2024-07-03_Ep23 Uri Marchand
===
Uri: [00:00:00] You know, it's about learning from these mistakes and seeing how you recover from them. That gives you the confidence to, at the end of the day when you hit that roadblock again, or this big uncertainty, you know, feel comfortable that, you know, you may not solve it today, but you're gonna take a good night's sleep.
You wake up in the morning and you'll find a solution.
Alex: Well, that was Yuri Marshan, the founder and CEO of Overwolf. Good friends of the podcast. Of course, yeah. Talking about. How important it is to learn from, we all make mistakes, learning from them, recovering from them, using them to build confidence as you navigate the future. Uh, we had such a great conversation with Yuri.
What a fascinating guy.
Aaron: Yeah. I think that's actually one of the most important things you need in game development. In life. In life too. Like it gets hard and how you, you, uh, you face that hard time. You know, I think I've said this before. Like if you run marathons, I know you do. You kind of walk through [00:01:00] that, right?
Like you're running and it's pretty easy. The first 5k are easy. Right. And then it starts to get hard. I
Alex: ain't doing no walking during a marathon,
Aaron: but you want to
Alex: actually, so I've, I've done a few, the last one I did in LA. It beat the crap out of me. Did you want to walk? That, uh, I think I probably, I probably walked like a.
You caved in. It was not my finest hour, but, uh, or for however, but yeah, no, I agree. Do you have any, got any good examples of that?
Aaron: Yeah, of course I have many. I ha I actually can see my mature line. Uh, so in the game biz just before milestone. Everything that can catch fire will catch fire and, uh, or a build.
Right now that you need, you need to set, like, if you have a publisher or something or whatever, it always goes wrong. And like, and in the past, I've always freaked out [00:02:00] and you know, you're dealing with people. So sometimes it'd be like, Hey, I need this by three. Like if we don't get it by three, we're all screwed.
And then the person might be like, you know what? I don't like the way he talked to me, like leave or something. So there's always something and how you handle like negative attitudes of other people, how you handle like fires. Uh, and I used to not handle them. Well, I used to freak out and get vocal or, you know, shut down internally.
have a lot of anxiety, you know, and over time, like everything's still fine. Like I didn't have to act that way during that time. Does that make sense? Yeah. Just over time you learn.
Alex: Yeah. What, what did change for you in that? Cause I can totally relate to that. You know, was it that you just had enough muscle memory of like, we will find a way that's going to be okay.
I don't have to freak out. Yeah, it was,
Aaron: it was the, okay, go ahead. Well, no, no, no. What's the, or sorry, what's the, or
Alex: the, or is, um, just realizing that you get. What is, what is the phrase you get [00:03:00] more from honey than you do from God? What is
Uri: the phrase
Aaron: when you're,
Alex: when you're nice and easy going, you can have an easier conversation, you get what you want, then if you're like agro or, you know, yeah, yeah,
Aaron: yeah, that's true.
Well, uh, what's worked for me is there have been times where, and you get this usually when you get into a leadership position of any kind, or just responsibility. Position that there's no one that's going to help you, you know, and you, you have to. You know, it's like mom's spaghetti, you know, like you have to like, like that Eminem thing, like you're, it's the moment and you're either going to fail or you're going to show up and you have to show up.
And then when you show up and you succeed, it gives you a different kind of dopamine, you know, like it's like, it builds confidence and it, you know what I mean? [00:04:00] And, So it's like kind of a muscle memory thing. And we had this recently, like we were on a project recently and like, I could either a start blaming everybody that didn't do their job.
Or I could not do that and be like, all right, you know, like you discussed that with other people like, Oh yeah, well, they didn't do this and they didn't do that. And you could stay there. You know, you could stay in that hole. You could be like, well, yeah, they didn't do it. So this is what they get. You know, that kind of attitude, which is a crappy attitude to have.
And it's very easy to fall into that. Or you could be like, okay, well, you know what? We still have to do this. It needs to get done. Let's get on some calls. Then let's go. And we got there, you know,
Alex: and actually that that project was very successful. The outcome was very successful.
Aaron: Oh, that's one. I wasn't talking about that one.
This is another one. Yeah, that one too. You know what? I'm talking about that. That one was that every day, Alex. It was like every day. It was insane.
Alex: Well, and then you have the choice. You have to make the choice about whether you want [00:05:00] to put it in the work to try to correct that kind of interaction with whomever you're, you're collaborating with or move on from it, you know?
And it's funny, you, you talk about this, like, show up, you know, you got to show up because, you know, we've been interviewing and one of the interview candidates that I was talking to asked me what I thought was Was important for the, you know, the role to be successful or what makes a good team member at our studio, et cetera.
And that was pretty much my answer. It was, we're a team, we rely on each other and responsibility, which means, you know, you're able to say what you're going to do, and then you do what you're going to say, and you take responsibility for your contribution. And you are a productive member of this team that way.
That was pretty much, you know, the topic and, and I, I really agree with you.
Aaron: Yeah, showing up and then not, not holding on to other people's failures because you're working with humans and they have attitudes and they have
Alex: We all
Aaron: make mistakes. Emotions. Yeah. Right. Nobody's perfect. [00:06:00] Yeah. Nobody's perfect.
And then they might be perfect for five days, but then that one day they're not perfect. And I learned from my coworkers too, my, my colleagues and stuff, I see how other people react to stuff. It's like, Yeah. I think I've seen you, the way you react in meetings. Like I've been in meetings with you, and I think I even commended you afterwards.
I don't know if you remember, but we were in a meeting once and there were two hotheads in the call. There was like eight of us and they hated each other. And they were both in like Supreme leadership positions where they make, remember, do you remember this? And they're fighting each other. And this has happened many, many times, but you handled their like biting in a way that was like, Okay, we have to still move forward and you know, it was, it's very diplomatic in a way, like in a way it's a, it's a skill set, but you don't walk out of the meeting like, Oh yeah, man, did you see how he did that?
And like, that's not right. You know? And like the stain in the hole of like people's faults and you
Alex: know
Aaron: what I mean? It's very immature.
Alex: I will say though, I think in my experience, [00:07:00] there is a level of. Not okay.
Aaron: Oh, sure. Yeah. Yes. I think it's
Alex: great when we all have the attitude of, Hey, I'll pick up the slack.
Hey, if that fell behind the stove, I got it. Don't worry about it. But if somebody is like consistently throwing their shit behind the stove. It's like, eh, you know, go do that, somebody else will get
Aaron: you. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, on that project, I kind of felt like, I've felt like that many times, especially when other people are around you.
But you learn from them, like you watch them, and you're like, wow, they're not complaining, or they're complaining in a better way, and they're still getting stuff done. Yeah, it's a mindset. And I think everyone listening to this should try to develop that mindset. It is as valuable as learning.
Alex: Yeah, such an important part of being a teammate
Aaron: for your co workers
Alex: is.
Yeah. Is that positive attitude? You know, we all go into it with the assumption that everybody has the best intentions and wants to succeed. Um, and then everybody gets a chance to, to prove it, you know? Yeah. Well, thank [00:08:00] you, Yuri, for giving us that quote. You know, we had a few to choose from, so we'll definitely have some topics to chat about on the other side, but I hope you enjoy the conversation that we had with Yuri.
It's a good one. Yeah. We'll see you soon. See you on the other side. Hello friends. And welcome to this week's episode of The Fourth Curtain. Today, we are honored to be with Yuri Marchand, the founder of Overwolf based in Tel Aviv and started over 14 years ago. And that's like, I don't know, that's like what four or five lifetimes in the tech industry roundabout.
