Chris Heatherly is head of Games & Engagement at Recur, a pioneering NFT platform. A creative executive who works at the intersection of games and entertainment, Chris oversaw hit games based on IP from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars, when he was an exec at Disney and NBCUniversal
Chris Heatherly is head of Games & Engagement at Recur, a pioneering NFT platform. A creative executive who works at the intersection of games and entertainment, Chris oversaw hit games based on IP from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars, when he was an exec at Disney and NBCUniversal
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Chris Heatherly is a creative executive who works at the intersection of games and entertainment.
While an exec at Disney and NBCUniversal. Chris oversaw hit games based on IP from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Chris is now heading up games and engagement at Recur, a pioneering NFT platform. And of all people, Chris knows that to innovate smart, you have to be willing to let go of your most precious ideas.
Chris: Tim Fitzrandolph, who designed Where's My Water, and has been my creative partner at Disney and at Universal. One of the things I like about that guy is he [00:01:00] is prolific. And he has no ego. And it is so rare in the innovation business. He will throw his heart into something and then show it. And then you'll go, Tim, that sucks.
And he'll go, okay. And he'll just immediately go have five more ideas.
Amy: Listen in as Chris and I talk about the deep research that goes into truly understanding what your customers want.
Welcome Chris. I'm glad to get a chance to hang out with you today.
Chris: Same here.
Amy: Known each other for a while, but I don't actually know how you first got sparked to get into design and innovation.
Chris: Yeah. So it's something I've been doing for 30 years. I started off in journalism. And I could see that journalism was going to be a challenged industry.
And I got really excited about computers. You know, it was during the desktop publishing era in the early [00:02:00] internet. And I was working to pay my way through school by working at Apple. And then later at a company called Power Computing. And Power Computing was an online PC company, and they were just getting into selling and servicing computers on the internet.
I started working on their website. And got into web design. And it was at a time during that era, the early nineties, when there weren't any web professionals and nobody really knew what they were doing. And I could see that journalism was going to be disrupted. And meanwhile, I was doing this web stuff and getting paid pretty well for it.
I started thinking, okay, maybe there's an opportunity there to, to do something different. And so I wound up building up the e-commerce presence at Power Computing. I wound up working on their online support, doing things like blogging, which people weren't doing at the time. And when Power Computing was sold back to Apple, a bunch of us moved from [00:03:00] Power Computing to Frog Design, which had been designing our Website.
I went over to Frog and what they wanted me to do was work with clients and help them figure out what are they in this new internet era, where do they belong? What does the web mean? And one of the things that we found during that time was that just the simple act of trying to take your company and put it on a website caused all of these existential crises.
Which I'm sure you've seen over your career, because the first thing people want to do is organize their website around their org chart, not around the user. And once you started going down this path of thinking about how you present your brand to the user, it created a whole different way of thinking about these companies.
The second thing they wanted us to do, Frog Design is most famous, really originally as an industrial design company. And they're known for doing a lot of the design work for Steve Jobs when he was at Apple and doing the next computer and a bunch of things like that. So they had started [00:04:00] off in an industrial design and then they moved over into web design, software design and application design and branding.
And what Frog's clients were looking for us to do is really come to them with a complete kind of design and innovation package. They were looking for us to show up and sort of help them think through, okay, what is their innovation strategy? And then how is that manifested across all of these different things that they do?
So, you know, it should be manifested in their logo and their marketing materials and their website and their applications. And really, they were using us as a way to pull together their brand and their customer experience across the company. In a way that a lot of these companies at the time just didn't have the ability to do.
Frog wanted me to be this, this go between that it wasn't really account management, but it was really helping figure out, okay, what is the real strategic goal that these clients are trying to achieve? And then how do I align that with all the creative people at Frog?
Because I remember we would show up in [00:05:00] presentations, and we'd have three design teams. We'd have a industrial design team. We'd have a branding team. We'd have a website or applications team, and they'd have three radically different takes on the design direction. And so we didn't have that internal coordination. And so I created this group that wound up being the strategy group at Frog that sort of brought all those things together.
And not that I can fully take credit for this, but that wound up reinventing who Frog became as a design services provider. They went from being the place you went to get your stuff beautified. To really competing against like McKinsey's and the big business, uh, consultancies, but through kind of a design thinking lens.
And so that's what I did Frog, and I got to work on all kinds of different things. You know, I got to work on websites, enterprise software. I consulted on trying to make SAP more accessible to people and getting SAP on the internet. I worked on a strategy for Nike sunglasses.
My favorite project of Frog that I worked on was for Target to reinvent [00:06:00] Christmas lights. And so we did all this ethnographic research where we went out in the field and you always look for these super users who are the super fans of whatever your, whatever space you're trying to go into. And we went out and interviewed these people that get generators and max out on all the Christmas lights and use all the power for the whole block to light their homes and learned a lot about Christmas lights.
And one of the things that we learned is they consume a lot of power. So, um, And so I don't think we could take full credit for this, but we talked to them about different types of, of Christmas lights. We looked at electro luminescent Christmas lights, but the one that ultimately they wound up going with was LEDs.
And over the last call it 20 years, since we did that project, the Christmas lights industry has gone almost entirely to LEDs. And one of the things that we discovered was. When you went to LEDs, you could do things that you couldn't do with incandescent because you could individually address each one of those lights and then you could program them and do shows with [00:07:00] them and sync them to music and all kinds of things that you couldn't do with incandescent.
That was one of my favorite projects just because I like things where you touch a lot of people. And that was one of the projects where we touched a lot of people. Another interesting project was I got hired by Ford. They were looking at e-commerce. It was 20, 25 or more years ago. But they were looking at what was going on with e-commerce and realizing that you were just going to have this flood of shipment of e-commerce goods.
