Elevating Well-Being Through Gaming With Alina Matson

February 2, 2024

Elevating Well-Being Through Gaming With Alina Matson

Alina Matson is the Co-founder and CEO of Glossbird, an innovative game studio creating lifestyle-improving games for untapped player markets. She is an award-winning designer, engineer, inventor, and startup consultant with a diverse portfolio ranging from flying cars to the latest VR headset at Metis. In her roles at Glossbird, Alina leads a team dedicated to evoking positive emotions and enhancing well-being through entertainment. With the spirit of a game studio and the efficiency of a tech startup, Glossbird is poised to revolutionize the game industry — redefining the process, player demographics, and creators’ diversity.

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

Alina Matson gives an overview of her career before founding Glossbird
Explore the mission, inspiration, and essence of Glossbird
Glossbird’s four pillars and how it differentiates itself from other studios
Alina’s advice for aspiring game developers and studio owners
Alina reflects on cultivating a partnership with Glossbird’s co-founder, Samara Fantie
What is the Andreessen Horowitz funding initiative?
Key influencers who have shaped Alina's professional journey
How Alina overcomes imposter syndrome and breaks barriers in a male-dominated industry
Alina discusses her fundraising experience
Insights for creating a positive and thoughtful company culture

In this episode…

In the gaming world, several startup studios have emerged as transformative forces reshaping the industry. A growing trend is the development of video games specifically designed to promote physical fitness and overall health. For aspiring developers and studio owners, what factors can set them apart from the competition?

Alina Matson, a seasoned game developer and lifelong gamer, emphasizes that companies like Glossbird stand out by embracing fundamental pillars that serve as the foundation for their game development philosophy. These pillars are carefully crafted to elevate games beyond mere entertainment. Glossbird strongly emphasizes vital objectives, including fostering innovation in wellness, ensuring accessibility for a diverse audience, promoting creative collaboration, and maintaining a player-centric design approach. These guiding principles shape Glossbird's identity and contribute to creating games beyond conventional gaming experiences.

Join Lizzie Mintus on today’s episode of the Here’s Waldo podcast as she interviews Alina Matson, Co-founder and CEO of Glossbird, about well-being in gaming. Alina discusses the inspiration behind Glossbird, highlights the studio’s four pillars, shares advice for aspiring developers and studio owners, and offers insight on creating a positive and thoughtful company culture.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

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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: 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 video game 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 big thank you to GamesBeat Next.

Thank you, Dean. Thank you, Gina. Thank you, Rachel. Such a lovely event. And we were able to connect. Also, a shout out to going to events and COVID being less of a thing, so we can do that now. Today we have Alina Matson with us. She is an award winning designer, engineer, patented inventor and startup consultant that has worked on everything from Flying Cars to Meta's latest VR headset.

She co-founded Glossbird to create games that make people feel better. Glossbird has the heart of a game studio with the execution of a tech startup and is here to change every aspect of the game industry, including how games are made, who can make those games and for whom those games are made for.

Let's get started. I'm excited to hear more about your mission and thanks for coming on.

Alina Matson: Thank you so much for having me. That intro is a lot.

LIzzie Mintus: Oh, it's great. I loved it.

Alina Matson: One thing I like to add, and it's strange that I have to add this and preface this in some conversations. Not with you, but I always have to add, I also play video games. I started a game studio. I'm a lifelong gamer. All of my experiences has come together to start this company. But yeah, glad to be here today.

LIzzie Mintus: My first question is about that we met at GamesBeat and they did a women breakfast segment about how career paths are not straight lines. You've worked on so many different things, which I think makes you the strongest founder.

Can you give a history of your career when you got started and what's led you to where you are today?

Alina Matson: I was born and raised from Minnesota. And as a kid, I really liked video games, and I really liked building stuff. I got my first gaming console. It was a PlayStation 1 from my cousin.