Um, I got, I got questions about how you survived that long, but overwolf has built a platform. Maybe I would say the platform for UGC, uh, UGC kind of having a moment. So I got questions about how you saw this coming 14 years ago, but I'm very familiar with you guys. We have done projects together, just an amazing company.
And I didn't realize you started 14 years ago. I didn't realize that [00:09:00] you've raised, I think it's over 150 million worth of venture investment. So obviously you're not the only one who's excited about building in this space and maybe even more impressively, I was reading. I think you guys posted about this last year, paid out to creators, I think over 200 million.
Is that right?
Uri: Um, turn one. Yeah. Uh, just a little bit over.
Aaron: What is a lot is a lot of money. That's
Alex: a lot of cheddar. Um, so I, yeah, I don't know if, you know, folks out there who are playing games or even folks in industry have really understand the scale, which, uh, UGC is becoming an important part of the business, like just.
Dollars wise and say, and I just got to assume if you're paying out 200, there must be more than 200 coming in. So that's, that's not the size of
Uri: the business. That's, I mean, we generally operate on a ref share basis. And so, yeah, we have to pay the bills and build a sustainable business. [00:10:00] So, yeah, it's a little bit greater than, uh, 200 for the total revenue.
Alex: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this just to start, because, you know, as I was meticulously researching, you and I got to spend some time together in London a couple months ago, so that was part of my research too. You didn't know, probably, but. Research over
Uri: breakfast and then a panel in LVP. That's pretty good.
You're very thorough. You know, I. I knew that from the beginning, very impressive.
Alex: How do you make, how do you make a company go for 14 years? And was this the first
Uri: company you started? It's actually the second. So my background in a nutshell, I finished my service when I was like 25 and a half, studying computer science.
And while being a student, I started a different company in e learning. And the story back then was I studied for my SATs, it's called psychometric test here before applying to university. And I got really annoyed with the fact that I had to build this very rich vocabulary, which [00:11:00] I did not have in Hebrew.
And there was no software to teach me how to do that. It was just cards. So we thought, Hey, why don't we build it? So another friend from the air force and another one from intelligence, we teamed up and we built this. product that became a consumer product for people who study for the psychometric test in Israel.
And it was a really good learning experience. It was not a commercial success. We ended up shutting it down after about, around about four years of running it at low scale while studying computer science. And then basically as I graduated, I started Overwolf. So, so this is the story. I think this is the first kind of real company, real job that I had.
And about 14 years, um, you know, when we graduated from school, the, from university, our thesis was that if we're going to be able to build products that gamers want, we're going to be able to kind of somehow build a sustainable business out of that. We didn't have a very clear plan on how that's going to be.
But [00:12:00] since we played games, we felt like we have a good understanding on what people are missing. And we were naive enough to think that we'd be able to answer all these things by ourselves. And so our story in a nutshell is that we started as creators and we've built features for games, but we also had to build the engine.
And that was really, really complicated. So it took us about a year and nine months to release a very crappy beta version of the product back in mid, early 2020. 2011. And then we started playing around with a bunch of ideas. A lot of companies kind of came to us and asked us to do like a bunch of features anywhere from Microsoft that wanted us to solve gameplay on windows tablets.
So back when iPads were a hot thing and Microsoft wanted to kind of provide an alternative. The thesis was there are so many games on steam that aren't playable on a touch device. And with your attack, you can make them playable. So we thought, Hey, it's a cool idea. Let's do it. And like this cool idea, there were like 20 others.
And we also thought, despite the fact that we were just [00:13:00] like 10 people, we thought, Hey, cool, let's do it. And we ended up with a bunch of mediocre products that weren't going anywhere. And when we sort of ran out of money in mid 2013, we had to think really hard on what's going to be next. Like, is this just not working out or did we have our strategy wrong?
And what we realized is A, games industry is going great. B, there are a ton of use cases of what you could build. From mods to apps, to private servers, like so many different use cases. And there's no company that is dedicated to building the engine, like the caring engine for all these products and services.
So what if we just focused on trying to be the best in the world and building the engine to build all these products, apps, mods, servers, And that's what we've committed to.
Alex: Yeah. So wait, when you say engine, when I hear engine, I think about, you know, game engine that's doing the rendering. But I think you're talking about the, something a little different, right?
Like, like the [00:14:00] purchase and engine that allows people to create pluggable content or like, how do you guys describe engine?
Uri: So our first products are apps. So apps that you download to your computer and then you can use them while you're playing a game. So the first feature this engine would have is the ability to create a desktop app.
So you don't need to build your own installer. I mean, now there's Electron, so it's a lot easier for those familiar with the framework, but back when we started, there was no Electron that you had to like figure out how to build an installer. For example, very simple theoretically, but actually quite complicated.
If you only know. JavaScript and HTML. And then the second thing is we realized that if you want to have an interface in the game, you want to be able to create an overlay and draw it in HTML and refresh it in a reasonable rate to provide a good experience without crashing the game. If you change resolution or tab out.
So the overlay was another feature for the engine. And then we realized that we actually need a lot of real time telemetry. So another part of the engine was to look at the screen and to try understand [00:15:00] things like my location on the map or which weapon I'm using, or if I just dealt damage to my enemy.
How much damage did I deal?
Alex: And all of this would sit on top of like any game,
Uri: any game that we support. We had to go through the process of developing that support, you know, per game that we support on a game by game basis, hard work. What was the first flagship game you worked with? Did you
Alex: start with Minecraft?
Uri: No. Um, I mean, I was playing so much Starcraft back then and our first game, and we were using Skype, our first feature was Skype and, uh, the first game was StarCraft and World Warcraft, and from there we've kind of grown. At some point we switched to playing League, so naturally a lot of the content became League of Legends focused.
And then Minecraft for us is something that we didn't really solve until we started doing Minecraft modding, which is like a different sort of vertical or a different category of UGC, which we just did not focus on as we were focused on. [00:16:00] Maturing our first segment, which is apps. That's really okay.
Alex: All right.
So before this, so before overwolf and what was the name of the company that you started before over? The
Uri: name was Aplicel, um, because, uh, it's like, you know, the obvious combination between applications and cellular, because we, uh, Sort of wanted all of our software to work on a mobile phone. Do you remember WAP, W A P, like the former interface for, for websites for mobile phones, so even have a service, uh, with WAP, but we thought that this is where the future is going to be.
So. This is why I please sell.
Alex: Okay. That's a very, that's like a Silicon Valley company kind of name, isn't it? And WEP means something totally different today.
So, but before that you said you finished your service. So you were. You were in the Air Force, right? You were flying planes, is that right? I
Uri: actually flew helicopters, uh, so CH 53s. That's freaking [00:17:00] awesome,
Aaron: dude.
Uri: Which one? CH 53s. It's like, uh, it's a big one. It's on the modern warfares. They usually have, you know, a Blackhawk would be a smaller version.
Of a CH 53. Um, it has the two propellers. No, that's a Chinook. Okay. I don't know their names. Just a big beast with one. Come on, Aaron. You worked
Alex: on battlefield. You gotta know this stuff, don't you? We didn't add helicopters
Uri: to the game.
Aaron: In
Alex: our version. We did. Oh, we added one little one. We did. The, the, uh, We have the Huey in there.
No, we didn't have the bell Huey. Cause we didn't have the, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. We were totally changed. I love you. We just had, I don't know if you know, I don't know if you know, Shannon Loftus, but she, Shannon's a pilot. Uh, and, uh, Joe Staten, who we, who I worked with over at bungee is also pilots. And it seems like there's a lot of.
A lot of high flying folks in the game industry, I guess. Okay. All right. But, but helicopters though.