And so they wanted us to think about that entire ecosystem and whether there were business adventure opportunities in there for them, including we talked about how you would design delivery vehicles differently to make small package delivery easier because these vans and things that they built were really built around the movement of bulk goods, not around moving all these small packages.
So, that was a really fun project to work on. And then my last project at Frog was working with Disney and the idea of what's to do a really fun take on consumer electronics inspired by [00:08:00] Disney. It had Disney elements, like one of my favorite ones was a TV with Mickey Mouse ears, but they didn't want it to be like a cartoon or look like a character they wanted to be more inspired by.
And so we took this whole idea of design language, which is something that really Frog had innovated going back to Apple. They developed this, what we call a design language, which are all of these different parts and pieces, basically a style guide of design, a style guide that creates an iconic and recognizable and consistent look across a variety of products and expressions.
So we worked with Disney to create a design language for Disney Consumer Electronics, but in that they need a lot more because they needed someone to help them figure out how to source the electronics and get them into retail and all this other stuff. Things that I had never done before, but they didn't have anyone to do it.
So I wound up figuring out how to source and manufacture and distribute and market these Disney consumer electronics and wound up building a business for them. And so Disney asked me to come on board and [00:09:00] run that business, which I did for a while. We were actually at one point nominated for a Cooper Hewitt national design award.
Didn't win, but it was an honor to be nominated as they say. And then we got merged with the Disney toy group and the toy team wanted us to bring a lot of the design and innovation things that we've been doing in consumer electronics into toys. And so I wound up creating this toy. Incubator called Toy Morrow that brought together some of our consumer electronics people and toy design people, some engineering people.
And we did a ton of innovation work there. We built a flying team for Bell that was manufactured and distributed by Wowee. We did robotics. We did a, we did a Buzz Lightyear robot that could walk and move and talk. We did a WALL-E. It's one of my favorite things that we built there. It was a full size WALL-E.
It was probably about a, three-foot high WALL-E that was super articulated and looked like the character from the movie. And then we did toys that interacted with the iPad and the surface of the [00:10:00] iPhone. And so we were the first ones to really figure out how to make physical objects interact with touchscreens for smartphone devices.
Out of that, I have something like 30, 35 patents. Most of those from the Toy Morrow era. Some of those from the, what I did games. But a lot of patents from that time and a lot of looking forward and thinking about, okay, where's technology going to be, we have patents on toys. They can see, for example, like machine learning toys when computer vision was a very nascent thing.
So there was a lot of like future R and D work that I did in that role. Then I wound up taking over Disney toys as general manager for North America and really leading product development for most of the world. And so we, during that time built Disney princess into the powerhouse brand that it became.
Disney Cars, Toy Story, uh, three, I worked on very closely with, uh, with Pixar. And so I got to spend a lot of time with Pixar and Disney Animation, the animators there, but really got to experience what it was like to build brands at enormous [00:11:00] scale. And what I liked about that toy job was, the one my kids were that age.
They were, they were white in the sweet spot of the products I was making. But two, you rarely get to work in a business. Like I said, where you're making something that touches almost everyone, you know, and Disney toys did that. Those Disney princess dolls and dresses and tiaras and all that stuff that we made, or the, the Pixar cars, every kid had those, anybody's house you would go over to, they had kids, you'd see your toys there.
Sometimes you hear about it too, if the parent had a complaint, but to get to be A part of so many children's childhood and to get to be a Geppetto and make those toys make foundational memories for them and their parents. That was a really special experience. And then I, I decided if I stay in this toy thing much longer, I'm going to, I'm going to turn into a toy guy.
And I'm not really a toy guy, although I love toys from the best jobs I ever had. So I went to the interactive [00:12:00] side to work with Club Penguin and I had met Lane Merrifield, who's the co founder of Club Penguin when they were first acquired by Disney. And I did the original Club Penguin toys and Lane was very protective of the brand.
And I worked really hard to sort of build his trust that we were going to not over merchandise this thing and we were going to do right by the Club Penguin brand. And then later, Lane was looking for someone to come on board to sort of take the reins from him because he was reaching a point where He wanted to spin out and do his own stuff.
And so he brought me on board and I oversaw production for him of Club Penguin and the other virtual worlds, Pixie Hollow, Toontown, Pirates of the Caribbean Online. I oversaw that for several years. And then when he left, I wound up taking over Club Penguin. And we can talk about Club Penguin in depth if you want to, but it was a really special experience because like toys.
If you're interacting with these kids and your own kids are part of the audience. But the thing that was different is it's live, right? And you're doing it over the internet. We [00:13:00] used to say Club Penguin was the world's largest playground. And it's that team was just a magical team. All of those people who worked on Club Penguin were completely dedicated to those kids and to making sure that they had a safe experience and a fun experience.
And there was a lot of responsibility that came with it too, because we often had kids who would come online and say they were being abused at home, or they were being bullied, or, or sometimes threatened suicide. And we didn't publicize this much, but we got involved in hundreds of cases of kids who needed real help, and we were able to get them that help.
And so, that was an exceptionally special time for my career as well. I'm getting to work on that because it was a product that had purpose, not just the product, but we had a big charitable mission. We gave millions of dollars a year to charity, and we were very involved with those charities. It's not just like we gave the money.
There are schools and playgrounds and water wells and hospitals and libraries that have been built [00:14:00] all around the world because of Club Penguin and the work that we did during that period. And they're still around and to be able to do that was awesome too. And then I wound up taking over a Disney's mobile team and it had gone through a big shift because we had acquired Playdom, which was sort of a late roll up of a bunch of social gaming companies.
