Makers Series: Jen MacLean on Betting a Company on Human Creativity [016]

Episode Description

Jen MacLean and I met at Columbia Business School more than twenty-five years ago. I was one of the oldest people in the class, and she was the youngest. Since then she's been the first in her family to go to college, a teenage playtester at MicroProse, and an executive at AOL, Comcast and Xbox, where she ran some of the company's largest partner relationships. Then she left to co-found Dragon Snacks Games. We talk about what's happening in the games industry right now: job losses, the fight over AI, and what a launch the size of Grand Theft Auto 6 means for small studios. We also get into why she calls AI her "MBA intern," useful but always in need of checking, and why players in North America and Europe push back when games are made with it.

Then we get to building. Jen explains why the funding she planned on shrank from $10 million to $2 million to $3 million. Her rules for getting through it were simple: don't hire until it's painful not to, and assume you'll never get more money than what's in the bank. She also pitched the game to her own team as if they were investors, so everyone understood why their work mattered. Their game, Farhaven, is about building a life with the people who matter most to you, which also sums up the choice Jen made. If you're weighing a line on a résumé against a line in a eulogy, start here. Full disclosure: I'm a friends-and-family investor in Dragon Snacks Games.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

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