Uri: Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. Helicopter. You're, I think you're the first helicopter pilot. I mean, but
Uri: a Huey is a helicopter. Let's get to the chopper. [00:18:00] Exactly. Get to the chopper. Uh, Huey is a helicopter. Uh, I need to work on my German accent, but, uh, Huey is obviously a helicopter.
So who did you say flew a Huey or? Was it not?
Alex: No, no, no, no. I think we were talking about whether we had a Huey in battlefield mobile. Oh, right. The tutorial.
Aaron: I remember now in the beginning, we're
Uri: going
Alex: all over. I'm curious about like what it was like growing up for you. Like that was technology part of the household.
Were you playing games? Sounds like you were playing a lot of Starcraft in the formative years around the beginning of Overwolf, but like, what'd you grow up on?
Uri: I think as a kid, when I grew up. Not too many people had computers where we had one kid in the class that had a Nintendo and we had a few folks including myself with a PC and You know, the first games were Karateka and Test Drive and these type of games But then it evolved to all the quests But the game that I really got hooked with was Dune 2 [00:19:00] and I played so many skirmishes of that game, obviously Online wasn't really a thing, but so many hours, so many games.
And obviously when Warcraft one came out, it was like, Oh my God, you know, this is, this is my new life. And I played so much with friends online on a crappy modem back when phone bills were actually, I don't know how it was in the U S but for us, uh, depending on the hour of the day, it was like really expensive to play in the morning because it was like, Every one minute you had to pay something like 20 cents or something, but at night it's like every half an hour, 20 cents.
So we would play until the small hours of the night. And, and then two and Starcraft and all of that. So, so I think this is my origin as a gamer. I continue playing as I was kind of in my service, mostly Warcraft three back then. Yeah. And then Starcraft two. And so mostly RTS and mobile for me. So that's my kind [00:20:00] of games, but, but not command and conquer, huh?
No, also the command and conquerors back then. So I forgot. I played everything that was. RTS,
Alex: RTS, right on. I love a good RTS. Yeah. I have
Uri: like, I don't know, 60, 70 games or so it's tricky. Like I I've told that to Tim, by the way, I did listen to your episode with him from a couple of weeks ago, I think. But anyways, the, the tricky part right now with all of the early adopters.
It's like, they're really, really good. So for me, you know, I cannot afford to play as much as those guys play. My, you know, win to loss ratio is embarrassing. Like 20 percent is all
Aaron: losses. Yeah.
Alex: You too. You two should play together because it sounds like you're in the same boat. I'm
Aaron: like, how do you, how do you build this thing?
So I'm like looking at the tent tree and then it's like, they come in and just destroy me. I'm like,
Uri: crazy rushes. And it's really complicated. Previous bash, the. [00:21:00] health camp annoyances, uh, where they would just camp next to your base and go heal themselves. Like, but it's fun game. It's good. Feels good.
Alex: Okay.
So a real RTS origin for you, I guess.
Uri: What do you think that they're not around so much anymore? It's really, really complicated. And, and also for me, you know, um, At some point, it was so difficult to stay in shape with StarCraft 2. So I switched over to playing League of Legends, which I love. And now the only mobile game I play is TFT every once in a while.
Really trying to get to plat. Last season, I was like gold one. This one, I'm stuck right now in like gold four, maybe five. So it's really difficult, I think, with a game like Stormgate to improve your win ratio from whatever, I don't know, 15, 20 percent to, you know, 44 and climb the ladder. I mean, the amount of time and investment and, uh, both micro and macro, it's just like, it's so difficult.
So I think this is maybe the reason. [00:22:00] I think one of their purposes with Frost Gen and team was to create something that's more approachable. Right now, the experience to me feels very hardcore and maybe that's because I'm older. But I don't know,
Tim was
Alex: saying that the co op is for 40 plus gamers. And
Uri: are they doing like, is there going to be
Alex: an overwolf thing?
Uri: I mean, we'll see, you know, the, they're planning to do a map editor. And, um, you know, once you have a map editor, that's only kind of the first part of the problem you want to solve. You then want to solve saying things like, uh, hosting and discovery.
And potentially premium content. How do you monetize that? And a bunch of other problems that they would need to solve. But we'll see, we'd be very excited to work on it. And obviously StarCraft 2 has this UGC ecosystem to it, so I think it's been done before. Yeah. And they do crazy
Aaron: stuff on StarCraft,
Uri: like
Aaron: they'll make like a completely different game that's not even StarCraft anymore.
Alex: All right. Well, so I guess we catch back up to the early [00:23:00] years of Overwolf and you guys were building an engine that would allow you to, on a game by game basis, produce some functionality and apps, but you weren't necessarily making like game mods at the beginning, right? Or we weren't,
Uri: uh, it was always on the roadmap.
But I think we understood, I mean, the biggest mistake we've done as younger entrepreneurs was to bite way more than we can chew and not commit to doing something and be the best in the world in doing that specifically. So I think it would have been a mistake for us. Before we've reached maturity and maybe not maturity is the right word, but just like quality and polish on the apps platform sort of expand to something else.
I think ever since, uh, 2013 or 2014, we had this coming soon, like on our app store, it had, it said mods and then coming soon, but the coming soon became a joke in the company because we always thought that it's going to be next quarter. [00:24:00] You know, just being like four or five years later, at some point, we just removed it.
And then when we started working on it, Did
Alex: you put a little trademark, a little TM next to soon? That's what we did at Bungie. We'd say it's coming soon. Trademark. Yeah, absolutely. No, we've not done this. We really thought
Uri: that it's coming. It's coming soon. Like when we've, when we had that, we thought that it's really around the corner, but it was never, we, you know, we've done this even like article in games industry that in 2014 talking about how The industry should think differently on modders and not think about them as cheat creators, but as content creators and how everyone would benefit if, you know, this would be the trend and this is from 2014.
And, you know, for me, one of the reasons that we did it is because we hadn't known our roadmap for the next quarter. So we wanted to kind of have reference and start. doing a little bit of ideation in the industry for different perspectives around modding. And yeah, we, it only took us like an additional, I don't know, five years to release the first modding related project.[00:25:00]
So we started working on the tech and then we were really lucky to have the opportunity to acquire Curseforge, which had the biggest Minecraft community and World of Warcraft community for modders and was really kind of. It was with Twitch, but the team was finding it difficult to get resources and focus from the company because obviously Twitch has different core business and they just tried to find the right home and they talked with a few companies and we were lucky to be the one that got the asset.
And from that point on, we basically took the tech that we started building. We sort of merged it with what they had. It's been a big, big pile of, you know, legacy code that we had to figure out what to do with. So that's been fun for our engineering team. Did
Alex: you just turn a phrase into a polite phrase?
You'd started with pile of, and then you finished that phrase with legacy code.
Uri: No, I, I, I'm still trying to figure out what WAP is. These days, by the way, but, um,[00:26:00]
Alex: that's, that's homework for later. Yeah.
Aaron: This is PG.
Alex: It's not, I checked the explicit lyrics check bar. So it's, it's okay.
Uri: I, I, I don't know if I tried it. Look, the product was working, so it was definitely not a pile of. You know, something that you do in the toilet, definitely not. It was a working product. It was great.
It was just under nurtured, I guess. It didn't get enough love, tender, and care for a lot of time.
Alex: It wasn't a top priority in a large organization there, but for you guys, it could be,
Uri: and we also had a bunch of our own con code, so the challenge was. You know, getting a bunch of legacy, a bunch of new, marry them together.
That never works well. So a lot of embarrassing things like the weirdest bug that we had was it's so stupid in the featured content on curse forge, we changed it from six to seven games and then our CPU [00:27:00] on the server. Went over to a hundred percent and the server crashed and we had like a task force and we've invited the Twitch folks and we looked at the thing and we analyze, like who would have thought like for such a small change, we had like an endless loop somewhere and just destroyed and crashed the whole service.
