tool leaders use to cultivate the feedback culture they want in their creative, design, and product teams. If you can’t describe the feedback culture for your creative/design/product team, it may not have one, and that is the first place to start.
This specific feedback framework may not work for your team or culture. Find a structure that allows the team to provide feedback that doesn’t overwhelm, contradict, or confuse the recipient and ensure the recipient knows how they are expected to respond.
We Don’t Do That Here - 5 Lessons on Culture
Team culture is critical to success. Here are 5 hard earned lessons on building and shaping a great culture.
Much (too much?) has been written on company culture. I want to contribute my insights from building the team at Proletariat over ten years. For more great info on culture you should check out Ben Horowitz’s book or look at the talk I gave at GDC 2022.
Defining Culture
Culture, as I perceive it, consists of two parts:
1. Shared Aspiration
The simplest definition of a Shared Aspiration is that it is the way you and your team see the world and their role in it. It is a combination of vision, mission, and values.
Vision: What the team hopes to achieve or become
Mission: The purpose of the team
Values: The core principles that guide the journey
2. Habits/Standards/Norms
This encompasses the behaviors and practices your team adopts to realize the vision and achieve their mission. It is the embodiment of the team’s values in their daily actions and decisions.
Five Key Lessons on Culture
1. Define Your Culture or It Will Define You
Cultures are grown, not built. That doesn’t mean you and your team should not define a blueprint. As a leader, you should boldly articulate the culture you want to be a part of and ensure it is well understood across the team. A successful culture is one that the team is proud of.
Defining culture is not a one time exercise but a constant process. As a team grows it is common for individuals or groups to interpret parts of the culture differently. If this is not unified, it can split a culture into several (often contradictory) subcultures or redefine parts of the culture for the entire team. I have seen this happen organically, but I have also seen examples where core values are weaponized by being taken to extremes. When this happens, leadership must clarify the definition they intended and get buy-in from the team that the meaning is well understood.
2. Everyone is Responsible for the Culture
Cultures are communal. They are cultivated over time within a group of people. Growing and maintaining a strong culture is the responsibility of the entire team, not just that of leadership. Team members should not only understand and uphold the culture, but realize that they contribute to it. The actions they take, the way they communicate, how the team defines good work, what the team chooses to incentivize and celebrate, are all part of what creates a culture.
If a team member feels uncomfortable contributing to the culture, it is likely because they either do not agree with the Shared Aspiration or they see a mismatch between the team’s stated standards and how they actually act. This is not a sustainable or healthy situation for the individual or the team. Either the team needs to evolve the culture or the individual needs to move on.
3. Culture is Determined by the Rules You Enforce
If you’re not actively pruning your culture, it will grow wild. Cultural norms are mostly social–a breach of culture is often not illegal or clear grounds for firing. It is up to the team to actively police behavior that goes against the culture. If you observe a deviation from your cultural standards and don't address it, you inadvertently set a new standard.
Enforcing rules may seem obvious but this is the most difficult part of maintaining a culture. Fixing a major cultural faux pas is easy. It is much harder to fight off culture creep where teams get lax on their own standards and eventually drift into behaviors they would have never tolerated. An example is a senior developer with a long tenure on the team who misses a deadline. The team lead gives this developer a free pass because they have hit fifty deadlines before this one. However, a new developer that just joined the team doesn’t know that and now sees a culture where missing deadlines is normal.
4. Culture Can and Should Change
Changing culture is not a bad thing nor a sign that there is a problem. As companies evolve, the Shared Aspiration is bound to change. As a team scales, the habits that got you to your current point may not be the ones that will get you to your next destination. Don’t be afraid to update your culture when it suits you and your team. Ensure that when you do make changes, the team understands the reason for the change and accepts the new standards
Like many startups, Proletariat’s initial culture put more value on hard work and hitting deadlines than it did on maintaining work-life balance. As we grew, we worked to shift our culture to still value hard work but ensure it was sustainable for the team. An example of this occurred when we had an employee who pulled back-to-back all-nighters to hit a deadline. In our early culture we heartily celebrated this person for putting in so much effort. We knew if we celebrated his behavior this time it would communicate to our team, especially the new team members, that the way to get recognized is to sacrifice your work-life balance. We thanked the person for their effort and made it clear that they should not be pulling all-nighters no matter how much it may help the company. This was a clear cultural change, and a difficult trade off, because our past culture of celebrating hard work above all had significantly contributed to our success so far. However, we knew if we wanted to retain our top talent and not burn people out, we had to make a change.
