Nancy is a seasoned executive with over 25 years of leadership in the gaming and digital entertainment industry. She has an outstanding track record, having launched over 100 games, including 11 No. 1 titles, collectively generating more than $2 billion in revenue. Nancy has held pivotal roles at top companies such as LeapFrog, LucasArts, Atari, and Hasbro. She also co-founded and served as CEO of Fingerprint, a global provider of digital content for kids that reached millions before being acquired by Sandbox Group.

Currently, Nancy leads WorldWinner (formerly Game Taco) as its CEO, steering the skill gaming platform known for its "Play to Win" experience. Since joining in 2021, she has revitalized the brand by doubling its real-money player base and tripling cash entry fees, solidifying WorldWinner's leadership in the competitive skill gaming space.

Tune in as Nancy shares her extensive journey and insights, including building major brands, the rapid growth of the skill gaming industry, and her unique reflections on entrepreneurship and leadership in the gaming industry.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How Robin’s team is revolutionizing retro gaming preservation
• The art of scaling technology for niche markets
• Why mentorship and perspective are key to leadership
• Insights into the future of video game hardware and emulation
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Nancy MacIntyre on Linkedin
• World Winner

Episode Transcript

Welcome to The Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by, you guessed it, Here's Waldo Recruiting. We're a boutique recruitment firm for the game and tech industries, and we value quality over quantity. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Andrea of Zebra Partners for introducing us. Zebra Partners is a wonderful firm led by Perrin Kaplan. They do PR, marketing, everything. 

Today we have Nancy MacIntyre with us. Nancy joined WorldWinner, which was formerly known as Game Taco in 2021 as the company's general manager and Chief Marketing Officer, where she led WorldWinner direct-to-consumer business. She was named CEO in May of 2023. 

Nancy is a well-respected games industry executive with more than 25 years of experience in digital entertainment. She has a proven track record of successfully growing audiences worldwide for mass-market digital products. Through her career, she's launched more than a hundred games and 11 number-one game titles, which has driven more than 2 billion dollars in revenue. 

Before WorldWinner, Nancy held senior leadership positions at LeapFrog Enterprises, LucasArts, Atari, and Hasbro. She co-founded Fingerprint, a leading global provider of digital content for kids, which was acquired by Sandbox and Company. Let's get started. Thank you, Nancy, for being here. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Hi, Lizzie. Thanks for inviting me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Before I ask you any questions, something new I'm doing, I want to tease our listeners on what we'll get into today. It includes, but is not limited to, how to build brands and player communities, your career evolution, the evolution and future of being a woman in games, founding and selling a company, and why skill gaming for the opportunity to win cash and rewards is one of the most thriving sectors in games.

I want to begin with how you got started in the game industry. Was it always your dream or did you, like me, stumble into it? 

Nancy MacIntyre: I would say it wasn't my dream, but I was working in technology at Lotus Development. Back in the days, 25 plus years ago, and that was really a technology business. And through being in a technology business, I started to learn about video games, actually, because one of my customers was an electronics boutique, if you remember them. And they were both selling productivity software as well as selling video games. 

And I started to learn about sort of video games as a business and was just fascinated by that because I loved books, movies, entertainment of all kinds, and games just really seemed like the next frontier. And everyone back in that time period, I was obsessed with arcade games- Pac Man, Frogger, et cetera, and games just seem like a dream come true. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's fun. It's fun to work with passionate, creative people and see all the love that goes into it versus tech, that's less love, I would say. 

And how did you end up at Hasbro? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Well, my first games job was at Broderbund Software. So I was working on things like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and Myst, and Kid Pix, and Print Shop. And like a lot of companies in the earlier days of games, the company scaled and then ultimately was sold to the learning company.

And during that time I was recruited by Hasbro because Hasbro was starting an interactive division and they had some of the best brands out there like Monopoly and Scrabble, et cetera. And I got convinced that they would be a good place for me. And I went and was one of the first people that joined Hasbro Interactive and was really involved in scaling a brand new game company within a much larger toy company.

Lizzie Mintus: Funny to think about where they are today. What was Hasbro doing and what did you contribute to and build while you were there? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, so Hasbro's vision back then was really to make family game night stretch beyond just board games, but to interactive games. The vision really was that if you love playing Monopoly or you love playing Candyland on the board, why not play it on your TV or on your game boy or on your PC?

