My 1st Company’s 1st Anniversary
Last week was my company Construct Studio’s 1 year-old birthday. It’s been real. Nothing can be more excited than seeing my baby has grown from a newborn to an infant. And I’m grateful that we’ve already got our first external funding from Vive X Accelerator within the first year.
So you might ask me: what does it feel like to be a startup founder? The answer is simple: I’ve learned a lot. I thought starting a company is just to focus what we want to build, and then keep iterating it. I’m a producer and a business development, so I thought I just need to manage my team and look for partners to work with. But our first advisor Carl Rosendahl, the founder of PDI who created Shrek and Antz, told me that the first thing I need to do is to find a lawyer but not just rely on any online legal paperwork website. He mentioned that we need someone to answer our “questions”.
1st Practice — Legals
The first three months was the most painful period, in the first three months of my company. Yes, you didn’t read it wrong, because the legal paperwork is not only painful but also endless(still dealing with it every week), especially for a English-As-A-Second-Language person who needs to read all the English legal terms. But I’ve learned a lot. I didn’t know what’s “convertible note”, I didn’t know what’s “option plan”, and I didn’t even know what “angel”, what “seed round” really means until I started reading online document and watching How To Start a Startup(A series of startup lessons from Stanford. MUST WATCH if you are interested in starting a company or already started a company). But my passion of being an entrepreneur scares those pain away. That was the first practice I learned.
2nd Practice — Right Place to Start
We started in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Carnegie Mellon University(CMU)’s main campus is. Joel Ogden and I are both from CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center(ETC), which is the production-focused Master program founded by Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli. And Jesse Schell, one of the most famous person in VR industry and the CEO of Schell Games, is one of our current professor. ETC focuses on making games, animations and interactive content with cutting-edge technologies. I moved to Silicon Valley in August 2015, because ETC has a campus embedded in Electronic Arts(EA). But Joel knew that in the beginning of the company, we would just need to focus on development. So he convinced me to move back to Pittsburgh, where the CMU talents are and the living cost is much cheaper than Silicon Valley. Just like Google cofounder Sergery Brin said: “Don’t come to Silicon Valley to start a business”.
In total of that three months in Pittsburgh, I only spent $950 US Dollars for my rent. My rent per month right now in Silicon Valley is $1250.
In that period, we found Amy Stewart, Brentt Kasmiskie, Nigel Randall, Larry Chang to join us. They are all from CMU ETC, so we were already familiar with how to work with each other. We were trained in the same way.
The most important lesson we learned from ETC is “Playtest”, which means user-testing in game design. Since we started Construct Studio right after we graduated from ETC, most of our friends are still in Pittsburgh looking for a job. And we got to invite them to come over to our “studio”(someone’s living room) to playtest our game for us. That’s where we started getting our name out there.
3th Practice —Press and Marketing
Press for The Price of Freedom
We spent around 6 months to create our first interactive content The Price of Freedom(PoF), which is an interactive VR narrative that based on the real stories of CIA’s Cold War Mind Control program Project MKUltra. Before the release on Steam and Viveport, I knew we need to do something for marketing so we could get more downloads. So far we’ve got 40,000 downloads, but I know we could get more if we did the marketing differently.
We released PoF on Dec. 21, 2016. Before that, we hosted a “The Price of Freedom Preview Party” at Upload Collective. Will Mason and Taylor Freeman really helped us a lot on this. I invited the VR contacts I’ve been building since I worked at Wevr in January 2016. Tony Parisi, now Global Head of VR/AR Strategy at Unity and Construct Studio’s advisor, was my boss at Wevr. He basically knows every VR person in Bay Area, so I got to meet a lot of VR friends ever since. I invited around 100 people and 70% of them showed up at the event. I thought it could be a good story for press to write, however, it wasn’t that simple. Building relationship with press was a something I never learned before, and I wish I could learn that earlier.
Without inviting press to come to the Preview Party, it basically means there is no press. No matter how good the game is. PoF so far got 97% Positive on Steam, featured in Sundance and Cinequest Film Festival, and runner-up of Best Narrative VR at Unity Vision Summit 2017 and Best VR Game at Brazil Indie Game Festival 2017. But still, not many press wrote about it. Why? Because we didn’t give any press a private demo before launch.
If you let me do it again, I would research into the press about who write about VR stuff, and then visit them individually one by one, to let them know who we are and how good PoF is. I know we have a good story-driven VR game, and we are one of the first one to figure out what “interactive VR storytelling” is. I didn’t say it by myself, but from everyone who has tried PoF. You should download PoF here(free) if you haven’t tried it. I’m really confident about what my team has created.
I know it’s just another practice of starting a company, and I don’t regret I did it wrong because that’s how we all learn. But I know I won’t make the same mistake again, and wanna share with you this important lesson if you haven’t learned:
Press likes PRIVATE DEMO, they don’t like to write something that’s already available to the public no matter how good it is.
