#73 - Patrick Moberg and Holly Liu

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Patrick Moberg and Holly Liu. Patrick is the co-founder of Playdots, which is a mobile game studio in New York. They make Dots, Playdots and Dots and Co.
And Holly Liu is a visiting partner at YC. Before that, she co-founded the gaming company Kabam. All right, here we go.
Let's start with an explanation of what Dots is, what the whole entity is, and we'll just go from there.

**Patrick Moberg** (0:30)
Okay, so Dots started as sort of this little art project that was born at Beta Works, which is an incubator investor in New York City.
And it was sort of my final synthesis of sort of art and technology, which I had been sort of dancing in between up until then. So games was this really natural progression. So it was sort of my first four into that. And I think it was like a lot of right place, right time. I think the idea was like simple enough that would just sort of, I think as a group, we're kind of surprised by how well and sort of how far it took off and sort of the fan base that it resonated with. And so we've now built a studio around that idea.

**Craig Cannon** (1:14)
And had you made a game of any kind before?

**Patrick Moberg** (1:18)
It's funny, I feel like right when I started learning how to program, I was like messing around with 2D arrays and grids and very similar to what Dots sort of became, but that was like 10 years earlier.
And then I kind of hit a wall because I was so new to programming. So I moved to server side stuff and started doing much different type of work. So it was interesting to come full circle back to that after programming for a long time. But I really didn't, in the interim, there wasn't a lot of interesting games.

**Craig Cannon** (1:48)
Huh.
And why art and technology then? Like what made you synthesize it to?

**Patrick Moberg** (1:55)
Around Dots.

**Craig Cannon** (1:56)
Yeah, well, because I mean, it obviously resembles a Damien Hirst piece, right? Did you try out other things where you're like, oh, maybe I can mash this up or was that the first?

**Patrick Moberg** (2:06)
Yeah, so the big point of inspiration was this artist, Yeo Kusama. So the year before I went on this trip to Japan and sort of went to the city Matsumoto where they were in a retrospective of this artist's work. And it's all like dot based. It's a little more like off the grid than Damien Hirst.
But the whole city was sort of like covered in her work.
So the buses were wrapped, the like Coke vending machines were wrapped.
There's like a couple big museums that were showing just her work. And so it was sort of dots everywhere. And so the way the program at Beta Works was run was like, it was basically an open prompt to build a prototype of whatever you wanted within three or four months. But there was like, you had to launch something at that time. And so I was kind of like looking back on that trip and like, I think her work was really formative because it was like beautiful, but accessible. So it was like the idea that it could almost be playful to be like interacting with something beautiful was kind of the impetus. And so I like started with screenshots of just like, what could a mobile game look like that would be different from what else is available and the gameplay kind of came from that design. Like it was very much like, okay, here's what it could look like, how would this play? And so I started sort of like, the rules kind of came from there.

**Craig Cannon** (3:28)
And are you prototyping these interactions and then showing them to people? Are you asking?
I don't know much about game development. So like, how do you figure out those mechanics?

**Patrick Moberg** (3:36)
I think what was really cool is that, so Paul Murphy, who would later become my co-founder with Dots, the way he ran this program at BetaWorks was that basically every week, we would check in on Thursdays and sort of either talk about what you did or sort of later in the program, show what you had completed. And so we got in this weekly cadence that I really wanted to show something every Thursday. And so it kind of drove that prototype really quickly and made me want to make things that I was proud to show. And so I found that was a great way to produce that type of game.