He said, Alina, my PlayStation one is broken. If you can fix it, just keep it. I don't care, whatever. So I teared apart the PlayStation 1 at the age of six. And it was just like a Cheez-It stuck inside of it. So took it out and I had a PlayStation 1 and that kind of began my journey of both mechanical engineering, which was my former background, and video games.

I went to school for mechanical engineering, found out I did not want to work a more traditional factory or manufacturing job. So I hopped over to the west coast to do startups. I really fell in love with the idea of startups.

I really put founders on a pedestal. I thought they were these amazing guys, like world class geniuses and strategists, and I just wanted to be under them, work under them, and learn as much as I can. And that's where I really got my start in my career. So I started as a mechanical engineer and grew my way up to a technical lead at a startup consulting firm.

At that firm, my perception of founders actually really broke. I soon found out that a lot of these founders are just regular people. Anyone with the right drive and resources time can be a founder. I didn't realize that until like years in and I remember thinking, huh, these guys aren't that smart. And it was always guys.

It was a lot of men. Most of our clients were men and of all ages. We'd had 20 year old founders raising millions of dollars and didn't know how to host a meeting. We would have to train them on every single thing and do every single thing for them. That just really gave me this big inner confidence to, one day I'm going to start my own thing, and I'm going to do it so well. So that's the genesis there.

LIzzie Mintus: I had a similar experience. I think it's a really empowering moment to look at people that own companies, realize they're not different than you. In fact, maybe you have a skill that they don't have, and maybe you could do it better. For anybody that's not familiar with your company, can you share a little bit more about Glossbird?

Alina Matson: So Glossbird, we're an innovative game studio focused on creating games that make people feel better and in general make the industry be better. We have four main pillars of GlossBird to differentiate us from the other game studios.

Our first pillar is wellness centric design. So all of the video games we make have a wellness angle. So our first game, for example, is a game called Fitment and fitment is a social mobile game for bite size workouts designed for cozy gamers. So basically it's just Animal Crossing for exercise. And that's been really fun. And that's an early access.

Our second pillar is diversity. Gamers are super diverse people and right now it's so frustrating. A big reason why we started the studio is 85 percent of gamers are overlooked. Right now, almost the entire industry focuses on a white male teen demographic or going up until 20s maybe early 30s demographic. And we don't look like that. Players do not look like that. So I want to make sure that we're building games for these overlooked players- lGBTQ women, senior gamers, et cetera.

The third big pillar of our company is, we're trying to run it like a tech startup and tech company. We use agile development, keeping everything lean and mean and fast.

Finally, our fourth one is, and the game industry is starting to look into this, but strategic partnerships as a main and major go to market strategy. For example, that would be like Fortnite teaming up with the Ariana Grande concert to get more players that would have never played Fortnite into Fortnite and doing a similar thing like that. So that's the big overview.

LIzzie Mintus: I like that mission. Thank you so much. On the 4th pillar, in terms of strategic partnerships, are there any that are announced that you can talk about that?

Alina Matson: Yes. Super exciting. We have recently announced a partnership with Twitch as a official Twitch developer partner. Maybe a little more context; we build in public our games. So we actually stream multiple times a week, our game development process. Our players and our super play testers would come in, give feedback, or sometimes they're just there to hang out and vent about their day. It is a really beautiful community we have there. I don't wanna say it's a common thing, but a lot of indies do it.

Twitch saw that we were doing it in this more professional and formalized way. So we got together to turn Fitment, the exercise mobile game, into the first ever interactive Twitch exercise game, designed for streamers. And so now you can stream Fitment. It ties directly into Twitch Chat and so people in Twitch Chat can actually modify that gameplay and have it do that. It's just an amazing partnership. So that just came out like a few weeks ago.

LIzzie Mintus: Congratulations. That's such big news.

Alina Matson: Thank you.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah. In terms of developing in the open, is that what you've done the whole time? And if so, can you talk more about that? Because I know that can be really scary for a lot of people to do if you're a developer.

