Moritz Baier-Lentz: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Gaming
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Hey everyone, and welcome to Generative Now. I am Michael Magnano. I'm a partner at Lightspeed. And this week, I'm excited to share a conversation that's all about gaming and artificial intelligence with my colleague Moritz Beyer-Lenz. Moritz is a partner here at Lightspeed where he backs breakout companies that fuse AI with game design, storytelling, and world building. He was a world champion player of Diablo II.

turned Goldman Sachs banker and Stanford scholar. And now Maritz helps shape how we'll interact, create, and play in an AI-powered world. Here's my conversation with Maritz.

Moritz, how are you? I'm great. How's it going? Good. Good to see you. You know, I see you almost every day. So just another great day here at Lightspeed. I mean, almost every day is probably an understatement. That's true. It's every day. It's probably multiple times every day. But, you know, we're always talking about deals and companies. We don't often get to talk about each other.

And so I'm very excited to talk about you today. It is one of my favorite topics, it turns out. For people that know you, anyone that's listening that might know you or watching, they would probably agree with that. I think there's no way to start a podcast with you without talking about how you got into gaming. So let's

let's do it. So I think my gaming career technically goes back about 20 years now and it's been on and off but it started as a player professional player during my middle school and high school years. I grew up in a small town in Germany and

My parents had dropped out of school and my brother had dropped out of school. And frankly, the bar was relatively low. They just asked me to finish school. And I thought that was well doable while also playing a bunch of video games. Soon as we got connected to the Internet, which was late, I think around 2001, fell in love with Diablo 2, popular Blizzard game at the time, played that every day. I mean, at least for eight to 10 hours, more on the weekend over years.

and ended up peaking out at global number one ranking twice in 2003 and 2004. It was a wild west days of item trading as well. I mean, this has become a topic in the Web3 era, where we're obviously also active with our blockchain infrastructure team. But the truth is that digital item trading was already a thing in the Web1, even before we had social networks, YouTube, Twitch or any of that.

it was possible to sell off digital items on eBay, which was back then also in its first and second year in Germany, respectively. So, you know, very loose platform.

You would find someone online who was willing to trade off their disposable income for your skill and time. And there was a market. And with that money that I made during those years, I ended up financing college and grad school, went into tech for a few years, and then picked up gaming many years later at Goldman when I was supposed to do tech investment banking, but had the idea to start a gaming practice for the firm. So hold on, take it a step back. You made money by...

basically going finding items for people like they would pay you to go find an item in Diablo 2, like a bounty hunter in Diablo. So basically, there were certain items in the game. And I mean, the big beauty, I think, of Diablo 2 was this beautiful systems design and items catalog design where you

As much time as you spend and put into this game, it never felt like you were done. You could technically finish the game in a day, as in beating all the levels and beating all the bosses or whatever, but it felt like you could never finish this game and you would inevitably always make progress towards something bigger, better, improving your character, improving your gear, improving your skills and all of that. And so the ceiling was limitless, but...

I would say, rarity and value of what gave you an incremental advantage grew exponentially the further you went in. And so it was incredibly hard to obtain certain items because it was very hard to get to the bosses that would even drop them. You would have to do it many, many times to get lucky on the exact right role of random attributes on such items. And so

You know, there was basically a translation of skill, knowledge and frankly, time to find these items. And then you had some rich folks, you know, all the way from the US to Russia who didn't want to spend a couple thousand hours to get the best stuff in the game. And maybe had, let's say, five grand laying around on the bank account and

And they would take the leap of faith to basically wire the money up front on eBay through PayPal, agree on a time and day to meet in-game.

open a trade window and for me to put that thing into the trade window and effectively trade it for nothing because I've already received the money. So that was how it worked. Does the money get held in escrow or something? Or they're totally just trusting that you're not going to scam them? It was totally paid up front. And the kicker was also...

Because it was web one and not web three, the IP, including the items, was technically publisher property. So what you were selling was the service required to obtain the item, not the item, which obviously no one cared about the service in the time. People cared about the item. Technically, what you could have done, and again, this is...