So anyways, we had a lot of those, um, and that got us to start working on mods.
Alex: And those first mods were those, what games were those first mods?
Uri: So it was integrating the existing communities of, uh, the biggest ones were Minecraft Warcraft and some other games on this ecosystem. But then it evolved as the company evolved to a providing another solution to integrate, like what we have with Arc and the Unreal plugin that does a more integrated kind of approach, but also what we do with the Sims, which Kind of like minecraft or kind of like world of warcraft It's a third party client that you download and then the client manages the mods and right now I think uh, the total count is It's around about a hundred [00:28:00] games and yeah, we hope to grow this in the future.
Alex: Wow. Yeah. A hundred games. And so do you have to like maintain your platform for all a hundred games? Like does stuff break when those games do updates from time to time? So it
Uri: depends. And, um, the short answer is, I guess the short answer is it depends. So, for example, when there's a Sims patch, mods can break.
So we don't need to fix things on our end, but modders do. And we provide them tools to kind of prepare for that, or do a quick update, compare versions, and a bunch of other things. In different games, like, say, Stardew Valley, the community has different needs that we may not cater with just the features we have for World of Warcraft or Minecraft.
So then we would need to develop, um, Started value specific features to support this community better. So unfortunately there's no, you know, generic solution. So the bullet that works for everybody, there's always a lot of ad hoc work. But since we can't, we don't have infinite resources, then there is a long tail.
[00:29:00] And that long tail is something that is usually difficult for us to touch on so they can enjoy the self serve tools that we have.
Alex: Aaron is intrigued about the Stardew Valley mods.
Aaron: That was a curve
Alex: ball. I didn't know it had mods. I didn't know it had mods. Yeah, absolutely. That's
Uri: amazing.
Alex: It does
Uri: have
Alex: mods.
Uri: Yeah, it's, it's quite big with mods, actually.
Aaron: That's
Uri: made by one person.
Alex: Yeah. Now I got to look into this. I did not know it has
Uri: mod packs.
Alex: What's the craziest mod that's kind of. That you see. Well,
Aaron: yeah. Cause I was actually have a similar question to Alex's is the crazy mod. Do you have anything like, cause if you think of some of the best games right now, they all started as mods.
Like battlefield was desert storm. Was it called desert strip? What was it called? For Half Life, Desert something. Anyways, it turned into Battlefield, I think. Right. And then there's, uh, uh, League of Legends, which started out as Dota for Warcraft, right? Yeah. And then, uh, what's the other one? Counter Strike, which is still the mod, like if you think about it.
[00:30:00] Yeah. And pub, I think PubG started as a mod too. In ARMA, right?
Alex: Yes. That's right. It was a mod out of ARMA.
Aaron: So has anything like that come out? Like, have you seen anything or so, and like, I guess that falls into the craziest
Uri: mods thing. So, yeah, so I, I guess it's two questions. Right. And since, uh, we are PG 18, did we say two
Alex: questions?
Because
Uri: I'm,
Alex: I'm more interested in the crazy mod, like the one that's like, Oh man, it shouldn't have done that. So
Uri: again, adult content. Um, we, we had this. that got submitted with like a diaper or diapers skins for, for Minecraft. And apparently some, some people have like a preference for diapers. And it was for us at the beginning, we, we published it because I guess the moderator that looked at it said, okay, diapers.
Okay. It's just diapers. And then we started getting complaints. So we took it down and when we realized, so that, that was like a weird, crazy kind of experience. We also [00:31:00] had another one, uh, more educational that someone basically created Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Minecraft, and then they submitted it and we tried to have a conversation with the creator to understand where they're from and what's their intentions and, and all that.
And we couldn't get traction with the creator. We couldn't have a conversation. So we ended up not approving it. Which was a bit of a pain because for educational reasons, we would have loved to publish something like that, but we don't know where it could go to. So we decided, you know, not to publish it.
And there are a lot of stories like that. So these are just two anecdotes. In terms of interesting, uh, gameplay mods, you know, it's, there's nothing that I think of is like the new battle royale, kind of like what Arma had, but I hope I'm hopeful that we would have something like that, but there's nothing like that.
There are a lot of live services. Like if you look at the Minecraft ecosystem and all the different private servers, these are amazing live services, but they're like games. in themselves. They can really be, I think, replicated in a [00:32:00] different environment, because a lot of them are inspired by other games.
Sometimes it's, you know, the other way around, you know, back in the day it was like a mod becoming a game, but sometimes games are becoming Minecraft servers. Like, you know, I can create a battle Royale, you know, Minecraft server and, you know, call it hypixel and build a nice live business for myself. Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. I mean, no surprise to anybody listening. I'm a huge believer in the space and I, you know, having been at larger companies that deploy a lot of capital into the creation of new games, it's often, it's, it's very difficult for those companies to invest in, make small investments in non. Traditional or things that don't have comps to them, you know, and they, you know, a company like EA, which is a fantastic company will, sometimes they will look themselves in the mirror and go, why didn't he make Fortnite or whatever, you know, but the answer is it's kind of obvious the answer is because, you know, there's a, you know, they have a [00:33:00] responsibility to return to their investors.
So they have to invest in the things that have the highest likelihood of making a return. Whereas in this space where there's creators who have like, you know, They don't have a, they don't have any fiduciary responsibility to anyone. They're just trying to do something cool. It's such an amazing crucible for coming up with new ideas.
You will
Uri: not see EA coming up with a banana. Have you seen this thing on steam? Yeah. I just saw that yesterday. That's amazing. Oh my
Aaron: God.
Uri: Yeah. You're
Aaron: talking about the steam thing, right? Where you click it and it just generates like
Uri: a random banana that has, yeah. I mean, yeah, we'll see how long it sustains.
I haven't checked it out in the last day or two, but you know, interesting initiative and definitely got to a bunch of concurrence. I think last day check was like 400, 000 or 500, 000. Yeah. People are building mods that just click it for you, right? Or whatever. I mean, so you don't have to, you kind of need to click to keep it alive and then there are drops every once in a while.
And once you get a drop, you [00:34:00] can trade it and that's it. That's pretty much the game. I've seen a quick YouTube review that, you know, a lot of people thought, Hey, maybe this is thing is, is like a malware. It's stealing my stuff, doing key longing. They basically reverse engineered the entire game, which is on unity.
So super easy to understand what's happening. The game has three classes. Like, I don't, I don't remember the classes, but it was like super simple. So nothing too complicated. All
Alex: right. Well, so for folks who actually I made, maybe this is for anybody listening. How do you guys make money?
Uri: Our business model is a rev share and the way our partners make money.
So the creators choosing to use our tools is either to sell their products. So in a purchases, and then we have a rev share, depending on the product, depending on the platform subscriptions. And then again, we have a rev share or they show ads. Now ads cannot be shown in a Minecraft mod or something like that.
So this is more on our apps and websites side of the business. So if [00:35:00] you're a creator, if you're a web creator, we can help you out. Or if you're an app creator, we can help you out with monetize with ads, which is a big pain in the ass in the desktop environment, and then the business model is a rev share.
Rev share is very between five and 30 percent depending on the product and depending on the services that we provide.
Alex: Right. That's the rev share to the mod maker. That's
Uri: what we keep. So if all we're doing is payments, that's what you take, um, it's kind of similar to Xolo, it's 5%. If we're doing kind of the whole thing, it's closer to 30 percent with, uh, ads and all these other services.
And then in other cases, it could be in that kind of range. But it's always, um, the creator is getting a 70 percent on a minimum. And, you know, I think that one of our key things in the company, and we've talked about that back in LVP is that our single North star is how much creators are making, because this is the fuel that drives the soul industry in our opinion.
