In this episode we talk to Cole Clifford from Pickford AI. This is a little bit out of our normal zone as Pickford is more in the broader entertainment space. However as I’ve gotten connected to Cole and his co-founder Stephen, I found their journey one that share a lot in common with other game industry founding stories. And while its hard to replicate a founding after a successful exit, the path Cole has navigated to learn how to go from “first engineer” to “founder” to be full of great lessons and reflections.

This year I hope to continue to broaden the conversations I have to find more and more interesting and insightful founding journeys in and around games and entertainment that we can learn from and enjoy.

Welcome back to Founder’s Quest here in 2025. Our first episode of the year is with Heather Cerlan, founder of NEARstudios. After seeing the announcement of their game Hawthorn last year, I wanted to learn more about Heather’s journey to that moment. An artist being the galvanizing founder of a team is on the more rare side and learning how Heather found the spark to start a studio and navigated that journey was both interesting and inspiring.

I hope you enjoy hearing her story as much as I had recording it.

As the last episode of the year, I sat down with my co-founder at Jam & Tea Studios to have him share his founding journey. Hearing his perspective of the journey that we've shared really emphasized to me how each individual's founding journey is truly unique. I look forward to talking to more cofounders of folks that I've already interviewed next year. For now, we'll be taking a bit of a break over the holidays -- though its really because I've been fundraising over November/December and haven't gotten a chance to record much until January. I hope you've enjoyed the series thus far and look forward to more episodes in 2025!

Irena is a kindred spirit for me. She founded Unleashed Games in 2023 to pursue making games that tackled social design and brought players together. She hasn’t always wanted to start a studio, but after spending a career at places like Scopely, 38 Studios, and Blizzard working on World of Warcraft, she didn’t see anyone focused on the problems or opportunities she was most passionate about. If no one else is doing it, the sometimes you need to take the lead.

I deeply enjoyed my conversation with Irena, I hope you do as well. Let’s jump in

I've known Jeanne-Marie Owens (co-founder of Critical Path Games, 2024) since 2020 when we worked together at Phoenix Labs. There she had the interesting experience of being the first employee of a startup and going on the whole founding journey through to an exit. It was a remarkable run and amazing learning experience, which she was then able to carry with her as she decided to be in a founder seat fully from the start on this journey.

We also talked a lot about the work that DigiBC - The Creative Technology Association of British Columbia does for the Vancouver startup ecosystem and the fulfillment and enjoyment she's gotten from participating and becoming the executive chair of gaming for the org. It really shows the power that local organizations can have on a founding journey, and the power of communities they can build.

Let's jump in.

Ran Mo, founder of Proxima in 2021, didn’t always work in games. He initially spent time as more of a consultant and corporate strategy side of things before transitioning into product management at Electronic Arts. That said, entrepreneurship and games was always the goal and so he spent time learning what he felt he needed to before making the jump. And despite being a very hard jump, Proxima has been successful! Releasing Suck Up, one of the first embodied AI games, earlier this year to strong success and building off of that. Ran’s journey has definitely had some wild turns and was wonderful to listen to. Let’s jump in.

I met Mickael through the local development community in Vancouver Canada. He’s one of the founders of Caldera Interactive which spun up in 2019. As you’ll hear, Caldera really came together in the classic game industry fable way of folks who wanted to make games, doing it on the side, then make a play to do it full-time and succeed. In this case, the play was applying for the Canadian Media Fund, or CMF. I wanted Mickael to come on and share his story so that folks could hear about how local ecosystem funding can be a source as much as the classic tales of publishers and VCs. Not an easy road, but a viable one.

Andy Mauro founded Storycraft in 2023 after spending a lot of time in the "chatbot" tech space, including a previously founded and exited company. He and I got to know each other through our mutual investor, London Venture Partners. I've always really enjoyed his insights from the tech side as he approaches building a game studio and merges his prior founding experience with being a lifelong gamer. Andy also has spent a lot of time both being and receiving Coaching and spends time in the episode to talk about how that experience has shaped him as a founder, and his team.