There are a lot of things about startup life that I’ve loved being around again.
Plastic tables from office depot in a spare bedroom for half of a year. A house strewn in network cables across two floors. Moving across a state to work with new friends. Building a new home for all of us from scratch and spare parts. Integrating even more new friends into a team, watching them develop into far more than the sum of their parts.
Observing brilliant people develop products amazingly well. Seeing (and occasionally helping) people deliver beyond what they thought was their best. Being able to identify a problem in the morning and have it dealt with by the afternoon. Figuring out creative ways to push forward that don’t break the bank. Finding yet more people, from across the globe, to help us do what we need to do. Conceiving of ways to balance the old and the new to create something truly special.
Meeting a new community of enthusiastic and friendly players. Witnessing them interact with a new kind of truly engaging, social entertainment for the first time.
Best of all, being there to observe the first “lightbulb” moments as they exclaim: “This is FUN!”
Seems like a natural time to grab on and hold tight forever.
As counterintuitive as it might sound, once you get it running, sometimes the best thing you can do is step down and make way for a vision for where it goes next.
I don’t make decisions like this lightly. When a company’s doing well, I stay in one place for years. When it doesn’t work out, I’ve been the last one to turn out the lights. This is an entirely new kind of decision for me. It’s of course painful and difficult, but it’s the right one.
Never in my career have I seen such a small group of people accomplish so much, so quickly in this space. Products, pipelines, systems, processes, relationships — you name it. I remain entirely in awe in many different ways. I’m extremely proud to have played my role in building it up from nothing, and value the new friendships that have been made in the process more than I can say.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for the people who’ve consistently overdelivered and continue to go beyond giving their all, day in and day out, revolutionizing what online games are and how they’re made.
There’s a huge success story ready to burst out there, and I look forward to seeing it happen. Give ‘em hell, ohai!
What’s next?
This is a great time for online entertainment. Every day there are more people online looking to have fun with their friends and make new ones in the process.
There’s an ever-widening spectrum of exciting things waiting to be built. Some of them are games in the classic sense, others are purely social devices, and a massive range of opportunities lie between them.
At the end of the day, they all have the same goal in mind - Bringing people together.
Time to figure out which one sounds like the most fun to build next. 
