In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, Lizzie Mintus sits down with Anton Bernstein, the CEO and founder of Pocket Worlds, the fast-growing Y Combinator-backed company that has connected over 45 million users and 10,000 creators through shared virtual experiences.

Anton takes us through the journey of building Pocket Worlds, the parent company behind two major platforms: High Rise and Everskies. High Rise is the leading virtual world where users create avatars, express themselves, and forge deep friendships through shared experiences. Meanwhile, Everskies offers a creative space for users to dress up pixel dolls and interact with their community. Anton shares how these platforms have shaped social interactions in online gaming and how experimentation led to the growth and success of High Rise.

From growing up in the Soviet Union to founding multiple successful companies, Anton reflects on his entrepreneurial journey and offers valuable insights into user acquisition, engagement strategies, and the importance of social connection in virtual spaces. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about entrepreneurship, community building, and the future of virtual worlds!

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

• The role of subcultures in shaping digital communities and experiences.
• The importance of flexibility and iteration in entrepreneurial ventures.
• How to adapt and pivot your vision to create value and impact.
• Strategies for building a thriving, engaged community of creators and users.
• Why perseverance is key to entrepreneurial success, even when the path changes.
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Anton Bernstein on Linkedin
• Proof of Play
• High Rise

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. I am the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we talk to 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 that values quality over quantity and makes data driven hiring decisions. 

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to High Vibe PR. You're awesome. Thank you so much for the introduction today.

We have Anton Bernstein with us. He is the CEO and founder of Pocket Worlds, which is a technology company that empowers shared experiences to connect the world. The company is a fast growing Y Combinator backed company with over 45 million users and 10,000 creators. 

Currently, the company has two platforms, want to get into this more, High Rise. This is the leading virtual world where people make avatars, they express themselves and engage in shared experiences and create deep friendships along the way. The other one is Everskies, the leading pixel doll community where users dress up avatars and chat with friends. 

Let's get started. Thanks for being on the show.

Anton Bernstein: All right. Yeah. Great to meet you. And thanks for having me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What Anton didn't mention in his bio is that he came to the US when he was five from the Soviet Union, founded and exited two successful companies prior to Pocket Worlds, which we'll get into, but I want to start by talking about Pocket Worlds.

Tell me about the creation of the company. What was your initial idea? 

Anton Bernstein: So I started the company with my co founder, Jimmy. We were both in San Francisco. I had just exited the last thing that I was working on. And for both of us, we grew up playing games, still play games. And we kind of experienced that games were the most social experiences that we had online. Much more social than when people considered it to be social applications like social networks and Facebook, Instagram, whatever. It felt like much more interactive multiplayer experiences. 

And we actually started Pocket Worlds in 2013, and that was about four years into the release of the iPhone. And so we said, Hey, you have this identity device, the iPhone. Gaming has always been a very, very social part of our lives. The most social we've had online. What can we build at the intersection of some kind of social experience online and gaming? And so that's kind of how we got started. And neither of us had worked in the gaming industry before. I come from consumer technology and e-commerce. Jimmy had come from Apple where he was a hardware architect.

We were just kind of exploring and experimenting at the intersection of social networking and gaming. And we did that for about five years in bootstrap mode. So we didn't raise any money. You know, I had some money from the last thing. Jimmy was fine on cash. And so we were spending five years just kind of experimenting and learning and iterating. I think that's something that people would normally do at some other company, right? Like on somebody else's dime, we just did it on our own. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Five years? That's wild. 

Anton Bernstein: Five years. Yeah, we released over four products, but four products that we actually shipped, of which all of them were varying degrees of not successful until High Rise, that we launched in 2016.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Just you two for the first five years? 

Anton Bernstein: For the first five years, we had like a team of five or six. It was a pretty small company. So by 2018, we were already starting to kind of scale. And we ended up entering YC in 2018, raising funding, coming out of that, raising funding in 2020. 

