Chelsea Blasko, co-CEO and Partner of Iron Galaxy Studios, started as the company's 13th employee and quickly became the catalyst behind the studio’s incredible expansion across multiple locations

Chelsea has been instrumental in guiding the studio’s leaders through product development and collaboration. She also established Iron Galaxy’s career coaching program, ensuring every employee has a senior mentor to support their career growth and interests.

Tune in to this week's episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast for exclusive insights on cultivating a values-driven culture and understanding the crucial role of diversity and mentorship in building a successful game studio.

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

• Leadership and Growth Strategies
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives
• Challenges and Tough Decisions in Leadership
• Advice for Aspiring Leaders

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Chelsea Blasko on LinkedIn
• Iron Galaxy Studios
• Dave Lang on LinkedIn
• Eve Crevoshay on the Here's Waldo Podcast

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, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a to Eve Crevoshay for introducing us. Eve, you're great. Eve runs Take This, a non profit organization and games, and does so much for the community. I've also had her on my podcast, give her episode a listen. 

Today we have Chelsea Blasko with us. Chelsea strives to create a welcoming environment where talented people can do their best work. As co-CEO of Iron Galaxy Studios, her innovative leadership of human resources, product development, and technology has produced a strong values based culture that nurtures creative excellence as much as the creators. Her personal accomplishments as a developer have equipped her to improve the production methodologies that enable efficient work and quality products to help the studio grow from 13 to 270 employees. 

She keeps her teammates on the evolving edge of continuous improvement by investing in growth of their skills and careers. She is a strong believer that diversity builds better teams, and she has guided the formation of new policies to take uncompromising care of every employee. The result is a company that delivers industry leading work that happens to balance with a healthy lifestyle for the people who do it. I can't wait to dig into more on this.

Let's get started. Thank you for being here with me. 

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here on this day of the eclipse, as we're recording a Monday. 

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe it's good luck. 

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, I hope it is. I take it as good luck. It's like a fresh beginning, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. So for anybody that's not familiar with Iron Galaxy, can you please give your spiel?

Chelsea Blasko: Sure. So this is our 16th year in business. We are founded by Dave Lang. I did come on as the 13th employee and our strategy has always been diversification. So we do co development, we do porting, remasters, some of our own IP, like Divekick or, Rumble Verse that was out before. And we work with a variety of partners.

We've shipped over 80 titles. We have studios in Chicago, Orlando, Nashville, and some folks in Austin. And we're over 270 now. We're almost 300 people. But yeah, that's us. And I've been here. This is my 14th year at Iron Galaxy. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congratulations on all your success. How did you end up there?

Chelsea Blasko: Oh my gosh, totally by accident, I ended up at Iron Galaxy. Basically, I had been in games for about five years previously. I started at EA Chicago, and then I was at another studio called Robomodo. EA Chicago shut down. I got laid off. And then Robomodo basically had a two thirds reduction in staff. And at that time I parted ways with them. And since we are this kind of small, well, we're small, but big as an industry. But I do love that one of the owners of Robomodo had gotten in touch with Dave, and said, Hey, We had these layoffs. And here are some people who are in Chicago, because at that time we were just in Chicago.

And so I actually got a call from Dave to come in and to interview. And honestly, at that point, I was thinking, do I even want to stay in games? What is going on? I don't want to just keep getting laid off and all of this happens. And so I came into it kind of feeling like I had nothing to lose.

And I was doing some volunteer work and kind of trying to figure things out. And Dave actually offered me a job right there at the interview and was surprised when I said, well, I'm going to think about it. And then I came on board and here I am 14 years later. So it's pretty amazing. I would never have imagined that.

Lizzie Mintus: What a good story. And I love that you had to think about it. I guess most people must have accepted on the spot. 

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, I think he thought, okay, she doesn't have a job. She's volunteering. I was doing ecologically friendly demolition work, which is fairly cathartic. And he always says habitat for humanity, but it wasn't building. It was taking down and saving the pieces for reuse. 

But, yeah, I wanted to make sure it was something I felt good about. And, before too, I think I did have a little bit of an attitude of like, I've made AAA games. That's what I've been doing. And the studio had a different philosophy and it was pretty much 12 guys that all knew each other.

I was like this new person. Sujatha and I, we were both hired the same day. First two women. I was the second non-programmer and neither of us knew Dave before. Everyone else, they'd worked with Dave. So that was like, we were the new kids on the block at the office. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's probably helpful to start with somebody else too, because then you were both the new kids.

