Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist, This Week in Startups. Very excited to have Brynn Putnam on the program She Is, the CEO and founder of Bored. Welcome to the program.

**Brynn Putnam** (0:10)
Thanks so much for having me, Jason.

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:12)
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**Jason Calacanis** (0:49)
I saw you going trending. I think my friends over at USV, Union Square Ventures, major series A, I'm assuming, or a big seed. Congratulations on that. I've been friends with Fred Wilson. He was hired me to read business plans for him in 1995, just to massively date this. He was doing something called Acme Ventures with Jerry Colona, which became Flatiron, which then became Union Square. But he's been at it for a long time. And I've known him since I was 24 years old. Great investors. But my lord, what an amazing demo sweeping the interwebs.
Maybe you could tell everybody what board is, and maybe we could look at a launch video or whatever you have here, because I saw this and I was like, oh my god, I'm buying three of them.

**Brynn Putnam** (1:35)
I love it. That's what we want to hear.
So board is the first face-to-face gaming console. It's a 24-inch touchscreen that sits on a table. And what we've done is we've trained the touchscreen to recognize physical game pieces. So it delivers an experience that's like board games meets video games, where everyone can sit around the same shared display, interacting with the screen, using these incredible game pieces.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:00)
Okay, so it's a giant iPad, but it has some sort of way of knowing what's on the screen that you put on there, whether it's a chess piece or whatever it is. And this technology has existed in iPads for a little while, yeah? What does that know? It hasn't. So what is the underlying technology here that lets the board know about the pieces? Because touch screens have existed for a long time, obviously. What is the technology that's having these pieces? Because I know I saw something that worked on iPad, but I'm not sure how the technology worked. And it might have been like a decade ago, it was some sort of a Disney thing, but I can't remember.
You tell me.

**Brynn Putnam** (2:42)
So touch screens recognize 10 touch points. So if you put two fingers on, it recognizes 10 fingers, but the 11th or 12th finger, it doesn't recognize. So our challenge was recognizing unlimited touch points as well as physical objects. So the way that we do that, we actually made you a special piece, a special Jason next piece.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:02)
Oh, look at me. I love it.

**Brynn Putnam** (3:03)
Jason in the next. To the straight up purpose.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:06)
Put me in Coach Brown. I'm going to be, I'm going to be in, I always, I always wear a pair of high tops just in case Coach Brown puts me in the game.

**Brynn Putnam** (3:12)
You're ready to go? I'm ready to go.
So the way that our pieces do that, they don't contain electronics or sensors. They have a unique conductive pattern built into the surface that uses a special blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic and as a unique manufacturing process that we've developed in-house. And then our custom software stack processes the raw data from the board's touch sensor using embedded AI to detect and track the pieces. So it knows this is the Jason piece, it's over here facing this direction, it's shooting a basket. And so we can play games where the pieces are actually controlling the digital screen in real time. And all of that is built entirely from the ground up. So our models are proprietary, trained on our own custom data set.
We leverage open source frameworks, but really everything is unique to our platform.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:04)
How many years have you been building this? And what does it take today to build a hardware product like this to the level of refinement you got to? Because people used to always say, hardware is hard. I don't want to touch a hardware startup.