Interestingly, we haven't spent any of the money that we've raised just because it's kind of this bootstrap mode, I guess. But we've been profitable and pretty successful ever since we first raised. And so we never got a chance to deploy the money.

But yeah, High Rise really started to take off in a meaningful way. And High rise as a platform originally started as this kind of virtual world space. It's a space to hang out, play some games with really, really rich dynamic social features Anyone who plays High Rise will tell you the reason why they play High Rise is because of the people they've met or connected with on High Rise. 

And as we've evolved what we've seen is you as we give our community tools to build the world that they want to see, kind of creator tools, they would always impress us with what they were capable of building. So fast forward to today, this year we actually launched High Rise Studio. 

So we've launched a bunch of creator tools along the way, but High Rise Studio is really the big one. It's our kind of answer to Roblox Studio and UEFN. You use a combination of Unity and Lua scripting to build any game or any experience and deploy it directly with one click into High Rise. You can monetize it. You can distribute it. You know, you can have direct communication with your fans. You can do all sorts of stuff. With the worlds that you build, and then you ship them into the high rise platform, and then people can engage and interact with each other through it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. And you have 45 million users. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Obviously, it's a great platform, but how have you attracted 45 million people? What's your user acquisition strategy? 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. Partly I think High Rise is just a great platform. So we have quite a bit of organic lift. So people kind of discover it and find it when they're looking for a place to hang out online. 

And so over 50 percent of our user growth has been organic word of mouth, and then the rest has been paid acquisition. So we have a performance marketing team. This performance marketing team is very good. And they're basically looking all over the world for people who would be interested in the kind of thing that we provide.

And so we've spent years building out cultivating all of the data that goes into understanding, Hey, where is our audience? Who is our audience? As well as the data that connects to all of the different marketing channels, the self attributing networks like Facebook and Snapchat and all of those, as well as ad networks and things like that. So we have a good split between organic growth through word of mouth and paid advertising where we have a dedicated team focused exclusively on that. We do all of that internally. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, that was my next question. Is it internal or external? So it's internal. How did you figure out the right people to hire for this role? As a recruiter, how did you know? 

Anton Bernstein: A lot of trial and error? I think a lot of it has been high level looking for people who are, this is across all... So we have about 120 people or so. So across all roles in the company, we look for excellent problem solvers who take a lot of ownership and have a lot of agency in marketing. In particular, you have to do that because you're constantly running experiments. So you have to have this experimental mindset where you're very much willing to fail, take ownership of that failure, learn from that failure, and then try again. And then keep kind of shipping experiments, shipping ideas.

Are we going to try this channel? Are we going to try this creative? Are we going to try, maybe a playable, or are we going to maybe even try to build a feature around invitation to referrals that there's just so many different possibilities and kinds of growth opportunities, but they're all experiments and you don't know if they'll work until you try it. That's the plan. 

So the values that we look for are excellent problem solving and decision making, taking a lot of ownership, willing to take risks, and the ability to move really fast urgency is very important because, you know, every experiment is kind of like destined to fail until it isn't. And so speed is most important there. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. This is also one of my core values. It's very important. And obviously I don't want you to give away exactly what you asked people, but do you generally ask them about their past experience or how do you discern it? Because I think obviously you've had a lot of startups.

But one of the hardest things really in any company is finding the right people in the right seats. And so many companies get so caught up in like, has this person done, has this person worked in a virtual world company, in this engine with all these specific things, but they're not like, does this person have the core values that I need, right? So I love that you do that, but how do you go about discerning it? 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah, well, so I would say there's two different buckets. One is the experience bucket. So it doesn't have the experience to be able to hit the ground running and have a meaningful impact. And there is a non trivial value to that. If someone has been acquiring for the last four years at a really solid company that we know is very good at data and very good at user acquisition, they can bring in a lot of kind of expertise. So we definitely evaluate that and that's important. 

But then on the other side, just that culture and character, we have a series of questions around ambition and problem solving that I think are probably fairly standard. You know, things like, if you could start any company, what would you start? Or tell me about the hardest thing you've ever done and how did you get through it? Things like that, that are much more kind of cultural.

