AI Will Turn Everyone Into a Gamer w/ Max Child

James Currier (0:04)

So Max Child, thank you for being back here with NFX.

Max Child (0:07)

Excited.

James Currier (0:07)

We've been working together with you for nine years, and you are the number one voice games company in the world.

Max Child (0:12)

Yes, that's right. And maybe number one AI games company in the world.

James Currier (0:16)

Okay, there you go.

Max Child (0:16)

But definitely voice games for sure.

James Currier (0:18)

Awesome.

Max Child (0:18)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We have tens of millions of ARR, and have grown really fast in the last couple of years.

James Currier (0:28)

Can you tell us what you guys are doing?

Max Child (0:30)

Yes, we run a company called Weekend. We are dedicated to the principle that AI should be used to make people's lives more fun, more joyful. And specifically, our product is voice AI games. So games powered by speech recognition, large language models, speech synthesis. And you can play our games on essentially the biggest screen, the biggest computer you have in your home, which is your smart TV. And so we have a weekend app. It's on Fire TV, Roku, Samsung, LG devices. Download our app, subscribe, just like Netflix, and you get a bunch of games that you can play with your friends and family.

James Currier (1:09)

And are these multiplayer?

Max Child (1:10)

These are all multiplayer. We actually have a majority of multiplayer usage. So people playing, you know, sitting on the couch next to their family members or people come over for a party. We have a few kind of key genres of games that are working really well. One is game shows.

So we have like a Jeopardy! game. If you ever watch that TV show, we make like a simulated version of Jeopardy! Sit on the couch, you know, you see the question on the screen, you try to buzz in on your phone, beat your friends, you know, say like, what is Sacramento? You know, so game shows work really well. We have, you know, Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune, some other ones. We have kids content. I know you and I both have kids. So we make like an interactive, playable version of Cocoa Melon. So I have a three-year-old, she can play Peek-A-Boo with her favorite characters and do hidden object recognition and that kind of thing. And then finally, storytelling. So interactive fiction, you know, big believers in the sort of like using AI to, you know, create characters that you can talk to and go on missions and quests and things like that.

James Currier (2:12)

Amazing. And doing anything in music?

Max Child (2:14)

We, yeah, of course. So we have a very popular Guess the Song game called Song Quiz, where we play pop music, try to shout out the title of the artist, as well as Karaoke is one of our up-and-comer ones. So I don't know if you've ever played rock band, but.

James Currier (2:27)

Yeah. So we've been on this journey with you for a while now. Why did you decide to go into voice? And what devices were you on initially? And now what has it moved to?

Max Child (2:37)

Yeah, absolutely. So we back nine years ago, when we started working together, we were just getting excited about voice. I think I can't really explain it other than my co-founder, James and I were just always intuitively attracted to the idea of like talking to computers. It felt like the next big thing in terms of how we use computers. We felt like it was the thing that comes next after touching your phone. And I think we were probably wrong in 2015 or 2016, or at least we were like way too early. We were pretty successful on these smart speaker devices in the house.

James Currier (3:17)

Everything from Amazon and Google.

Max Child (3:19)

Yeah, Amazon and Google, Alexa, things like that. We built a pretty solid games business on that platform, which is still quite profitable. But you know...

James Currier (3:29)

We are the number one voice games company in the world.

Max Child (3:31)

We are definitely the number one voice games company in the world by a lot. And ultimately, I think smart speakers, you know, they're in maybe 20, 25% of American households. But what we figured out a couple of years ago was that the really big opportunity was being on the device that is in 100% of US households, which is television. And ultimately, you know, I mean, we think mobile and iPad as well are very exciting. But, you know, these TVs that everyone has, the average American spends actually like four and a half to five hours a day in front of a television, which is pretty mind blowing.