Alina Matson: It totally is. The big thing is just, get over yourself. It's okay. I'm a self taught coder as well. In the very early days of building in public and coding online, it was so embarrassing. There's like people in the comments, what is this code? You don't have any of the conventions. It actually became a good learning experience as a couple of game devs would hop in and help out and became this whole big thing. So it became less about being embarrassed and scary, but more forging community through transparency and showing hardship in the game development process.

This term, build in public, it's more popular in the Silicon Valley, tech bro, indie hacker scene, but we don't see it as much in the game industry, but I think it's super powerful. I'd love to see more studios build in public. I don't know why games are top secret.

LIzzie Mintus: I think it's gaining more traction, but there are still large studios that haven't had anybody playtests their game and they're close to ship and that's pretty scary.

Alina Matson: They get cancelled! I was chatting with someone the other day from a big AAA studio and they said their last game, no names, they pivoted the game several times because they didn't do proper playtesting and each pivot was 20 million dollars. Just down the drain and I'm like, are you kidding me?

LIzzie Mintus: How did you land on this mission for your company? How did you decide what to do? From coming up with the idea everything find your co-founder.

Alina Matson: Oh, goodness. The game Fitment came before the studio. It was like a hobby project. I was in this incubator program, Microsoft for Startups and Female Founder school. We just entered in and we just needed a project. And so this was my learning project. I really struggled with exercise. This was during the pandemic. I was working a lot, really stressed, stopped exercising for months. I'm like, I need to fix my exercise problem.

So Fitment began as a hardware project since that was my expertise. And I'm like, everyone loves hardware. Everyone loves the Pelotons and it's great. And then, as I was interviewing customer discovery calls, I learned that it wasn't the hardware. People had treadmills in their basement gathering dust and some people with Pelotons like got rid of them. This whole secondhand used market of shoes like exercise equipment grew.

Really the secret sauce came down to gamification and video games, like the Peloton app or for Dance Revolution.

It's not necessarily just the pad, it's that really addicting scrolling, arrows, rainbow, lights, gameplay, and that instant feedback. I just went into this wild, deep dive into game design and just learned everything I could- taking classes, reading textbooks, finding an advisor to show me the ropes, teach me the way. And that was really the first year of my journey. At that point, I'm realized this needs to be a real business. I think Fitment had so much high potential.

As I was learning about games, I just wanted to build more games. And so a game studio made sense, but I needed to find someone from the game industry had that background. I found my co-founder Samara by complete accident. I was not expecting it. Last year, in the spring, I put up an ad listing. I was at Meta at the time. I wrote, $15 an hour artist intern and had all these great, younger artists apply. And then there was one resume and a cover letter that pepped into my inbox and it's was Samara, professor of game art.

I thought, dude, this is a scam. This is a freaking scam. Why is a professor applying to my 15 an hour job? So Google searching, LinkedIn searching. Is this person real? Is this a BS resume? I just need to hop on a call with this person. And so I hopped on a call with Samara.

Interview one, and I'm like, dude I don't know if I can swear, cut the bullshit. Who are you? Why are you applying? And she's was like, oh, I love your mission. I love what you're trying to make with Glossbird. I love the concept of Fitment. And I just want to work with like really cool people. So she joined us. I made her still go through the formal art interview process. She did all three rounds and she was the best candidate to o, by a long shot. She gets the job and we start working together and she's great.

We're full remote. She's on the other side of the country. And I'm applying to accelerators and things just to like really get Glossbird started. And a month later, we get an email from Free to Play Campus, a mobile game accelerator in Spain saying, you got into this program. You can bring up to four people to Spain. We'll pay for a Spanish apartment, provide three meals a day. You just need to be full time, in person, and build. You need to gather your team by the end of the week, and let us know if you're going.

I was like, Oh my god. We have stand up every morning before my day job so I hop into to stand up because I read the email prior. And I'm like hey everybody, who wants to go to Spain in one month? And then everyone's what are you doing? We were freaking out. We started planning. And then on that call, within five minutes, Samara was like, I'm going to Spain and she quit her job as a professor. That's really how that began. And Spain was great. She was amazing. We worked really closely and you really get to know someone when you live with them. It became the ultimate stress test.