And they really had a vision of making toys and games interactive. And because they were a toy company and their complete distribution strategy was retail, selling at Toys R Us and Walmart and Target, et cetera. Initially, I went there to run sales. So I was calling on the Walmarts and the Sam's clubs, et cetera, the world and working on getting distribution for the products and along the way, the CEO of the company, Tom Dusenberry.

He suggested that I had a great product sense and maybe I should move over to the product side of the house and I did. I became the VP of marketing for a new division that was interactive toys. So they were toys that had a PC game component and I worked on things as diverse as the NSYNC cell phone, which was a PC-based NSYNC experience where you could play games and talk to the boys on your phone. I worked on the Britney Spears Girl Talk product, which is another PC game, as well as a range of different products, Star Wars Galaxies, Tonka Trucks, et cetera, that really merged interactive play with toys. 

And it was a completely fascinating business because I was really working at the intersection between physical and digital and back then which was the early 90s. It was way ahead of its time. So that was super cool. And I learned a lot about the business and then we made it a multi million dollar business. And along the way I got promoted to be head of all product marketing for all of the businesses. So then I was working on PlayStation, GameCube, and Xbox, and you name it, we were working on it.

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me about some stories that you have from this time, just figuring out product market fit, launching a whole new category. There are so many stumbling blocks and things that go right. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, there's things that go right and there's things that go horribly wrong. Some of the things that I remember so clearly are just going back to the NSYNC hotline or the cell phone game. Everyone was super excited about it. They had a new album, which had no strings attached and sync was the biggest band in the world. Millions of teeny-bopper kids and girls were excited about it. And we were able to get an absolutely massive distribution.

And in fact, Walmart was so excited about this, that they asked me to come down and present the product at a manager's meeting around Thanksgiving time before Black Friday, because they were going to promote it. And there's thousands of people there, all these Walmart merchandisers, managers. And the person that went on before me was Regis Philbin, and he was selling a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game, and so I'd been feeling pretty good until I had to follow Regis Philbin. And I just remember that so clearly because it was such a crazy, crazy time.

But also at Hasbro, we had a brand called Backyard Sports that had been purchased from humongous entertainment. So it was really about playing with the pros as kids. And we had an NFL game that we, not only worked with the NFL, but created a bunch of fantastic kids' video content that went on Nickelodeon and went on CBS before games. And that was another one that was like, we were way ahead of our time really thinking about content and brand and game integration and on a super high level. So that was really cool. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's amazing. And then the next one, I've kind of lumped in one question, which was wild too. Do so feel free to unclump it, but you're a VP of marketing at Atari, VP of global sales and online games and marketing at LucasArts and EVP of product innovation and marketing at LeapFrog, which I don't hear about every day. But can you share some stories about the same thing you just talked about, building brands and player communities, because this is clearly your strength?

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah. So after Hasbro, I was working at Hasbro headquarters in Beverly, Massachusetts, and the opportunity came up to join Lucasfilm or LucasArts to run the Star Wars Galaxies, the online MMO. And this was before the days where every game was online and had a big player community. And I would say that Star Wars, the Star Wars Galaxies experience was one of the most humbling in my entire career, because it was a fantastic product that had been developed by Sony Online Entertainment that had done everQuest, and it had an incredibly passionate fan base. But George Lucas and Jim Ward, who was the CEO of LucasArts at the time, really believed that Star Wars Galaxy should have millions of users. And so I was brought in to help them not just build the brand, but evolve the product so that it would be as broadly appealing as possible.

Well, it turns out that we could make a product that was broadly appealing, but all the rest of the users, the legacy users would be super unhappy with all the changes because we changed the new game experience, et cetera. And many of the legacy players really protested. And there was a lot of unhappy players and a lot of commentary about the changes that we made that really all culminated in an article in the New York times. It was titled, Anatomy of a PR Disaster. 

So it's nice to have your products put in the New York Times, right? But not when you have just completely and totally misjudged what the audience really wants, but that was not a fantastic experience. But the flip side is that also at LucasArts, I got to work on Lego Star Wars, which was amazing and is one of the best games of all time. We, of course, got to work on Battlefront as well as the early days of The Force Unleashed. And so really amazing experience there, but not without its bumps in the road, mostly self-inflicted, I might add. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's a great bump. But I feel like the problems in games remain, right? So, in this situation, what did you really learn? What did you take away? How could you have made updates to be more appealing while still staying true to your loyal fanbase? This is like the timeless question, right? 