5. Hire for Vision Fit, Fire for Habit Miss
It is common for hiring managers to consider “culture fit” when they are interviewing a new candidate. I prefer to focus on Shared Aspiration fit. Ask questions about how the candidate sees the world, what their values are, and what motivates them. Once a new candidate joins the team, train them up on the habits, standards, and norms just as much as you do on the mission, vision, and values. As stated above, if they cannot meet the standards of the culture, and you let them stay, you have created a new cultural standard. It doesn’t matter if they believe in the vision and mission of the company, their behavior will alter the culture that you, and the rest of the team, are growing.
Final Thoughts
Cultivating a vibrant and effective culture is a dynamic and continuous process. It is often up to leaders to define a culture with the help of their team but it is the obligation of everyone on that team to reinforce that culture. Your culture hinges on clear definition, universal understanding, rigorous enforcement, and constant evolution. Culture is all about the people, so choose those who align with your vision and will uphold your standards.
From Unknown Title to Viral Game: 12 Growth Lessons From Spellbreak
I did a talk as part of an event put on by Andreessen Horowitz.
The full post is available on their website.
Or check out my Twitter thread on the topic.
The presentation is also viewable.
Being a Good Follower
Being a good follower is critical in any team dynamic. Even leaders need to be good followers to be effective. The way you behave as a follower will drastically impact the outcome of any project or team.
At Proletariat one of our core values is “Decide Fast and Iterate”. Good followership is incredibly important to making this possible. To decide fast means that true consensus is rare, so team members need to trust each other and the process.
Problem and Solution Alignment
This is important for all parts of culture inside a company. When constrained to a single problem, it is crucial for communicating effectively during a team discussion. Typically when team members cannot agree on a course of action there are usually two reasons: disagreement about the problem or disagreement about the solution. It is important to figure out where the disagreement lies to find alignment on potential solutions.
The Problem Direction
If a team member is not bought into the premise of a problem it can be impossible to find a solution. If everyone can agree or compromise on the following questions it means you have established the problem direction.
What is the problem?
Is the problem worth solving?
Who are we solving the problem for?
It may not be possible to compromise on a problem direction. If that is true, skip to the Effective Followership section and start there. Until a problem direction is solidified no solution space can be established.
The Solution Space
Once the problem direction has been established it is possible to explore the solution space. Finding agreement or compromise on these questions should lead to a potential solution.
What is the solution?
Does the solution solve the problem?
Is the ROI of the solution worth it?
Effective Followership
If the team is able to reach consensus or agree on the problem direction and solution space then followership should be easy. It is when teammates disagree with some parts of the problem or solution where the following tactics can be most useful.
What if I am wrong?
If you want to be a good follower you need to ask yourself this question every time you disagree with a team member. By simply considering this idea it means you become a more open and valuable team member in any discussion. If you find yourself vigorously fighting for a direction and simply cannot understand how anyone could disagree with you, that is the most important time to consider this. I have found it valuable to actually write out ways in which you could be wrong, as well as the outcomes, to see if it aligns with what other team members are thinking.
“Yes, if...” Instead of “No, because…”
We have all seen the value of using “Yes, and...” to improve brainstorming and team communication. If it seems impossible to riff off an existing idea it is important to consider possible ways to make the solution work. A common response is to simply say no, and sometimes a more helpful one is to give a reason as to why the answer is no. However, both of these responses stop the solution completely and don’t allow for exploration of the solution space.
A diverse team will have a variety of perspectives so it is worth considering that other members of the team simply do not share your point of view. Instead, it is worth considering that the solution must move forward, so what would make that solution work for you? That is where you answer with “Yes, if…” and add your perspective to the solution space. This can often lead to compromise that can work better for everyone.
Disagree and Commit
There is always a limit that teams reach where it is clear there is no compromise. This is simply a reality and these decisions are often the hardest to make. I hate when a decision gets to this step. However, that does not mean a compromise is the only solution or the best solution. A good follower will recognize when the disagreement has reached this point and will agree to commit to the direction anyway. This means wholeheartedly contributing to the solution and supporting the team even if that solution fails. Saying “I told you so” is a failure to commit even if it comes after the fact and it rarely helps the next iteration of a solution. The ultimate goal is to find the right solution in the fewest possible iterations and anything that distracts from that is not helpful.