And, and what had happened at that time is Facebook decided that they didn't want to push games heavily on the platform anymore. And so suddenly that games business just went poof, disappeared and everything went over to mobile. And I think a lot of people thought, well, it'll just be easy. We'll do what we were doing on Facebook on mobile.
It wasn't that easy at all. Mobile was completely different technologically and did a lot of work to clean up and transition those teams from the social gaming or on Facebook over to mobile games. On the mobile platform and so got that business in good shape and then my old boss from toys called and he had gone over to universal and was starting this group called brand development, which is focused on [00:15:00] taking the IP the universal had and trying to build it into these 365 holistic franchise just like we had done at Disney with, with princess and cars and marvel and those things.
And he wanted to see somebody to run his game division. And so he brought me over to build that up. And we built up a team to make and publish games. The most prominent stuff that we've done are the Jurassic world games. Last year, we had a dress world console game. That was a park builder game. That was a very successful sold over 2 million units.
We have three successful mobile Jurassic Park games, including the one that launched under my watch, which, which is Jurassic World Alive. And that's a Pokemon Go, uh, location based game. We were the second big location game to come out after Pokemon Go, so that was big. Pretty intimidating. And then we also did a bunch of stuff in VR.
So we did an experience with Dave and Busters. That's a Jurassic world ride experience that you can ride in Dave and Busters. And as far as I'm aware, that's the [00:16:00] most successful location based VR experience of all time. The most visited is that Jurassic world experience to this day. And then there's a bunch of other things that, that we did at Universal, but that's a quick snapshot of my background.
Amy: So, you've been working in toys and games, with different platforms for games inside of Hollywood for quite a while.
Chris: Yeah, for at least 20 years.
Amy: And you don't make movies. You make games.
Chris: Yes.
Amy: Big toys. How are games and toys perceived inside of Hollywood that might be different than they might be perceived outside of Hollywood?
Chris: I think it's a really good question and it goes to the heart of where games and toys work and where they don't work and a filmmaker that you're working with and how much they care. When I worked with Pixar and John Lasseter, for example, John, was a toy guy and his office was just filled floor to ceiling with toys.
And the [00:17:00] people around him were toy people too, I think in part because they liked toys and in part, they had made a couple of movies called Toy Story. That group at Pixar, when it came to making toys, saw them as being as important as the movie. And there's a story that John would always tell about. When, right after Toy Story came out, he gave his sons the Woody doll, Woody and Buzz from Toy Story and they opened it for Christmas and it was like the movie happening for real life in his living room.
So they saw toys as something that was, uh, to be looked up to or mark of prestige and not as dirty merchandise. And in fact, we did a line of Toy Story toys with them that were, uh, Completely authentic down to the part lines on the plastic parts, the way that it was displayed in the movie of detail was down to the millimeter on these things.
And to the extent that we had to pull all kinds of engineering [00:18:00] tricks, because when they made them for the movie screen, they didn't think about how you'd actually manufacture them. To make it look like it looked in the movie, but be manufacturable was quite a trick, but we did it, and we did original packaging for all of those characters, and some of them, you'd never seen a box for the character in the movie, and so Pixar designed the boxes for us.
If you're working with a filmmaker like that has a particular passion for toys or games, you're going to get a good outcome. I think, as applies to games, It helps a lot if they're gamers and if they respect the medium like Colin Trevorrow on Jurassic World is a dream to work with Steven Spielberg is a dream to work with because these are gamers and they get games and so when you talk to them about how you need to modify things or take some liberties.
Or just think about it from the perspective of what makes a good game. They're very open to it. The thing that throws these filmmakers for a loop, I've found, is this idea of agency, which we have in games. Because if you have a filmmaker who's [00:19:00] strictly a narrative person, they're thinking about, okay, I created my story, And there's a canon to this story, and there are characters, and they're accounted for by the storyline, and I don't really want you coloring outside the lines of that too much.
But, if you're working with a filmmaker who understands the idea of agency, which is for a game to be good, I need to parachute you into that game. And by putting you in that game, by giving you agency as a player, you now are impacting the events of the story of everything happening around you. And you've got to have a filmmaker and a conceit that is open enough to allow the player to have a place in that world.
And some filmmakers get it and some filmmakers don't. I think things are getting, it's, it's, it's been a challenge over the years. I would say that where Hollywood messes up with games is when they think about games as merchandise. And games are not merchandise. They are entertainment, but they are a different form of entertainment.
They're an interactive [00:20:00] form of entertainment. If you treat it like that and you treat it as something to be treasured and to be put on. A pedestal up there with your movie and you see it as a brand extension that it can be Then I think you can do amazing things But it's really a generational shift that we have going on right now a lot of filmmakers and executives at these companies They're not gamers and they haven't come from the gaming era There's like atari and after and pre atari in terms of the population and those who are pre atari They don't necessarily get gaming.
They don't get it as a culture. They just can't quite grok it, but that's changing as more and more filmmakers and executives, the Gen X of the Gen X generation are coming up.
Amy: So you and I both know that success comes after lots of mistakes, right? The nature of innovation is you have to make mistakes for you're not pushing the edge.
What are some of the mistakes that you learn the most from?
Chris: I always say that there's good failure and there's bad failure. I think you have to know that whenever you're doing [00:21:00] any kind of innovative thing, that there is a high risk of failure. And so you need to set the project up in a way, especially upfront.
