Getting2Alpha

Dr. Julie Gurner is an executive performance coach with a Doctorate in Psychology. She has coached top-percentile executives, talent, and teams operating in fast-paced, competitive environments for over ten years, helping her clients unlock peak performance. She publishes the Ultra Successful newsletter on Substack. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/YGFEerM6lwM

Joakim Achrén, “the gaming startup guy”, is a games investor, and founder of Elite Game Developers, which provides advice for game founders. He co-founded Next Games (which was acquired by Netflix), and worked as Director of Analytics at Supercell. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/VEd3uedgY7g

Pavel Samsonov is a design architect and UX Practice Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in New York City. With a background in graphic design and a passion for human-computer interaction, Pavel has spent the last three years at AWS helping large companies adopt cloud computing and build innovative products using design methods. His professional accomplishments include being named a top UX des...

Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publ...

Celia Hodent, a Game UX Strategist with a PhD in Psychology, has dedicated 15 years of her career to applying user experience (UX) and cognitive science in product development, particularly in the realm of video games. Her impressive portfolio includes her role as Director of UX at Epic Games for Fortnite, as well as work on well-known franchises such as Star Wars: 1313 at LucasArts and Rainbow 6...

Vinayak Joglekar is head of India Operations and Chief Technology Officer at Excellarate , with more than three decades of professional software development and delivery experience. Joglekar earned his mechanical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management and mentors bright minds in software development and product deliv...

Osama Dorias is a Lead Content Designer at Blizzard Entertainment. In the past, he’s worked at Unity, Warner Brothers, Gameloft, GEE Media, Ubisoft, and Minority Media. He also teaches game design at Dawson College and loves to empower people in expressing themselves through game-making, especially marginalized people and causes.

Steve Meretzky is an American video game developer best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the hit interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , and the comically titled Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment . H...

Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.

Brendan Greene , better known as PlayerUnknown is a video game developer best known for creating PUBG: Battlegrounds . In 2019 he left active development on the game to form PUBG Special Projects and PlayerUnknown Productions, where he is developing an ambitious virtual world far larger than the one in PUBG.

Entrepreneur and angel investor, Rei Wang is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at The Grand, a group coaching platform to help people navigate transitions at the intersection of work and life. Before The Grand she served as CEO of Dorm Room Fund   at First Round Capital where she nurtured a community of 250+ startups, and counseled entrepreneurs on topics ranging from fundraising to managem...

Philip Rosedale is the founder of Linden Lab, which launched the popular virtual world Second Life in 2003. His goal has always been to build a viable model for a virtual economy or virtual society, not just an entertainment platform. Before Second Life he served as CTO at RealNetworks, where he wrote some of the earliest algorithms to compress video for transmission across the internet. In 2013 h...

Barry O'Reilly is a business strategist and author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. He’s worked with top executives at Wells Fargo, American Airlines and Walmart to cut through complexity and make smart decisions in a changing world.  In doing this work, Barry has learned that most executives resist unlearning what they already know. Listen as Barry talks about the importance of questioning as...

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 Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks. Chris co-founded the Product Design Consultancy, the Re-Wired Group in 2010 with jobs-to-be-done expert Bob Moesta, and co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook with Bob Moesta.

Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur and investor who founded the early social media company Tribe Networks, and the mobile social gaming company Zynga. More recently he co-founded investment firm Reinvent Capital in 2018.

John Linden is CEO of Mythical Games, creators of the pioneering NFT collectible game Blanko’s Block Party. John has a deep background in gaming, leading AAA titles like Call of Duty, and helping develop the Millenium Falcon ride at Disneyland.

Amy Bucher is Chief behavioral officer at the digital health company Lirio. She is the author of Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change , and has a Ph. D. in Psychology from University of Michigan.

Raph Koster is an entrepreneur, game designer, and author of a Theory of Fun for Game Design. He is currently CEO of playable worlds. He was Lead Designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He founded Metaplace in 2006, which was acquired by the social gaming company Playdom.

Garry Tan is a software engineer turned entrepreneur turned investor. On his popular YouTube channel he offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He is intensely aware of the privileged position he is in as a tech-savvy investor in Silicon Valley, and is eager to share his knowledge with the next generation.

Gabby Dizon is cofounder of Yield Guild Games, an organization that helps its members make money playing blockchain-based play-to-earn games. As a long-time game developer and player, Gabby had long dreamed of a game guild owned by its members. 

Mitch Zamara is Lead Product Designer on Million on Mars: Land Rush! He has over a decade of experience as a game designer working in the free-to-play social/mobile game space at Zynga and other companies. He specializes in designing game economies.

I first learned about John Hagel in the late 1990s, when I was elbow-deep in community-building -- working as a systems designer & UX leader on Ultima Online and eBay. One of my clients gave me John’s book, Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities. It blew my mind and inspired me as I was writing my first book, Community Building on the Web. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to...

Schwark Satyavolu is a serial entrepreneur and early-stage  investor at Trinity Ventures. After founding and growing several innovative startups in the fintech space - a journey that included a stint as an executive at Mastercard - Schwark is now building up the fintech practice at Trinity.  His background as an entrepreneur makes him empathetic  to the realities of what startup life is life -- a...

I first met Siqi Chen at a Lightspeed CEO dinner hosted by Jeremy Liew. We bonded over our mutual love of product design and fascination with customer engagement. Ever since, I’ve followed Siqi’s career from Zynga product lead to fast-pivoting startup CEO to VR executive. I love how Siqi’s ideas about vision and leadership keep evolving. This is a guy who’s always learning. Listen in and learn how...