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, and I knew Sujatha already too, because we'd worked together at Robo. And so both of us came over, there was some comfort in that. And it was my first time working with pretty much only programmers. So I started working more with art and that was more my background and then full teams, but never like everyone else is in tech, like in coding, but you. 

Lizzie Mintus: How did you go through that adaptation? Obviously it's true. big change. What did you do to acclimate yourself or maybe acclimate them to working with people outside of the bubble as well? 

Chelsea Blasko: A lot of it is just willingness to constantly learn. The first day, I know I've told this story, but everyone else knew how to build a computer. I had not done that. I was used to going to a job, they have IT, somebody sets it up for you, and I just got the computer in a box. And so I kind of knew right away that I'd need to just figure things out, which I'm pretty good at. I was intimidated, for sure, at first, but I was like, Everyone else knows how to do this. 

I better figure it out. And then I wanted to show, okay, I'm a good sport. I want to get to know people. And we had an opportunity early on. There was this charity rock band event here in Chicago. And so I joined the Iron Galaxy Rock Band as one of the singers, and I thought that would be a good way to show that I can be one of the crew. Let's go. And that was a lot of fun. We didn't win, just too bad. We were pretty good. But it was a fun way to get to know people, not just the work, but also have some fun with people too. 

Lizzie Mintus: And you started as a senior producer. 

Chelsea Blasko: I started. Yep.

Lizzie Mintus: You moved up the ranks to co-CEO. How did you accomplish this?

Chelsea Blasko: How did I do that? Again, a lot of it is wearing a lot of hats and not being afraid. Also, I credit Dave with understanding that he needed help and being willing to get out of the way and allow that to happen. So when I started, we were already doing multiple projects. As I said, most people knew Dave and they were used to Dave being the lead on everything.

So one of the first times he was out doing biz dev, cause when I stepped in, then that freed him up to do more biz dev and be gone from the studio. I remember it was some milestone night. We needed to make some decisions. I don't remember what it was, but one of the OGs was like, we can't do it. We can't get a hold of Dave. We can't do it. 

And basically I said, I'm going to make the decision. If it's not a good decision, you can tell David was all on me and he can fire me when he gets back. And I think kind of showing that I was willing to take that chance and just really stand behind, knowing that inaction was going to be worse than even potentially the wrong action at that point, gained me some respect as well. And then, I just started kind of looking around the studio and realizing other things that needed to be done. Maybe we need to have an HR policy because we didn't have any HR. Maybe we need to evolve how we're doing our reviews or evolve. We didn't have any bonding leave or we didn't.

So I just started kind of filling gaps where I saw it was needed. And, frankly, no one else really wanted to do what they saw as, I think, kind of the boring business and policy stuff. stuff either. So I could easily fit into that role. And luckily, Dave did give me a lot of autonomy. He's kind of one of those leaders that he doesn't really give you a ton of encouragement. He just tells you when he doesn't really like what you're doing. But I didn't get much of that. So I just kept going. And I think, again, kind of feeling like I didn't really have a lot to lose. It empowered me to just take over things, and I think I've always just worn a lot of different hats. Not being afraid to jump in and just do what's needed. And communicate about it, though, not just jump in. And I don't know, you can jump in and make a mess, too. But just making sure that I was filling gaps that needed to be filled. 

And then the last time I worked directly on a project, I was still kind of balancing doing the HR and doing all of the deployment planning and doing a lot of the growth conversations and mentorship. I was game director on Killer Instinct season two and three. And then after that, I pretty much transitioned to management, mentorship policy, pretty much as my full time job shortly after that. And also when Adam Boyse came on as well, that also gave some more firepower at the top to balance things out because Dave and I had been just kind of running forward and we needed to add another person so that we could slow down a little bit and revisit some of the things we put in place as we continued to grow.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, this was one of my questions. So you grew from 13, 17, all the way to 270, close to 300 policies. Did you put in place at the beginning that enabled that initial growth and then. What did you really have to revisit because things break at different points and policies at the beginning, but then fail you later.

Chelsea Blasko: Oh, yeah. We were pretty loose. At the beginning, there really wasn't much hierarchy at all. Up until we were about 35 people, it was just kind of getting it done. And everyone kind of could understand that at that size. And we were all in the same room. We could look around, hear what each other were doing. As the producer, I could hear when things were going wrong. Dave and I pretty easily split responsibilities. He was out doing the biz dev and he was kind of a bad cop escalation point with partners. I was more the good cop and the internal piece. 