This is my 14, 15 year old me doing this. You could have run away with the money and probably totally be fine. Yeah. And the money was paid up front and it was a total leap of faith. And obviously that improved with Web3. But the fascination and the idea and what created the value of these things in the first place, which was people caring about a great game and who they are and what they can do in a great game, that hasn't changed.

So if you don't mind me asking, how much were you able to make collecting items for rich people in the US and Russia? More than a teenager should make. And enough to help with financing college and business school in the US, which is also cheap. That's crazy. When you are ranked number one at Diablo 2, one of the most popular games in the world, what does that...

especially it's all online. And as you said, this is web 1.0. We're not all sitting on Twitter all day. You know, we're not all overexposed on the internet. Like what types of doors does that open up for you? What comes along with being number one of a video game in that era? There was not much to do with it at the time. There was no, I mean, there's barely any professional esports infrastructure. So the way to make money with esports

tournaments, prize pools, or any of that was just starting. And I think, you know, that was really only the case for Counter-Strike maybe with ESL, Electronic Sports League forming at the time, other than item trading. And we saw the same thing happening in RuneScape around the same time. Like that was basically the way to monetize. Just to spell it out, there obviously also was no way to turn eyeballs, kind of creator monetization streams around this. There's no Twitch. Like,

No Twitch. Yeah. Pre-Twitch, I think around the start of YouTube, those channels didn't exist. Nobody was watching. No one was watching. Yeah. And I think even like, you know, async game watching on Twitch, on YouTube wasn't a thing yet. Yeah. Wild. Wild.

It's crazy how different maybe things would have been for you if you were doing that today. I still like to play. Rocket League is my game of choice. Maybe in the top 1 or 2%, but top 1% is very different from top 1. There's a big, big, big gap in between. Top 1% is like best among your town.

on weekend pick up soccer and top one is Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. And there's still some room in between. But it's frustrating. I'll say that like I could feel how things got harder even between age, call it 18 and 22. I think our raw intellectual capabilities, reflexes and all that kind of stuff peaks around age 20. And then it slowly degrades from there. And we make up for it with that.

And it's not just that more people came in and just got more competitive? You'll find very few esports athletes over the age of 25. Huh. Okay. I didn't know if maybe it was just it got more competitive, it got bigger, it got more popular, bigger pond. That is also true. And like, you know, the meta and the frontier in these games have moved forward and

people are now spending a lot more time and are willing to make it a career because it is more viable, obviously. You know, everyone back then was primarily playing for fun. Like no one was really playing for money. The money was a side effect. Got it. That's wild. So, yeah, I mean, I knew I knew you were number one or, you know, highly ranked. I didn't know the full story. But, you know, when I met you, I knew that and obviously had a sense that you were a super competitive person. And then I think within the first weeks of knowing you a couple of years ago,

You're like, I'm going to run seven marathons and seven continents in seven days. I don't know. That seems impossible. So I feel like that's another thing. We just got to hear the story of... The main lesson for me from the video gaming days is... And a lot of this I realized only in hindsight, maybe 10 years later, that it was this beautiful global playground where...

So many opportunities presented themselves. There were so many ways to play this game and to be number one, you basically had to deeply understand all the systems, take the entire thing apart,

and put it back together in ways that no one else was thinking about to kind of get that edge. I think because it was during my formative years that's that ingrained something in me and this notion of arguing from first principles, chasing global optima, not getting too hung up with how the game is played, translated into looking at life in similar ways. And

I think these are ideas that can translate into how you approach your job, maybe academia, but really taking a step back

I tremendously enjoy just laying out what are the next five years and experiences that I want to have. And it's a conscious exercise that I go through every December. And that includes, obviously, the things we work on here and how we set our strategies and focus areas. But it includes some experiences with my wife, friends, family, and it includes things that I want to do.

physically, how I want to educate myself, how I want to grow spiritually. And I think once you get that

a taste of the fact that the things you can do when you set your mind to them, because I'm not a standout athlete. I think my 23 and me has me marked for like tendency to overweight. So I, you know, I, I have to eat very disciplined and do a lot of sport to kind of still never see my six pack. Going into crazy adventures was one of the outlets for,

for that and it went from Marathon to Ironman to Ultras to this race that you just referenced which is

running seven marathons on seven continents in seven consecutive days. We started in Antarctica. Once we made the first step in Antarctica, we completed a full distance marathon there in South Africa, in Australia, in Dubai, Spain, Brazil, and then the United States, all within 168 hours. Two separate charter planes, a group of 50, and about two or three years of planning. And

