Brian Meidell On Raising $79 Million To Give Everyone Easy Access To Fun Entertainment

In the sphere of innovation, there are individuals whose journeys span continents, cultures, and industries, shaping their perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. Brian Meidell, a Danish entrepreneur with roots in Copenhagen, embarked on a remarkable journey that led him from a stable upbringing in Denmark to disrupting the gaming industry.

His venture, FRVR, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Accel, Hiro Capital, Makers Fund, and David Helgason.

In this episode, you will learn:

• A Danish upbringing instilled a sense of psychological safety, fostering the risk-taking mindset crucial for entrepreneurial success.
• An early fascination with mathematics and gaming laid the foundation for a journey from an aspiring inventor to disrupting the gaming industry through coding and technology.
• Brian’s career spans solo game development ventures to collaborative endeavors like Cape Copenhagen, highlighting the evolution from individual efforts to teamwork in the tech industry.
• Reflecting on past experiences, Brian emphasizes the importance of understanding co-founders on a personal level, drawing parallels between successful partnerships and marital bonds.
• The shift from strategic planning to meticulous execution underscores insights into achieving sustained success, emphasizing the need for refining the entire development process.
• An innovative approach to game analytics contributed significantly to shaping the gaming industry, showcasing the power of problem-solving and market understanding.
• FRVR’s unique approach prioritizes distribution over game creation, aiming to reshape the gaming industry dynamics by enlarging the revenue pie for developers and offering an alternative to app store challenges.

SUBSCRIBE ON:

For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here). 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

About Brian Meidell:

Brian Meidell, based in Copenhagen, DK, is currently a Chief Executive Officer at FRVR, bringing experience from previous roles at Cape Copenhagen, Producentforeningen – Danish Producers’ Association, and Cape Copenhagen Aps.

Brian Meidell holds a 1997 – 2002 Bachelors in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering @ Technical University of Denmark.

With a robust skill set that includes Game Development, Programming, Video Games, Game Design, C++, and more, Brian Meidell contributes valuable insights to the industry.

Connect with Brian Meidell:

• Crunchbase
• RocketReach
• LinkedIn
• X

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So do they? We have an amazing founder. We’re gonna be talking a lot about building scaling financing but but really interesting stuff. You know how to go about strategy versus execution going from a. Bigger type of company to a startup ah and and any other good stuff. You know that that I find that you’re all going to very much enjoy because it’s going to apply to many of the journeys that you’re all embarking in but again super inspiring the conversation that we have ahead of us so be be prepared so without further ado. Let’s welcome our guests today Brian Mayel welcome to this welcome to the dealmakerr show. So originally born in Copenhagen but they raised in Denmark so give us ah walk through memory lane. How was life in in Denmark and and and all kind of stuff.

Brian Meidell: Thank you very much happy to be here.

Brian Meidell: So Denmark is a very safe and settled place. So wonderful. Had a good childhood I had good support of parents. Nothing nothing interesting or dramatic about my my upbringing I think um I think it was a great. Great influence gives you a lot of psychological safety for stuff like creating startups I think there’s a dearth of ah of the kind of mindset of aggressive scaling and and and the way business is built in something like Silicon Valley but ah, but I think um. I’ve I’ve slowly learned more and more people like got got to know more and more people who come from context like that which I think has has ah made my my thinking develop and grow over time I think when when you know that you’re going to be a right I think it it gives you a higher affinity for risk. So I’ve never been.

Alejandro Cremades: Um, what do you mean with psychological safety.

Brian Meidell: Particularly concerned about losing my job or taking risks I have a fairly high-risk profile. But after leaving denmark and seeing how you know other places in the world works I Realize what a complete privilege it is to to actually grow up a place where you feel like. Not only your parents but the society has your back if you fall. Um, so I think that that that has given me an appreciation for not everyone coming from that background and and you know it’s It’s not particularly brave for me to do something like this but it certainly is brave for someone who comes from a place that has you know, no parents. No ah. No no safety net in the environment environment that they’re in. So I think yeah I think it’s an important factor.