And, obviously, those answers aren't that useful in a vacuum but when you're comparing answers between different candidates, suddenly you start to see, oh, this is an excellent answer. Like this is someone who has really persevered through a lot of hardship and has identified ways to improve.

There's a question that YC asks, for example, is tell me about a time that you've hacked a system. We ask that all the time because one of our core values is to take every unfair advantage. And the idea there is, you know, if you can hack the system, you should, obviously assuming you're not doing anything nefarious. But these are people who are hackers and hustlers and can identify opportunity. We're looking for people like that. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, and then so your UCG platform is a little bit newer. Prior to that, what did you think about user engagement? Once you acquire a user, how do you make sure that they stay engaged and stay on your platform?

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. I mean, look, I think that's the hardest part of building any kind of consumer product is, giving people enough value that they keep coming back every day. And so the way that we think about that is like our number one core value. The pinnacle value is focus on impact. So everything we do, what is the impact that it has on people's lives, on our business? And so kind of keeping that in mind, we essentially flip it.

Instead of saying, Hey, let's, Retain the user. Let's look at that as a stat, let's give the user value. And if the user gets value, then they're going to retain it. And so there's a lot there. So we have a full social world and as a result, we have multiple different personas within our world. And different personas get different values. 

And so what we try to do is we try to organize our user base according to different personas and what value they'll get out of it. And then we try to deliver that value as quickly as possible. So a social user might want to meet somebody. And so there, we want to surface that as quickly and easily as possible, whereas a more kind of self expressive dress up user might want to see, Hey, how can I essentially like paint by avatar. Like, how can I make the most expressive, most interesting avatar I can, because I'm here to express myself creatively.

Still, we have a secondary market that's very large. We do about a hundred million dollars a year in transaction volume across our primary and secondary markets. And so we have a fairly large number of users who are really into trading and collecting. And so it's like, Hey, how do you get into that experience as quickly as possible? And how do you see what that has to offer? How do we deliver value to the right people at the right time as quickly as possible so they don't leave before they see the value. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I like to flip it on value. Very Amazon of you, opposed to just how can we retain the user and squeeze money out of them.

Anton Bernstein: Right. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Some have success and others do not. And why would somebody use your platform instead of a Roblox UEFN? What makes you different? 

Anton Bernstein: So the way that I think about that is, every one of these platforms has their own subculture. So like Roblox has, essentially the nine to 13 subculture. I mean, they've been kind of slowly expanding out of it, but it's still pretty squarely kind of nine to 13. UEFN has the Fortnite subculture. It's usually kind of like teenagers who want to play a first person shooter and shoot each other up. 

Our subculture is different. Our subculture is mostly women, 70 percent women. The average age is about 20. So it's older than Roblox. It's more female than Fortnite. And the type of gameplay is way more social without shooting. 

For example, it's not competitive PvP. So competitive PvP is traditionally, a lot more, let's say, like a kind of masculine energy. Let's say, whereas PvE, player versus environment, is a little bit, Like more social, a little bit easier to get into if you're not into that PVP environment. So we do a lot more PVE type of experiences. We do a lot more, again, dress up and self expression and crafting. So think like Animal Crossing fits into our style. Stardew Valley or Farmville fits into our subculture. And they're not being served by Roblox. So Roblox is like fast Twitch, first person, you're a 10, 11 year old, things exploding, obstacle courses, things like that.

And then Fortnite shoots them up. You know, it's shooting games. We're not shooting subculture. We're like, raise a pet, farm, dress up, express yourself. That's our subculture. And there's honestly no other platform that is serving that subculture.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but you also kind of went a different direction. I mean, everyone is, How can I be the next Roblox? How can I be the next Fortnite and do the same thing that they're doing, but just a little bit different? 

It doesn't 

Anton Bernstein: really work. 

Lizzie Mintus: Obviously. We've seen that over and over.