Yeah, it is pretty crazy, but life's short. And I think this is my version of YOLO in the sense of

I think it's a precious gift and we should make the most out of it and life's too short to live it in a normal way. And this is, I think for me, this is one of the ways in which it manifests itself. How does that way of living and also your competitiveness and your drive now manifest into VC? You drew a connection to the marathons. Is there a connection to what you do now? Yeah, I mean, like, look, I think we're in a very competitive time.

Right. There's we're in the business of not only finding extraordinary people who build generational companies, but also building

convincing them that this is the right partnership and the right platform for them to engage with. And there's obviously formidable competition that we have. And there's a ton of smart people and a ton of motivated people out there who are trying to etch us out on what are the most enticing opportunities for Upside. Not just for us as a firm, but I think at this point in the stage that we're in for the future of humanity in many ways. And it takes a lot of

work and a lot of energy. I mean, you know this yourself, for us to stay up to date, to have original thoughts on the things that matter, which change quickly, I think to impress with the value that we can add in the right situations and

When we find something we like, you know, just like I do, what it takes to bring it home. And that is all consuming. Tell us about gaming, maybe kind of like pre-AI. Explain to the listeners and the viewers, like, what VC looks like in gaming pre-AI. What is the opportunity? What are the types of bets you're placing or you would be placing? You know, what are the types of founders and teams VC is looking for in gaming? Yeah.

Gaming VC started in earnest, I would say, around 2019, roughly in that time frame. So really recent. Relatively recent, yeah. Before that, if you had a good idea, if you were making a game, you would go to a big publisher.

milestone-based financing that way. This is how kind of like video game projects, more like indie game projects maybe got funded. For consoles, for PC? For PC, for console, for the mobile phone. So when we see a new game come out on PlayStation 5, it probably went through this process. Yeah, either it's part already of a big publisher, so it is maybe a division of an Electronic Arts or Take-Two

or an Activision Blizzard, or it is one of those independent efforts that receive publisher funding or milestone-based funding. There are a few things that happened, I think, over the last

I would say, 10 years that made video game investing a lot more viable and palatable to the VC mindset, which is what you can't have is some big creative binary effort that if you get so lucky, makes a good amount of money in year one, everyone buys it off the shelf. Then you go back into year two,

three, four, five of pretty much no revenue and having to come up with another game too. And like very lumpy revenue streams and kind of like highly risky. You basically have to nail the launch. The most important elements here that turned it into something that looks a little bit more like SaaS software with recurring revenues is this idea of life ops or life operated games that

are launched almost more like platforms. The game launches, but it's managed through the cloud in a way where you can push updates, where you can modify the game and effectively build this thing as you are in the market. I think Fortnite is a perfect example for that. If you think about how well Epic Games is managing it, in part also because they own the underlying engine, Unreal Engine, and they can just do a lot of magic that...

some developers don't even have access to. You know, you can bring an IP. You can literally, I mean, on some days, Fortnite looks like a car racing game. And then you suddenly tell your friends, hey, have you seen this? Like log in today, it's completely different. And, you know, there are special events, music events, film events, and even announcements get integrated into it. And it's this beautiful, I mean, people use the term metaverse, but it's this beautiful, interactive, social environment

third place that can encapsulate all other media categories. Then as a VC, now you're looking at something where you have revenue in year one, but there's also a plan to grow that in year two and three, instead of going back to the drawing board