And I remember thinking, this really a impressive person. So I asked her to be co-founder at the end of the program. It was like a marriage proposal in a way. Will you be my co-founder? And then she said, yes.

LIzzie Mintus: And now we're married.

Alina Matson: Now we're married for business life.

LIzzie Mintus: It is a spouse. What a great way to really know your co-founder too.

Alina Matson: Yeah.

LIzzie Mintus: You've done so many different combinators. First, can you talk a little bit about the other company that you founded, Coral Labs?

Alina Matson: So Coral Labs was a Y Combinator company. Basically what we were trying to do was automate manicure, so painting nails at home. And so people could buy a little robot, like a toaster, put it on their counter and get their nails painted. And so I was one of the founding engineers there and one of the first hires there with Brad and Ramya at that company. But, that was, looking back at my career, the biggest technical achievement and it also really hit all the aspects of product development from the very beginning all the way to the very end.

When I was a startup consultant before, our projects were between maybe three months to a year, so I only saw a snippet and it was also very engineering focused. Here at Coral, I did a little bit of product management, I did branding work, I learned about marketing, and how to get much deeper into customer discovery calls. Unfortunately the company did have to shut down due to funding, but we did build this really impressive working prototypes of a machine that could paint your nails. It took seven seconds per nail to get painted. One of my favorite patents I have is from that, but it's an electro, chemical, and mechanical solution. So we combine all three things to create something totally novel in the approach.

LIzzie Mintus: I would love that machine. Getting my nails done is very important to me.

Alina Matson: Me too.

LIzzie Mintus: I just went, side story, the day before Thanksgiving to get my nails done because I need to get my nails done every three weeks. And my husband texts me, traffic is terrible. It is one of the most dangerous days to drive. I do not think you should get your nails done today. And I was like, I don't think you understand. I'm going to get my nails done right now. I have to do this. Always, snowstorms no matter what.

Alina Matson: Yeah. Cheers to that. I was actually gonna do my nails before this podcast. Now I'm upset. But yeah, I'm a big nail person too.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah. I think doing what you're passionate about is so important. That's a big accomplishment. Even work on a product start to finish and I'm sure you had so many learnings that prepared you for what you're doing today.

Alina Matson: Yeah, that experience especially really prepped me to be a CEO for Glossbird.

LIzzie Mintus: You've done a lot of different combinators. So you did Y Combinator. What was the Spanish one?

Alina Matson: Free to Play Campus.

LIzzie Mintus: Free to Play Campus, Microsoft for Startup Fellow Program, which was all women. That sounds awesome.

Can you tell me more about the Andreessen Horwitz Talent and Opportunity Accelerator Fund?

Alina Matson: Andreessen Horowitz, talent and opportunity. We are in that right now. Next week is our demo day. Just getting ready and prepped for that. It is a separate fund of Andreessen that they started to help fund founders that they call cultural breakthroughs.

So it's not just about software. It's not just about tech, but you have something there that is going to be the next cultural pop cultural thing. I'm really excited to be part of that program. There's a totally different lens when you start building, not just building a company, not just building a product, but trying to build a movement and designing intentionally for that cultural change. So it's been amazing. The program is very intensive and it's first class all the way. The mentors, the lecturers, the programming. Life changing, absolutely life changing.

LIzzie Mintus: How do all the different programs compare to each other? And especially how did the women's one compare? Because I would imagine there are less women in the other programs, but maybe that's not true.

Alina Matson: The talent and opportunity one is pretty diverse. But comparing them, the Microsoft for startups slash female founder school was an incubator. So really early stage. People came into that program with an inkling of an idea and so they really just made you hone in on it. I think the most I got from that program, because I was already doing a lot of that work, doing startup consulting was more of the marketing side and learning about go to market, because I wasn't doing that as a technical lead at the consulting firm. And so that was really great.

