Teaching an old dog (me) new tricks
I’m constantly studying entrepreneurs (both via media and in person), as well as successful startups and companies, in an effort to continue learning and growing as a CEO. Many of my favorite books are great examples of this.
Dragon Army will be a year old in 11 days (September 1st). The amount of things I’ve learned over the last year about the gaming industry, about raising funds, about running a consumer-focused startup, is quite frankly staggering. I can’t believe some of the things I did not know before I started this company.
And while I have more to learn, I feel like I have a solid grasp over the industry and what Dragon Army must do to be successful.
On a vacation recently, where I read no less than four books on successful game companies, I had a massive revelation and subsequently came back and restructured how Dragon Army was going to run. I wrote about that on the Dragon Army blog yesterday.
That change – giving our team much more control over what they’re building and putting Will Hankinson in charge of the studio – is something I should have done a long time ago. I’m sure many people, particularly other CEO’s, will think its crazy to put the future of your company in the hands of someone other than yourself. But if we want to build great games – truly great games – then I believe our games need to be the culmination of the passion, experience and leadership from those that are actually building the games.
Every great consumer product/game/business has started from such a team. A team of people that were building something that the world just had to see. I’m not someone that can lead a team to do that. What I can do as the CEO is set the vision, make sure we have a team that can get us there and then empower that team in any way I can. And that’s what I intend to do from this point forward.
[…] these team members have wanted to build games since they were 8 years old! One of the main reasons I gave the team more responsibility for our games last week was to help them continue to be as passionate as possible about what we’re […]
[…] these team members have wanted to build games since they were 8 years old! One of the main reasons I gave the team more responsibility for our games last week was to help them continue to be as passionate as possible about what we’re […]
[…] another entrepreneur recently about some pivots we’re going through at Dragon Army, such as taking the control of what games we make out of my hands and into the team’s hands. These pivots in the company are because I studied our current path and realized if we didn’t […]
[…] another entrepreneur recently about some pivots we’re going through at Dragon Army, such as taking the control of what games we make out of my hands and into the team’s hands. These pivots in the company are because I studied our current path and realized if we didn’t […]