That accommodates for the idea that you're going to fail a couple of times before you figure it out. And it's the whole fail fast idea, but you have to account for that. And you have to have your stakeholders on board for that. And if you're not in a climate that is going to be tolerant of the fact that there's an iterative try and fail kind of process, you could really be in for trouble and you need to make sure that the risk tolerance of the people that you're working with matches.
The risk tolerance of the team, because where I've run into trouble before is when. The team is super ambitious because I like to do ambitious things and the stakeholders have a low risk tolerance. They may give you some period of time, but eventually that's going to catch up with you. And so you need to be really aligned on how you're taking the risks and how you're talking about the [00:22:00] risk as you go along.
And so what I always used to say to my teams was what good failure is. We had a hypothesis going in. We kept the iteration or the cycle prototype short. We had a way to validate whether we were right or not. And we learned, right? Bad failure to me is we didn't really have a game plan going into how we innovate.
We putzed around and didn't do it on any kind of timeframe. And then we get a murky outcome and we didn't know what we were trying to prove or how to assess where the, we had really, Really had some potential or not, because the thing that you do when you iterate in these cycles is you've got to say, okay, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, right?
You may find that, okay, we iterated on this thing. There's something good about it. Let's take the thing that's good and the thing that's working and reposition it and pivot it in a different way. But you've got to have a very clear way to validate whether you got the outcome you wanted or not. And if everybody's still [00:23:00] debating whether this was a success or a failure, and the criteria by which you're measuring it isn't clear, then the process will just go on and on and people will want, give me another sprint, give me another sprint, give me another sprint.
And these long kind of meandering projects where you wind up earning a lot of money for a very kind of murky outcome are to me, that's bad failure. We're not learning as we go. We're not getting better as we go. We're just continuing to limp along. And so that's how I think about it.
Amy: That's really interesting.
So here you are looking at this variety of experiences you've had and what right now do you feel you really understand about innovation? In addition to what we just talked about that you wish you had known 15 years ago.
Chris: I think that if you're going to do anything innovative, it goes a little bit back to the risks tolerance thing.
But I would say at a personal level, I think everyone who's involved in doing [00:24:00] something innovative needs to understand the personal risk to them, because there is a chance that these things don't work out right. And you have to be emotionally prepared for that. And you have to be willing to take that risk and deal with the consequences if it doesn't work.
I remember one time we have a mutual friend who introduced us. And I remember one time star and I had to do, unfortunately, do some layoffs and star got up in front of the group and said, guys, I hate to say it, but this is the business we've chosen. And in this business, you get the opportunity to do groundbreaking innovative things, but sometimes you come up short and when you come up short, there are consequences. And there are those of us who are nuts and we're going to go sign up to do that again, knowing that we could have bad outcome.
And for some people, the stress and the anxiety and the uncertainty of it all, it's just too much. You've [00:25:00] really got to assess if you want to continue in the games industry, this is part of the life cycle of being in the games industry or being in the innovation business, you've got to be up for the challenge and up for the potential failure.
Because it can be very emotionally difficult. You can get into second guessing yourself and there's all the financial stuff that you worry about. It can be humiliating when you fail. You can wind up worrying about, Oh my God, is anybody going to work with me again? Cause I had a failure. The thing that I found is that you get suspicious of people who haven't had any failure in their career.
Cause like the odds are not in their favor. If you've had a track record of success, good on you, but eventually you're going to crap out. And so you'd rather get somebody after the humiliating failure than right before it, because success can make you arrogant and it can make you blind to the risks and it can make you sloppy.
I bring up this thing about validation a lot. It's like, how do you know that you're right? How do you know that [00:26:00] you're onto something? And it can't just be my gut and I'm so smart and I'm so creative. When I used to work in industrial design, we used to have designers who would say, it's just my job to know what people want.
And I'm just so much of a genius that I just know. Well, that's bullshit. Sometimes that may be true and you may have the best case level, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're so confident in your ability, why are you afraid to put your idea out there and see if anybody agrees with you or not? And it's that design arrogance that I think leads to blind spots.
The other thing that I would say to people is if you're going to be successful at innovation, you can't be precious about your ideas and you have to be passionate. But unemotional, what I mean by that is that I've worked with designers who, who it feels like their, their, their first idea is their last idea.
They lock onto something [00:27:00] and that's it. Okay, I came up with it. That's it. There you go. And they don't want to iterate. They don't want to come up with the options. They don't want to vet them out and what happens there, and there's, and it comes from a fear of this idea is so good to me that I may never have another one.
But once you realize that you're a creative person and that you're going to have a bunch of ideas, then you don't have to be so, so fixated on each one or so stubborn about each one. And it's more about a process of trying to figure out, okay, which one of these ideas is the right one? Not, okay, how do I get to the solution all in one shot?
Tim FitzRandolph, who designed Where's My Water and has been my creative partner at Disney and at Universal. One of the things I like about that guy is he is prolific and he has no ego. And it is so rare in the innovation business. You know, the thing I love about Tim is he will throw his heart into something and then show it.
And then you'll go, Tim, that sucks. And [00:28:00] he'll go, okay. And he'll just immediately go have five more ideas. And when you work with people like that. They're going to have a higher chance of success because they're not kidding themselves. They know that all their ideas can't be good and they're really genuinely motivated around trying to find the right solution, not just be right all the time.
Amy: Absolutely. So earlier you mentioned super fans or super users that sometimes you go and you get some super users and you use them to help you innovate. Or you use them to help you market a new innovation. Can you talk about how you think about how to leverage those hot core early fans of an innovative new experience or product?
Chris: Yeah, there's a couple of ways to do it. One is if you're doing something that has an existing community, of course, hopefully whoever you're working with already identified those kind of core fans. And so you have a way to access them. But [00:29:00] if not, you can do things like ethnographic research where you go out into the field, like the Christmas lights thing.
