Justin Waldron - The Future of Social Gaming - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 50]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This week's episode of Founder's Field Guide is sponsored by Klaviyo. Want to deliver marketing moments that last a lifetime? Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience and keep your customers coming back. See why brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove and Nomad trust Klaviyo to grow their business. Get a free trial at klaviyo.com/founders. That's klaviyo.com/founders.
If your startup doesn't have the right compliance certifications, you can't close major customers. It's that simple. Vanta is trusted by over 1500 SaaS companies to automate the time consuming and expensive process of preparing for a SOC 2, HIPAA or ISO 27001 audit.
With Vanta's continuous monitoring solution, you avoid hosting auditors on site and taking hundreds of screenshots to prove that you're compliant. Here's how it works. Integrate with your cloud provider and tools, check off items on the customized to do list and let Vanta continuously monitor your security so you can focus on growing your business. Founder's Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1,000 off coupon at vanta.com forward slash Patrick. That's vanta.com forward slash Patrick.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:47)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:12)
My guest today is Justin Waldron, co-founder and president of Playco. Justin is a pioneer of the social gaming industry after he co-founded Zynga at age 19 and he has continued to build games ever since. In our conversation, we cover how Justin sees the future of gaming as the social platforms evolve, how gaming may be the next tool for content creation and how Playco has approached aligning incentives for game creators and players. As talk of the metaverse becomes more mainstream, it's fascinating to hear directly from those around it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Justin Waldron.
So Justin, you have built some of the most interesting companies in the world, past and present, and also operate in the gaming space, where I'm personally so fascinated because of the way in which it allows people to interact. Now across the globe, across a whole number of different platforms, and it gives you a window into how people are behaving online that's pretty unique. So I can't wait to go all over the place with you today. I was thinking about the right place to start.
And before we hit record, you mentioned something that maybe is an interesting on-ramp, which is this concept, very popular concept these days of the metaverse, which we think of as some sort of new digital world where we all have some digital representation and can do everything we want with all the people we want. I think you have a slightly different conception of how we might get from where we are today to that sci-fi future. Maybe you could begin by outlining what you think is happening and why it's so interesting.

**Justin Waldron** (3:37)
If you think about the way that things started off online, we started representing each other with text.
And when we started in the chat rooms that we had over a decade ago, and we moved toward images to represent our avatar, and then we moved towards social networks, where we started being able to add all of this context. Who are your friends? What are your hobbies? What do you like to do?
Now, we're representing ourselves with video, live video, and audio over the internet. And we keep upgrading, bringing our real selves online. While I see that there's this one movement happening on the side of the metaverse, which is creating a world that's so compelling, everybody wants to move to it, pack up their bags, leave the real world and go to the new virtual world. I think that what we've actually been doing is slowly migrating ourselves in pieces into this virtual space without realizing it. And because it's happening gradually, we look at ourselves on Zoom and it feels so natural. But we're actually in these virtual rooms together and we don't really think about it.