For a while, every company that I was recruiting for was like, we're building a first person shooter in Unreal. Like, wow, there's a lot of things coming out right now. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah, exactly. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, so it's nice that you're doing something else. And then tell me about the evolution of Everskies and how that fits in. 

Anton Bernstein: Sure. Yeah.

So Everskies, we acquired it, I want to say three years ago. And the acquisition story is actually awesome. It wasn't even a company when we bought it. They both work for us, Alba and Marcin, a boyfriend and girlfriend, a couple who built it together. And Marcin actually built it to impress his girlfriend. She was like, I'm really into this other game. It's called a virtual pop star. It was like a big forum type game. And he was like, I can do that. And then he built a way better version.

Lizzie Mintus: I hope she was very impressed. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. I mean, she was Head of Product. Yeah, they hadn't even formed a company yet. This was a kind of a side project. We actually discovered it because our users were talking about it. So it kind of fits within our subculture. And so then I saw that. I reached out to them directly and said, Hey, you know, what's going on with this? Do you guys want to join us? And they joined us. 

And, today they're a core part of our company, not like the team members. Everskies too, we bought it- it was doing maybe, I don't remember. I think it was at like 50,000 monthly active users and we scaled it to a million monthly active users and in large part, because we launched mobile. Mobile was a key driver. 

Lizzie Mintus: How was my next question? So mobile. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah, it was desktop only at first. And then we launched on mobile. So yeah, Everskies is similar, but younger. It's still focused on dress up and very much focused on the avatar. It's very social because it's a forum, but it's teenage. So the audience is a little bit younger, and it's got this kind of MySpace nineties vibe. All the characters are pixelated. It's actually got a really cool brand. And just organically, it's got over a billion views on TikTok and it's just an organically popular aesthetic.

Lizzie Mintus: So you're kind of operating two companies that feed into each other, but are separate, right? I mean, that's a different growth stage. There's so many breaking points. So how do you go about operating two companies that kind of feed into each other? How has your strategy changed? How has your data changed? What do you think about that? 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. It has a little bit, not tremendously. So essentially we kept the two separate. But actually as we've built out High Rise Studio, Everskies is now actually working on building experiences in High Rise Studio. It's because High Rise is built in this way where you can build any experience. So we have literally over 10,000 worlds that have been built already by thousands of creators.

And so Everskies is actually coming in and saying, Hey, we're going to build a dress up world using our assets, but integrating them into High Rise because we don't have a world. And that could be actually a case study for other brands and other organizations and companies that can build experiences and launch them into high rise if they want to access and want to kind of work with our subculture of users.

That's kind of the way that we've set it up. It's still independent. It's run independently. I work mostly with the High Rise team and then with Everskies, we kind of like to align on goals and they kind of build what they're building. 

Lizzie Mintus: And have they scaled or it's just. The two that started.

Anton Bernstein: They've scaled. So actually one of them is now integrated into the High Rise team. So he's deeply integrated into High Rise. And then, the other one is still the product lead on covers guys. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. I want to go back, you said you worked for five years and you launched four varyingly unsuccessful products, to quote you. Why do you think that those didn't find success? What were your learnings from those? 

Anton Bernstein: I mean, high level, we didn't know what we were doing. That was like the biggest issue. But, the first one actually that we launched, called Pockets, was a precursor to High Rise. The aesthetic was very young. So I think that was kind of part of the problem. It was like very chibi, kind of short and big head characters that just attracted a very young audience. 

However, when we look back on it, actually- so we had launched that and then we were like, yeah, this isn't really doing that well. We should shut it down. And then we created another thing called Harvest Crossing, which was a farming genre MMO. So again, we're like trying to go for this non combative, non PVP, very social MMO type of experience. 

What we didn't realize is, just again, because we didn't know what we were doing at the time, was that farming is like a solo endeavor. You don't want someone to come into your farm and curse you out. Randomly because it's meant to be an experience. 