Disagree Internally, Defend Externally
Disagreement is important. As mentioned above, having a diverse set of viewpoints will lead to disagreements. However, to provide confidence to external parties and to support the team internally, it is important to manage how those disagreements are displayed. A big part of disagreeing and committing is defending the direction of the team even when you do not agree.
It is important that every leader considers how best to establish a culture where team members can freely disagree internally. There should be ample opportunity to do this before a decision is made, but even if that is not possible, it is up to the good followers to defend the team direction externally.
If team members disagree both internally and externally it can lead to a toxic culture where there is a lack of trust and loyalty. If team members are required to defend internally and externally it can lead to a culture that stifles other viewpoints. It is up to the team leader to establish good follower practices that enable rigorous internal debates and consistent external stability.
This is a great opportunity to lead by example and ensure as the team leader you keep disagreements internal.
Conclusion
Team members will disagree. In my experience the natural friction caused by a variety of perspectives on a problem produce a better solution than a single monolithic voice. There is always a cost to managing this sort of challenge, but the potential upside is also incredibly valuable. Not only does being a good follower build trust between team members, it is also a good way for a leader to prove they care about the ideas from their team.
Good followers are good teammates. Everyone should be a good follower, especially the team’s leader.
Five Levels of High Functioning Teams
As Proletariat continues to grow, I have found success using this methodology to build effective teams. By analyzing the level of each team within the company it has allowed me to better support the leads and team members. Teams can look at their current level and focus on the important changes needed to move up.
This framework is also useful to become a high functioning member within a team.
Level 1 - React and Subsist
Everyone has worked on a team like this. A Level 1 Team is barely able to keep up, is struggling to execute, and has frequent communication problems. Many teams get stuck at Level 1 forever, unable to get ahead. The biggest blocker to improving is often a lack of resources, a lack of clear goals, poor process execution, or poor communication.
If you answer Yes to any of these questions you’re probably working on a Level 1 Team:
Does your team frequently miss deadlines without knowing why?
Do you often not know what other members of your team are working on?
Do you feel like you don’t know why you’re doing a task?
Is it often unclear where tasks come from or how you’re being assigned work?
Does your team change priorities often without clear reasoning?
Do team members often do overlapping work or does work often fall through the cracks?
Graduating out of Level 1 involves these steps:
Organize and track all current internal initiatives, ongoing work, and external tasks. It can be useful to audit where each team member is spending their time for a week or more to capture this.
Identify current team priorities and prioritize all current work accordingly.
Define clear roles and responsibilities for the team to cover all known work.
Create a process to capture incoming work and assign that work out to the proper team members.
Track the time required to complete tasks and build a process to properly scope and complete current work.
Not all of these are required to move out of Level 1. I consider any team that can plan, prioritize, track, and complete tasks as being ready to move on. Until the team is resourced and organized properly it is simply reacting and subsisting.
Disclaimer: if your team sometimes becomes reactionary due to shifts in strategy or other events, that is expected. If the team cannot pull itself out quickly, it is worth reevaluating the above steps.
Level 2 - Plan and Execute
Once a team able to keep up with current work the focus should shift to planning ahead, increasing predictability, and becoming more resilient. Level 2 Teams are able to proactively plan, predictably execute on a set schedule, and mitigate common challenges. For most teams this means creating protocols to manage surprise work, or other randomizing factors, while preserving parts of the team to continue to progress on ongoing projects.
Successful Level 2 Teams follow these steps:
Identify future goals.
Create a process to predict incoming work based on past work or future goals.
Build a support system to deal with common contingencies and single points of failure.
Utilize a retrospective process to objectively analyze issues and improve future decision making.
There is a trap that lies between Level 2 and Level 3 that can be easy to fall into. Level 2 is often about improving team efficiency and it can be exhilarating when successful. To paraphrase a good lesson from High Output Management: you can make the most efficient egg cooking factory in the world, but that won’t matter if your customer orders toast. There needs to be a shift from focusing on doing work the right way to ensuring the right work is being done.
I could (and maybe should) devote an entire blog post to efficiency vs. effectiveness.