And I think for us and the type of venture outcomes that we require, it's almost a fallacy to back games per se. I think the games need to look like platforms. Like platforms. Yeah. They're scaled consumer platforms with strong social network effects that even in year five plus still need to entice a player to come back, which in the attention game that we're in, not just within gaming, but competing with social media and all other outlets for attention, like

that is that is the the war we're fighting and and then there's other things that help like you know most uh most purchases are now done digitally they used to be purely physical you know going to gamestop which gamestop obviously developed its own complete uh dynamic but digital distribution life ops um these these are big big trends that made

gaming a bit more VC investable. And then obviously AI changed everything again. So maybe still pre-AI, you know, you're not necessarily looking for like the next Elden Ring, which obviously like

hyper celebrated game you know one of the best games of the year or whatever when it comes out but you're looking more for platform that can effectively like go on indefinitely like fortnight where there's their seasons like you know every time there's a new season it's like a whole new opportunity and obviously like you said like a deeply social aspect to it yeah so and and obviously then you know i think for most vcs investing in gaming and interactive media

Even before AI, the focus wasn't limited to studios, but it was also platforms and technology companies in and around gaming, things that can rhyme with Roblox, Unity, Discord, etc. You know, one thing that we'd be remiss not to mention is gaming is this beautiful playground that has actually brought upon

a lot of technological innovation. I think the most perfect example is Nvidia, which started as a GPU company for gamers. We built these GPUs originally because they were the most powerful engine for complex 3D calculations, which really mostly at the time was to make video games work.

And then from there, it became effectively the most powerful computational backbone that we could come up with and brought us advances in autonomous driving, the blockchain all runs on GPUs. And then obviously, most recently, the AI and generative AI explosion. And now gaming is a fraction of it. And you could look with a similar eye at the engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, right? It's this very hard...

complex environment, very competitive, very technically demanding. If you get something done in that space, it tends to have implications also not only for other media and entertainment domains, but oftentimes in many sectors beyond that. So I think also with the lens of AI, it's not just that

the gaming industry is using AI to improve itself, there are also precedents even all the way back to decision trees where gaming has also, through its own technological advances, advanced the field of AI. You know, again, going back to more of the traditional venture opportunities for gaming pre-AI, like what are these founders like?

to the founder that we know that builds, you know, SaaS product or, you know, consumer social network? Like, you know, I think everyone has like an archetype in their mind for these types of founders. Is it similar for the gaming founders or are these people more designers, artists?

It's yeah, like give us a sense. Leaving the studios aside for a second. If you look at the platform and tech companies in and around gaming and interactive media, I would say they look similar to what we would look at in other VC sectors. Right. They're effectively building software companies or social networks of sort. Okay. And for the game studios, I think the key roles you'd be looking for are

I would say designers and producers. Designers is not necessarily an artistic discipline. Designers as in designers of the fun, designers of the game mechanics, like what makes players come to this game. Like a product manager? Is it kind of like a PM? Yeah, I think product manager is maybe a fair comparison for this. Basically, these are experts in designing systems and designing engagement systems

for lack of a better word. And sometimes you even come up with completely different genres, right? There was the first time someone built a first-person shooter or an RPG game or a MOBA. And so these are designers that come up with these decisions and test them out. And then a producer is probably more of a...

you know, commercial manager, almost like a studio CEO, if you want. So I think the thesis by and large has been that in this field, you probably want to solve for people who have substantial experience, where maybe in other domains and in VC broadly, I think we're very open to

hungry young entrepreneurs that have unique insight that that that if true have profound implications and are willing to try something new AI has probably changed the playing field here a little bit as well and and changed a little bit you

you know, how people look at the industry today. But I would say that's probably a fair description of the last kind of like five years of early VC investing in the gaming industry. And in these teams, you know, so you clarify that a designer is not like, it's not an artist. It's not a, you know, they're not designing pixels, but there are

lots of those people in these organizations, right? Like these things. Yeah, that's, I think, I think art is typically one of the biggest proportionate representations in a studio and one that's, you know, going through big changes right now. Yeah. So that's, that's a great segue. So, so yeah, now take us through the AI moment. Like how is AI on the ground today impacting gaming, gaming studios and maybe even gaming venture investments when, when,

Yeah, I mean, I have to imagine these studios are now getting incredible leverage from AI, generative image models, video models, or maybe not, maybe not yet. Talk us through the transition that's happening right now. Yeah, I would say the early AI applications in the gaming industry were focused on, I think, productivity improvements, you know, including things like accelerating an ability to come up with concept art, even if you're not using stuff in production, you

you know, the what's called the pre-production process of like finding your art, finding your art style, getting inspiration, visual inspiration for engineers,