Nancy MacIntyre: It's one that I deal with in my current job all the time, how to keep legacy players engaged, happy playing, while making the product as appealing as possible to new users. It's really hard to balance. And fortunately now with the level of sophistication with customer segmentation, et cetera, we have many more ways to actually target users with specific things that they want, but it's still a challenge that needs to be dealt with.

But in answer to your question about Star Wars Galaxies, I think what I would say is that it was a long crawl back. We made some changes to the new game experience that, after we launched it, were designed to make players happy. We found some incentives and motivations for the legacy players to get them to come back. But we had damaged their trust and we had to work really hard to get that trust back.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, maybe like what Unity is going through. They're in a similar situation of regaining trust. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, exactly. It takes so long to build the trust up and it's really hard to use it. Even at Worldwinner, the company's been around for, this is our 25th year. So the product has been ongoing in the market since 2000, I think. And we have a large base of users who have been playing for 10 plus years and they like, how does the reward system work? How did they turn? What are the games? 

They really have certain ways that they like to play the product. And about six or eight months ago, we launched a all new version of the product with a new tech stack, mostly to deal with legacy performance issues and stability, just to bring it into the 21st century, literally. And we got a tremendous amount of pushback from people. Like we've dealt with it. People are still playing, they've come back, they're happier than ever. But again, it was a process. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I just had Joe from Solstyn on, which analyzes player behavior and what players say they want versus what they really want. And he said, sometimes your most vocal players love you the most. And they're the most upset about changes, but they're also the most loyal. So how do you go about parsing feedback between what people say they want versus what they actually want? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah. And also, we have a really robust player services and community initiative. So our player services people are talking to players all the time and like in any other category when they're unhappy, you hear a lot more from them than when they're happy, just like any other business.

But it's really important that the feedback that we get from player services has to be really parsed around, what are the things that are real and need to be looked at, dealt with, addressed, and what are the things that are very particular to one user. And should we address it? Should we look at it? So we look at everything we communicate with every player, but just because a particular player thinks that the new blue in on the platform is too bright doesn't necessarily mean that we should change the color to another color since it's already been tested, played through, etc. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I can see how that would be the knee-jerk reaction.

Can you talk a bit about what Worldwinner is and the evolution of the company since you joined outside of the company? The awesome new name change. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah. So Worldwinner is in the skill gaming business. And just for any of your listeners or you, if you don't know what it is, skill games are sort of what they imply that they are games that were caught that rely on a player's skill in order to win, which could be speed, agility, strategy, et cetera. There's no element of randomness and the outcome is entirely based on the player's skill. So it's like the difference between playing chess and roulette, for example, would be, would be a good way of thinking about it. So skill games can be anything. They can be anything from puzzle games to card games to golf games, etc, as long as they require an element of skill. And there's actually a mathematical definition. around skill games, since they're not random, et cetera. So there's a legal definition and a random definition. 

The way they are played is you are always playing against another person, a real person or a group of people, and you enter tournaments that can be head to head, or they can be multiplayer. And you're essentially paying an entry fee that puts you into the tournament. I play it. And then at the end, someone wins and someone loses. 

And our business model is that we take a portion of the entry fee as our rake. And that's how we make money. So we don't sell in app purchases or subscriptions or loot packs or any other kind of mechanic. Our only mechanic is the players make a deposit. They make entry fees into games and then they win or lose against another person. And so it's a really interesting category. It's been around, like I said, for something like 20 years. It's round numbers today, about 20 million people are playing in the US. 

So 12 to 15 percent of the total gaming audience in the US are playing. And like 50 percent of adults either have played or are currently playing it. And they're also playing casino games, and casino sweeps games, and social casino, and sports book and a range of other kinds of things, because gamers that like the thrill of winning money tend to like the thrill of winning money across a range of categories.

Lizzie Mintus: Why do you think it is thriving so well right now? Do you think people are sick of microtransactions or the certain demographic that you cater to is? And they just like this simple method of playing and the competitive nature. 

Nancy MacIntyre: I think it's really about the competition. What's interesting about skill games is that even though they go across genres, the most popular are card games, puzzle games, strategy games, solitaire, and bingo. Those types of games tend to dominate this category. So they are casual, but they are competitive in the same way. So easy to learn how to play them, difficult to master, but fun to really build your skill up, right?