Level 3 - Measure Impact
Building a team to Level 2 is no small task. Now that the team is able to efficiently get work done, it is time to prove that the team is doing the right work. Level 3 Teams are able to plan effectively, execute predictably, understand what makes them successful, and measure their impact. This means using goals to determine KPIs and creating ways to track and report those KPIs back to the team.
Successful Level 3 Teams follow these steps:
Determine the metrics used to measure success for the team.
Prove that current and future goals are aligned with success metrics.
Build a system to track success metrics and distribute that information to the team.
These steps alone should improve decision making for the entire team. In my experience if people are able to understand the metrics that drive their success it can allow more autonomy and satisfaction in the work.
Level 4 - Improve Effectiveness
Once a team has proved their doing the right work and can measure their impact, it is now time to improve those results. Level 4 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, and have created processes to improve their effectiveness. This takes customer insight, competitive analysis, and general product magic. For Proletariat this often involves building a more concrete scientific method into the product pipeline.
Successful Level 4 Teams follow these steps:
Generate theories on how best to improve success metrics based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight
Use those theories to create a pipeline of future work.
Produce expected outcomes for future work based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight.
Develop an ROI based prioritization system that looks at the cost required to do future work along with the expected outcome.
Build and release the work.
Analyze the results and compare them to the expected outcomes and planned cost.
Create learnings and apply that to current theories.
Being part of a team that is able to do all these things is one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever had in my career. There is a sense of mastery and control that binds people together and the added side benefit that the team is almost certainly successfully hitting goals. Even if the team is not able to reach their goals the consistent improvement can be a magnifying factor in team health and motivation.
Level 5 - Amplify Others
If a team can manage to improve their own impact, the next step is improving the impact of other teams within the company. Level 5 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, improve their effectiveness and amplify others. This takes an awareness of the goals of other teams and a deep understanding of the business. It means the team can put their work in context of the wider goals of the company and amplify the work of others. The best way I can describe this is that a Level 5 Team is able to make the lives of other teams easier.
Ideas to help achieve a Level 5 Team:
Learn how all teams contribute to company success and be included on the metrics information from other teams.
Understand all the factors of how your team interacts with other teams.
Create metrics for cross team interactions and share those with other teams.
Factor other team’s success metrics into goal setting.
There are many strategies for achieving these results and I have not found a single set of steps that works repeatedly. One idea that I have found useful is cultivating peer relationships across teams within the company. A powerful component of any relationship is knowing what makes the other person successful. Educating the entire team about this can greatly improve how they perceive their work and the interactions they have with other teams.
It is important to not lose focus and over emphasize helping other teams at the expense of your own team. This can be seductive and sometimes comes with strong incentives, but I have rarely seen a case where compromising one team’s success for another is healthy long term.
Conclusions
There are many ways to create high functioning teams. As a leader it is important to find/steal/cultivate a variety of tools to use to make teams better. I have found this approach is helpful for many types of teams, from product development to publishing and marketing. Much of this requires a foundation with a good degree of certainty that is difficult in early product phases. I have found this sort of structure can be overwhelming for prototyping tasks or instances where teams need extreme flexibility. Consider where your team, product, and company are before committing the time and effort needed to build this sort of team.
Proletariat's Remote Work Setup and Why You Should be Using Discord
Before the global pandemic I loathed working from home. I am one of those people that feeds off of the buzz of productivity in the office and it turns out studies show that boost is real. I hated not knowing when teammates were available. The increased friction on communication often frustrated me. It meant that I would punt work until I could get back into the office and simply tolerate the WFH state. Enduring remote work is not possible right now, so we have made it a priority to improve our process. This meant finding answers to a number of challenging questions.
How do you tell if the person you need to communicate with is currently available without interrupting them? How can we make the team feel like others are being productive around them? How can leaders have an "open door" policy while working remotely? These questions and more have forced us to iterate or change some of our cultural communication standards.
Slack
We use Slack for quick communication and avoid it for deep discussions and brainstorming. Every morning we run Slack standups and it is the first thing most people check every day.
Proletariat has three different types of Slack channels that have their own prefix:
Spellbreak - Any channel that is specific to Spellbreak, like for our development pods (sb-combat).
Proletariat - Official channels for the entire team, like for our artists (prol-art).
Unofficial - Channels for any other topic, like beer (uo-beer).
Very little has changed with how we use Slack. Some people previously used it for quick voice or video calls but now that is all handled in Google Meet or Discord. In Slack you can be a variety of channels all at the same time and it is high friction to set your status. We do not attempt to use Slack for presence.