Sharing = Marketing
In this first year, one thing I feel I did it right — the China/Taiwan trip. I went to China and Taiwan for 1.5 months, trying to figure out the VR scene over there and connect with the local developers and investors. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for around 2 years. I’ve heard thousands of people told me that they want to bring their business to Chinese market, but not many of them have been to China. In February 2017, I got a chance to connect with Travis Wu, the cofounder of Lumiere VR and part of Vive X Batch I Shenzhen, and he told me I HAVE TO visit China to understand what’s going on over there. So I decided to go on a trip a month later to Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Since there are several HTC Vive offices in those places and I’m part of Vive X, I got a lot of great support.
During the trip, I met Remington Ji, who is the marketing director at ZhenFund and worked at OgilvyOne for 7 years. He gave a talk at Vive X Beijing about how important branding is. After that talk, I decided to start a video blog(VLOG) to share what I saw and learned in China. You can see my Episode 1: Intro here and Episode 2: Overview of China VR Arcade below. The reason I said I did it right is because I got 132 Facebook shares and 1000 likes for my Episode 2. I’ve never got that many shares or likes in my entire life. I believe that’s because this is something people really want to understand Chinese market. So people shared it, liked it, and commented “I’m intrigued to hear more.”
Sharing information and knowledge is the best branding and marketing for your company and yourself.
4th Practice — 1-on-1 Meetings With My Team
A friend of mine got a MBA degree from UC Berkeley. After he graduated, he told me he only learned two things from the program: 1)connections, and 2) 1–1 meeting with everyone on the team every week.
I don’t know if this is something that every founder would do, but I’m sure this is something that every founder should do. This is so far the biggest challenge but most powerful practice for my 1-year startup life.
Everyone always has something to share during the individual meeting. Sometimes it’s small, then it means you discover a potential problem. But when it’s big, then that means you have to figure out a solution and find the right people to solve the problem together. For example, teammate A would think the scope is too big for the current sprint but teammate B thinks that’s totally fine. Most of time teammate A is on the engineering team and teammate B is not. Then gathering two different perspectives to discuss how to cut down the scope is the first thing I do after knowing the problem, in order to waste no more time. This is a small problem, but sometimes some of teammates would not speak up in the multi-person meetings because they just don’t know how. It can become a big problem later after they “hide” too many things.
About the bigger problems, for instance, if teammate C thinks teammate D is incapable of an important task, then I have to start figuring out if that’s true from other teammates. If it’s true, then I’d need to think about what else D can do and how I can convince him to do other work without hurting his/her feeling. On one hand, I don’t want D to hold C’s back orslow down the whole team; on the other hand, I want D to do what he wants and likes to do the most. Every teammate is important for me. I found every single one of them. I talked to them one on one before we hire them, to make sure he or she is the right fit for the team. That’s why it’s hard for me to make a decision when this happens. But when it happens, most of time you just need to make a fast decision, in order to cut down the loss. And I did. It was truly heartbreaking for me but I know it’s better for the company.
As a founder, we can’t be emotional, because people make the wrong decision when we are emotional. It could potentially waste a lot of company resource and kill the company.
With 1-on-1 individual meetings with everyone on the team every one/two weeks, I’m able to understand everyone’s real thought and what they are really thinking in their deep mind. I’m not trying to find out any gossip. All I want is to make sure everyone works well with others and no one is unhappy about their jobs. I’m building up a long-term relationship with my team, and spending time talking with them is the best way I found.
5th Practice — Do More, Learn More
Conversation with Investors
I remember one thing really clearly — the first time I sat down and ate dinner with investors. And one of the investors at that table was Tipatat Chennavasin. We were in a Korean restaurant in Orange County. Kristie Ku invited me over during SIGGRAPH 2016. We started the conversation with great food around the world since we were in a restaurant. I didn’t know what to say cuz all I expected was to pitch my ideas to investors. My brain was running all kinds of scenarios that they might be going to ask me. After food topic, we started talking about the technologies we saw/tried in SIGGRAPH expo. Still, nothing came up in my head cuz still thinking about the pitch. Finally, Alice Lloyd George asked me about what I do. I was super nervous because the moment I’ve been practicing in my head has finally come…
I started talking but I didn’t know what I was talking about, and then we asked for the “check”, from the waitress. End of Story.
I felt pretty down afterward, but I know it’s just the first time. We all have the first time for something and screw it up.
After hundreds of meetings after that first one, I don’t even need to prepare anymore. I know what we are doing. I know what people might ask about our product. I know every detail about Construct Studio because I’ve been practicing a lot with potential consumers, investors, in English, in Mandarin, and even with people that know nothing about VR/AR. I also spend a lot of time talking with different teammates, to understand different perspectives of our product, from engineering side, from art side, from sound side, from any possible side to be ready for any kind of questions.