Free to play campus was very specific and niche, focus on mobile games. So everything you need to know about the mobile game industry, taught there. Data science, user acquisition, retention, how to design your KPIs, your workflows, your live ops plan, and very detailed. That was great because a lot of that information, you can find it on the internet, but not next level. So our mentors were the guys from Candy Crush, Cut the Rope, Two Dots, like all these very big mobile games teaching us. Those were some of the main ones there.

LIzzie Mintus: Are there a lot of people from the program that you keep in touch with regularly?

Alina Matson: There , especially the Spain one. There's a lot of folks. There were five game studios in total. Every once in a while, just hang on Discord and see how everybody is doing. But it's so interesting to see where everyone has gone basically since a year from today.

LIzzie Mintus: I feel like you're very focused on company growth and self growth, right? They intersect. Who have your biggest mentors been along your journey so far?

Alina Matson: Yeah, there's been a lot. I think the first one, Heather Chandler was the former senior producer of Fortnite and she was like my first mentor within a month of deciding I need to go into the game industry. She was like the first person I reached out to. She wrote this fantastic textbook really liked, and I've saw her speak at different online conferences. So I was like, this is the lady. She just taught me everything about game production in detail and how to get organized and helped me take my transferable skills from how do you manage a engineering project to how do you manage a games project? I think in the early days, what I struggled with the most was dealing with creative, dealing with artists, communicating with artists, organizing just everything related to the art side. Because in engineering, you got industrial designers, you got UX UI designers. It's very clear cut to create deadlines and have accurate estimates for resource loading. But in games, it's a little fluffier until you get a better sense of it. So that was, yeah, a huge one.

Another one, Jerry Ellsworth, CEO of Tilt 5 Augmented Reality. Just amazing technical person. She's my role model. I was a fangirl and I was looking for clients at the time. I also ran my own consulting business after the fact to make money while getting the studio off the ground. I cold emailed Jerry and I said I'm such a big fan of your work. I love your products. She's like the godmother of augmented reality. I just sent her this long email and I'm said if there's any chance at all that I can help you with any problems you may have, do some consulting, just let me know. And then she responded, and said yes. So I freaked out. Oh my god! I was able to work with her and learn from her and also help out with the Tilt 5 launch. That was incredible. Those are my top two.

LIzzie Mintus: Congrats on sending her this big email and it worked. I think that's such an important takeaway. For everybody, just send the email. But in both instances, you've done so much research on both people and you really had a reason for reaching out.

I have a lot of people reach out for jobs, which is different, but similar, but sometimes it's like, hey, I need help or can you look at my resume? I'm like, I don't have time. But I think when you send such a compelling email with such a reason and actionable follow up item, it's really clear as to what you want. You can get a long ways.

Alina Matson: I agree. Customize those cover letters, customize those emails. I think both of those first times I reached out to both of those ladies were very heartfelt emails. I think the emails are probably like two or three paragraphs long, just like saying how much respect I have for their work and what I would like to learn from them, not just ask but gives and what I can offer you as well in exchange.

LIzzie Mintus: That's important and sincere. Thank you. I want to talk about imposter syndrome. It comes up for everybody. At what point in your journey have you had imposter syndrome and at what point did you really feel successful?

Alina Matson: Oh, no. The term point is not the right word because it's more a line or a blanket that has encompassed the entire journey. The entire journey has been imposter syndrome.

LIzzie Mintus: Because everybody feels it at every single level all the time. So how do you deal with it? Maybe how you deal with it, not at what point, because some people are like, I don't have imposter syndrome, but...

Alina Matson: Who said that? That is so not true.

LIzzie Mintus: That's what I mean. Every single person.

Alina Matson: Yeah. Gosh. To be totally honest, anger has driven me through my imposter syndrome and using anger as a tool to get me through. A lot of my imposter syndrome was caused by comments from others. Because I knew I was a hardworking person. I wouldn't call myself smart, but I was very hardworking. And I've always been very focused and driven.