And then at 35, we decided to add the Orlando studio, which I think that's the first time we really had to think intentionally. Earlier on, Dave and I would always say we're never going to get bigger than 20. We're never going to get bigger than this. And that was the first time we were like, okay, we're intentionally growing from 35 to 55. 

And one of the things that was really important about that was being on site and present in Orlando. It was myself at the time, the art director and the head of engineering at that time. We were there about a week out of every month, making sure people understood the culture, making sure people understood, even though our values weren't written then, making sure they understood the values that we all produced. And also making sure they felt like not just some satellite branch of Iron Galaxy, but Iron Galaxy proper, which was really important to us.

And I think that we also had to figure out, do we have an office manager? How do we make sure they are getting what they need in Orlando when we have... You know, we had someone in Chicago. So do we need that person there? And also figuring out better ways to communicate distributedly because we had all again, I could hear everything that was going on.

So now we had to be a lot more intentional with communication and find new tools to use. So our tools evolved for doing that distributed work. That happened pretty quickly too, but I would say the biggest piece there was the travel. And then once we got to 100, then I feel like that was another inflection point of having to have continued to have more structure and also realizing we hadn't really done a great job giving mentorship to the people who already had some seniority or were already pretty versed in their craft. We'd been focusing primarily on the less experienced folks. 

So then we had to really create a more comprehensive program so that everyone got some mentorship. And that's when we started to turn around our performance management and have recorded feedback biweekly and started training people and giving feedback, and having conversations, and how do you write up feedback? And I stopped doing all of the reviews. Because before I had done all the reviews. I could go on with so many different examples, but the deployment too, it was like, Okay, now I need each of the people who are the head of the projects or the head of the departments to contribute to the deployment and understand what the skills are of their employees, what growth opportunities they're looking for, how to balance that with the business. 

And so some of it was figuring out how to expose other people in the studio to different pieces of the work. It's also easy to criticize some of the work. If you're not doing it, understanding how complicated it is later and building that empathy, then I had more people to share. So part of it is also, when do you delegate? What do you delegate? I feel like I'm just rambling on, but there are so many things. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So you built up this new performance review plan. I would love to hear more about how you thought about that. 

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah. So I had been doing, as I said, from the time we are about, I don't know, 30 people to 115, all the reviews, once yearly, gathering information from their managers or the people who are the head of the projects and setting these goals. And the goals would not be worth much, after a few months, for a lot of people. And I was pretty much, like I said, doing most of it. I had help. Well, I don't know if you would like to be called a helper, but I did have Tom Carbone in Orlando. He was helping me to do some of the programming feedback and be a partner to me. And also Chad Newhouse started doing some of the art reviews. 

We started to look at, if we do kind of sprint planning and we're more agile and how we plan our projects for success, why wouldn't that make sense and how do we give feedback? So we started to look at it as, you have one person who's responsible for giving you immediate task based feedback and helping you stay on track and understands that more myopic kind of short term picture. And then over that is someone who understands the bigger career aspirations, but is able to mine all of the information from the task based data and feedback as well as conversations with that manager to build the bigger growth plan. 

And for us, it's still the way we try because our codex and how we give feedback and how we evaluate people has continued to evolve, but it's never about competing with anyone else but yourself. But you always want to do better than what you have done. And that's really important. Another thing that was really important to us was a couple things. 

One, that all work matters. So you might be a principal rendering engineer. You might be fixing bugs. You might not be working on a feature because that's the work that is important and needed right now. And we want to recognize and celebrate that and that we want people to be able to try different things. Try management, try a different role and have it not be just this ladder that, oops, you tried something. It didn't really work. And now. There's no place for you anymore. The way we wanted to design it was more like a path or branches where your title and your role could be different things.

And also recognizing that not everybody, not the best animator is always the best manager. So wanting to build those success paths for multiple different types of skill sets. So those were some of the main goals. And I'd say now we've had the latest iteration rolled out for a little over a year, but it doesn't mean it won't continue to evolve as well. As we have more people, we want people to really understand where they are. I still meet with each new employee and do an orientation. And in the last one, I love it when I hear things that I would have never thought of that helped me see, wow, with these fresh eyes.