Lizzie Mintus: I want to plant my flowers in the rows by colors. 

Anton Bernstein: Paint by flowers. And we just didn't know that because we were clueless. And so we launched it and it was just not successful at all. And we just didn't see a path for it to succeed. So then we shut that down. 

But what we did see was that actually the Pockets data was pretty good. So at first we thought Pockets, hey, it's not going well. And then we launched Harvard Crossing and it's like, oh, this is what failure looks like. Pockets actually were okay. 

And so then we went back to evaluating more, the more kind of like open social hangout space versus something more concrete with kind of farming genre. We did a couple of other things in the middle that we just felt like we wanted to come back to the pockets, what became High Rise experience.

Lizzie Mintus: And what do you think you found? What went right in order for you to make High Rise that didn't go right in those other ones? 

Anton Bernstein: I think one, we found an audience. I think our aesthetic really appealed to a core audience, a core early audience that really enjoyed it. We also found out how important social was. In the beginning when we launched Pocket, social media was very light, like you could chat inside the world, but we didn't have a messenger. We didn't have a news feed. We didn't have any kind of voice chat, like any of that kind of stuff. 

And as we layered those in, we saw that people heavily engaged with that, and that actually created a lot of the value for them, the social framework around it. So we leaned into the social side. We also leaned into the creator tooling side. So when we launched Pockets, there was no creator tooling. And as we evolved on High Rise, we kind of built it up. 

But I would say high level, it's really been a process of iteration. Like even HiRise, we launched in 2016. From 2016 to 2018, we basically launched a feature a week for two years. Maybe every two weeks on average. I'm not sure, but it was fast. And it's because, again, we were kind of discovering what the world wants, and we had a bunch of hypotheses, and we were just kind of experimenting. 

So it's not like we had a vision, and we knew, hey, this is the vision that we want to get into the world. High level, we have a vision around games being able to connect people with each other socially. The details and the weeds were very much an iterative process. So we kind of just learned as we went through experimentation. 

Lizzie Mintus: You're so fortunate to have five years to do that too. I mean, obviously you did that by your other companies, but that's amazing.

Anton Bernstein: Yeah, you know, we look back on that time and we're like, was that a good decision or a bad decision? It's like hitting your head against the wall for five years, so...

Lizzie Mintus: it got you to where you are today. So it ended up being the right decision. Just a painful, full journey.

Anton Bernstein: The dots connect backwards, as Steve Jobs would say. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about your unique background. You left the Soviet Union and you grew up eventually in an entrepreneurial household. Can you just please elaborate a little bit more about your background? 

Anton Bernstein: Sure. So when I was five, my family left the Soviet Union. My dad came first, and then my mom, my brother and I followed. The Soviet Union has no concept of money really. It's just, everything is owned by the state, and then you get what you get. I guess everything is owned by everybody in theory, but in practice it's owned by the state. And so, when we left, we left with nothing, because there was nothing to leave with.

When my dad was there though, he worked at a hydroelectric power plant, and he would always get computers. So essentially, they wouldn't pay him in money. They paid him in computers, in a way to kind of cultivate his hobby. And so, he was always programming random stuff. And he always wanted to start a company, but, obviously, when we moved here, that was not possible. We didn't have the money to do that. We were kind of like living off charity for the first couple of years while my parents were working on jobs. 

And my dad always wanted to build a software business. And so maybe like six, seven years after we moved, the family that sponsored us through the synagogue that was next to where we lived, they sponsored our meals and they gave us food vouchers basically. We became really close to that family and they actually sponsored my dad to start his own company so that he could legally do that and they took no ownership of it at all. They were just really generous, awesome people Yeah, the Bowdoins. 