Another thing about investors I learned from an investor, he told me:
“Most investors don’t know the industry as much as you do.”
Investors spend time finding the right founders and startups to invest; founders spend time digging into what they focus on as deep as they can. Investors may know what’s the best-selling VR game or what are the main problems that could cause people nauseous, but they may not be working on a new locomotion system and trying really hard to solve the dizziness problem for VR.
And some investors told me, for early-stage company investors, most of time they invest in the founders themselves instead of their ideas. They believe these founders are the right people to invest. They can foresee them doing something right. So being confident and passionate about your own product is one important step. You have to understand every detail of your product and also need to be very sure about what you are looking for. For example, I always say “we are raising 1 million US Dollars”, but not “we are raising 600K~1.5M”. I, as a founder, just always need to be confident about everything even you are nervous. I always don’t think too much or pretend I don’t care at all before talk to investors, and it really helps.
Talks & Panels
This was my first talk that is ever invited by someone in the United States. As a English-As-A-Second-Language person, it was pretty excited and in the meantime scary for me.
I want to thank my teammates Amy, Joel, Jaehee, Jack and Eric for this.
As you can see in the video, I was nervous as f😳k. Every sentence was not a correct or complete sentence. But I still tried to talk jokes because I gained confidence on stage when people laugh at my jokes.
I just wanted to show you the first one and the most recent interview I did with FusedVR.
Yes I think I’m fatter than a year ago, or maybe it’s just the lighting… But my point is, I become talkative because I’m more confident now. It’s because I practiced in a lot of talks, panels and conversations even though some of them were still not complete sentences. But I already know what it feels like to talk in front of many people. I stop getting THAT nervous.(but still a little bit every time)
We just need to do more to learn more. And you learn more from news and the people you talk to. One day you know more about your area than other people do, you just don’t feel nervous and get used to it, because you know more than they do.
Do more, learn more, then do more.
6th Practice — Remember To Stay “Healthy”
Healthy Mind
In the beginning, I was working 12-15 hours a day. I clicked the mailbox app on my phone more than 100 times a day, because I wanted to make sure I reply the email as soon as I can. “I’m a founder, so I need to work harder than anyone else on the team.”, I kept telling myself. Then I got a problem. I lost passion really easily. “Passion” is what I think the most important element for any startup. I only hire people have passion about our product. As a founder, if I lose passion, I know it could be contagious and affect teammates’ mood.
Later on, I found playing basketball allows me to release a lot of my pressure, and spending at least one day a week away from work keeps me motivated. Not just doing those things, but need to focus when doing those things. For example, when playing basketball, I always try my best to not think about my work. Because if I don’t, none of the pressure would be released, because “thinking” is where the pressure comes from. Also, I try not to bring my phone during basketball or eating or hanging out with friends. I got inspired by Simon Sinek’s talk about Millennials in the Workplace, and “put away your smartphone” can easily make you feel relieved.
Do not rush. Take a break sometimes, your passion can last longer.
Stay Clean
If you know a little bit about VR, you definitely know Job Simulators from Owlchemy Labs. But you might not know one of founder Alex Schwartz’s title is “CEO/Janitor”. I don’t know his reason, but from my perspective, it’s really hard to ask your teammates to clean up the space and work hard in the same time, especially during crunch time. However, if the environment is not clean, some people on the team won’t be happy and can’t be efficient on their work. Most of time, “some people” is me. So I’d grab a vacuum and start cleaning for my team, in order to be in the position to “whip” on them to work harder 😂😂.
And I believe everyone knows, no one like dirty and smelly workspace, right? Well, maybe? 🤔
Overview
I said “Practices” instead of “Lessons”, because I think it’s an ongoing thing. I don’t know when I’ll finish these practices, but I believe there will be more practices and challenges when more things happen. I hope this could be helpful if you are trying to start a company, or already started a company and are still learning like me.
Joel Ogden and Chuck Tsung-Han Lee started Construct Studio on June 6th, then we officially registered as a Delaware company on July 12th. We started as a content creator and created The Price of Freedom(PoF). During making PoF, we realized the tools out there are not efficient enough for VR/AR interactive content development, especially for storytellers and artists who don’t have coding experience. So we decided to expand and share our in-house production tools and construct a templated-based pipeline toolkit Vera that works on top of major content creation platforms like Unity and Maya. Vera bridges the pipeline between creative platforms and game engines to empower all the creatives to make interactive content easier and faster. What we want is simply to help the VR/AR industry get more good content easier and grow faster!
Sign up for Vera waitlist: https://Construct.Studio/
I’ll write another one on Construct Studio’s 2nd anniversary if my baby is still alive 😂😂😂