Alejandro Cremades: Um, and then at what point do you get involved you know or develop that interest towards perhaps mathematics and engineering and problem solving.

Brian Meidell: That’s I ever since I was a kid I wanted to be an inventor and then later on I found out that that means that’s called ah, an engineer and in real life I had Uncles and family that were engineers I think it’s kind of in the blood. Um, so I went originally I wanted to be an animator. And and many other things eventually I’ve figured out that I really like writing code and like computers once I got my first one with around H 12 and then it was kind of a straight shot through engineering school and then into building tech companies since since that.

Alejandro Cremades: Um, and it sounds like gaming has been pivotal for you too. How do how did gaming come knocking.

Brian Meidell: Well I Think as anyone who had a a computer early on games was one of the amazing things you could do back then it wasn’t super common to have a computer or for games to be as common as they are now. But I think I kind of feel vindicated that being a a comic book Nerd. Likes rpgs and computer games which was really strange when I was a ah kid not now that’s like mainstream culture. So um, it it grew out of that playing games was super interesting building that was even more interesting.

Alejandro Cremades: And and right after graduation I mean you you did the whole spiel of doing a little more on the corporate side and and being in bigger corporations. How was that journey from being in bigger corporations. How do you think that shaped you and at what point did that open up, you know the possibility of perhaps you know Doing. Or going at it on your own.

Brian Meidell: Well I think it builds your network. It builds some Expertise I’ve actually regret that I’ve never really built been in really big companies I would have loved to have been at a you know like a really competent big startup and and kind of learned the patterns there. Um I realized recently that the business that I’m working in now was. Briefly The biggest business I’ve ever worked in but coming coming out of that environment. You get a great network a bunch of colleagues that are you know, skillful in the in the arena that you are in they go out. They get new jobs. They grow out to the ranks and eventually you know a lot of people in a lot of good positions. Have a strong network I Also think it’s you know it’s good. Both to work for companies that really screw up where you see what not to do but even more importantly, it’s It’s good to work for companies that that do it that do a really good job of of certain things I can definitely tell from people I know that I’ve worked for very competent startups. What kind of. Shaping that has ah has given on their thought processes and I I think a lot of I listen to a bunch of episodes of of ah of dealmakers where you can hear people have come out of this like in a great way learning from from ah from world-class talent from simply having a job. I Don’t feel like I’ve done that and I think I’ve been very slow about realizing some of the things that other people have have ah have learned a lot quicker but I think that’s um, yeah, that’s the advantage of of ah of working in bigger companies.

Alejandro Cremades: I Totally get what you’re saying you know having that transition. You know making it as smooth as possible because you have a good idea of what’s the path to follow I think that that’s a that’s really valuable now in your case, you know when he came to that transition. You know it was It was kind of like a like I. You first did the consulting and then you know right away you got started with a game Equation. So What was the sequence of events that needed to happen for you to say I’m going I’m going for it.

Brian Meidell: I actually I think the the main thing was I found someone to partner with was a colleague at that point at my at my job back then? um and there’d been a bunch of rockiness in the company that was in that we we just ended up feeling like we could. Could go make a a plunge of it. The other thing that had happened was the the market had started getting ah an affinity for smaller games where the kind of stuff I was building before would take hundred plus person teams you know years to build now people were building games with like small teams in you know. Sub 1 year release cycles and actually making a good business of it. So these things seemed conducive to be a small startup and we we took the leap and and built something.

Alejandro Cremades: Now Eventually your cofounder left and he went to to his job I Guess when it comes to cofounder dynamics and alignment. What do you think you got from from that experience.