And that's how he started his company with another co-founder from Russia, who we were friends with. My parents were friends within the Soviet Union and they also came. And so yeah, he definitely inspired me to start companies. That was his dream. So I guess it kind of permeated through osmosis or something to become my dream as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I feel like it's maybe a little bit genetic too. My family's also entrepreneurial and I watched that growing up, but they were never like, here's how you do PNL. But I think for me, I watched them treat people really well and then go above and beyond to make people happy, which I thought was always cool. And people come to visit and bring me toys and then have this nice experience. All these friends basically came that were business partners. Then I watched my family just have life flexibility. I mean, obviously you work hard, but you can also make your own schedule. So I always thought that was cool. And I wanted to do that too. 

Anton Bernstein: Totally. Yeah. My dad, Definitely was able to make his own schedule and his schedule was working from like nine to nine. But the other thing that was cool to see was the progress. We started with nothing and then every few years, we moved to an apartment and then we moved to a townhouse, then we moved to a house, then we moved to a better house. And just like being a kid and experiencing that kind of American dreamism was very inspiring. It was very confidence boosting and empowering. It's like, Oh yeah, anyone can do that. 

Lizzie Mintus: I thought that too. I work for someone then I was like, why don't I just work for myself? What am I doing? 

So prior to starting your business, you worked in venture capital. So interesting to be on the other side of the table and you eventually raised. So I'm sure that was super helpful. What insights did you get from working at insight partners and Redpoint that prepared you for founding your own company? 

Anton Bernstein: A lot of jealousy. So my first job out of college was Insight. And then, at Redpoint after that, I was actually recruited to be the first associate in the growth equity practice. So these were all late stage deals. So these were all people who already had very successful businesses. They'd been doing it for a long time. 

One, there are a few aspects that I thought were really interesting about it. So first of all, my job was to source investments. So I was calling companies and trying to get them to take our money. That's kind of the name of the game when you're an analyst or even associated at one of these places. 

And I would say to become good at that, a lot of it is understanding the space you're calling into. So kind of mapping it out, talking to everyone. You know, every time you talk to a company or a CEO of a company to say, Hey, who are your peers? Who are your competitors? Who's the best competitor you have? And really trying to map it out and frame it out. Probably a lot like recruiting. It's like, Hey, who is the best person you've ever worked with? Is something here? But it was more about mapping an industry and mapping a set of businesses. 

Being able to understand the economics of different businesses- so you know, at a very young age, talking to many different business owners, particularly in technology and seeing like, Oh, this is a high margin business. This is a low margin business. This one has these complications. Just being able to see which industry is essentially a better or worse industry than others. Don't ask me why I got into games. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I was just gonna say, I don't think the game industry is that great. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah, exactly. It's such an unlike sass, some sort of sass. But nonetheless, it was really interesting. It clearly didn't influence me enough to like not doing what I wanted to do. But that was cool. 

And then I would say the last thing is like, as someone young, I was definitely very jealous. I would talk to these people who built amazing businesses. And as a person who always wanted to start a business, I'm like, I can do what you're doing. I don't want to be on this side. I don't want to be investing in you or supporting you at least at this age. I want to be your teammate. I want to do what you're doing. I want to beat you, like all these things as a 22, 23 year old. So it was definitely a foregone conclusion that I would leave and start something, mentally couldn't get over that. 

Today it's a little different. You know, now that I've done it, it's like, Oh, okay. I like angel investing. I like supporting and being on the sidelines of someone winning. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: And maybe it's not as glamorous as you think, especially if you're just at the company level that are already so successful. They've already made it and they need more money versus the starting level. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. And oftentimes they're not even, they don't need more money. They're just looking for secondary, they're just like, they're actually looking to take money out of the business. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. And then you went and you started your first company, Lookingo. 

Anton Bernstein: So the Australian version was called, Oufer, terrible name. And then the other one, the French one was called Lookinggo. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. 

Anton Bernstein: I remember coming up with the name, but honestly, It was just like something that sounded okay in French. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's okay. I mean, it's French. So it sounds great. 

Anton Bernstein: It's supposed to sound like look and go, because it's a local daily deals website. So it's like you find something spontaneous that you want to go do and then you go do it. So you look and go. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I didn't read the name and think, wow, this is a bad name. It's like, Oh, is it like dual? I was just wondering about the pronunciation. 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. So it's called Lookingo. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay.