There were just some folks, some guys, some co workers, colleagues, classmates that just said, mean things or slightly off handed things. I just could not forget those things and really caused a lot of imposter syndrome, but just made me angry. I wanted to prove them wrong. I remember it was like the first week of class in mechanical engineering, some guy comes up to me, hey Alina, I think you need to design a robot that can make me a sandwich. I'm like, are you mother effing kidding me, dude? Yeah I can design you that effing robot?

LIzzie Mintus: It can be the best robot ever, way better than your stupid robots.

Alina Matson: Exactly. I'm just trying to channel that energy in a positive way.

LIzzie Mintus: Whatever motivates you. In the tech industry, game industry, and Silicon Valley, you have a lot of men. How have you been able to combat it and cope with it in a way that feels authentic to you? I hear a lot of people say, Oh, when I pitch, I try and sound more like a guy, or I try and do these things. I could try and dress more masculine at an event, right? I had somebody come up to me at Gamesbeat and tell me I was really brave to dress so feminine, which made me laugh.

I'm like, I'm just doing my thing. This is just who I am as a person, right? That's my authentic self, and I'm going to show up as my authentic self. I don't care.

Alina Matson: I do the same thing to all of that. I used to dress like very business formal- pantsuit, all those things and I didn't feel like myself. I think clothes, makeup, these feminine things that I grew up with and love are super important to me. I spent a little extra time on my makeup todayto feel good for recording this podcast and it works.

I'm just staying true to yourself. I think for me it's like finding your allies, whatever gender they may be or whoever they might be, just finding those allies and then having that conversation with them mentioning, thank you for being ally. Thank you for your support and then they keep on doing it. And it becomes really great. I think there hasn't been too many I would say, saboteurs, but there's a lot of people that are just quiet. They see it. That robot sandwich comment, the TA heard it, the professor heard it, the classmates heard it, no one said anything. Yeah, I wish I had an ally in that particular class.

LIzzie Mintus: Me too. So if you are a person listening to this and you are hoping to support women, people of color, anybody that is not a traditional game developer or anybody that looks a little bit different in the industry, how would you recommend that they go about that?

Alina Matson: If you want to support more underrepresented game devs, I think just be vocal about your support. And so we can be like, oh that person, that's an ally. I feel safe reaching out to them or vice versa. If you are an ally, reach out to the the women, the non binary, all the underrepresented folks in your life and ask, just hey, how's it going? How can I be more supportive in your journey? Just communicate that and be there. I will say though, the game industry is this such a beautiful and unique place. There are a lot of really cool, really nice, really supportive people. I don't see that kind of, I don't know if intimacy is the right word, but that like level of intimacy and commodity across an industry like games.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah. It's a small industry too. You bump into people all the time and I like what you said earlier about how as an engineer, artists are very different in their creative process and in their timeline and everything. Game making is like Texas and Texas is so funny to me. In Austin, you have like very liberal, eccentric, and then you have people with guns there, but they both exist in this very interesting way and live and work together. And it's fascinating to me. I'm not from Texas. I'm from Washington. Not that one person has a gun and one person is a liberal by any means, but there's just very different brains that work together in the game industry, and they figure out how to work together. And I think you have to collaborate cross functionally so much more because you're all building this creative product together.

Alina Matson: 100 percent agree. I think that's what makes games maybe the one of the hardest medium. We have like technical challenges, we have our artistic challenges, but to combine those two is wild.

LIzzie Mintus: It's really hard. In terms of your current startup, what has been the biggest surprise about getting into the game industry or running this company? What did you not anticipate or what's the biggest learning you've had? I'm sure there's so many.

Alina Matson: Oh, gosh. Yeah. There's a lot of ways I can answer this question. There's the business side on fundraising and learning the fundraising process and dealing with investors and great stories and really horrible stories from that journey.

LIzzie Mintus: Will you share more about that? I think fundraising is such a hot topic and people would love to hear more about what worked for you? What didn't work?