And the reason why we call ourselves. Uh, the guild for in game [00:36:00] creators is because we're building a new profession in our opinion and we're transitioning from four decades of people doing gaming UGC and doing it for fun and for free to continuing to do it for fun and for free, but also allowing those that actually want to make a living to make a living.
So this is how we measure our success.
Alex: Right.
Uri: That makes sense.
Alex: How do people like get access to you?
Aaron: How do I start? Like, I want to make a mod. Yeah, exactly. Where do I go? Like, Hey, I'm, I'm making mods right now for the Sims or I'm a listener and like, okay, where do I go? Where do I start?
Alex: Okay. That, that's a question.
My question was maybe even, are we doing the two question thing again? Maybe, I don't know, but even, even before, like, I have friends now who have kids that are going to college. Right. So a conversation I find myself in a lot is, Oh, Should my kid go to a video game program? You know, they don't have those when I was coming up, but a lot of them are, are very good.
And you know, [00:37:00] sometimes, you know, it depends, you know, it's like sometimes, yeah, that's a great way to get into the industry, but almost always having a portfolio is just a really good way to introduce yourself to a company if you want to get a job. But this is a whole different thing. This is like, feels to me like this is more entrepreneurial.
Like if, if you want to try and make money in this part of the game industry, it's, um, I don't know that anybody's going to teach you how to do this. I don't know. That was my question. It's like, how, how, it's like YouTube, right? Yeah. Is, is this a career? Is this like a thing that like, should I have my, should my son be looking at, at whatever, you know, I think more and more of the answer is going to be yes, but I'm just kind of curious.
Like, how do you view the. I guess it's sort of like the talent funnel, you know, like how do people enter this part of the industry along with you, if you, I'm guessing you have some ideas of how that's happening already organically,
Uri: you know? So in our opinion, it starts with, uh, just being very passionate about a specific game.
And it could be Hearthstone, could be League of Legends, could be Minecraft, could be GTA five. [00:38:00] And then as a passionate user of the game, you're starting to consume content that other people have created. And it could be a website, an app. a mod or private server. And then at some point, a lot of these folks that are technical are saying, Hey, I could do this better, or I can build something to improve my experience that I'm not receiving with these other products.
Then they would probably search, they would get into discord communities, they would find us and read our documentation on how to build stuff, they would find YouTube tutorials on how to build something. And then they would open an account in the relevant kind of side of our business, whether it's the app platform or Chris Forge for mods or whatever, and, you know, start uploading content and interacting with, uh, users, you can get information from our website, from discord communities, from YouTube, from just.
So it's like anyone with their flavor of how to get information and how to get started. But this is generally, I think the funnel from being a gamer to being a creator. [00:39:00] Right.
Alex: Usually starts with being a very enthusiastic about a particular game. I think so. Yeah. Because then you have some, you're kind of part of that community.
Exactly. And it just
Uri: sets you better for product market fit. Cause otherwise, if you're, you know, just being opportunistic on saying, Oh, I hear games is a really good business. Uh, what about this game called, you know, blah blah blah, whatever, League. Uh, let's do something for that. Let's interview players and ask them what they need.
It's like such a hard process compared to, I'm just, I'm feeling it. I know what I'm missing and you know, that's what I'm going to do. And, you know, at best I'm going to succeed as a creator and maybe monetize, but at worst I had a nice learning experience and added something new to my portfolio, but also something that I want for myself.
So there's no way you can lose. Yeah.
Alex: Right. And I got to imagine folks that are building in this part of the industry. It's like, it's harder. In some ways, right? Because it's like the creation tools that they're not always like super user friendly, [00:40:00] not always super well documented. So you have to do, you have to really want it, right?
Uri: You have to really want it. And, and, you know, and we try to make everything as accessible as, as we can. I mean, obviously. Let's say you have, you know, Roblox or UEFN. So, you know, it's a single platform. It's a big company, a lot of resources. You can really invest in creating the best documentation possible and making sure that getting started is clear and easy.
Alex: You would think, right? You would think they could.
Uri: Settle me
Alex: down.
Uri: I mean, everything, everything is a journey, right? I mean, look, um, everything is a journey and, uh, You want to ship product fast and, you know, I'm sure it's going to continuously evolve and improve. Um, we have the challenge of doing it from a lot of different games. And again, we, we need to, where we can invest more in polishing that and kind of the bigger ones and the ones that we can afford ourselves to.
Invest more and more. And sometimes it's self serve and yeah, you've got to figure it out. So, [00:41:00] yeah,
Aaron: it's kind of like old school, like really the old school way, like there's a lot of learning. I mean, this is how money started, right? Yeah.
Alex: Right. On the BBS, you know, but with the modem, somebody figured out the file format for that save game file.
And now, you know, now we can, you know, write a little piece of code that'll do a diff on that and
Uri: insert some stuff and now it's like, yeah, you talked to in one of your. Um, previous, um, sessions on, on using like FTP servers for transitioning files and someone like stealing your game. You remember that one?
And yeah, so it's, it's like, yeah, it's kind of like old school. Sometimes that was marathon, right? Or what was that? I don't
Alex: remember the name of the game. That was, I think that was back in the, in the marathon days. Yeah. Back in the, back in the nineties, you know, yeah. It kids don't realize how much nicer it is today than it was back then.
Aaron: I have a question. Okay. So we have a team and there's, we have engineers and you know, [00:42:00] there's people that understand a lot of the, the difficult stuff and the easy stuff and integration, but you Stardew Valley, that game has mods. And how does a creator, like, let's say I really like Stardew Valley, and now I want to, I have an idea, like, oh, it would be cool to, and I don't know what the mods for Stardew Valley are, but like, let's say it's a new bush that drops a new fruit or something, what's the starting point to get to, To go through this like ecosystem, you know, like I want to do it.
Like, where do I go? What do I do? You know, is it just,
Uri: yeah. So first, uh, I'm not a Stardew Valley expert, so we can Google it together and go through that, go through the process. But what I can tell you,
Aaron: it can be, it can be any game. I wasn't trying to put you on the spot here. It can be any game.
No, choose a game. Like, let's say like, what's a popular game where like, In fact, I would say choose the easiest one. I
Uri: mean, we can talk about ARK. Okay, ARK, yeah. Go to the Epic Games Store, download the editor, [00:43:00] check whatever online documentation that is out there that is relevant, but you don't really have to if you're an Unreal developer, and just play around with the editor and the game's assets.
Um, so this, this would be, you know, ARK. Stardew Valley has a loader, so the game itself did not have native mod support. There was a very creative person by the nickname of Smappy, and I think that's his nickname, or this is the name of the product, and this is like the Stardew Valley mod loader. And so, if I'm a user and I want to use these mods, I would need to install that somehow with the mod and load them.
But basically in terms of discovery, it really depends on the game. And a safe starting point is probably Google, but we, but we have, we definitely have a lot of documentation. So if you go to Chris forage and you check for. Documentation, online references, uh, will help you with
Aaron: that.
Uri: And it's different
Aaron: for every game.
I assume like some are dragged these files to this folder, put it a dot in front of this file. So it doesn't load on that kind of stuff.
Uri: We try to make it by the way, really easy for, for gamers to consume these mods. So [00:44:00] through the mod manager, you can, you know, just choose your Sims mods and, you know, do whatever.
But if you want to create custom content, there are, I think, three different community created editors for the Sims that help you do these mods. But you got to Google them. You got to download, you got to check the documentation. You got to build something. It's going to take you time and then you publish it.