We went to people's houses. We sort of researched who are these people that are super into Christmas lights. And we flew out there and went to their houses and talk to them about how they do things. You interview them and they'll tell you because they are super fans. They'll exhaust you with details and information, but there's tons of insight that they're going to give you.
You know, when it comes to things like games, there's a lot of research techniques you can do up front. I like doing a lot of play testing and you can screen those play tests for people who are of various interest groups or who play certain games a lot. But there's a lot you can do in the recruiting to get high quality people up front.
I just love finding these people who are really engaged in a genre and, and just putting prototypes in their hands and putting concepts in front of their hands. When we were at Club Penguin, we would leak things a lot to the kids. The thing I did on. Uh, at Penguin was I was on Twitter as my character, Spike Height, because Lane, his character, Billy Bob had wrote all the blogs on the Club [00:30:00] Penguin site.
And so I, when he left, I made a decision. Somebody has got to fill that void. And if it's going to be me, then if I'm going to lead this thing, I really need to have a connection with the audience. So I understand what they want in the product. And I was, I blogged, but I was also on Twitter. And would just run ideas by the audience on Twitter.
And I would get feedback from the kids. I would leave things to the kids and see what they thought. And the thing about, especially kids is they're very vocal, but they tell you what they like and they tell you what they don't like, and they're not as varnished as we are as adults, or they're not as worried about your feelings.
And they would tell us if they liked it or they thought it sucked. And we constantly kept the kids in the conversation. About everything we were doing on Club Penguin, we would change storylines, even to the extent that, you know, a lot of the things that I think are best remembered from the era that I was on Club Penguin are things that were ideas that came from the audience.
The kids would always, like, make stuff, and sometimes it was based on something we seeded to see if they thought it was interesting, [00:31:00] and sometimes it was just some piece of art or something that they completely misinterpreted, like, there was a cloud in Club Penguin that looked like a shadow. So, And kids thought that it was a shadow ninja.
And so the ninjas became a big meme around Club Penguin. And so then we decided to make a whole card game called card Jitsu based around the ninjas that the audience had come up with, we had this bad guy character named Herbert P. Bear, who was a Lex Luthor of Club Penguin. And somehow somebody had taken a picture of one of our scrum boards or a calendar of upcoming content, and it got leaked on the internet and there was a big posted on there that said operation blackout.
Now operation blackout was actually that we had to take the servers down because we were launching Germany. And so we were going to have to switch over period where we were launching Germany and the servers were going to be blacked out for a period of time. But the kids. Made up the story that Herbert was going to block out the sun on Club Penguin because he was [00:32:00] always trying to crack down on the penguins because of their penguin partying nonsense.
And so they came up with this whole storyline. And so we did it as an event in the game and had several chapters of this kind of unfolded the game. And another one was the rainbow puffle where we had these cute little pet characters called puffles. And there was always a rumor that there would be a rainbow puffle.
And so we did the rainbow couple because the kids wanted the rainbow couple and we put it in a cloud in the sky and you had to go through this whole, through this whole kind of quest to get there. And so all of those great, some of the best stuff we ever did were things from just listening to the audience.
And the thing was when it was their idea, they always loved it so much better than when it was our idea, because it was something that they had been rumoring about and talking about, okay, is this real? Is it not real? And so whenever it came to be true, then it was so much validation from them because they had been kind of part of creating it.
[00:33:00] And there's a lot of different ways you can tap into these user groups. But I think what's important is you identify the most passionate, extreme users. Of what you're trying to do up front And then find a way to keep them engaged in the process because you'll get so much learning out of them.
Amy: Wow. Yeah, that is gold.
So as you gather up these learning and look forward to what excites you and the landscape of what's happening in media and entertainment and tech. What are the trends and dynamics that you're paying attention to that you see it's creating exciting opportunities for the future?
Chris: I think that one is that the streaming wars are completely transforming Hollywood, and I think the ones that survive are going to survive because they figure out how to transform what Disney's done with Disney plus is a transform the company kind of bet.
But it took Bob Iger [00:34:00] saying, this is we're going to bet the company on this. And then he did the Fox acquisition to back it up and they burned the bridge behind that, right? They can't show up tomorrow and say Disney plus was a mistake. And because the whole company is behind it, they're making it work.
But what it's forcing them to do. It's to become a direct to consumer company, which they never really been outside of the parks and to become a technology company, which was a real struggle when I was there. It's very public that Disney bought a lot of tech companies and a lot of them didn't work out.
And a lot of it had to do with culture clash and the way you think about making software and technology versus the way you think about making movies. Those are different things. Made in different ways and by different people, right? Alan Horn is a guy that I respect more than anyone I've ever met in Hollywood.
He's one of the greatest producers and studio executives of all time, but Alan's not a software guy. So you need those kinds of [00:35:00] people in the mix. And, and so I think Disney, by buying BAM, by buying Hulu, they brought in the right skill sets to start to transform the company, but. They're really only at the beginning.
This is going to be a whole journey for them as it will be for all of Hollywood. And I think you'll see some companies that just don't make it because they can't make that transition to thinking like a tech company and thinking like a direct to consumer company, at least where I live in Los Angeles, there's going to be fallout for another decade around, around the streaming wars and what it means.
Amy: Can you break it down for us? How is Disney plus at the company move?
Chris: I think, you know, Iger, he's going to go down in history as probably the best CEO of all time. It'll be him, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch. He's going to be top five, at least. Under Eisner, Disney was kind of in a, you know, rough shape when Bob took, took it over.