That is something that's probably most prevalent right now. I would say there's still, this is an artistic industry by and large, and it's probably fair to say there's been a longer resistance inside gaming as there has been in other artistic domains to the benefits of generative AI. But what we can also clearly see, especially I would say over the last 12, 18 months, is that

everyone's coming around to it. And there's a lot of pressure on budget reduction, especially for AAA games. And so I think it'd be a red flag for us if a studio wasn't excited about leveraging AI to improve internal workflows. And there are other domains here as well, like animation is one where AI can help. But

I think an important point to make here also, you know, as we speak about this is using AI to improve existing player experiences is one thing. And I think it's a less interesting thing. And then the more interesting thing is actually to use AI to create what we like to call internally previously impossible experiences in the end.

players don't care about the sausage making. I mean, it's great if you shave some margin off by being more efficient, but players care about the sausage, right? If what comes out on the end is not differentiated and unique or blows your mind and you would say, wow, this is something we could not have done before AI. And some of those examples include more intelligent non-player characters, agentic simulations inside games like

creating these truly living, breathing worlds where not everything is pre-scripted. Objectively, it's not something we could have done before AI. That is actually changing the sausage, so to speak. And I think that's where the value lies and where we have to be adamant and focused because this is a learning we can draw from previous platform shifts. When the mobile phone came around,

The companies that didn't master it, and a lot of them were the traditional incumbents at the time, the big PC and console players, they all tried to port their existing experiences to the mobile screen.

After going on for probably way too long and saying, oh, no one's going to want to play on their mobile phone. It's too small. It's not performant enough. And once you get around to it, you try and do exactly what you did on PC and console and bring it to the mobile phone. At least two fallacies with that. One is it's a completely different experience.

interface, right? The touch screen is fundamentally different from a non-touch keyboard, mouse or controller controlled monitor or screen.

And also, and maybe more importantly, the ways in which players engage with this new modality is fundamentally different. It's much shorter session times. You carry it in your pocket. While you wait in line for the DMV, you pull it out and you complete a level and then you put it away and then you get a notification. You get back into it a couple hours later for a few more minutes. That's so different from saying...

I'm playing Diablo 2 now, sitting down and playing for four hours. Right. And so we're seeing the same thing again. And I think we see enough now that I can say with confidence that I think history repeats itself here. And companies and the startups that natively embrace AI are

for how they design their organization, but also the types of experiences that they're going after. Those are probably the ones that will build the multi-billion dollar outcomes. And it's our duty to focus on those. So it's not going to be the, you know, the classic studio that now just gets leverage on AI to make, you know,

art creation more efficient. It's like, hey, what is the net new experience that leverages AI to do something that's never been done before? So you mentioned NPCs, non-player characters that are now alive. I imagine they're sort of agentic and sort of powered by these open-ended characters.

LLMs. What are some other new sort of formats of gaming that we're seeing or new elements of gaming that we're seeing based on AI or that are built on AI or AI first? I think the most interesting applications that we're looking at is one is anything that

brings non-scripted behavior into existing game worlds. And we touched on that a little bit. I think that's one thing. And, you know, one portfolio company of ours that is pursuing this strategy is InWorld AI. The other interesting pattern that we see with AI is enabling everyone to build video games. And that is currently unfolding in two fundamentally different ways. And one is early and the other is very nascent.

The early one is vibe coding games or a few companies that have basically developed prototypes for a prompt to game experience. And this makes sense if we think through the modalities that are already going through the prompt to medium transition right now. Obviously, text, images and sound and music and video we can now all generate. It would logically follow that

the next frontier here to crack is to enable users to also build generative games. And there are two different ways. The one where we see a little bit more progress right now, and it's also a little bit easier to wrap your head around, is effectively automating coding

in the traditional ways in which game development happens today. So still in a game engine with textures and meshes and effectively automating the things that a designer or engineer does today. And that's akin to, let's call it like a cursor for game development. Just like we can automate software development, we can automate game development. And it's more complex and harder because it's not just code.