Brian Meidell: I think there’s a couple of things. So 1 thing is um I really appreciate that working with him but I didn’t know him very well and he was very He was a very private person. Um, and I think one of the things I took away from that is if. If I don’t have like a strong mental model of how another human being functions then I probably shouldn’t be in a business with them because at some level it’s it’s kind of like being married to them. They have a lot of ah of financial and legal involvement in your life and I think it’s it’s a fairly good idea to be. Really close with someone and know them pretty well before ah before making that kind of commitment to each other I bear him? Absolutely no ill will I think he did what was right for him. But the fact that it was even a surprise to me that that happened is ah is is was an important learning.

Alejandro Cremades: Not.

Alejandro Cremades: Whats it like a big difference from you know, being a co-founder to perhaps now transitioning into being a solo founder on your end did was it like really lonely the experience there the transition.

Brian Meidell: It was but it also forced some really important learning so I ended up sitting and building a game on my own and the tech to build it. This was in the pre-unity days and I sat there for a very very long time building a game I I was expecting it to take six months it ended up taking over 2 years but in that I kind of really groked why ah planning and management of time was really important so eventually once I I couldn’t figure out once I sat down and really thought about why my to-do list wasn’t getting any shorter and and started going a bit meta on the problem and and building some some actual plans. I very quickly started to appreciate why that is an important part of every company to to map that stuff out. It was ah it ended up being on one man shop I I released some games under that label I made some decent money on it. I built some tech.

Alejandro Cremades: So whatever happened with a game equation.

Brian Meidell: And then I traded that tech up to a stake in a company that was founded by my two later cofounders in what eventually became Cape Copenhagen so they had ah back then game engines weren’t ah common or free I had a game engine. They had some. Ah. Had a running business and we had ah a shared goal about wanting to build small games and and getting them in the hands of millions of people. So I traded some tech for for some equity in what was essentially a very small company at that point and then we grew that into a 45 person company. Ah, that mainly built games for others over the the following couple of years.

Alejandro Cremades: And what did you learn there about scaling because you know you were used to smaller teams and perhaps running your own shop. But now you have to delegate you have to scale things up, you know, talk talk to us about scaling.

Brian Meidell: Yeah I think um I think there’s a bunch of interesting learning. So so in that I kind of feel like each company gave me some important set of learnings that I took with me and I think what I learned from from Cape Copenhagen was was ah was building a company that people actually enjoyed working for I think I absolutely sucked at business at that point ah it kind of um I managed cash really? Well I managed sales really poorly in spite of that we built great product and because of that customers kept coming back and we we ended up growing to a fairly large size. But I think we. We could have made that a ah quite successful profitable business but we kept syncing our profits into like projects that that were more passionate projects than they were actually based on any real commercial thinking and I think I think scaling. Ah, beyond that which which has happened in an frvr I think one of the the key things for me to learn was basically the difference between strategic thinking excellence and execution excellence and I think I’ve been surrounded by a lot of good thinkers and my in in my career and and I think we really. Nailed the strategy on on this business but it took us a very long time to realize that we actually guessed a bunch of things correctly, we just were really poor at executing them so when we couldn’t really find out why we weren’t moving the needle over ah over a longer period of time it turned out that we’d had the right answers all along. We’ve just been really poor at.

Brian Meidell: Actually executing so over the last twenty four months we went through like a serious transformation where we really took a hard look at how good we were at things versus how good we thought we were at things and then realized we were bad at a bunch of things like um, ah like like. Just executing really meticulously on stuff that was based on metrics. So we we had some very ah early wins in the in the business and it it made everything look easier than it actually is I think it can be really ah problematic if you if you luck out early enough because it makes you think that. That the success is easy. It makes you not look close enough about what the actual mechanics of that success is and it took us a while to get around to that drill down really get good at it and then start shaping the team or on the knowledge that we found and in that I learned a lot of a lot of other. And principles that I really live by now one of them is it’s it’s really important that you that you don’t try to hire to solve a problem as much as you hire to scale a solution I had a tendency to hire people to try and solve things that I couldn’t really figure out myself and when you try and do that it’s It’s a very It’s very difficult to get the hiring right? So I would really urge founders to really try hard instead of saying oh I’m not a salesman I can’t do sales I should just hire some master salesperson from another context, you should really try to learn the principles and at least try not sucking at it a little bit.

