The transition from working FOR someone to FOR Yourself
It is something many want to do but only a small few ever really think they can do, and even fewer try. Bob Drobish (True Games’ co-founder and CEO) and myself went through these stages that many in our position probably have gone through in the past where you say to yourselves “we should do this” which then becomes “we really can do this” and eventually you reach the “we ARE doing this” point. We left the security of working for someone else’s company, getting a paycheck and 401k and paid vacations, etc.—basically stability—and took a risk to start a brand new company from scratch.
It was December of 2007 when we officially started True Games Interactive (www.truegames.com). We knew we had a lot to offer a new company: good ideas, a great eye for superior products and quality relationships and development partners. We were lucky in that Bob and I shared a similar vision of what we wanted to accomplish and how to best accomplish that through finding and appreciating quality people and partnerships. In fact, we made a conscious effort to go after some of the world’s most talented developers who also happen to be stand up, honest guys in Petroglyph Games and Possibility Space.
We named our Company “True Games” because we wanted to create an organization built on integrity-- both internally towards our employees and externally towards our partners. Our goal is to provide a fun, meaningful and quality experience to our gamers and our partners in business.
What are the keys to making it through your first year?
Learn from past mistakes. Not that you won’t ever make any in the future, but some of the biggest mistakes people in our industry make is repeating their mistakes. It’s that simple. So many companies in our industry have always done things a certain way and are continuing to do things a certain way—even when they don’t work. When you make a mistake, or when something isn’t working, learn from it and do better in future scenarios.
Build a quality team. The functionality and the core attitude of True Games is very important to us. We carefully selected our core team to bring the expertise and values to the company and encourage cohesiveness through the process. Two critical hires for our team were Peter Jarvis, Chief of Technology and Peter Cesario, Director of Development and New Business. Both have been key in building teams beneath them and in getting the company off the ground and running. When you are in a position like we are where you are starting fresh and looking for key talent to build a team, people come out of the woodwork all over the industry. It is important not to feel like you have to give everyone you have worked with in the past a job just because you have one available—now is the best time to hand pick the group that will help make your company a reality. You have to be critical and hire only the best.
Set your vision and don’t waiver. I think like any other business, the first thing to do when starting a video game business is have a clear vision for the future and recognize what it will take to get you there. For True Games, we have always felt that quality, integrity and fun were the keys towards success and those qualities have been a motivator for everything we do from development, to hiring-- and throughout the core of the business. True Games was not created to license in content, but rather to create, develop and publish new and unique games from the ground up. We have already announced two of our projects and you can see that Warrior Epic (Possibility Space) and Mytheon (Petroglyph) are raising the bar in typical micro-transaction based games. Being involved in the actual development of our games is unique amongst many of our competitors today. Game development offers a lot of unique and fun challenges and brings out tremendous creativity in all of us!
Survive the investment process. Going out in search of funding is a job in itself. It gets quite stressful and is a period of time filled with highs and lows. These investment companies see hundreds of people who want their money, so you have to prove why you are the one they should give their money to and why your business will be a success over someone else’s. You have to show the strength of your team, your partnerships and your products (even before you have the money to pay for any of those things!). Even then, that that will only get you in the door…Securing funding is not for the faint of heart. The hardest part is finding the marriage between your plan and the investors’ interest. Ultimately, we were very fortunate in connecting with UTV as they provided tremendous strategic synergies to our plans as well as the ability to aggressively combine a series A and B round.
Would we do it all over again?
The first year of being in business was really hard. Things you take for granted when you work for someone else suddenly fall on your shoulders and it takes some getting used to. It is within these first 12 months that key hires have to be made and major decisions that affect the ultimate direction of the business are decided. It is also a time where a lot of money is being spent in terms of hiring, development projects, marketing costs and operating costs – and no revenues are coming in to support the costs. It is like a perfect storm where all the ingredients have to come together for it all to work out. We know we are one of the lucky few teams who had all of those ingredients come together.
Before we started our own company, both Bob and I had very strong work ethics and would regularly work evenings and weekends, but it doesn’t compare to the work involved in the first year of starting your own business. I think we both spend 24 hours a day on the business whether it’s through travel, planning, meetings, interviewing – we sleep with one eye open and our PDA’s in one hand and we are constantly looking for the next big task to accomplish. By no means is the storm over now that the first year has passed. But the whole experience has been tremendous and extremely rewarding. As we get ready to launch our first game, Warrior Epic (www.warriorepic.com) in April of next year, we are all burning the midnight oil around here and putting our best efforts in towards a successful launch.