That's one area that we see. The one that is very nascent right now and maybe even a little bit wilder is this idea of world models, generative, interactive video.

which takes the premise that we can now generate video. And ultimately, if you think about a video game and what we're looking at most of the time, at least until we have augmented reality glasses and things are truly 3D, what we get from a video game, what reaches us in 99% of the cases is 2D. It's on a 2D screen. So really, if we could perfectly...

fool the player, so to speak, with a live interactive 2D video stream

It would be indistinguishable from what happens in the background of a traditionally developed game because you don't need to know all the 3D calculations that are going on as long as it looks coherent and what the final 2D output is. And so there's a few companies who are basically at the cusp of generating video in a way where it responds to your actions

key inputs, mouse inputs, controller inputs, and gives you the next frame that is logically congruent, including lighting and shading and multiplayer interactions, and can render this quote unquote next frame at 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second,

Right now, it's still very low frame count, low resolution. You can also look at mid-journey pictures from like, what, four years ago where the dogs had like three eyes and seven legs. And I think our...

job is to squint a bit, but squint smartly, maybe, and then try and find analogies or at least come up with the hypotheses that would need to be true for this to become a reality in a reasonable timeframe, right? Sometimes it's not enough for us to be right on something that

ever happening, like brain computer interfaces or augmented reality glasses. I mean, I think we can probably agree they will be part of the future. And the bigger question sometimes is whether it's in the next, call it two to three years or maybe ten. Just to get really clear, what you're saying is in these types of world models, if you could generate everything, the next frame based on keystrokes, etc.,

you know, all the teams and the organizations we spoke about, you know, the dozens or hundreds of artists like that just goes away because the model sort of does it automatically. Is that kind of what you're saying? I think the most extreme version of how this could manifest itself would be a future where you may no longer need a lot of the roles that make up

a studio today or in an even more extreme case, studios altogether. But even if we get to the point where you can generate these games, I think even if we get to high fidelity experiences in the beginning, maybe it will take a while for them to really be off the caliber. And we just talked about how these are managed like platforms, right? Like evolving ecosystems with IP integration. So let's say even when you can prompt the first games that are actually fun,

then there's still a long way to go to get to that level. I mean, that is hard for me to see in the next five years, but maybe we'll get something, you know, in the next two years. And...

You know, YouTube also coexists alongside Netflix, coexists alongside the traditional film industry. And maybe this will unfold similarly. And maybe it's also a fallacy to use these new methods to try and recreate the things we can already do today.

If we can truly have generative live interactive video, maybe people will use it to play memories, to relive moments. You put in a photo...

of a cherished moment playing with your child. And you can dive into that photo and you can walk around in that photo with a reconstruction of the room based on all the photos you've taken of your home and basically relive moments. And maybe those are the kind of things that people will do. I think it's really, really hard to come up

with what this will do and what this will enable. Just like I think a lot of the mobile experiences, even just how games look today, it would have been very hard to predict some major changes

developments, even I would say 10 years ago. Right. So world models, you know, the near the near term application, which is somewhat obvious, is that game experiences become generative. They become dynamic based on, you know, the models sort of creating them in real time. But if you just go further and further up the curve, yeah, maybe it goes beyond games and it's more about

you know, actual worlds, right? And then if you start thinking about the innovation around hardware and, you know, maybe we take something like the Apple Vision Pro several steps ahead. Yeah, you can imagine sort of teleporting yourself to a completely different experience that feels completely lifelike and real. It's a wild time.

It's a wild time. What else is happening in gaming that people aren't really talking about? You know, other promising use cases of AI in gaming that are maybe under-discussed or ways that people are potentially using AI as a tool for playing games. Like what else is happening right now? You know, the other theme that's maybe not even AI related that we see a lot is this idea of game mechanics and things that work inside games.

trickle through into other sectors, I think specifically consumer. I think Duolingo is such an interesting example, right? Like this is

I mean, you know, some, some, some people say it's really more a game and, you know, if you get, if you get lucky, you'll learn a little bit of language along the way. I think New York times is a super interesting example. Uh, it's technically speaking a publicly listed gaming company. It makes over 50% of its revenue with games, uh, these days. And, um, you know, it's one of the ideas that we also explore on, uh,

our recent video podcast, Game Theory, which is really not only about games, but about the concept of play and the importance of play in creating experiences well beyond gaming and interactive media. And I think even in the ways in which we conduct ourselves, one thing that lives rent-free in my head is that