 We have a lot of partner projects. We have internal projects, but there were some people who were saying that they didn't know if they were living up to our values because they hadn't worked with an external facing partner project. And I'd never even thought of that, but it made sense. And so at our last, I have a culture and values summit with our leadership. We talked about that value and what it means. And should we update it? Should we change how we're talking about it and communicating with people? We have internal and external partners. Or can you live every value to its full extent every single day? Is that the expectation? Or is the expectation that it's aspirational and at different times you might epitomize one value more than another? So I think the biggest part of growing and having more people and more sites and more complications is never being afraid to revisit anything and check if it still makes sense.

Lizzie Mintus: You talked about how you had values when you were 30 something people, they weren't written down. And now you talked about evolving the value. So how did you go about really figuring out what your values are? I think lots of companies have them on the wall. Like I worked at a company and they came in one day and they're like, here are values. It's like, these aren't our values at all. Like, I don't understand. These are just words that you think sound nice, but that's not really what we're doing. So how do you make them real and reinforce them with your team? 

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, we solidified them shortly after Adam came on board. Here at Iron Galaxy, we worked with an executive coach to talk through what we think our values are, what really defines us. And so it's not actually the value, but kind of the pillar is stability, and then it's people, partners, capabilities, and continuous improvement. And I still think all of those apply. But for instance, there were a couple things when we started, I put together our first DEIA committee, and we had to talk about the values, so we added some bullet points for describing the words that really resonated more with our DIA committee, making sure that we embraced that part of our values as well.

Also shortly before the pandemic, I was trying to go to other studios to talk to their leadership about their values and how they did things. And I started realizing, we have those values on the website, and they're great, but we have these other kind of tertiary values that aren't written down, but that anyone who's been here for a while knows. And so I thought, okay, I need to make it more explicit. So the orientation that I do is really around those more tertiary values, our value of teamwork, our value of teamwork and collaboration and picking up a shovel and of contextual transparency, knowing your audience. I talk a lot about the collaborative aspect of the work and sharing your expertise, raising a flag. 

Raising a flag is sometimes really scary for new people. You want to build that trust and maybe you got burned doing that somewhere else. So definitely talk through them. And then we also, in our performance management tool, which is also a pulse tool, we do have hashtags. You can high five people and then hashtag a value. So one way to reiterate. We have value awards that we started doing last year to recognize people in the studio who exemplify the values that are voted on in the studio. 

And I really do hear them in the lexicon. I hear people say them. And I always ask during orientation, like, Hey, you've been here a couple weeks now or whatever. Are you feeling this? Is this your experience? And luckily, I always get yes, which is amazing, because I would hate for it to just be words on the wall, and then I get out here and I do talks like this and talk about nonsense that isn't really happening. That would be a nightmare for me. So I love to check in and make sure we're actually, overall living by our values.

Lizzie Mintus: Well, I read online that 90 percent of employees at Iron Galaxy say it's a great place to work compared to 57 percent at a typical US based company. 

Chelsea Blasko: Wow. 

Lizzie Mintus: So I think that you're doing it. 

Chelsea Blasko: Well, thank you. We certainly try. I think that's another value, just really trying. And that's been our DIY spirit from the beginning and not having the ego again, to think, Well, I came up with this idea. So this is the way it has to be. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it sounds like evolution is really key in acknowledging when things that worked may not work anymore. Maybe you're wrong. They really are working so you don't have nightmares.

Chelsea Blasko: Yes. Exactly. 

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me about the committee that you built. What is it? 

Chelsea Blasko: So I am no longer in charge of it. Now Rijesh, our program manager of DEIA, heads up our DEIA committee, as well as our ERGs. But a few years ago, well, I really do want to credit one particular employee who sparked this for me, but then I had a few other who came up to me as well, who said that they wouldn't have come to Iron Galaxy if they hadn't seen that there was someone like me in a leadership role.

And I was always really happy being this internal voice or kind of back of the house. And that really made me feel a lot of responsibility that I needed to get out there and be seen more. And to that end, I also wanted to start a DEI Committee to make sure that we were hearing everyone's voices, giving everyone a voice. And so I just kind of started floating the idea around the studio, at first to people who I thought had mentioned they'd be interested. And then I had people self identify that they wanted to be part of it. So we met and we came together. We put together some goals and what we wanted to focus on, some of that being hiring and how could we have a better pipeline for diverse candidates? That was some of our first goals because we had done a big survey too, that showed once people got here, they identified that they felt a good sense of belonging, but how could we get more people? 