And then he bought Pixar and then he bought Marvel. And then he bought Star Wars and he invested in the parks and he did international expansion. He did all the right stuff. [00:36:00] And Disney was on top of the world as an entertainment company. Where can you go net? Like, how do you keep growing that? Like you're already the best.
And then they had done these big long term streaming deals with Netflix. And they're looking at Netflix getting 150, 60 million users North America alone. And all of a sudden these deals that kind of seem like nice little ancillary revenue streams, suddenly Netflix has got all their customers with their content.
And then meanwhile. You're seeing all the cable business and network television, the ratings going down year after year because people are cutting the cord and it's more people cut the cord, it accelerated. And this is one thing I've learned about disruption and nobody really talks about this. But one of the big things I've learned about disruption is that it accelerates, right?
It's exponential at the growth curve. So it feels like it's kind of happening slowly. And then it hits this zeitgeist tipping point moment where all of a sudden it [00:37:00] goes a linear and it's out of control. You remember that people think Netflix streaming is a relatively new phenomenon, but I mean, they've been streaming for what, 15 years?
And at first it was like, novelty thing, only people with really good, rich people with good broadband had it. And then all of a sudden everyone you knew had it and everyone was watching Council of Cards. And that all of this has happened in the last five, six years. It's all really recent. You know, I think Bob saw where that was going and he was like, if we don't figure this out, it's very disruptive to our business because one of the things that Walt Disney did in the early days was.
He had a deal, ironically, with Universal to distribute his Oswald cartoons, and Universal wound up cutting him out of the loop, and he had, like, a film producer that sort of stole his team, and they cut him out of the loop. They owe you Oswald, and because they were the distributor, they said, we don't need your services anymore, Mr. Disney, we're just gonna go make Oswald cartoons without you cheaper.
[00:38:00] And after that, he was like, I want to own everything. So when he produced Mickey Mouse, he set up his own distribution and distributed his own cartoons. And then he did the Disneyland television show on ABC. Because he wanted a direct television audience.
And so Walt was thinking about this stuff in the theme parks, of course. And Walt was thinking about all this stuff decades and decades before anybody else, he invented it. But it's very deep in that company's DNA that you don't really let anybody get between you and the customer. For the longest time, there was this belief that content is king.
And when it started to shift over to this idea that no distribution is king now, and Netflix is going to have its own set of really good shows. And if you don't have a way to get around them to the customer, eventually they're going to cut you out and they're going to own all the customers and they're going to tell you what you're worth.
And so I think Bob saw that coming and all of Hollywood knew it, but was, I think, terrified to make the [00:39:00] leap. And I think Bob realized he couldn't just pass that problem on to the next CEO. He needed to solve it on his watch. And so he extended his time there and he made this huge bet. And like I said, when they pulled those shows off of Netflix and announced they were doing it, it changed Hollywood.
And the entire town now is trying to figure out, how do they respond to that? And look, now that they've had a success, and I saw an article today that they said, I think they got 10 million subscribers the first day, saw an article today that they're adding a million subscribers today, and these numbers aren't official, but my Lord, that thing is growing so fast.
You can't understate the fact that someone in Hollywood has actually figured it out. After decades of this town, just falling flat on its face, Fox buying, uh, my space and then getting completely displaced by Facebook, these kinds of things. But I think it finally was like, look, it's not going to be a hobby anymore.
This is for real. And we're [00:40:00] betting the farm on it. That's the difference.
Amy: Wow. That takes an amazing CEO to pull that off with a company as large and established as Disney.
Chris: Yeah. And it's my belief around corporate innovation, because you're going to ask me about that so I can go to that, which is that I'm very jaded at this point in my career around big companies, ability to innovate my advice to most big companies would be.
You should just buy stuff as opposed to have a lot of these internal innovation efforts, which I know will bum out some of your listeners. But the thing is that when I was at Disney, Jay Razulo said something that really resonated with me, which is he was a CFO. And he said, We are no good at buying anything that is less than a billion dollars, because if it's over a billion dollars, Then it's too visible to wall street and we have to execute on it.
Like you buy marble [00:41:00] and your report card is going to be how well did you integrate marble? But if you buy maker or play dumb or something smaller than a billion dollars, and then the antibodies just come out against it and the numbers are so small in the scheme of things. That it's easy enough when the times get hard to shut it down.
And I think there's something really true about that, which is that as a guy who's done a lot of innovative things at big companies for years, it's really hard to do them and get any kind of scale that's like meaningful and versus what these companies are really good at doing is buying and innovating.
And so I almost think what big companies should be doing. Is working more on a venture model. They don't like to make minority investments, for example, which I think is a mistake, they like externalize the risk, be there as an investor, be there to use your capabilities to accelerate things once you bring it inside the corporate PNL and it's answerable to wall street on a quarterly [00:42:00] basis, the dynamics completely change.
And so you better have at that point, and even a positive business that's self sustaining and growing, it's no longer in an investment mode. And I think, you know, that has been the mistake is buying these things that are still unproven and still unprofitable.
And then putting them in an environment around all these mature businesses that are predictable and long term, versus all the volatility that comes with starting something from scratch and being in a new innovative space. My advice to companies would be, unless you're willing to bet the farm, unless you're willing to say, this is a make or break proposition for my company and the person at the very tippy top Is going to vouch out that thing and say, like, everyone get in line.
We're going to make this work or make a break. And I'm betting my personal CEO ship on it. If, if you're not [00:43:00] willing to do that, then it's a distraction, I think. And that's the lesson that I've had, particularly in Hollywood around a lot of these innovation things, because it's very easy for all the executives to want to say, you know, You know, yeah, we want to diversify and we want to be innovative and we want to be in all these spaces, but when times get tough, they will get tough in an innovation business.