Alina Matson: Yeah, and disclaimer, we will be starting our raise very soon. And so I'm not talking I successfully raised yet. We're about to begin this journey. There's definitely a lot going through my mind right now. But fundraising, it's just the dog and pony show. It is truly a presentation at there's a lot of showpersonship, showmanship involved. Unfortunately, and this is maybe the downfall, there is a lot of charisma, there is a lot of social engineering involved.

They always say create FOMO, fear of missing out. And to me as a engineering background was very strange because being really good at socially manipulating you to take my first call has nothing to do with me running my game studio. Totally separate skill set. And I think that's the thing I've learned. There might not be much overlap between your fundraising skill set versus your CEO skill set.

I have heard investors say, no, fundraising shows that you can be a visionary and you can convince people to join you on your mission. That's the purpose. I disagree with that, because how I talk to investors is not how I talk to my players. People are joining us without all of that show person ship.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah, it is very showy. How do you want Glossbird to be different than the places that you've worked in the past?

Alina Matson: I have a saying I like to say. I do believe the CEO is the culture and culture is not that rule book you write down, but really the actions of leadership and how it propagates through the rest of the organization and those people you hire and how you scale and build your team.

Right now, the game industry is pretty toxic. There is sexual harassment. There are studios that overwork people. Crunch culture is assumed and all this completely bogus stuff. Honestly, you can design those things out. If you are intentional enough from day zero, you can really design those things out.

What is crunch being overschedule and over budget? Where does that come from? That comes from bad project management. That comes from bad financials. That comes from a bad feedback loop. That comes from a bad development process.

It comes from leadership. I can get like very ranty about it. So I'll go ahead and stop there. But I think Glossbird, happy game devs make better games. That's what we're trying to do different.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah. That's a fact. I had Eve Crevoshay from Take This on my podcast, how your team's mental health impacts your game and that impacts the community that you build from your game as well. So it's really all related. Your culture is there, whether you are intentional or not.

I worked at a company and I remember coming in one day and we never had core values or anything to find, but I came in and one of the leaders is said, here are our core values. And they were not what we were. They were not what we were at all. It was delusional, literallu none of it. I didn't say anything. I was just like, okay, great, these are our core values. Who am I to tell you that they're not, in the circumstance, but I think that's an example also of trying to backpedal a little bit. If you're not intentional from the start, it might not be real when you implement them years and years later.

Alina Matson: Yeah. Another side story on that. Again, no names, but I was at Dice last year and there's a lot of game CEOs that go. I was chatting with a bunch of CEOs and much bigger companies with 10,000 plus employees. They were discussing culture and mentioning that thei r game studio is toxic. It's hard for us to keep women at our studio. Maybe we should write some more guidelines like a handbook about it. I'm listening into these conversations that I'm like, what, dude, you're thinking about this after you have 1,000+ employees? What? That was mind blowing.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah. There are a lot of things you should do early on. I was having a conversation last night about having a one pager when a woman is going to have a baby given out in terms of what you can expect and what is appropriate to say and what is not appropriate to say. That could be a really useful thing to because if you don't have kids or were not involved much in raising your children, as a man, you might not have a good idea.

Alina Matson: I love that. I love that. Even though I said writing it down isn't enough, I think the process of writing it down and having it as a reference is really good. Something I'd like to share, and I hope other game studios start doing this as well, is community agreements and community agreements are documents and usually verbal agreements, it's not a legally binding agreement, of your communication standards at your company.

And so ours has no jargon. If you use jargon, you need to explain it. Respect gender pronouns. Do not interrupt people. If there's no time for questions, we will make time for questions at a later date. Other ones is, you can pass if you don't know the answer to a question.