Brian Meidell: Before you hire someone to replace you and then once you do that you better understand the principles of what it is that you’re hiring for you better understand what you’re asking that person to do and then they can blow you away with their 10 times as long experience and and how to do it even better. But I really think it’s important that you take those first. Hard steps on your own.

Alejandro Cremades: Now in this case, you know for you one One of the one of the things that also happened there as a project was a game analytics. Whatever happened with game analytics coming into the picture.

Brian Meidell: Oh yeah, so so when I was ah building the the stuff in game equation. One of the problems I had was that no one had really built a solution analytics solution for games people were talking about it but usually there were big companies that would build their own data warehousing solutions and like have infinite cache. Um I built this really simple prototype for um, for my own game because I wanted to balance how the progression of levels should be so so I built a dashboard I built a bunch of stuff that basically sent metrics from from the about 100 testers I had voluntary people playing my game. It would send me metrics and I had a dashboard that would basically allow me to tune the difficulty of the different levels and find the right progression for them. So I took that’s part of the tech that I traded into um two was it called to Cape Copenhagen and later we tried to spin that up as a started. And its own and I think there was an important lesson in that I think at some point people that are hopelessly optimistic around their time needs to figure out that they actually need to focus on fewer things. But I was trying to spin that up as a was like a spun out startup under Cape Copenhagen um we manifested a small team. We started building the product but at some point we figured out that this was just not realistic to be doing 2 2 things. So um I can’t take credit for out the the success that became subsequently but I I registered gameallytics dot com I talked with ah with experienced founders and ended up handing the.

Brian Meidell: The the basic idea off to someone else who then went and executed on it to a point where they actually build it into a a startup and and sold it. So um, I’m not I can’t take credit for it I’m not part of the official narrative. But I think it’s fun to have been involved in some early level on on I’m making that happen.

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely you know that company and then up raising millions and then you know got acquired. so so I guess in your case obviously you know right? after a this this this this journey that you were doing you know with with this company with the previous one Cape Copenhagen that was ultimately the immediate step that can I let you do your biggest success today which is frvr. So obviously you know here you are now a founder that has done it a few times at least 3 times and and you had been around the block. Why did you think that the problem.

Brian Meidell: True.

Alejandro Cremades: We say with this company with Fr Vr was meaningful enough to for you to jump ship and and make it happen.

Brian Meidell: It was ah I think for my entire career. So. At this point I’ve been making games for for more than 20 years and 1 of the the things I’ve always loved is trying to make things that make it easier to build games or make ah games more successful. In the beginning. It was a lot about building engines and tooling and things like that because I thought that was a lot of fun. It’s great to solve problems for other people and it’s fun to see them use it but then eventually I came to realize that ah through the work I did in the game equation and and Cape Copenhagen I came to realize that. Actually building. The game is is table stakes you have to make a great game but that’s kind of like being able to sing if you want to be a rock star. That’s only a tiny percentage of what you actually have to do the rest of it is really about distribution and getting in front of people and that was a that’s a much harder problem to solve and I think the market has just gotten. Worse and worse in terms of of ah of how difficult that is as the actual means of production have been super commoditized so in this startup it was really about trying to solve that problem and thinking of a game company as being a distribution first solution. So we build an entire games platform that basically was all about getting games in front of people first and foremost and then the authoring piece and actually building them was ah was a secondary priority.

Alejandro Cremades: Now I guess for the for the people that are listening to to really get it. What ended up being the business model of FRVr how do you guys make money.