And part of that was the representation and highlighting, not just me, not just Dave or Adam on giant Bob or whatever, but highlighting a variety of stories here at the studio. As well as working with a lot of data and finding some great, Eli is our head of recruiting now and he is amazing and so passionate and positive. 

But yeah, so I just said, okay, I do not have the right amount of time to dedicate to the DEI committee to continue to make sure it is successful. So at that point we hired Rejess as the program lead, program manager. And so she continued to build out the program and that's her full time job, which was really important to me because I realized you need a lot of intent. You need someone who is accountable to keeping it all going. Yeah, as much as I've kind of wanted it to be this grassroots thing, I was like, no, it needs not just me saying, yay, I care about it and trying, but someone who's completely devoted. So that's been great. 

And then different ERGs have really started to rise to the occasion and see what other ERGs are doing and get inspired by them to expand. So it's been really fun to see the evolution, but I certainly can't take more credit than just being the spark. 

Lizzie Mintus: You sparked it. That's important. Hiring is obviously what I do for many different companies, and lots of people say that they want to build out an inclusive team. And there's data, it's a fact that if you have people of color and women, in your organization that you are more profitable. So I truly think that every company should care, but many people are like, Oh, well, that's just not available.

No, it is available. You just have to put in a concerted effort and be really intentional. So I'd love to hear if you know from a recruiter standpoint, are there certain organizations that you partner with? Is there a certain language that you found better in your job description? I know you mentioned you've highlighted stories of all kinds.

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, so we did a review of all of our job descriptions to make sure they were inclusive. We do the first 'look at all the resumes' is blind. We always try to make sure that we have at least the industry benchmark, if not a higher percentage of folks in the pipeline for any given role. We also don't just see hiring as a short term goal. We see it as a long game as well. 

And so we've also invested into our internship programs because we do know that there's a lot of young talent that we want to encourage that maybe wouldn't get into games. And a lot more, for instance, at Vanderbilt, who we partner with, their CS department is 50 percent men, 50 percent women. So that was a great pool to draw on to get more women. And for us, it was really finding more people for our pipelines. When we have the people in the pipeline, we hire at that percentage of which we have them in the pipeline. But it's just keeping that pipeline constantly open. And yeah, part of it is getting the word out there. Part of it is partnering with things like Connexion, and other groups. And we've been on the wiki board and we do pride events. So some of it is, I guess a little bit of marketing. Hey, we're here. Maybe you didn't hear about us before, but we're here. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's important. I mean, just like games. How's anyone going to play your game if they can't find it if they can't find you? 

Chelsea Blasko: A lot of partnerships with universities too, and helping students with capstones and building those relationships so they remember us. They tell other friends about us. And that, we've seen conversion from interns to full time hires. So that's been great. 

Lizzie Mintus: Definitely. And I love that you know that your employees are nurtured once they get there, because I know a woman who was in computer science and she said she was horrified by the amount of women when she joined then half of the women that were in it. Graduated. And then she went into work and it was even worse.

And she watched so many women drop out. And so she went on to create all these programs that support women. But I think the beginning years are so important. And if you can show people the way and give them the confidence that they're going to go really far and help you and her on those videos. 

Chelsea Blasko: Oh, definitely. I feel really proud that we have had a couple young women programmers who come on who had experiences in the past where they felt like they weren't listened to, or they were dismissed a bit. And when they report having a good experience with us and a good experience throughout the recruiting. One of the things we do is we give basically everyone who applies some feedback. 

I mean, when I was looking for jobs, there were so many companies that I heard nothing that even just getting like, sorry, you stink, would have been something. So I'm really proud of the work that the recruiting department is doing.

Lizzie Mintus: Good, and you should be. I think a lot of companies don't consider how important that is and how important the messaging is and how important the process is and how it's a small industry and everybody talks to each other. So if you have a lengthy interview process and the recruiter ghosts a candidate, it's a really negative experience for all involved. And it has a full ripple effect. 

Thank you for being responsible with that. So if you could go back in time and share something with Chelsea, who's just starting her Iron Galaxy career, is there anything you would tell her? 

