Ran Mo, founder of Proxima in 2021, didn’t always work in games. He initially spent time as more of a consultant and corporate strategy side of things before transitioning into product management at Electronic Arts. That said, entrepreneurship and games was always the goal and so he spent time learning what he felt he needed to before making the jump. And despite being a very hard jump, Proxima has been successful! Releasing Suck Up, one of the first embodied AI games, earlier this year to strong success and building off of that. Ran’s journey has definitely had some wild turns and was wonderful to listen to. Let’s jump in.

I met Mickael through the local development community in Vancouver Canada. He’s one of the founders of Caldera Interactive which spun up in 2019. As you’ll hear, Caldera really came together in the classic game industry fable way of folks who wanted to make games, doing it on the side, then make a play to do it full-time and succeed. In this case, the play was applying for the Canadian Media Fund, or CMF. I wanted Mickael to come on and share his story so that folks could hear about how local ecosystem funding can be a source as much as the classic tales of publishers and VCs. Not an easy road, but a viable one.

Andy Mauro founded Storycraft in 2023 after spending a lot of time in the "chatbot" tech space, including a previously founded and exited company. He and I got to know each other through our mutual investor, London Venture Partners. I've always really enjoyed his insights from the tech side as he approaches building a game studio and merges his prior founding experience with being a lifelong gamer. Andy also has spent a lot of time both being and receiving Coaching and spends time in the episode to talk about how that experience has shaped him as a founder, and his team.