Anton Bernstein: And then Offer in Australia. So we first started the company in Australia. I did that with my friend from Insight. And it originally started as a daily deal company, a competitor to Groupon, which at the time was growing pretty quickly. And so it was really, again, not the most intelligent way to start a company.

It was like, we could do this at night. We could moonlight on it. Because it's in Australia. Yeah. So we could call Australia while we're in New York and San Francisco. Really not a good idea. But nine months in, it really started to take off. 

I don't know. It was like doing three to $400,000 a month in revenue. And we thought, okay, we should go do this full time. And so we left, we raised 5 million Euro from a French investor called Odeon Capital. And we went and launched it in France as well as Australia. So we continued the Australian business. And I ran the team in France as well as the product and marketing teams for both Australia and France. Our engineering team was actually in Ukraine. So we were pretty global for pretty early days. This was 2010. 

Then we grew the French business pretty quickly, grew to 15, 20 million euro in revenue and sold it. We sold it to another French company called Smartbox, kind of a big more packaged goods retailer. Not retailers, they sell in retail like FNAC, which is like the big kind of Best Buy of France. And then the Australian business we kept running, we ended up merging our Australian business with another company called deals.com.Au. And then evolving it to something called luxury escapes.com. 

So basically because we were doing these daily deals, we're doing restaurants and we were doing spas and we were doing these other things. And then all of a sudden we did a hotel in Canberra. And that hotel totally crushed it. It was just a very, very well performing deal. And then we did a hotel in Melbourne and then we did a hotel in Vietnam and Bali, and all of a sudden these deals started to become very, very big. You know, 10 million, 15 million sales. 

So we really discovered through the process of iteration that this travel vertical was going to be huge. And so we kind of put all our eggs in the luxury escape basket today. It does a billion dollars in total transaction volume, and about 300 million in revenue. It's around there. That's like around the gross margin. And then we basically acquired a bunch of companies in Australia. It's kind of a longer story, but luxury escapes became really the flagship brand and that company is still independent. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. And it sounds like your iteration process was really, I mean, not obviously the exact same, but you started out with a concept and then you found something that works and went really further in that direction. But maybe what you ended up with was not what you started with at all. 

Anton Bernstein: Definitely. The story of my entrepreneurial journey is kind of going with the flow and not holding on too tightly to anyone like hard vision... and I would say that's often countered a lot of game development from what I've seen.

So we're not really a traditional game studio or anything like that, but I've seen a lot of game studios where there's a creative director, they have a creative vision. They're trying to realize that creative vision and they will spend the next five years realizing it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And if you don't realize it, they'll leave and realize it somewhere else.

Anton Bernstein: Right. And that's just not the way I think. I'm trying to deliver a lot of value to the world, as opposed to trying to express my creative vision. So just two different ways of thinking. But mine is more like, I guess, in service of the value that we can create for other people, as opposed to I need to paint this painting. Like this painting needs to exist.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think a lot of indie game devs are that way too. And sometimes it really works, but right. They have this idea, they have the game they always wanted to play, and they need to make it. 

Anton Bernstein: I really admire it. I really admire it. It's just not the way my mind works. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I mean, those are passion driven people, but a lot of times those are not business driven people, right? They want to make what they like because they like it, not because they are like, Oh, the Tams are great. This is a real business opportunity. I'm doing the opposite of what is so popular. 

Anton Bernstein: Totally. Totally. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you've worked at VC, you started multiple successful companies. This is a big question, but if you were going to distill all of your learnings and ups and downs from all of these companies- sounds like iteration is huge, but we have a lot of entrepreneurs or maybe aspiring entrepreneurs that are listening, what advice would you have for somebody that wants to start and scale a company? 

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. It all kind of connects to each other, but in a way it's like, don't give up and instead iterate and be flexible. I think if we hold on to something really dearly, then maybe we end up giving up because we're like, Oh, we can't do this thing, this precise thing that I really, really wanted. 