They will get tough in a startup business. They will get tough in a new, unproven business, unforeseen things are going to happen. If you don't feel that you must succeed and therefore you are willing to endure the pain. To reach that success, then you will cut day and it will be all for naught. Right? And so that's what I've learned about these things, because I saw the same thing when I was in the design business at Frog, the paradox around that business is you get hired by people who want you to help them be innovative.
That's what they say. And then you try to help them. And they don't want it and they resist it in every way culturally possible. And so I have a friend who [00:44:00] was very successful named Mitch Prevella, who was in a company called Fuse Project. It was considered one of the hottest design companies in the, in the world.
This was during the latter years of Steve Jobs. Everybody would come in and say, I want my, you know, iPod. I want my iPhone. And he would say, are you Steve Jobs? Because you don't get your iPhone without Steve Jobs. Like Steve Jobs is a risk taker. He's an innovator. He's willing to work on the idea of what is a supercomputer as a phone for years and years and throw away dozens of prototypes and spend billions of dollars.
On trying to figure that problem out and keep trying to figure it out after he's failed Dozens of times right if you're not willing to do that Then you're not going to get your iphone because it's not cheap and it's not free But to me, it's not so much about the money. It's about the commitment if you want to make Any kind of change in a big [00:45:00] company, whether it's cultural or product or innovation or whatever it is, if the people at the very top are not completely invested through thick and thin and are willing to put their jobs on the line, it will not happen.
That's where I've come out.
Amy: Not for the faint of heart or these small of pockets.
Chris: This is why we have the venture community, right? This is what they do. They go raise a hundred million dollars. And they give some of it to seed for smaller bets. Go prove your basic idea and come back to me I'll give you more money and then they put some of it to growth which is to pour gas on the stuff That's already got a little bit of a fire And they have a portfolio of risk and they're raising that money from people Who are also in the business of taking risk the corporations are not in the business of taking risk.
They are in the business of predictable, profitable, forecastable growth. And that's what you have to understand about [00:46:00] corporations is it's the wall street of it all. Once you move it out of the column of VC or private equity into corporate, the dynamics change and. That could be okay, but you better be ready for it.
Where I think there's been a lot of mistakes at these traditional companies over the years has been saying, how do we become more like Silicon Valley? If you want to become more like Silicon Valley, then you've got to buy something of scale that's like Silicon Valley that you feel is in your core. And that's going to transform your core.
And then you've got to put the company behind making that transformation. But if you're not willing to do that. And you just want to feel a little more like this is my thing is, are you innovating because your life is on the line or do you want to just feel and hang out with the guys in the black turtlenecks?
And if that's what you want, a little lifestyle kind of design thing to make the executives feel like they're contemporary and cool. You can do that, but it's [00:47:00] not really going to transform anything.
Amy: Oh boy do I know there's a lot of innovation theater that makes people feel really good. And consultants, a lot of money, but doesn't do the hard work of transformation.
Chris: Well, when as a consultant, you got to be careful, right? One of the reasons I left consulting because Frog was a consultancy was I was like, look, I'm putting half my time into business development. I'm putting probably another 40 percent of my time into convincing people to do things they want to do. And then there's 10%.
That something actually happens, the yield rate on my time is sucky. So that's right. And where that goes is you get a reputation for being the person who is like an innovation playboy, you know, ne'er do well, who like, yeah, you know, they go to the right conferences and talk the right lingo and dress fashionably, but they're not going to really produce any business results.
And that's where I've always felt that if [00:48:00] you're going to be a professional innovator, you've got to be. Choosing about where you spend your time, who you work with. And it's what I said earlier, are you aligned? With the people you're working with on the mission and on the risk taking or not. And if you get that part, you're going to have a much higher chance of success.
Amy: Words to live by. Is there anything in particular that's coming up that you're excited about that you'd like to share with us?
Chris: Personally, I still have a few games to ship from Universal that I can't really talk about yet, but the things that, the things that I'm excited about. One thing that we, that was announced today that I can talk about is we've been working with Dreamscape.
Doing location based VR. So I talked about the thing that we did with Dave and Busters. This is a step beyond that because it's, uh, using the, how to train your dragon franchise and working with Dreamscape. And it's a bunch of my friends from the Imagineering. It's Bruce Vaughn and his old crew of Imagineer.
And we built together, although I have to give the most of the credit, how to train your dragon attraction [00:49:00] where you can actually fly on a dragon and you have agency in flying your dragon. And that was really hard. And to the extent that as a guy who takes risks and is willing to innovate and take multiple whacks at the pinata, there were times where I called Bruce up and I was like, Dude, should we tap out?
It feels like we're breaking through, but they credit to them. They didn't want to. And they kept, they kept at it and we figured it out. And I think it's a pretty innovative thing for VR because being able to move, fly in VR without getting sick is a real trick. And so I like doing stuff like that where you VR has had a lot of commercial difficulty, but I'm still a believer in the experience of it all.
And Dreamscape has been having success with what they've been doing. And so I think we're working with the right people. It was a lot of fun to get to work with them. Again, a bunch of ex Disney guys working in a whole new context. So some of my projects are still coming out and in terms of [00:50:00] what areas that I think are interesting, particularly a lot of my head spaces in gaming.
Still, I think the gaming both as a platform. And a medium, it's just going to explode over the next decade or so. I mean, I have to ask this question. Even my son wants to be in the game business, a game designer, and, you know, he's getting ready to go to college. And I'm like, look, I don't see how you go wrong getting a game skill set right now, because this is what you do, Amy Jo, but it's gamification can be extended to so many things.