There's got to be
Alex: some
Uri: crazy mods for the Sims, right? There's like real content. That's crazy. Very consistent with how this podcast is going from like an age restriction perspective.
That's
Aaron: why Alex checks that box. It's all good. But that's what makes it magical, right? Like, I remember, uh, the Counter Strike mod, it was like, hey, have this file. And it's like, what do I do with it? And then it's like, you have to go in your, your structure and you have to edit these INI files. And it was just really neat getting it to work.
And then, you know, you feel like a hacker. It's a
Alex: game in and of
Aaron: itself, right? You felt like part of the
Uri: secret, you know, like. But then if you wanted to scale right across, like, Pretty much [00:45:00] everyone. You got to make it easy at least to use it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yuria,
Alex: how big is this overall? How many people?
We're about
Uri: 180 right
Alex: now. 180. How, um, are you remote in person? Do you have offices all over? How is that working?
Uri: So we have offices, uh, where our headquarters is in Tel Aviv, uh, where there are about 120 of us. We have a UK subsidiary that is fully remote, uh, around about 40 people. And then all the other folks are around the world, mostly in the U.
S., and they work, uh, fully remotely. In the office, we work three days a week from the office, uh, to maintain kind of, you know, good face to face communications. And two days from home tomorrow is the work from home day. Oh, cool.
Alex: Right. So wait, is this your office we're
Uri: seeing with the
Alex: guitar?
Uri: Exactly. This is my office.
So halfway through COVID, I just could not work from home anymore. So in our backyard, we built this, uh, small, you know, shed with air conditioning and. [00:46:00] Guitars and drums and whatever you see here in the background. Um, yeah. And, and we have a drum kit
Alex: back there too.
Uri: Yeah. It's an electric drum kit. It's electric.
You like a one man band or what? Actually, I majored in music and physics when I was in high school. So back then I was playing both bass and music. These were in guitar. These were my main tools. So bass was in a big band, mostly jazz guitar was actually more funk or funk rock. And, and I always wanted to be a drummer.
So when my son started playing drums a few years ago, I joined him in lessons. And now I actually play with high school friends. We try to play once a week. It's, it's usually once every two weeks. Uh, but I'm the drummer in the band, so they play all the rest. I'm the drummer on real drums. No, that's fun.
Your dream came true. Well, if you can play bass,
Alex: you can get a gig anywhere.
Uri: You can play bass and read, uh, the, the notes, the
Alex: music notation.
Uri: Oh, yeah, the notes. Yeah. That's exactly what Sasha told me when I was the bassist [00:47:00] for the big band. He said, uh, you know, with a thick Russian accent, something like Yuri, if you can play good bass and read, uh, the partiture.
I don't know how it's called in English anyway, tablature tablature. That's what it's. Yeah. You're not going to start
Alex: right on. All right. Well, so you've run this company for 14 years and you've grown as 180 people pay you're writing checks, 200 million for the checks to kids who are modding and pros and pros, so you have like a decently mature business, like what's your style?
Do you have like a, a management? Style or philosophy. Like how, how have you kept it going? Have you, you seem like super, to me, you seem super chill. You don't seem like you're pulling your hair out. Although I don't have much though.
Aaron: What the heck Alex?
Uri: Just, just shaving it.
Alex: But how have you, what [00:48:00] kind of people do you look for when you hire? Like, how have you set the company up to be successful for so long and scale? And like, that's pretty rare. You know, it's, it's pretty rare that in our industry, a, that, that, you know, You can run a company independently for that long and be, continue to grow and be successful.
So like, what, what's your secret?
Uri: Uh, you know, I think, uh, no silver bullets, a lot of trial and error, but everything starts with the mission that we all are passionate about of building this, uh, new profession, this very strong alignment between. Who we are as people, as creators, and this feeling of we're on a sacred quest, you know, to build a new profession in the games world.
And the prize is huge in our opinion, because we're moving the needle for so many people and we're getting positive feedback from so many people that we've kind of changed their lives in providing an opportunity to make a living doing what they're passionate [00:49:00] about. And I think, um, this is probably the most important thing, but then learning from mistakes and not repeating them and reading a lot of books that have massively influenced how we run the business and, you know, working with people with a very strong growth mindset and with a lot of curiosity to change and modify.
And, you know, we always. I think a company is like a product where you always need to think on, uh, what's no longer relevant and what's a new thing that you want to develop and how do you further polish your either processes or anything else like strategy. You know, my WhatsApp thing says, uh, chop wood, carry water.
And I really believe that building a company. Is a lot about doing the day to day work that is compounding over time and allows you to create something that you could be proud of. And a lot of people can find valuable. So this is sort of how I'm thinking about it. You said chop
Alex: wood, carry water.
Uri: Is that
Alex: what you said?
Yeah. [00:50:00]
Uri: The fundamentals,
Alex: the fundamentals, the basics, get the basics right.
Uri: Do the, do the hard work. And, you know, they're all, you know, all these, um, perspectives on how to sustain building a company. And the funny thing is that, you know, 99 percent of them are true, but they're really hard to kind of say very difficult to do.
And. This is what kind of gets me back to being really passionate about the mission and the vision as a key contributor for the sustainability of the whole business. Like, yeah, I think, you know, if we were doing something that doesn't have an impact on the world, or that I did not deeply believe that it has an impact on the world, you know, it's very difficult to sustain, you know, after a while I probably want to do something else.
But this feeling that, you know, what we're building has no expiration date, and games as an entertainment medium has no expiration date, and it's only growing. And we believe that we're building like the new form of creators, or the new generation of creators. So I feel like we even, we [00:51:00] have a responsibility to keep on doing it, to keep on leveling up and to think very, very long term.
And this is the key. And then sure, you have to be really curious and you have to be very humble in how you think about things and, uh, listen to feedback and improve based on feedback, which is super, super important. Obviously we all have blind spots, read a lot of books, like, you know, I'm kind of repeating myself, but I think, uh, Yeah, no,
Alex: no, that's really interesting.
Cause there aren't, I didn't really think about it that way, but you're not just building a, your company is not just enabling entertainment, you're enabling the livelihoods of a whole new group of people that are now have access to creating entertainment through your platform. So your platform is as much about enabling a whole category of makers.
Correct. And their livelihood. And that's, yeah, I could totally see that being just very motivational, you know, beyond the, like the, what the rest of us do, which is just entertaining. Exactly.
Uri: You know? So I think the [00:52:00] mix is. What allows a lot of people in the company to, you know, wake up in the morning and feel energized just like they did a decade ago.
And we, and we have a lot of folks who have crossed the decade, you know, on the team, which is awesome.
Alex: Oh, that's cool.
Uri: That's
Alex: awesome. That is awesome. So you mentioned books, like it made me want to ask you, like, if you have any like role models or was there anybody who kind of like growing up, it's, it sounds to me like, When you hit your professional years, you went straight into being an entrepreneur.
You had your first experience. Maybe it didn't go the way exactly you, maybe you hoped, I don't know, you can shut it down, but you went back in and you kept going. Four years is long though. Yeah, four years is long, but I mean, you, you stuck with it is my point.
Uri: Yeah, we stuck with it. We had moderate success, but it was clear to us that it's not going anywhere.
You know, we probably, Sold something in the neighborhood of, uh, 150, 000 as well. Being students, um, we understand that the market's so small. We thought that we're going to take it to the U S for SATs or GMAT, but then we realized that the [00:53:00] market is. really competitive and we're very much behind and it's going to be very difficult for us to be the best in the world in doing that.
And so based on that, and then based on other personal kind of constraints that my co founders had, we just decided that we're not going to do it. You know, one became a PhD and went over to work at Google. Another one became an accountant and then started a different company, a different space. So we kind of each went off different paths.