Brian Meidell: So the way we make money is we basically we help ah game developers make money and then by by getting the games in the hands of billions of players and then we take a cut of that revenue so we we take ah, we’re sitting in the value chain where we take part of the revenue out. Between the player and the developer but our aim is to always make the pie bigger to a proportion where the the piece that we’re taking out of it is is ah is still leaving the developers with ah with a bigger spice. So the idea is basically that we have a platform that is the last platform you ever need to build for and. That means we have all these games built on our standardized platform and then we go and make relationships with huge partners. Um and basically make deals around bringing these games to players via all kinds of alternative paths that aren’t just releasing them on the app store. And this sidesteps a big and increasing problem whereby user acquisition costs for for things on the app store has gotten to such an expensive place at least for games that it’s very very hard to make more money on on users than it than it costs to acquire them and I think we we have a pretty good solution for that.

Alejandro Cremades: And how do you go about market timing.

Brian Meidell: Um, yeah, market timing is an interesting one because we actually started this ah the startup seven years ago and at that point it was complete heresy to talk about anything beyond the app stores and at this point so when we were pitching back then to investors investors were a little bit looking at us shaking ah their heads and saying. This is weird like you’re you’re just doing it wrong and then as time has gone by the market has moved in the exact direction that we foretold but we were completely wrong on type timing the place where we are now I think everyone is starting to realize that they’ve gotten. They made a faustian bargain with the with the app stores and they need a different path to market. But at this point we’re where we are now I expected us to be there after 3 years so it’s taken a lot of iteration. A lot of scrappiiness. Um and a lot of gradual building to get to the point where now we don’t suck at execution anymore and the market has moved in odd direction. So I think we’re. We’re feeling a ah win at our backs these days and that’s ah that I think that’s the feeling of of actually having hit market timing now I think in many cases the wrong market timing we had could have killed the company but somehow we made it through and I think ah, it’s definitely given me. And appreciation for how important it is that you’re you’re not too early either. It’s not just bad being late. it’s it’s it’s also really difficult to be too early to a market.

Alejandro Cremades: Um, and what about this one you know versus you know Malta or copenhagen or any other place why this one.

Brian Meidell: Um, so we we made. Ah, we basically made a move to to molta that was for me personally I wanted to at that point frvr was fully virtual company I wanted to live somewhere sunny that was nice. Um, we’ve been talking about it for years me and my my partner. Ah, so we decided to to make a move and and the goal was to have it be a place where when I took my fingers off the keyboard. It would feel like we were on vacation so we moved to Malta I lived there for about 3 years and I think there’s a lot of things around. Learning how how ah what are the prerequisites for actually building up a company. We were trying to build a team there for for all three years I don’t think I ever managed to get more than 8 people on my team there even though we were hiring for the full three years and people were leaving as quickly as we could hire them not due to the company but fundamentally because a lot of people. Um, move away from Malta after a couple of years so so and we we decided we needed. We. We got a lot of success at 1 point and we needed to be able to build up a team to to a greater degree so we were looking at opening up a location for the company. Um, so. We were doing desk research on on many different places in Europe basically all the big tech hubs and all the capitals and we had only managed to actually do on the ground research for for lisbon because it looked like 1 of the more promising candidates and then covid hit.

Brian Meidell: And everything got locked down and we were basically trapped on in Malta. They completely shut down. You couldn’t sail or fly in or out for for a fairly long time. So in the end we were so bottlenecked by the lack of ability to to execute with no team that we just had to make a leap of faith. So I think it’s. It’s ah fairly important sometimes to be able to make hard decisions based on incomplete information and this is definitely one of those cases so we ended up taking ah 2 of ah of our people that were in Malta which was a pretty big remaining part of the team. And and our families and then moving to lisbon during covid and we were basically on the first flight off the island we were in an airport that was completely shut down the power wasn’t even running um and we didn’t really know whether we’re going to take off until we were in the air and then we land here in lisbon I think past midnight we had some. Some people on the ground here already and we were you know everyone wearing masks and gloves and shuffled into buses and then we sort of just landed here with our families. Ah, we had no place to live so we were just hanging out in airpn bees and then we just kind of had to spin it up to to begin with. But now I’ve been here for three and a half years I really love the city. It’s got something. Nice going for It’s great quality of life. It’s a good talent pool and and I actually I really enjoy living here. The the idea was to build up a company ah on the spot and we actually hired a whole bunch of people in in lisbon. But um, but after coming out of covid.