And so most players, they play them because they really love playing casual games and they really like the competition and having just like when you bet on a football game it makes the experience of watching it more enjoyable or if you go to a super bowl party with a pool it's more fun when you have skin in the game. Same thing with skill gaming. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what makes people want to return just to continue to get that thrill? Or do you have specific in game events that happen? How do you draw players into your game? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Well, so every day we're running between two and 300 separate events. And so for every game, there might be eight to 10 different tournaments happening. And some of them are big tournaments with $10- $25,000 payouts. And others are head to head tournaments where the payout is $1.35. And so people really like continuing to come in because they're building their skill level. They're feeling more successful. And as you could imagine, we have a whole economy where.

People are not just winning money, but they're winning bonus bucks, or they're earning RP that gives them incremental entries into tournaments, so there's really a full circle there, like a continuous game loop, like in any other game. And on top of that, we have a really lucrative and exciting loyalty program. And people really like achieving lifetime rewards, getting benefits for being a long-term player. So even though it is a real money game, the psychology of the player is really not any different than people that are playing free-to-play games in any other category. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And what about in-person events? Do your players ever get together to play in person? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, so not really. Some people call skill gaming e-sports because it's competent competitive games for money, but it's not e-sports from the perspective of, we're not broadcasting events. People aren't going to large groups and watching people play that may come eventually, but it hasn't really come yet.

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. Maybe that's the next wave. Okay, back to your time at LeapFrog. So you were at LeapFrog and then you decided to start your own company. Why then?

Nancy MacIntyre: So after Lucasfilm, I went to LeapFrog and I was running product innovation and marketing. And I think I had like 400 people reporting to me and they ranged from ASIC chip engineers to people writing kindergarten songs. I mean, it was a very, very large and broad thing. At any given day, I might be working on TV commercials, or I might be discussing the architecture for the next leap pad. And I realized after being in gaming that working in the back sort of in the greater toy industry was just too slow for me and it wasn't sort of a great bit and I really wanted to be interactive. 

And along the way, the iPhone came out. You know, it seems like agent history now, but the iPhone had come out and I had become obsessed by the idea that LeapFrogs' competition was not Nintendo, which was the conventional wisdom that LeapFrogs' competition was every mom of a two-year-old with an iPhone in her purse because I lived in San Francisco. I could see it happening. And it was so clear to me that someone was going to be able to win the kids content business. And that the biggest issues for parents were going to be finding high-quality kids content, knowing what their kids were really playing, finding experiences that they could trust and navigating the app store.

And so the idea for Fingerprint was really born from that insight, as well as looking at businesses like. Zynga and GmoCo. Those types of companies that were aggregating content and cross-selling across the content. and Netflix. I thought, all right, well, there should be a play here for kids, a kid's business. And off I went. And so with two kids in high school and having never been an entrepreneur before I made it happen. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. So did you recruit people who you worked with before? Tell me about, not the boring LLC setup part of the business, but you had this idea and then you built a team, you raised money- how did this all come together? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. So it was an utter serendipity. But I left LeapFrog. I was doing some consulting work while I was working on my business idea. And one of my consulting clients was the game company, THQ. And while I was working on the project that they'd hired me for, I really got to know some of the leadership.

So Brian Farrell, the CEO and Martin Good, who is the head of the kids business and I started talking to them about this business idea I had for Fingerprint and what it was. And I basically pitched them on what I wanted to do, not quite off the back of a napkin, but not much further than that. And they really liked it. 

And at that point they were one of the largest sellers of Game Boy cartridges and Nintendo products. And my pitch to them was, you know, you have the most to lose by the shift to iPhone. So why not invest in something that is going to future proof you. And so they became, other than the incubator that I worked with, K2 Media Labs, THQ was the first major investment in the investor in the company. 

And I still feel very lucky that it all kind of worked and they were the first investor. And then I was off to the races. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. That's a great story. So you had a pitch basically back of a napkin. 

Nancy MacIntyre: I had a PowerPoint. I had a vision of what the business should be and how we would make money and how to do it, but I did not have a technology plan. And I was able to convince them that I was investable and that I would get the technology plan sorted. And I was able to network to find a brilliant CTO that came in and helped us design and build this thing and get to a prototype of it that we then use to do our subsequent much larger rounds. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And then can you tell me about fundraising? And I would love to talk about fundraising and just being a woman in games because it is different.