Alex: Right. But what made you an entrepreneur?
Uri: I don't know. You know, I've done it. I was a babysitter when I was in second and third grade, even though I was scared myself, which is funny. I was scared waiting for the parents to come back home. So that was my first job. I was a DJ in fifth and sixth grade. Did a bunch of other stuff.
And I just had, I think I had this notion of, I think I can do things. I think I can figure it out. And, um, you know, I also [00:54:00] had that in the Air Force where it's a highly bureaucratic organization. And apart from being a pilot, I was also an officer and I was responsible for special ops. So really interesting things in our neighborhood.
And when I wanted to kind of bring new capabilities to something that we did, I just hit walls from my direct supervisor and then they're more senior and more senior. I didn't let that kind of stop me. And at some point I went all the way up to the second, to the air force commander that approved what we wanted to do.
And then it sort of went down the ranks. Um, at the end of the day, now everyone's using that capability. And. I was very proud of doing it, but I was also very frustrated that I had to literally bang my head against walls to make something happen. And, um, yeah, you know, if, if I have an idea about something and I feel passionate, I just want to go ahead and do it.
So I think maybe that's.
Alex: Okay. So you're very self motivated. Yeah. Sounds like it. [00:55:00]
Uri: Yeah. I, I guess, I mean, I think so. Yeah.
Alex: Did you think at all? Like, cause for me, like when coming out of college, I knew I wanted to start a business, but you know, I had interviewed for jobs. I had a moment of not knowing what to do.
You ever have those moments where you don't. Either sort of career wise, or I got to imagine, you know, with Overwolf sounds like you've gone through a few pivots or bits of learning. Have you ever had one of those decisions to navigate where I don't know what to, there's no right answer here. I don't know what the right answer is.
Uri: Yeah. So we basically ran out of money three times and we had to figure out what to do and how to do it. And I think up until the point where we really had Uniconomics and there was a real economy behind what we do. I had a lot of these, you know, uncertainties and concern, and I still do like almost not on a daily basis, but, you know, quite often where I'm like, oh, shit, like, you know, how do we solve this?
Or how do we, but the only thing that changed for [00:56:00] me over the years was the confidence that eventually I will find a solution with our team. And Back then it was a lot scarier because, you know, I had less experience in dealing with this really kind of complicated situations of not knowing what to do, but I've had plenty of those.
And I've made so many mistakes and some of them I mentioned here in the podcast. And it's like, you know, it's about learning from these mistakes and seeing how you recover from them. That gives you the confidence to, at the end of the day, when you hit that roadblock again, or this big uncertainty, you know, feel comfortable that.
You know, you may not solve it today, but you're going to take a good night's sleep. Wake up in the morning and you'll find a solution. So proving that to yourself was really important to your question. I feel like I'm facing that every week, you know, these situations. Oh shit.
Alex: How are we solving this?
That's really interesting to hear. I mean, I think that's probably good for people to hear that. Cause I, I agree. Like that's, that's kind of a consistent [00:57:00] aspect of running a company is that there's always a challenge. You know, there's always something to figure out. And just that the amount of frequency, it's interesting to hear you say that you guys basically ran out of money three times, the amount of frequency that, you know, cashflow is just such an important part of running a business.
And, you know, folks don't always really think about like how it's the fuel in the gas tank, you know, and it's like navigating the ups and downs is, is, uh, it's can be a real burden, you know, psychological burden of responsibility for a whole big group of people.
Uri: Yeah, absolutely. I think that just to kind of end that piece with a positive note, you know, with us as humans, uh, I really believe in this, uh, sentence that a lot of people use, you know, use it or lose it.
Um, and I think in some ways we got to use our body, we got to use our minds and we got, uh, we're kind of almost engineered to overcome obstacles. [00:58:00] And this notion of there's going to be a day in which I'm going to just sit back and relax and everything is going to be wonderful and flowing. You know, I'm going to have a drink, you know, this is where I'm going to start kind of decline in my capabilities.
Yeah. We talked about this yesterday, Yuri. You know what I mean? So it's like, I don't want to really change that. And if we're not really chasing a reality in which we're just chilling, lying back, getting some, Suntan and drinking a beer because that's kind of boring or, you know, it's nice for a week, but that's when you die and then it's when you die.
Right. And then you start, you know, start forgetting things and like everything deteriorates. No thanks.
Aaron: We were talking about this yesterday, Alex. Remember we were saying, it's like, dude, when you retire, that's when you die. Like, it's like chasing retirement. It's like.
Alex: I mean, everybody has a different idea of retirement.
I'm with Yuri on this one. At some point, I'm going to spend more time in the workshop than, uh, [00:59:00] Yuri, I
Uri: love to do woodworking. That's awesome. And, uh, That that's awesome That, you know, there's a huge difference between working with your hands and planning things and building things to just lying back and say
Alex: yes.
No, I totally agree. Totally agree, yes. Yeah. I have one last question just 'cause you mentioned some books that you found. I don't know if you can, if you remember any of the books that you were referencing that have been inspirational for you, but I would just love to hear what your reading list is
Uri: like.
Sure. Um, so I'll start with the, the one single book that probably inspired me the most is, it's called Nonviolent Communication. By Marshall Rosenberg, it's, um, unfortunately he passed away, but it's, uh, it talks about his approach for. how to deal with life and how to communicate. And if you're into psychology, it's more Adler compared to Freud that, you know, I don't know what your preference is, but I'm a big fan of More on the Adler side, you get to kind of choose, you know, what to do every morning versus, uh, deal with the past and all that.
Um, [01:00:00]
Alex: my guess, Yuri, is that comparison right there may have gone over a few of our listeners heads. I don't know. Went over a little bit. Your mom, everything's your mom's fault versus, versus not. Is that Freud? Everything's your mom's fault? Is that Freud? And is Adler more like everyone is captain of their own ship?
We make a
Uri: choice. Uh, we wake up in the morning and if we have this tendency to like really get insulted when someone, you know, slightly, maybe not speaking nicely to us, it's a choice that we make. And you know, it may happen to us because. You know, we had a childhood friend that used to not speak nicely to us.
And we were kind of go to the corner and feel bad. And sometimes if you go through therapy, you kind of find these points and through finding them, potentially you overcome them. Um, others a little bit different. They're saying, well, you choose to get insulted because you benefit something from being insulted.
For example, you're not forced into confronting that person or. Maybe something [01:01:00] else. I don't know, but you make a choice. That's the bottom line anyways, nonviolent communication. That's one on the business side. You know, I love Jim Collins, uh, you know, built to last good to great, great by choice, amazing books.
Patrick Clancione, five dysfunctions of a team, four obsessions of an extraordinary executive, a couple of other books, really good. And, um, Gino Wickman, he wrote traction. It's also a phenomenal book on how to run a business that takes a bunch of insights from all these great books. And kind of built an operating system out of them.
Uh, so phenomenal book traction. Uh, there are others, but I think, uh, these ones are definitely at the top.
Alex: Right on. We'll compile a little list of your reading picks for the episode notes for folks. I
Uri: mean, we have a deck for all our company team members with recommended, you know, lists, so we just share the deck with you.
And if you want, you can put the link.
Aaron: Oh, that's cool.
Uri: Oh, that'd be awesome. Like the top ones. But if, if you want to go the extra mile, there are more books. I'm a big fan of deep listening. I [01:02:00] just learned a lot.
Alex: Yeah. Yuri, thank you for hanging out with us. What a great conversation. I learned a ton and I get like, just congratulations on the 14 years.
And I totally agree with what you're saying. There's no expiration date. And the fact that you are not just making, you know, enabling entertainment, but enabling the livelihoods of the creators, whole new classic creators. We didn't even talk about. Where these folks are coming from. And that's another part of what's happening, uh, in games today.