Brian Meidell: Things Never really went back to normal with regards to people coming to the office so we kind of had to make a decision on whether we wanted to go fully remote or whether we wanted to force people to come into the office and we felt like it was ah it was a hard decision but ultimately. Decided that was better for us to to go fully remote because I think this this is the way the world is moving I Definitely think it’ll go back and forth in waves but getting good at this I think is something that gives you a competitive Advantage. So we’ve We’ve been trying to do that ever since.

Alejandro Cremades: So so as you’re talking about people here talk to us about strategy Excellence versus Execution excellence.

Brian Meidell: Yeah, so I think I think as ah as I mentioned earlier I think we had the right ideas really early on I think we just got we got a bit lucky with ah a bunch of the early stuff that we did without really understanding why it it succeeded so it took us a very long time to come back to. Actually assessing whether the initial ideas that we tried and failed with weren’t actually good to begin with but it was just the way that we were doing them that was wrong. So once we did that and went back and really insisted on going deep on every single detail and really looking and and these are things like how do you measure your. You know the efficacy of your ah your game updates. Um, you know, being good at data is difficult being good at evaluating whether what you did was write or not is is important making sure that you get that whole end-to-end pipeline of of. Inventing something building it releasing it and then evaluating it to get that right? We had that already. But it was just very full of different flaws and misunderstandings and really getting close to that and really tightening the screws on that entire process. Once we got that right? It really made the numbers start moving. And it allowed us to the the way we did. It was basically we insisted on the fact that we had to get profitable user acquisition to work because that wasn’t a thing that we had been able to get to work every time we spent a dollar on user acquisition. We’d get thirty cents back and we ended up saying okay this has to work and then we went really deep on it and it very quickly went from spending.

Brian Meidell: Dollar and making thirty cents to spending a dollar and getting a dollar back but at like ten K a month and then we basically kept being able to tweak it and scale it until we’re you know, making spending hundreds of thousands ah a month profitably and and beyond um, and really. Really insisting on that having to work made us see many details that we’d just qua glossed over previously where where we thought we were doing it. But in fact, when we look closely at it. We weren’t doing anything that worked. Um I think that that had really given me an appreciation for You can have all the best ideas in the world. But I think if you have to choose between strategic excellence and execution excellence I think execution excellent will win pretty much 10 out of 10 times. Of course if you have both it’ll it’ll get to be really special. But um I wasn’t. And wouldn’t cognizant allow important that was previously.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about to fundraising how much a Kara how you guys raised date.

Brian Meidell: So I think we’ve raisedd about Seventy nine million so far with a mix of ah of of debt funding and and equity funding over over two rounds so far and we’re found fundraising right now for for a third round.

Alejandro Cremades: And how do you go about? you know the capital race you know, especially the experience of being there in Europe I mean how has it been the the experience of going through the different rounds the different blends you know to of equity versus debt. You know how how has it been for you.

Brian Meidell: I think it’s it’s given me an appreciation for in person because the first round we were able to see people in person and we were I mean our our strategy is a fairly comprehensive rewrite of the mechanics of of ah of the games industry. And that makes the strategy hard to boil down into a thirty second pitch so we were terrible at that in the beginning so we would we would need like at least an hour of a meeting to get someone to understand what it was we actually done but usually when it then clicked they were like okay that’s pretty clever and and they’d be interested in it. We somehow managed to raise our seed round without having a deck and by. Talking to people relentlessly for like an hour plus until they they understood what we were seeing um later we we and we basically had to raise the aron during covid and we actually we tried to raise an aron to begin with that. We ended up walking away from because. Ah, our core business was taking off to a degree where we didn’t actually need to raise so we decided to revisit it. But um, it made it really clear to me that one. It’s it’s very It’s very useful to be able to meet people in person I actually think that the that the round that we ended up ah dropping. Would have gone through if we’d just been able to meet people. But I think getting remotely. You had to get way better at being super sharp for new communications and pitching and so on. So so we spent a lot of time boiling. Ah our business down into you know ten slides.