You can almost separate everything in life into work and play. Play is safe exploration where you actually learn new things and then work is where you put the learned things on the road and execute. Not to get too philosophical, but

AI algorithms work in similar ways. They explore where they go wild and collect new information and you kind of tweak how much of that you want. And then they have exploit where everything they learned, they put on the road. All right, let's talk about game theory. So the new pod, which you just referenced. So you're doing a podcast.

Game theory. Well, I don't want to describe it. You describe it. Yeah, the idea with game theory and what we're doing, and we launched it last week, and I think very happy with the reception so far. I guess wherever you're watching this show here, you're probably one or two clicks away from game theory. So I'll leave you to it to find it. We sat down and we're doing this in partnership with Goldman and McKinsey. We sat down with the CEOs of

Roblox, Xbox, Scopely, Unity, Niantic and Take-Two, which I think is a very fair set of the leaders in gaming and interactive media.

And we talk about a dimension of play that each of these companies has mastered. For Roblox, it's user-generated content. We talk about AI with Dave Pizzucchi, the CEO of Roblox as well. For others like Niantic, it's the intersection of play and the real world.

with games like Pokemon Go. Through that company lens, but also through a personal lens with each of these CEOs, we explore the role of Play for the products they've built, but also in those CEOs' personal lives. How Play has impacted how they conduct themselves at work and how Play has impacted decisions they made in their personal lives and how they see themselves. And these are, I would say, very candid

conversations of about 40 minutes each. I think gamers or non-gamers would encourage to check them out. Are these people you've met before? I mean, these are obviously some pretty impressive people, CEOs of Roblox, Unity, et cetera. And if not, like, I mean, what have you learned from these people so far? I mean, these people are everything we just talked about. These people are like literally on the front lines. Yeah. They don't have all the answers themselves. You know, it's maybe one one takeaway, you know, on the first question over the last

I would say five years. This is just an industry that I care about tremendously. And I think between my previous job at Goldman, where I started the gaming practice and then over the last five years in VC. So I guess coming up on almost a decade on this weird intersection of gaming and finance, I've just personally enjoyed bringing together the people who shaped this industry

In thoughtful formats, like every year we host what I think now has become the largest CEO gathering of gaming CEOs annually around GDC, which is a big conference in San Francisco in March. This time around, almost everyone was attending. I think something like 80% of the gaming industry was there with their CEO. But we're not talking about business and shop. We're bringing everyone together and we're asking people like pretty...

personal prompts for intimate small group table conversations so I think I love connecting people but I also love connecting them meaningfully and I think there's a lot of friendships and kind of unique meetings that have spawned out of that and

Dave from Roblox I'd never met before. There's a few people and Matt Bromberg from Unity, the episode that we released yesterday. I hadn't met him either. And so for in some cases, my first interaction with them, too. I was pretty surprised by how by how openly people spoke. I mean, you know, Matt, for example, took over Unity at a time where I was very challenged.

We opened up with a question asking him if anyone talked him out of the job. You know, and he gave a great answer to that. So we're not holding back in our conversations. Well, I'm excited to dive in. And yeah, like you said, I guess people can find that wherever they're listening to this. Type game theory, I guess, right? Lightspeed game theory. Lightspeed game theory. Awesome.

Moritz, always a pleasure. Like I said at the top of this, I see you multiple times a day, so I'll probably see, in fact, I think I'm seeing you in 30 minutes from now, but I really appreciate you doing this. And yeah, if you ever want the perspective of a casual gamer, non-gaming CEO on your podcast, you know where to find me. So thanks again. Sounds like a plan. All right. Take care.

Thank you for listening to Generative Now. If you liked this episode, please rate and review the show. And of course, subscribe. It really does help. And if you want to learn more, follow Lightspeed at Lightspeed VP on X, YouTube or LinkedIn. Generative Now is produced by Lightspeed in partnership with Pod People. I am Michael McNano and we will be back next week. See you then.