We have maybe it's up to 20 rules now. It's a living document. We have like kind of these deeper discussions to add little things and it's been just a really great thing because when someone's being a little off, I can be like, remember the community agreement? And then they're like, my bad, and then it resolves a lot of things.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah, putting things in writing and sharing them. It's huge. Somebody told me when I started my company that you're a CRO, chief reminding officer, because you have to say things over again. I think make my team listen to the same presentation every quarter. I'm bored of it, but I think it's important. Here's the values, here's what we're doing, here's the things, so writing things down is helpful at the beginning. But yeah, if you haven't done it at the beginning, at least if you can think about it at a later point in time and come to realizations, it'd be helpful. I do think it's it is an issue that people don't think about.

I hear people say that they want to do diversity hiring, but then I always think, what do you have set up to support underrepresented people once they come into your company? So that's a really important thought as well. I think the acquiring is top of mind, but if you don't have a plan, it's not going to work.

Alina Matson: Totally. Yeah. I just wish founders would think about this more. Just a little more intentionality, I think could change a lot of things.

LIzzie Mintus: Yeah, it seems like there are more and more speedrunning sort of programs that are available and hopefully that's something that's been been taught a little bit more. No one really teaches you how to run a company. You could learn some things from different places. I think it's at the top of mind, which I appreciate.

Do you have any advice for any of our listeners who want to start? their own company and or game studio?

Alina Matson: I do. Yeah. Going back to being intentional, I think the very first thing is starting with your North Star and your mission. That's like the big thing of why I transitioned from building one game, Fitment, to let's build a studio. What is that grander idea? And so I love looking at other game studios, missions, and North Star. These are a couple sentence statements you can usually find on a website.

For example, Supergiant Games mission is we want to build the games that make you feel like a kid or something like that. It's this very specific vibe and feeling. And so having intentionality of what types of games you're going to make, is really good. And then from there you can start building the rest of your process of, is part of your North star to be a profitable business. How profitable? Is this a side thing? Is this your main thing? And you can go from there.

For example, we want to be the next Nintendo for Glossbird. We want to get big and we're intentional in the design to scale and do that. If you want to be a solo indie dev and contract out some art, that sounds amazing. Just plan for it. And then from there, you can budget. All from this singular North Star.

LIzzie Mintus: I feel like that's the secret to any business really. If you don't know where you're going, how can you plan.

Alina Matson: Exactly.

LIzzie Mintus: So important. What can we look forward to from Glossbird in the next couple years? Where do you hope to be? What's your vision? You're the CEO. You're the visionary.

Alina Matson: Yes. Right now our games are in early access. We have that streamer edition and then the mobile version of Fitment, but those are going to get to Dev Complete next year. And so that's our first major release, but game two and game three, we're actually looking into virtual reality for our next titles.

Virtual reality was a space. I worked a lot with at Meta and some of my other clients' work and there's so much potential and just undiscovered things in it, that I believe a lean and iterative process how we do things at Glossbird, we'll be able to make really unique wellness centric experiences.

A couple years from now, I love to be the next multi million, billion dollar company making games that change people's lives.

LIzzie Mintus: Can't wait to see what you come up with. So much to look forward to. I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website at Glossbird.com.

The last question is from WiWIGI and they always talk about cheat codes. I wish I knew X at Y stage of my career. Please share your cheat codes. Everything happens for a reason, but what would have been really useful to know when you were starting either company?

Alina Matson: I think maybe the very first thing I learned when I moved across the country, these people you see high up, CEOs, these visionaries, they're just regular people who had some luck and some resources and the drive to do something. So imposter syndrome can be so debilitating and I think it's just really important to try it in your own way get over it. My way was through anger. Maybe your way is through something else. Cheat code is- you're a regular person too and you can do whatever you want.

LIzzie Mintus: So true. I agree. We've been talking to Alina Matson, CEO of Glossbird. Where can people go to stream your game, learn more about you, contact you? Maybe they can send you a heartfelt email?

Alina Matson: Oh yes. Please, if you want to build with us, please come to our Twitch development streams, twitch.tv/Glossbird. You can also follow us on all the social media, Glossbird Games or specifically for Fitment, Play Fitment, F I T M E N T. Best way to reach out to me is by adding me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a LinkedIn message.

LIzzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

Alina Matson: Thank you.

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.

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