And I think now 2 percent of funding goes to women, which is horrible and wild. And every year there's all these initiatives to make it better. This really changed. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that 50 percent of the gamers in the US or even more are women and really driving mobile games, but only about 25 percent of the people working in the games business are women.

And what gives me comfort is, that was the same way Hollywood was. We've begun to see more of a shift there, so I do think we will continue to see a shift. It's taking a long time. But you asked about fundraising. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, fundraising in your subsequent rounds. So how much did you raise and what did you have at the time in order to raise. Obviously it's different per the economy and it's harder, currently, but it'll get easier again. 

Nancy MacIntyre: So, I will say that, my initial business partners, the incubator that I worked with was called K2 Media Labs. Daniel Klaus and Kevin Wendell, who were two successful tech executives, had formed this incubator to essentially invest in businesses that they were passionate about. And they were phenomenal. 

I mean, they were the best possible partners that I could have. And once we had raised the initial money and we built a prototype and we had done some testing in the app store and that kind of thing, they were good at helping me figure out, how do we go do our major fundraise? And our first fundraiser was a Series A and we raised like, I think around 8 million dollars through a Canadian entertainment company, Corus Entertainment. And that, A. put me in front of a bunch of people who were strategists that were likely to like the fact that we were already in business with THQ. 

And because I'd come from a corporate environment and in their space, I could talk their language. So I wasn't an entrepreneur who had never built anything, never marketed anything. Didn't understand the consumer. I was like starting on third base because I had already had a long, successful track record of making successful products.

I had just never had to build the team and do the whole thing myself, but they recognized. They believed in me and they helped potential investors really see me and see what we were doing. And so if I had any advice for anybody, it's like mentors really matter. And you don't always have a choice of who your investors are going to be. But if you do, choose the ones who are going to be the most helpful because it really makes a difference. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's great advice. And eventually yoUSold the company. What led you to sell? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, so, well, we then subsequently raised a series B, which was led by DreamWorks slash Comcast. And so that was another step forward in validating that what we were doing was really interesting. And all of the investments also came with commercial relationships that helped us grow our audience, bring new content and et cetera. 

And we were running the business and we were showing some good, but not spectacular growth. The category was becoming more and more competitive between Amazon's Kindle for kids and all the Netflix initiatives. And we were working closely with Samsung, Verizon, T Mobile, et cetera. And then the pandemic came. The global supply chain issues came and so there weren't a lot of devices being sold to children and we were really, really struggling. 

We began to look for exits and Sandbox was a private equity firm that was in business with the global company, Liberty Global. They're based in the UK. They had already acquired a number of other kids businesses with the idea that they were going to do a major kids roll up. And so they acquired a fingerprint and hired me to run the kids business. And we were kind of off to the races. But it was a difficult time during the pandemic. 

And after being an entrepreneur for almost 11 years, it was really a hard landing for me, no issue with them as partners more. It was just a hard landing for me to go from a place where I was driving strategy decisions, et cetera, to working for a PE firm that had many other businesses. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's the biggest struggle. I always joke with people if they're going to last through their buyout period because it's a challenge when you're used to running it. But no, congratulations on the sale. And how did the roll up play out?

Nancy MacIntyre: It's still in motion. It's been three years since I left. They're still in motion. They seem to be continuing to do other acquisitions. They acquired another company called Play Kids, which is one of the largest kids content platforms now. So I hope they're doing great. And for all of my previous investors, I hope it's worked out well. 

Lizzie Mintus: What did you really take away after being an entrepreneur that you brought to Worldwinner? I mean, what a perspective change. 

Nancy MacIntyre: I do think in hindsight that when you're an entrepreneur, you are responsible to your customers, your employees, and your investors. And I think I probably erred too much on responsibility to my employees- like from the perspective that I really focused on keeping the company doing well enough to keep my staff, to keep things going, as opposed to I should have made harder decisions quicker in a lot of ways. Get out of business lines that weren't profitable. Make costs and structural changes more quickly. 

I really learned a lot from that when you're working at a big company. It's not usually your choice to manage your costs. You're given a budget, you need to fix within it. And I think, what I really learned from there was like, I should have been more laser focused on exclusively driving business results, because that would have been the best thing for our employees and our investors. And I think I got distracted, maybe because it was the pandemic too. That could have had something to do with it. But I learned that. 