One of the things that's fascinating to me is. All my kids are learning Unity in school for various reasons. Some of them are using it for filmmaking projects. Some of them are using it for robotics projects. Some of them are using it for game designing. My son's in a game design class. And just this idea that you're going to have this generation of kids that are coming out of high school and college, Who all work on a common set of tools and can use them for different things.
Because, you know, what you're really doing with Unity and these [00:51:00] tools and Maya is you're, you're learning to do visualizations, which is, there are a lot of applications for that. And then you're learning about interactivity and designing for interactivity and designing for behavior, which is what we really do in games.
And it's fascinating to me, the level of talent that we're going to have. Young, hungry talent. These kids are growing up. Also, they're watching and watching YouTube videos, and they are so much more savvy about game design. I had my son write notes for one of the games we're working on that we're getting ready to announce.
And I sent it to my head of development. And he said, did you write these notes for him? Is this your secret way of telling us what, what you think we should do with game? And I was like, no, it's like, well, I can't believe the level of game design knowledge this kid has. And I was like, Jim, they're all that way down there because all they do is watch these videos about game design.
So anyway, the thing for me is, I think that is going to be in the interest in that space. There's just going to be a ton of talent that can do [00:52:00] things that are not pen and paper designers. They're designer programmers. And so there's going to be abundant talent. You've got the number of ways you can buy and pay for games.
Is exploding, whether it's streaming with Google Stadia and that kind of stuff. Subscriptions like the X Pass, uh, Game Pass on Xbox and now on PC. The Epic Store, which is creating more storefronts to buy games in. Free to play gaming, I think, on console. And PC is going to be really interesting. All of these things are lowering the barrier of entry.
If you think about it, the model that we're mostly in today is you pay 60 bucks for a game. You have to wait 13 hours for it to download over the fastest broadband. And then you can play it. That requires a hell of a lot of commitment. Right on your part and how many of those games are you really going to be that committed for where we're [00:53:00] headed is an era where the games are streamed in a subscription or free to play where there is absolutely no friction.
To you getting in and playing those games and they're going to be distributed across every device The other area that i'm really interested in is what they call cross play But when people talk about cross play most people mean i'm going to get my xbox to play with my playstation 4 That's like a big innovation i'm talking about We're going to have games that you can play on any device, wherever you are.
Probably the game closest to this today is Fortnite, right? Fortnite you have, you can play it on any device. You've got your battle pass in your account, and that goes across all the platforms. And it's created this really interesting behavior, which is that. Even though the phone is not the best place to play Fortnite because of the controls and the twitchiness and everything.
People will do it because it allows them to accrue and earn against their battle class. It [00:54:00] allows them to grind against their goals. They'll sacrifice the play experience just to be able to put in the time to get their rewards. But it's still the same game across all platforms. I think we're going to be getting into a mode where you're going to have games that take very different forms depending on the device you're playing on, but there are games that you can play everywhere and on every device.
I could have a game where, you know, when I'm on my phone, there's a Pokemon Go style collector aspect of it, but I'm collecting my Pokemon and then when I get home, I'm playing. A Pokemon game, which is an RPG turn based RPG style game. I'm playing that on my switch or I'm playing that on my television or whatever.
And those are two completely different modalities, but they're all connected across all the devices. And I think this idea of making games that can engage people throughout their day. And with their friends, importantly, in a social context, [00:55:00] over a long period of time, I almost want to call it like ambient games.
It's like games that are just always with you. I think there's the opportunity to build entertainment franchises that are bigger than anything we ever saw on television or film as a result. Pokemon is already big. The biggest piece of intellectual property, franchisable intellectual property on the planet Earth.
Disney doesn't like to acknowledge that, but Pokemon is bigger than anything that Marvel, Star Wars, any of that stuff. And that kind of brings me to the last thing, which is that I'm very interested in trying to take this idea of what I learned in toys and entertainment, which is how you build a franchise and a piece of IP And a community that people want to be engaged in and, and build an IP and a franchise like that in the gaming space.
If you look at like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, these are in the boys action category and toy in the toy [00:56:00] space. These are, you know, probably three of the top 10 boys action IPs in, in, in toys, film and television, because of all the disruption that's been going on, because fewer people are going to the box office and you have a fragmented media landscape.
And the binge model causes people to watch a bunch of episodes and then forget about the IP for a year until the next drop of episodes come out for all kinds of reasons. Television is not creating new entertainment franchises anymore. There hasn't been one in a while. The big ones like Marvel still do quite well.
The new franchises are coming out of the game space, but the thing is the game makers. While they're having success, they don't understand brand building and franchise management the way that we, uh, did it at a Disney or that a Mattel would do it. And there's a way to think about that that I have a lot of expertise in that nobody in that space is really thinking about right now and I see the [00:57:00] opportunity to put some of these things together and and go create like the next big I. P.
That's around games as a platform as opposed to film and television. I think you could do film and television as part of that. But it becomes a brand extension as opposed to the main event. I think the main event is a game and, and I think there's some really interesting things you could do there. So that, that's how I see it is.
I think the game space is going to become the biggest entertainment category. It's going to be bigger than film and television in some places it already is. It's going to be a dominant culture maker. And that is going to lead to creating new franchises that become lifestyle franchises that people want to be involved in.
And that's what I'm interested in.
Amy: Fantastic. That is a great note to just tickle our brains and think about the future. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing a look backwards and a look [00:58:00] forwards on the digital landscape of games and toys and creating joyous experiences that bring us all together.
Chris: Awesome. Thank you. And thank you to your listeners. It was fun.
Amy: Love taking you out with you. See you soon.
Chris: You too.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.