Brian Meidell: As everyone does I just think it was an exceptionally ah difficult thing for us to do. It took us several years to get to that point. Um, and and I think covid has just generally changed the dynamics of fundraising in a way where people don’t take physical meetings. They have a fairly high bar for people to meet in person and I do think it’s a very difficult environment to. To to fundraise over video calls and I think people underappreci outbreak of a difference that is actually.

Alejandro Cremades: Oh yeah, now when it comes to um, obviously fundraising and people like we have been discussing vision is a big one. So if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of FRBR is fully realized what does the world look like.

Brian Meidell: I Think the the ability to be a successful game. Developer would probably be you know, right now I think the the hit rate is very low if you want to go into games. It’s kind of at this point I think it’s kind of like wanting to be a ah like a star of some kind you. You’ve. The the success rate is frighteningly low. There are a lot of people making games. There’s ah, an abundance of content and there’s ah a dearth of Discovery and that means that only the people are amazing at monetizing so that they can pay for marketing which is a bidding or are the ones that that basically get most of the eyeballs. Part of what we want to solve is fixing that basically we want people to end up with the games that are right for them. Not the games that could pay the most to advertise to them and in this in ah in a world where we’ve been really successful relatively small teams or individuals would be able to build games. On you know, passion economy time. Um, that would actually end up being something that they can make a living of we have developers that are that are living in the very unusual lives that are basically just living off royalties on our platform which is to to my great satisfaction I’d love to see that. Enormous scale where you know where where people build something that is meaningful and we connect the right people to that content that that really would enjoy it and then everyone wins.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about now the past with a lens of reflection. Let’s say I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time to perhaps that moment where you were thinking about starting something of your own you know and that was for example, you know the game equation. You know say I’m able to bring you back to that 2006 right? before you know in August where you were gonna be making this official and let’s say you were able to have a sit down with that younger Brian and you’re able to tell that younger Brian one piece of advice for launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now.

Brian Meidell: I really want to cram 2 pieces of advice and so there’s one piece of advice. So I think one of the the absolute first one is do the math early on because I felt like I I actually did the probability math and on.

Alejandro Cremades: Um, do it.

Brian Meidell: The thing that I’ve been trying to build for several years and in Kate Copenhagen and and I realized that it was completely unrealistic. So my my dream was to build a company that could build games that would be successful enough that we could keep funding the next game but everything around how we went to market once I actually sat down and figure out the unit economics and how that was supposed to work out. I could tell that unless we could consistently hit the top 0.1 sales numbers with our games. It was a complete pipe dream that math I could have done at any time and I could have saved myself myself a lot of naive years. Um, and I think the the second part of that is basically just think of the. Like be be honest and think about the business first and the utility to other people before trying to spend your intellect. Ah basically rationalizing you know things that you’re doing because you think they’re fun. Um I think I don’t think those 2 things are mutually exclusive. But I really think I was slow at at. Separating those things out and actually started thinking outside in at what I was doing and how it was supposed to work and how how it was supposed to be planned out and I think I’m I’m still not great at this but I’m getting better at it and it certainly saves me a lot of time that I can sit down and do that that spreadsheet. Instead of going and building something for 3 years and then figuring out that it doesn’t work.

Alejandro Cremades: Very profound so Brian for the people that are listening that will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so.

Brian Meidell: Um, I usually enter Linkedin messages within not not too long time but otherwise they’re welcome to to to basically shoot me an email on [email protected] or yeah I think that’s probably the the best method.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing! Well hey Brian thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today. It has been an honor to have you with us.

Brian Meidell: It’s been a pleasure being here. Thanks a lot.

*****

If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at [email protected]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More