Chelsea Blasko: Oh my gosh, hold on. Wow, what would I tell myself? I don't know that I'd tell myself much because I think maybe I would just say you'll be surprised where this goes. I mean, really, cause I had no idea. I had no idea we would grow and still be in business and be continuing to take on bigger projects and our roster of partners. So I think I would just say, Good job. Good job, you. Good decision. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's awesome. So business is not always sunshine and rainbows. And I read a lot of posts and often think how people don't really understand, how difficult it is to run a business and how many tough decisions you have to make, like a bad and a worse decision sometimes. What are some of the hardest choices or hurdles that you've had to deal with in business leadership?

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah. We are definitely a people first business. We do really care about our employees as people, but that doesn't mean there isn't tension sometimes between what the business needs and what any individual might need. And so balancing, finding that right balance to make sure you're giving the right accommodations or the best experience overall for all of the people, and balancing it with making sure that you have you're maintaining a stable work environment, right? They are making fiscally responsible decisions, while also keeping people happy. There's always some tension. 

So those are the hardest decisions when we have to say, Hey, we're not going to have a bonus this year. Because if we give a bonus, sure it keeps people happy in this moment, but then what could that lead to perhaps having to let some people go and so we'd rather not give the bonus so that we can keep people employed. And making those decisions and balancing things, we take really seriously because we know it is affecting the employee's lives.

So those are the toughest things, really knowing that every decision I make, I am responsible for all these other people and they're counting on me to, luckily not just me, but they are counting on me to do a good job and to make the best decisions that I can. So I think that's the hardest because you don't always know. You don't always know for sure what's going to be the right thing to do. 

Lizzie Mintus: I think about that a lot and I read people write nasty things about the company that they were let go from, but a business leader is really just a person who's making a lot of decisions to the best of their ability. And sometimes they do make the wrong decision, but it is all about, I think we've seen some companies that have done layoffs really well and some that have done a hard job of doing it. 

Chelsea Blasko: Of course, like we try to make every decision, even if it's a hard one, that we are compassionate in what we are doing and that we are as transparent as possible if something isn't going right.

This past year or so has obviously been a roller coaster and we're on the down downturn. So we're not afraid to share that with our employees, not to scare them, but to give them some perspective on where we are as well. And I think that vulnerability is important. I mean, during COVID, it was like I had to, all those decisions were hard and easy at the same time. Cause it was just like, what's the safest thing we can do. But I wasn't a doctor or an epidemiologist, or I'm reading through all this same data and everything that everyone else is trying to make the best decision possible. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I'm in this business group and I started my business in July, I was pregnant. It was an adventure, but I didn't have any employees and I didn't have to really worry. But almost everybody has the craziest story and how they think they were gonna have to shut their business down and then they got government money and had to make all these crazy decisions. So I feel grateful I didn't have to deal with that.

What can we look forward to from Iron Galaxy in the next couple years? 

Chelsea Blasko: Oh, my gosh. Well, we're going to continue to grow, and we're going to open an office in Austin too, because we have people down there now. And we want to have a physical footprint as well. And we're going to just keep partnering with all of the greatest names in games, I guess, and continuing to put out really good products and really help our partners to make sure that they get the quality they want.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. So inspiring to hear about the culture that you've built and congrats on everything. I have one final question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website so they can work for you, irongalaxystudios.com. 

The last question, what's one piece of advice you would give to somebody who is aspiring to be a leader in the video game industry?

Chelsea Blasko: I would say, well, I mean one thing, don't be afraid to be who you are. Sometimes, in my earlier career, I didn't know that was as appreciated. But as I've grown, it's really been important to not do things just the way they've always been done, because that's the way. Sometimes people won't understand because it's ahead of the curve when you have different ideas about how to do things, but don't be afraid to continue to try. If it doesn't work out, well you just have one more answer of what not to do. And then you can try again, try something different and better the next time. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great advice. Thank you. We've been talking to Chelsea Blasko, who is co-CEO and partner at Iron Galaxy Studios. Chelsea, where can people go to contact you or learn more about you or Iron Galaxy?

Chelsea Blasko: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Chelsea Blasko. I don't even know the numbers after the name. 

Lizzie Mintus: Chelsea and Iron Galaxy. You can do research. 

Chelsea Blasko: Yes, there you go. You'll see me. I have dark hair and I'm doing the kind of Wonder Woman pose in my photo. 

Lizzie Mintus: Your pic's awesome. 

Chelsea Blasko: Thank you. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

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.