If you can be flexible, be malleable, be iterative, then there is no real notion of giving up per se. You just kind of find a different path and you keep discovering which path leads you to greater... You know, there's one way to look at greater success, but the other is to have greater value and impact- like some path where you can have a lot of impact.

And if you don't give up and you stay flexible, you'll find that path. It's certain. But where people fail is they give up, maybe because they're being inflexible, maybe because something else happens in their lives. You know, maybe they can't afford it. Maybe they have a founder breakup, whatever. But a lot of the key is to persevere and be flexible enough to navigate to the most impactful opportunity you can find in your immediate view.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think that's hard too, though, because maybe also the number one death of companies is trying to do too much, right? Trying to go too many directions instead of staying focused. So I think it's probably a tricky equation. What do you think about that? Like when to launch something adjacent versus continue on the thing that you're doing?

Anton Bernstein: Yeah. No, I would say still do one thing at a time, like for sure. It's very hard to do more than one thing at a time. So I don't want to say that being flexible means doing many things at once or doing no things well. You know, it's still staying focused and doing one thing, but at some point, you're going to run into some sort of opportunity.

Lizzie Mintus: For sure. 

Anton Bernstein: It'll be in front of you. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you just have to run. 

Anton Bernstein: And then to kind of direct the ship to iterate towards that. I think it just increases the likelihood of you sticking with it and building something, versus, I'm going to persevere for 20 years on this thing that you're just much more likely to quit. That's the reality. 

Lizzie Mintus: Or like, Hey, I'm going to give it a go to have my own startup for a year or whatever, right? Once you limit yourself with that time, it might take five years, it might take a while. 

Anton Bernstein: It might take a while. Yeah. And again, it might look super different from where you started. Like everything I've done, it's looked super different. You know, even just a few years in from where I started. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I have one last question before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, pocketworlds.com. 

The last question, what are your long term and short term goals for Pocket Worlds? And where do you see it evolving in the next few years? 

Anton Bernstein: Sure. Yeah. So our short term goal is to cultivate more creators. So people who can build interesting games, content, experiences, clothing, all that kind of stuff. That's kind of one aspect. So how do we kind of grow our community of people who want to see a better High Rise and more interesting content. 

That's on one end and then on the other end how do we build a platform that just delivers a lot of value to the different people that I talked about? Like if someone's looking for a social space, Then we deliver as much value as we can to that person looking for social space. Or if someone is looking for, a place to dress up and be creative, how do we deliver as much value as we can there? So like, it's staying focused on the thing right in front of us, which are kind of those things.

I would say longer term, the goal is certainly to build a platform that is bigger than us. A platform where, especially for our subculture, so our community of people who are into what we're doing. We're into, we want to be able to have the widest variety of experiences and content that someone can have, and do that with our kind of social fabric layered on top.

So you're not playing Stardew Valley and switching over to Animal Crossing and switching over to this other thing and none of them interconnect and none of them talk to each other. You don't even know which friends are playing which things. But there's one big ecosystem where you can see which of your friends are playing what, hop into an experience with them at any time, have a good time with a friend, or make a new friend and then always be able to come back to that platform and experience a wide variety of things.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's really the investor's dream. Too bad you're not raising. 

We've been talking to Anton Bernstein, CEO and founder of Pocket Worlds. Anton, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you and or work for you? 

Anton Bernstein: Sure. Well pocketworlds.com is going to be the best. We have a careers page there. We also have our values and that kind of thing. I'm on Twitter as Anton Burr. I'm not wildly active, but I respond to messages. And I'm on LinkedIn. 

On High Rise actually, my username is Jake Ness, which is a weird story. I was just thinking of my friend Jake when I was making my user like seven years ago and it just kind of stuck. So that's my username. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, okay. Jake Ness. 

Anton Bernstein: I don't know. It just kind of happened. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. Thank you. 

Anton Bernstein: Right on. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.