At Proletariat we use Email for deeper discussions and when responses/actions are not required within a day. We adhere to a model similar to the one discussed in this article.
The most important features are categorizing the type of response required in the subject line and putting the bottom line up front with details like when a response is expected.
We have made no changes to our email process while being remote. Since we use Email for asynchronous communication it does not help solve our many of our new challenges.
Google Meet
Before moving the entire team to remote we ensured every meeting had a Google Meet video conference tied to it. This was important because we have some full-time remote employees and allow liberal WFH. We still use Google Meet because it is better at face-to-face meetings than Discord streaming. However, with Google Meet there is no easy way to see meetings in progress if you were not invited to them and no sense of presence.
Discord
The problem with all the above tools is that they lack a good way to understand presence for the whole team. It was not easy to tell when to "drop in" for a quick chat. There was no good way to get a sense of the entire team doing work around you. Discord helps us solve that.
We rebuilt our office in Discord with the goal of providing a sense of presence. We do not use Discord for text chat at all, that remains only in Slack. If Discord had the ability to thread discussions and better external integrations we would probably stop using Slack.
Everyone at Proletariat logs in when they start working and joins the proper voice chat. When people finish working for the day they log off.
Team Rooms - These are roughly set up to mimic the regions of our physical office. We try to seat people who work together a lot in the same area. Individuals can talk in these channels as they would in the physical office being mindful of other people in channel.
Meeting Rooms - Every meeting room is remade in Discord to match the physical office. This includes individual offices where meetings sometimes occurred. We tag all meetings in Google Calendar with the specific tool for the meeting like [Meet] or [Discord]. Discord can stream to up to 50 people and we have found it has better quality than Google Meet.
The Library - This room is auto-squelched so there can be no voice discussion. People use this area for heads-down uninterrupted work. This is the same as someone in the office having their headphones on. Message them via Slack if you need something urgent.
AFK - If someone is not available at the moment they us this channel. There is no expectation that the person will respond immediately to a Slack message while AFK.
Miscellaneous/Gaming Rooms - We're a gaming company so we have rooms for people to hangout and stream their gameplay to others. These are most often used during lunch and after normal hours. Even when I am not able to join these groups it feels more social because I know they’re getting together. I can drop in and just listen/watch.
Conclusions
Discord has been a major improvement for my quality of life working remotely. It has allowed for some amount of organic communication as people will drop into my Discord office during the day to chat. That alone has made this process worth it to me as I feel somewhat isolated because I no longer work directly on the game.
Many people at Proletariat also feels it has greatly improved their ability to communicate with their teammates. This has not been unanimous, some people feel this is yet one more thing that needs attention and updating. I personally feel it is worth the added attention tax for the benefits to the broader team.
Learning to Build a Games Company - Podcast Interview
A few weeks ago I had the chance to talk to Joakim Achrén on the Elite Game Developers Podcast. It was a wide ranging interview that covered nearly everything from my personal journey in the industry to the nitty gritty details of how we make decisions inside Proletariat.
Topics that we covered included:
What I think is the ideal company culture for a games company
Where a company can struggle in building a strong culture
The shift from mobile to PC/Console and how we think about pivots
Fundraising and the ideal amount of money to raise
The involvement of a CEO in creative and other decisions over time
Ways to balance innovation and proven ideas in game design
Hello (New) World
Why Now?
As I write this the world is in a strange place. COVID-19 is rapidly expanding around the world forcing millions of people to stay home and follow social distancing rules. In this turmoil, I wanted to spend some of the additional time at home doing something productive. I started working in the game industry over 10 years ago. The picture you see here was about 3 months into my first game job as a gameplay engineer. Since then I have been lucky enough to experience a number of roles including product manager, lead designer, executive producer, founder and CEO. Now seems like a great time to share some of the knowledge and lessons I have learned.
What is this blog?
Since founding Proletariat in late 2012 I have made dozens of notes, outlines and even full posts on a variety of topics. I want to finish those up and share them. These posts will mostly focus on product and leadership but may include some other things along the way.
What are these resources?
In my time as CEO of Proletariat I have had to constantly learn new skills. Starting all the way back at the founding of the company I knew I needed an education in startups, legal topics, fundraising details and more. The resources here are meant to list those out for anyone that wants to learn more. I will update them as often as I can.