But on the plus side, what I really learned, and I say this to every entrepreneur is, if you're going to be the CEO of a company, you have to always be selling. You have to be demoing your product in the elevator at the bar at a wedding. You have to be constantly talking to people, getting ideas, interacting with them about it, and you have to be completely focused on learning as much as you possibly can, so you can make good decisions because if you are constantly selling your customers, your employees, your investors. Like your partners, they have to believe because you believe. And if you're not doing that, it's really hard to make a go of it. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's true. You do have to be a hundred percent in and a hundred percent on a hundred percent of the time at all times. And you maybe don't want to be.

Such a successful career. And I always like to hear, what do you feel like in your years is your biggest accomplishment. What are you most proud of or fulfilled by?

Nancy MacIntyre: Well, I mean, there's the obvious that I met my husband in college and we're still married. And we have two happy, healthy, young adults as children. So that's a biggie. It's always that. 

But there's the obvious that I've gotten to work on a lot of super amazing products from Rollercoaster Tycoon to Lego Star Wars to whatever, and it's fantastic to make people happy.

I really subscribe to, I want commercially successful, but also profitable and products that really become part of customers' psyche and part of their lives. And I love it when I meet people and they're like Rollercoaster Tycoon is my favorite game of all times, or Civilization, or Frogger, or Lego Star Wars, or whatever it is. I feel most proud of that, that our products change their lives, and I love that. 

Lizzie Mintus: I love that. That's why I work in camps. It's fun. 

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, Worldwinner.com. 

The last question, you talked about mentorship and how you can't choose your investors, but you can choose your mentors. Who have been your biggest mentors in your career. And what have they told you? That's really stuck with you. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Well, probably the longest lasting mentor that I have had in my career is Tom Doosenberry, who used to be the CEO of Hasbro Interactive. We are still friendly, even though we haven't worked together in 20 plus years. And I credit Tom for recruiting me to Hasbro, then helping me thrive when I was working on the sales side to giving me guidance that allowed me to go into marketing, to not promoting me twice when I wanted to be promoted and lost jobs and really helping me learn from the experience. And then advising me through every job that I've ever had.

And then, including being an advisor to my startup to, even now, when our relationship is somewhat changed from, like, it's a mutual mentorship, because there's a lot of things that I know about at this point that can be helpful to him. And vice versa, long term relationships with people who you like, you trust, and you can be open with them is everything. 

People that will tell you the truth, but also pump you up, like, that's everything. And then the other piece is, I think mentorship can come from everywhere, not just people above you, but people around you and below you. And I do my best to surround myself with really smart people that challenge me and I really like. 

I've had multiple people that I've worked with a number of times in my career on the product side, the finance side, the engineering side. I try to surround myself with people that I trust and I like and I can learn from.

Lizzie Mintus: That's also what's beautiful about games. I feel like you work with people over and over again in different ways throughout your career. And I love to hear that your mentor became a little bit of your peer and now you give each other advice. 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, and what's even funnier is, we didn't talk about this earlier, but WorldWinner operates as WorldWinner, but we also have a strategic partnership with FanDuel. So we operate FanDuel Face Off, which is a highly successful skill gaming platform that lives within the FanDuel ecosystem. And the head of marketing on FanDuel FaceOff is Tom Dusenberry's son, Mike Dusenberry. 

So it's very much like a full circle and I love that. I love that there's families of gamers and even our head of product at WorldWinter, Heather Bales, her mother was a designer at Sierra Online. I love that there's multiple generations of gamers now. And that's just amazing. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it is. Yeah. I always tell people to always leave on a good note whenever you're exiting somewhere because that person's going to come back to you and sometimes, be their relative, right?

Nancy MacIntyre: Absolutely. It's totally true.

Lizzie Mintus: We've been talking to Nancy MacIntyre, CEO at WorldWinner, which was formerly Game Taco. Nancy, where can people go to work for you, contact you, or learn more about you? 

Nancy MacIntyre: Yeah, you can go to our website, which is Worldwinner.com and check out the Career Page. You can always find me on LinkedIn at Nancy MacIntyre and I do my best to respond to everybody. And then of course you can find our app in the app store under Worldwinner. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. 

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