That's really exciting to me. It's not just, you know, us white guys in America or the West, you know, who are making games now. And I think that's just great for, for the world and it's great for our craft. So thank you for doing what you're doing. And it's great hanging out. Yeah, it was fun. Thanks so
Uri: much.
And we'll see you around. Yeah. Nice to meet you, Yuri. Well, cheers. Cheers. Thanks Aaron. Nice meeting you too.
Alex: Yeah. I've, I got to spend some time with Yuri in a, at a conference at the beginning of the year, [01:03:00] and we went quite a bit deeper in this conversation here, and I'm not surprised that he's been able to.
Run and grow his company for, what is it? 14 years. Like, and with such an understated level of success, if you just look at how much they're paying out to creators every year, you got to know that they're doing pretty well. And I think they're happy to be in that position where they're, you know, They're basically supporting this whole generation of new creators to be successful and find new careers and all of that.
I think that's super cool. I'd never heard anyone kind of articulate it that way. That was one of the other quotes that we might've picked for the beginning was this idea of helping to support the invention of a new profession, which is the creator, the creative, the creative game developer who's able to do this work.
In these platforms that would have made it inaccessible.
Aaron: Yeah. It's a really cool, it's a very interesting side of the industry. It's like, I don't know if we talked about [01:04:00] this during the podcast or I've just been thinking about it. It's like the gold rush. I know we've talked about it before you have the gold rush.
And when you have this gold rush show up, like in San Francisco. There were a lot of people that made a lot of money outside of actually digging for gold, right? They were like providing wares, you know, you could go buy like shovels and pickaxes and you know, and all that stuff There is like people that made better axes.
There's people that made better mine carts There's people that made, you know, that were supplementing the actual digging of gold, you know And it's kind of I feel like this company that he's doing it knows That sees this new gold rush. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?
Alex: Yeah. Am I, am
Aaron: I not explaining it right?
Do I got it wrong? You're making faces. I'm saying it because they're not making games, right?
Alex: I'm trying to pull a cool thread out of here. Actually, that is totally true. It's, it's like, if you build a platform that allows creative people to find that gold, you can build a really [01:05:00] interesting business that as long as gold is being found, the platform can be successful.
But if you're the one who's like. Trying to find that gold, you're either successful or you're not. It's kind of a Schrodinger's cat kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that's a really smart way to go about it. It is actually a really smart way to go about it.
Aaron: I think it is. It's like, because I've used some of the Warcraft stuff he was talking about.
I don't know. Don't remember the name of it, but I remember I joined a guild. And they were like, all right, you need to get all of these add ons. And I was like, there's add ons for wow. You know? So I had to go look, look up these add ons that like did all this stuff. And it's like, okay,
Uri: yeah,
Aaron: it's a very interesting way to.
Like, I never thought something like this would be like, it's hard to even explain it to people. Like, even when I was like, well, how do I start? And he's like, you just really have to care about the game, you know? And I think that's a very, uh, that is. I get it. It's like, Oh, if I really like this game and I want to build on it.
Now there's a place that supplements my love for this game and the community [01:06:00] that helps me get my stuff to other people that like this as well. You know, it's almost like AOL chat rooms. You know, like I love dogs and you're like, let's talk about dogs. You know what I mean?
Alex: Oh, the kids just turned us off right there.
Aaron: Or Reddit threads. AOL
Alex: chat rooms. Is it Reddit threads? Yeah, I guess that's what it would be today. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah.
Alex: Reddit is pretty useful by the way. I don't know. Am I right in thinking about this? Like when I go and look at reviews of stuff online, if I go to like an Amazon or a Yelp or whatever, I'm just getting bullshit bot stuff.
But I feel like if I go to Reddit, I'm actually hearing people's opinions. Is that a correct assessment of what's happening on the internet?
Aaron: It's a weird place. Like I have my yeses and nos to that place. I'm not all in on Reddit. I'm
Alex: okay. Well, I have found that I have just started looking for restaurant recommendations on
Aaron: Reddit.
Oh yeah. I do it too. It's the first thing that comes up, right? When you search?
Alex: Sometimes, but all the [01:07:00] editorial stuff seems like it's ad driven and anything that's on an AI written. Yeah. And anything that's on any. Oh, don't get me started on the AI search results. They're horrible.
Aaron: Yeah, they are. Is there
Alex: a way to turn that
Aaron: off?
What, to finding, to make sure that the article's not written by You search for
Alex: something and the very first thing you get is, here's an AI generated search result for you. And it's horrible.
Aaron: No, I don't, I've never seen, I haven't seen that before.
Alex: Well, that's kind of a bit of a tangent, I think.
Aaron: But Reddit has a lot of good stuff.
I think. I go there for, there's a lot of really bad stuff and there's a lot of really good stuff. And I go, well, if you're going to mod a game, let's say, I bet you, you would find information on how to mod the game on Reddit. You know, if the, if that game itself doesn't have like, um, you know, a forum or something, you know,
Alex: yeah,
Aaron: you'd find it,
Alex: you'd find it on overwolf as well.
Aaron: Oh, right. Yeah. And I bet you, there's like people from Reddit.
Alex: Yeah. [01:08:00]
Aaron: Well, you still have to go looking. That was another part of his point, right? Like they, they provide a somewhat stuff, but then you have to. Love the game so much that you go and you search. Yes.
Alex: You got to put it in the work. There's something to be said for that too.
It's like, I love the accessibility of enabling folks who want to make things, you know, to be able to make it. But there's also, this was part of Randy Pausch's last lecture. It's like when there's a wall. You know, when something is hard, it's a filter, right? Yes. Those who don't want to put the effort in or look at the wall and go, I don't know how to get over that.
Aaron: Yeah. That was going to say, it's a good filter process. It's a
Alex: good filter, you know, and the, and the folks who are either like, Oh, I know how to get over that wall. They do. Or the folks were like, I don't know how, but I'm going to try and try and try and then, and do like,
Aaron: those are good filters. You get good content.
Yeah. You know what I mean? There's not just like random stuff like YouTube, you know, like just random videos. Like imagine if YouTube had an [01:09:00] AI that watched it and was like, nah, this isn't that good. I'm not going to put it up. You know what I mean? Does that not happen? No, I think you could put anything up there, but, but I think the, that filter cause it Oh, it won't even publish it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think if you really can like, man, I really love this game and man, it would be so cool if the missiles were like this and the gravity was like this and you know, and we had this enemy type and it's like, let's get working. And there's so much passion there that you end up getting things like Dota, Counter Strike.
Uh, League of Legends. That's all, like, people that were really passionate climbed over that wall that you're explaining.
Alex: Yeah. Uh, well, thank you everybody for joining us again this week. Special note, we're taking a summer vacation. My fault. So we'll be off. Hey, it's there's no I in team, Aaron, it's a we all.
We all came together to hold hands and say, we need a two week summer break. So we can recharge, spend some [01:10:00] time with family. Hope you do that as well. And this would be a great time to catch up on some past episodes. If you haven't listened to our conference episodes yet, I highly recommend it's, it's a kind of a special format, but we love producing it and hope you get a chance to listen to it, but we will be back.
Two weeks after this episode with the new edition of the fourth curtain. Thank you for listening and we shall see you next time
Aaron: See you later, everybody Thank you for listening to the fourth curtain podcast The fourth curtain is a production of fourth curtain media with community management by Doug Zartman Lovingly edited and mastered by Brian Hensley at noise floor sound solutions in Chicago to get a peek at upcoming episodes They're just sending questions to the show Visit our site at thefourthcurtain.
com and be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening.