
Bernard Yee is the Founder of Windup Minds, an unannounced game startup dedicated to building games that make players feel joy and surprise. He was an executive producer at Oculus VR and a TPM at Meta, where he created seminal virtual reality experiences. He’s a gaming industry veteran, serving in development and publishing roles at Sony Online Entertainment, ESPN, Atari, Harmonix (Rock Band), and Disney Interactive. Bernard also taught game design as an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Bernard Yee discusses his new game startup business
- What motivated Bernard to launch his own video game company
- The value of diverse leadership and how it impacts an industry
- Why should you surround yourself with knowledgeable people?
- Bernard explains why some video games succeed while others fail
- Understanding that pivoting is part of the process for building a successful game
- Bernard reflects on why a product's success depends on a target audience
- The importance of building peer accountability
- What is the future of virtual and mixed reality games?
In this episode…
Let’s face it! People play video games because they’re fun. But, considering the many types of games available these days, fun is just one reason behind the gaming industry’s soaring popularity. VR games create virtual worlds that allow people to explore. Additionally, consumers see gaming as competitive and sociable, and with esports, it can provide extra income. But what motivates enthusiasts to create their own video game company?
According to Bernard Yee, a gaming industry veteran, he founded a gaming startup to fill a void he discovered in the industry. The reality, however, is that building a video game startup isn’t for the faint of heart. Getting to the fun part, involves other crucial steps. Bernard cautions that before starting a project, the operational side first needs tending to, like obtaining licenses, hiring the right people, and purchasing healthcare. Brainstorming and identifying a target audience are also crucial in enhancing a product’s chances of success.
In this episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, Lizzie chats with Bernard Yee, Founder of Windup Minds, to discuss his new game startup. Bernard shares his motivation for launching his own gaming company, the value in diverse leadership, surrounding yourself with brilliant talent, and the reasons why games succeed and fail.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode...
This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, where we pride ourselves on keeping up with the latest trends in technology. Because we understand the particular needs of the tech industry, we’re able to engage with top-tier candidates in the field.
The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.
We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.
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 make a successful video game. 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 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.
Today we have Bernard or Bernie Yee with us. He was an executive producer and TPM at Oculus on the Oculus Rex team in Seattle. Oculus Rex has created the seminal VR experiences for Oculus' current -gen hardware. Bernie has worked in the gaming industry on a wide variety of games and genres. In both development and publishing roles, most recently PopCap as a lead producer on Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Piggle 2 and Bungie where he worked on Destiny. Prior to moving to Seattle, Bernie worked at smaller game startups in New York City and also Harmonix, Rock Band, Atari, Disney Interactive, and Sony Online Entertainment EverQuest. He also taught game design and production at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
He's currently the founder of an unannounced game startup called Windup Minds. Let's get started. Thank you for being here today, Bernie. I'm excited to talk to you. What can you tell us about your new studio?
Bernard Yee: It's a pleasure, Lizzie. Thank you for having me. It's been quite a journey, it's. It's funny because when you work at a company, everything is already done for you in ways that you just have no idea about like from recruiting to HR to onboarding, to interview processes and when you're starting a studio, I thought it was bad when you had to start up a new production process from scratch, but when you start a team, everything that you took for granted, it's not there. And you have to do it. If you're the founder, you don't get someone else to do it you look around and you're like, who's doing this? I guess it's me. So I am in the middle of trying to put together with my team, all the operational details that will make studio possible even before the game gets started. So it's quite daunting actually.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's a lot. I've been there.
Bernard Yee: Licenses and insurance and general liability insurance and health care and all this stuff. It's a lot.
Lizzie Mintus: It's an adventure. Can you tease us about what it is that you are setting out to do it all? What's your vision?
Bernard Yee: Yeah, I've long believed that especially coming into VR, the best games for a new medium take advantage of the unique things that medium does so. So in VR, VR has a very particular experiential affordance list, right? There are things you can do in VR that you cannot do elsewhere. And there are things elsewhere that just are better elsewhere than VR. And I'll give you an example, right? Is that in VR, you really feel like things are real, like these imaginary things in front of you. What could be an alien? It could be a dinosaur. They're real, right there. Your lizard brain tells you it's real. And no other medium can do that, right? Versus things that in other medium media like console games. Stick movement is obviously not even a discussion, of course you can move your character around in, on a console game, but in VR, it makes a lot of people motion sick, right? So there are things that console games can do and things that VR can do and mixed reality. So we really want to build around this idea that the best games in VR are going to be the ones that make. That takes the best advantage of it. This goes back to one of the first things my team built for Oculus was an experience called dream deck and it was a series of vignettes that put people in different sorts of VR scenarios and one of them is you're standing in a hallway. You can see a banner that says Hammond Museum, which is both a reference to the environment artist, Eric Hammond, who did that scene as well as Jurassic Park. And down this hallway, a T Rex comes around the corner and lumbers towards you. It stops in front of you and will sniff at your head. And if you move your head, the T Rex's head follows you around and is like sniffing you. And we've had people tear their headsets off and people being my wife and my son and other people. Because they thought it was real, right? And they knew they were standing in a demo room inside an Oculus office, but their lucid brain was telling them that they were in a room with a dinosaur. And I think the kind of games we want to make really focus on this illusion. We tell our lucid brain that the thing is real. That's all I'm going to say right now. But I think there's a kind of game genre that will exist in VR that doesn't exist, in the same way on, in console games. I think that is going to be really impactful in a way that we just haven't seen before. That's a small bet, not very ambitious. I've been around the game industry to see these patterns come out over and over again. I think they're good. Each medium is going to give rise to something that we couldn't imagine how good they were in the old, on old platforms. And then we're going to look back at them, of course it was going to work in VR. And I hope to be one of those teams.
Lizzie Mintus: I just talked to Ed Fries on the last episode, and he said that the founders that really make a difference are the ones that have some crazy brand new idea. And those are the pitchers that he gets so excited about. So I can't wait to see what you're up to.
Bernard Yee: Thank you. I hope he's right. I hope I'm one of those people. Ed should know. He's seen a lot of them.
Lizzie Mintus: He's definitely seen a lot. What made you decide to launch your own thing? It's a scary decision.
Bernard Yee: So it's interesting. I was laid off by Meta in November of 2022, and I had a great run, right? I joined Oculus before the acquisition. I came in at a pretty good stock price. I've done fairly well for myself during the time there, and the severance package was really excellent, right? I bear no ill will to the company, even though I think it's hugely their loss. I realized that companies make decisions that aren't human because they're not. Companies aren't human beings, right? So I don't think of it as personal. I think of it as just a casualty of a natural act of God, essentially. I can't explain it. And I thought, what am I going to do? Am I going to go back and work for someone else again? Or should I try something else? And to be honest, I've been wanting to get back to games for a long time,. I think companies like Meta and Google and even Apple, I think show how hard it is to be creative in a truly kind of artistic way, like a commercial art form, a game developers understand this, but how hard it is to be creative in these companies, you. You look at Google and Stadia, you look at some of the things that Meta has tried to launch that are game like horizon worlds. They have struggled, not from lack of technical excellence, but from a creative sensibility. And games are hard. So I was thinking I want to get back to games anyway. I had shipped some pretty significant things with my team. I think some of the best VR experiences that have ever been made. A lot of people in the industry knew it and they knew of my team's reputation and my work. And it's funny, sometimes people on the outside realize how good your work is more than on the inside, inside a Meta, right?
So one of the VCs who had been active in the VC world said, why don't you start your own thing? So even while I was interviewing, maybe I should start my own thing. And it all kind of came together shockingly fast. I don't, I think every experience is different. I know it was a hard time or people tell me it was a hard time to raise money, but we raised money. This person who poked my ribs and said, try to get in the game ended up coming on as an investor. And the other thing too is like, you always complain or not you, but I would complain like, they don't know how to do a thing and I could do this better. At some point you put your money where your mouth is, right? If you really think you can do this better, go do it better. Don't just complain about it from the background. So I figured. I've seen enough, I've learned enough, I learned a ton at Meta, Oculus, at PopCap, I learned a ton at Bungie, like really those, these three places really changed the way I think about game development and they're very dramatically different, and I felt like I had a good opportunity to like build a team from scratch with the kind of people and the kind of culture, That I valued, through lots of trial and error and lots of teams that were dysfunctional or had elements of chaos in them. So financially, I was in a position to do it. My success and my fame, as such as it is from working in VR, is only declining every day, right? Every day, I have less credit. If I'm going to use it, I felt like it was the time and I think we can make something a lot of this work is a continuation of things I've been thinking about at Oculus for the last eight years. So, this is the time to do it, right? And I think VR is going to hit a pretty big inflection point with mixed reality, both with the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro. I think that's going to change how people look at the device fundamentally. Everything's sort of aligned and I jumped in. I'm ready to go. So that's how I got here.
Lizzie Mintus: Congrats on your funding. And you talk about the team that you've built a little bit. Can you elaborate more on the kinds of people that you've hired for your founding team and why you've identified the people that you have?
Bernard Yee: It's interesting. On my team, and I'll conclude kind of full -time contractors, we have three men, four women, two people of color, the core engineering team are both women and we ended up with a super diverse group of people. Not sure how we got here, It's exactly the kind of makeup I wanted for this kind of game. That's how we ended up with a really diverse team, without planning to, and I think I asked one of the engineers I work with how we got here. And she said, Everything you hear about diversity is the more diverse leaders you have, the more diverse pools they draw from. I am a person of color. I'm Asian. I know, I think a lot of people in technology don't think of Asians as diverse, but I think if you look at the C suite of Silicon Valley, it's still predominantly white and male, even while a lot of the engineering leaders might be Asian. The C suite is not. In fact, I think Facebook just got their first person of color in Mark's team this last year was an Asian woman. So, despite the fact that a lot of senior leaders at Facebook were Asian, like no one in Mark's team was Asian. It was a person of color till now. I think that has a lot to do with it. And I think the other thing, there is a group of people that worked with me that seemed to be interested in working with me again. I wouldn't say that I was universally beloved by everyone I've worked with, but a certain group of people felt like I created a team culture that welcomed all opinions that really thought that really empowered people. On my old team, I was responsible for hiring a number of the women on the team. Originally as contractors and converting to full time and now they've gone into senior roles at Bungie and Riot. I don't know. I think I gravitate towards people who are a little more off the stereotype, maybe because I myself not necessarily representative of the lot of folks who work in games or technology, I'm a little older, I'm Asian and I value that stuff. And I come from a very diverse city. Like I'm from New York. I lived in Washington Heights. Washington Heights, we always call it the little Dominican Republic. I liked the fact that my son grew up in a neighborhood where people thought he was Latino. I think that stuff is really valuable. So it's always been like an implicit value of my family and me anyway. We really did. I hate to say things like that. We hired the best people we got and the best people we got were women. That kind of puts, in some ways it puts to this, it's anecdotal, but it puts it to, It's a direct sort of different experience. And well, we hire the best people we got, and they're all men. If that's true, then maybe you're not looking in the right places, right?
Lizzie Mintus: Yes.I hear that all the time. We want the best candidate. Oh, he's from a white guy too. You're just looking in your own network, which happens to be a bunch of other white guys. So no wonder.
Bernard Yee: My co-founders are white male. We end up hiring people we're comfortable with, and the people are comfortable with often look like us. I think the people I'm comfortable with are people that I can collaborate well with, and I think that if you can get along with a group of different people, that you end up with a network of different people, right? And, as an East Coast person, I never shy away from conflict. Like I used to be a lawyer, right? And I'm from New York City. So like the two most argumentative kinds of people are in me. And I love people who will push back on ideas, right? I think that's a plus, not a minus. So people who don't agree with me and who can be articulate and help me be better, like I love those people. I don't need someone to go along with me, right? I want to know if I'm doing the wrong thing. So I think I value that kind of exchange and the people who are able to engage me and lead me in different directions. I really value that.
Lizzie Mintus: That's really honorable. I like that. You're admitting that other people know more than you, which is not always.
Bernard Yee: No, as a role, I'm a producer, which means I know a little about a lot of things. So it's very easy to find someone who knows more than me. In fact, I really enjoy working with people. Who knows more than me because it's a chance to learn from some of the best people in the business, right? So why not? I want to hire people who know more than me. I don't have a ton of ego. In being right. I love being right, but it doesn't mean right now. Like if you show me how the right answer, I'm also love, like understanding that. And I think that's the thing about games is that you have to be really humble, right? As good as you are, there's the next thing that can be really like a slice of humble pie. And I think that's important. You look at athletes, right? You could go out, you can see Steph Curry. Light it up in one game. And the next game he's like, four for 20 or something like that. Like even the greatest players in the world have an off day. I think that's really, I love using sports as a metaphor because we're not robots, right? We can be up, we can be down. And I think that's, there's always an element of humility. Like you have to approach in your work. And as a producer, it's easy to be humble because everyone. I'm the least knowledgeable about almost everything in any given moment, right? But I know a lot about a little bit about a lot of things.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So you've been at a lot of big studios and shipped super successful games. What do you think the secret sauce to making a hit is? Why do some games succeed and others fail?
Bernard Yee: We used to say this at Oculus and Meta Reality Labs, and I'm not going to just call out them for failing to do this sometimes, but we often say do fewer things better. Yeah, it's really focused. And I see a lot of examples of this. Like I think about EverQuest and EverQuest was successful because the team, Brad McQuaid led that team. They chose a set of problems to solve and they solved them. They solved as few new problems as possible. In the most efficient way. So one of the things that they did was I remember this is a huge lesson. There’s one of the first games that required 3D hardware acceleration. And that solves a lot of software rendering problems because it could just rely on a 3d hardware card and could focus on our direction. Their game design was really like an extension of what Brad had run as a mod admin. They built a server architecture that had hard server boundaries so that when you moved from one region to the other, the world would freeze and it reload the thing in at the time the competitive game was Asheron's call and they had a software renderer that was very powerful.
They had this streaming world where they didn't have hard server boundaries. But as I recall talking to, I think it was Tim Brennan, who was the CTO of that studio. Those decisions cost them nearly a year of development time, which means we were out before them and our game looked better because it was 3D hardware accelerated. The consumer doesn't care, right? The consumer. Just want the game to look good. We were lucky at the time because 3D hardware acceleration was just taking off. But it was really the focus of the team to do fewer things better and in the most efficient way possible. And having a clear vision of that. I think PopCap had that also and I think it's really hard to give up the things you really care about in a game because everything seems so good. And I think that at teams that are very atomic. Like Meta or Google, each team owns a little piece. If you give it up, like your whole incentive structure is gone. What do you mean? I'm not going to work on this feature anymore. Like my whole year was on how am I going to get reviewed on this? There's a real kind of incentive resistance to doing fewer things better. So even though we'd say it. If you looked at what fewer things we do, no one could come up with it because no one wanted to give up the thing versus games, other games are like cutting features and paring away things and my teams at Oculus were like that. We're like, we cut, we look at the production budget. I'm like, okay. We don't have time for all these things, like making some cuts. We're going to keep this one thing, but make some other cuts and we cut it. And some people's features went away. They were super unhappy about it, but they got over it and we got on board. So those are the things I think is that kind of focus on what you want. And be able to make hard decisions around it. Cause it's easy to cheerlead when everything's going well, but when things go poorly, which it always does. What decisions do you make then? I also think the other thing, I remember the story from PopCap in the original PVZ days where George Phan's team, who did the original PVZ. The story goes that they were done with the game, they hit their deliverable, and they went to the CEO of PopCap, which is then privately held companies, and said, 'Look, the game's done.' I think I need another year to make this really special. And the story goes - they gave it to him. If you were at EA Mobile and I went to you and you're like, 'Hey, my game is done, but I need another year,' you'd be like, 'Well, sure, how come it's not out then?' That sort of creative vision gave that team. I get it's all anecdotes, right? So take this with a grain of salt, but that team got the opportunity to make what I would consider one of the best games of all time. In that year, I think the lesson is like, there's some lesson in there. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but that's sort of clarity of vision, the trust in your team. I think that's a thing that's really important and clarity of vision is not like I said, it's not when things are going well. You need that clarity of vision most when things are going badly because you want to know what you're holding on to in the middle of the storm. What are you holding on to? 'Cause everything was getting washed away. What are you gonna hold on to? That's the thing you want to defend. I think good producers do this. This is what I think a producer is really good at. A good producer should be able to defend the clarity of vision when shit hits the fan, and it's not about running a standup or doing agile or shit, like that's all good data, but knowing what the vision is and holding onto it when everyone else is like, when everything else is moving, what are you locking down? And I think that's the thing that from my point of view is what helps make a great game.
Lizzie Mintus: The book sitting here, I'll send you a copy. It's called the ‘The One Thing'. It's about how you need to simplify everything in your life and just think, 'What is the one thing I need to do this week to be successful?' And then do that thing, cut out all the other stuff. So games in life, maybe too.
Bernard Yee: And that's a pattern in a lot of things in sports is the same way, right? Don't think too far ahead. What is the one thing that's important right now and focus on it? Because the more you distract yourself, the less you're going to put into that one thing. Oh, if I do a little bit of everything, maybe it's, that's better than, no, no. If you know what that one thing is. Commit.
Lizzie Mintus: There are so many ups and downs and I feel like Near -death experiences and games, right? Things that just go terribly wrong. Tell me about the maybe seemingly worse situation you've been in and how you had to pivot to make it work or not work and have a lesson from that.
Bernard Yee: You know, it's a story. When I was interviewing, I would tell a lot of people, when people ask me about how I defend a division. So one of these experiences we were making for was an onboarding new user experience called 'First Steps'. What the things we did at Oculus were there were playable gamey experiences, but they weren't game mechanics to introduce VR to people. 'Cause VR is a real -life, like game system, right? It's not a web 2D mouse point and click UI. It is like picking up, throwing things, holding things, pointing, physics, like all these things, right?
So we built this experience and the centerpiece of this experience was a dancing experience where you get to dance with a robot. And I will say when people like asked me, like, how do you know it's good? When a good thing is, I think about this moment when, to, an animator and an engineer prototype dancing with this robot. Robot in VR. And we all had a team got together and everyone showed off their prototypes. And we all knew when we played this thing, like it was amazing. It was super janky. It was just a temp character, but dancing with a robot. And again, like you have to be in VR to feel like you're holding hands and dancing with a robot. It's this magical experience. We all knew it was going to be good, right? And we, that was the one thing that we held on to. So we built this, and we get Greenlit to do this, right? To the credit of Oculus leadership at the time, they got out of our way. We delivered all these things that were great before. Mark really loved this experience called Toybox, which we made. He spent hours in it. So we got a lot of latitude from leadership. But we started building this thing and Facebook has a very open culture where everyone can comment on everyone else's work. Like it's a big own mini social network inside the company. So you'd post things and people had opinions on it. We talk about it. You'd like it. You leave comments, the whole thing. A lot of people start playing our experience. And they hated dancing. They're like, it makes me anxious. It's socially awkward. I don't like it. The robot stares in my eyes, all these things. And I would say, well, thank you for the feedback. By this time I learned just not to say, 'Come on, what do you know? You're an OS engineer,' but it's legitimate feedback, and we did a lot of user research testing and we found out people like it. And I would pose people to this question, you think dancing makes you feel socially awkward. Well, we have guns in our game, and they feel like real guns. I mean, they're zap guns. They're like arcadey guns. But why is one okay, and the other is not? If you ask me, what would I rather have go on in my house, guns or dancing? I'm pretty sure I'd say dancing ten times out of ten. But that doesn't matter, right? The other thing you learn is that oftentimes. A rational approach doesn't help turn people's minds because they all think they're being rational themselves. So as Facebook's way, this grew in controversy, right? A few people jumped onto this idea in this public forum and convinced everyone like dancing is terrible, take it out. And I reminded people do you think there's a gender component to this? Because if you go to a wedding, usually women are the first people on the dance floor and they've got to drag their men on the dance floor, right? Like barely. There are unique people, men who like to dance and I envy those people. I think I am one of those people that have to be dragged out to dance and my wife is a modern dancer, so she's always like the first one out there. And I think there is a little bit of a gender bias like dancing. Is a more feminine behavior. And guess what? My old company used to be mostly men. And they were mostly men. They were mostly software engineers. Who doesn't dance. Who doesn't dance. I get you don't like it because you're an awkward nerd. I am also an awkward nerd, but I would love to be that guy who got up and danced. I would have met more girls this way when I was younger, like all that stuff. It would have,. I would have been a better person. Even now, I feel guilty. Like when my wife wants to dance and I can't get up the nerve to join her. I feel bad about myself. So they were going to cut it. And we escalated to Andrew Bosworth, who was running the organization at the time. And he said, "What's the user research say?" And we showed him the user research and he said, "What's the team's belief?" Team wants to do it. And he was like, " What's the problem?". He was a very matter of fact, 'cause he didn't really care. There was a guy, a software engineer who posted in an internal group said, "Why would we let this robot do something in this game that if I did in the office would be a fireable offense, because he thought it would be like an HR violation if I asked you to dance, if we work together. Okay. I went from that to just do it. It turned out to be the highest rated experience on the Oculus quest on Oculus store for like three years, the highest rating by users. It was the right thing to do. I had a senior engineer tell me the story of: I danced, I didn't like it, I thought it might be awkward, I brought it home, I showed my wife. She loved it. I'm like, "Oh, surely she's just saying this." And I showed the rest of my family and they all loved it. And he said to me literally, and he was a software engineer. He's like, "Maybe we shouldn't have these decisions run by male software engineers, setting it, sitting in a mental park." And I was like, "You think, yeah, exactly." Like any marketing person would tell you, you're not the target market. You know, software engineers making 600,000 a year on Facebook are not the target audience for this device. But marketing also has relatively little pull consumer marketing inside a company like Facebook, because it's relatively new to them. So I think that was like one of the biggest struggles that I had, because I tried to be the shit umbrella for the team, but the negative feedback was so overwhelming that people were like, "Are we going to cut this?" Like, how can we cut it? And it's not like a web service or website where you can cut pages and redirect things like the whole experience is built on top of each other. It's not like you could just have one change list roll back and you suddenly it all works. That was really tough, right? And that kind of showed me the challenge of making something with a strong creative point of view inside a company that doesn't necessarily have the vocabulary to talk about it. Everything you do can be taken away by people who don't share the same frames of reference you do. That taught me a lot of conviction. I think I want a lot of credibility with my team, because I really was the person who pushed back on a lot of this and to, in some ways, the detriment of my career. I was very vocal, no, thank you for your feedback, but we're not changing this. And software engineers are on the place and I'm not a software engineer.
So for me to go say no to a bunch of software engineers, of course, in theory, it's okay, but in practice. It's not easy to do, right?
Lizzie Mintus: That's interesting because I think a lot of ideas must get squashed by a certain group of people who are not the target audience for what they're building.
Bernard Yee: We had an OS, one of the engineers on the OS team on the VROS team, tell one of the marketing people, this is a story she told me,he told her I am the target audience because I paid money for my own quest. And she was like, "You literally don't know what a target audience target market is. Like literally you don't understand it, but how do you tell a senior engineer inside Facebook that you fundamentally don't understand a thing. And you're this woman who works in marketing, right? Like the power imbalance is gigantic.
So she had to sit and smile and understand. We have market research that shows this other thing. But what she really wanted to say is like, you literally don't know what a target market is.
Lizzie Mintus: I don't think I could work at Facebook because I would definitely say that.
Bernard Yee: It's funny because those are the implicit rules of any workplace that you never hear about. Who has the power and Facebook was founded by engineers. So of course, engineers, like they were there first. They built the thing they have the glow of, being the original founders of the company from Mark all the way down. I think their culture is used to everyone jumping into everyone else's business, which I think works for a lot of things. But when it becomes so different where. And OS engineers jumping into marketing's business, like that no longer work. That's that’s like multiple hops, right? So you're not in the same area code anymore. You're in a different time zone. So the farther away you are, the harder it is for that person, those two people to be relevant to each other. So I get why there's a cultural problem. If they could just hash it out like domain experts, they could do that. But it was an eye opening kind of experience. And I think the structures that work for a company in some contexts, hold them back in others, which is the pleasure of starting my own small company. I really admire super giant, the team that made Bastion and Transistor and Hades. They work hard to maintain their team size because they feel like the culture they have is really not necessarily scalable to much bigger. If they want to go make a AAA game and have someone write them a hundred million dollar check, they could probably do it, but they're like, I don't know, 20 people or whatever it is, and that those are the kind of games they want to make, and they want to make that team size. I think that's really admirable. They don't think that they can they could meaningfully keep the things they value to a different team scale, and they don't even want to try.
Lizzie Mintus: That's really knowing your why, which is so hard, I think, to come up with and having your vision and staying true when you could expand and go all these different directions, right? It's so tempting.
Bernard Yee: Right. And I could say "Oh, that's going to be our model too". But who knows, right? If someone says, " Hey. Go make the next super duper quadruple A game and here's a quarter billion dollars”. What am I gonna say? Am I gonna really say no? It's really, you can't judge till you're there. But I think as a producer, I tell people I'm a good producer, but I wouldn't know how to run a thousand -person game like Destiny. I have no idea how they do that.
Lizzie Mintus: That's where the smarter people come in, or the people who are smart in that area, right?
Bernard Yee: They want to do this.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's what they love. And that's not your genius zone. So ...
Bernard Yee: When I left Destiny, Bungie, and I went to Pop Cap, I remember landing on the team and I knew the team's names in the week. I played the build and understood the game all in a week. My first week. I'm like, okay, I know the engineering team. I know the design team. I know our team. I play the game. It took me like a week and a half to do it. I love that. Like, that's so good, right? I really like knowing the team. I like talking to people. I'm a personal connections producer, not necessarily a process producer. But you need a process producer to run a thousand -person team. Yeah, and that seems less interesting to me.
Lizzie Mintus: Well, it's good. You know what you are and what you aren't, and you're not trying to.
Bernard Yee: And I admire people who can do other things like, and I'm sure I could learn it if I was, if I had to. This is why I like working on my old team at Oculus. We're at the biggest, we were 50 people, including contractors and outsourcing. The unusual thing about this team is we were small between 20 and 50, but each one of our people were like AAA kind of talent, right? Like they were all really ambitious, really driven. I think our animator worked on these Hollywood movies and these games. He animated the character Rango for the DreamWorks movie. Our character artist did the Hulk for the Avengers movie, like these crazy talented people, but there's like 30 of us. So it was really like a dream, like in a lot of ways, like a dream team where I got to be exposed to people in a very intimate work, work next to each other way that I would never have gotten at a triple A studio, but they were triple A talents, right?
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that is so, and you can do what you want.
Bernard Yee: and that's why I'm super grateful for my time at Oculus. I have no ill will at all. It was a great ride and I got to learn a ton on Mark's time. Like Mark paid me money and I learned a ton. How good is that? That's pretty good.
Lizzie Mintus: That's the best. So how big was it when you joined? Tell me about the journey through.
Bernard Yee: Yeah, so 300 people when I joined. Then now the Reality Labs group is in the tens of thousands. I think in a lot of ways, Facebook is good at things like scaling, which I don't think Oculus is good at. But Oculus had a much clearer version of what VR could be. I think it was much more, I wouldn't say pure, but a little more informed by what they were building, not by the fantasy of what they thought it could be. You often hear Facebook and Mark talk about, "I want a billion users in VR." That's a great long -term goal, but again, it's like you get out of bed and you try to decide to be more fit and exercise more and you, then you look at like Everest and say yeah, I'm going to do that. Maybe you should eat well and exercise every day before you do the next thing. And then, in a couple of years, maybe we could talk about Mount Rainier, and then after that, maybe we could talk about Everest. But don't even think about that stuff now. Just focus on walking five times a day, five days a week, and eating well or something like that. I think that the original Oculus leadership was very pragmatic about- here are the things we want to do, and we want to make VR great. The thing I loved was I reported to one of the founders of the organization, Nate. I reported to him and then as Facebook, so we became more Facebook, I got farther and farther away from the leadership. That was frustrating. Like I shipped all this I worked in the AR group at the end. I was buried under multiple layers and disciplines from the people that ran the organization. And I looked around and I thought I'm the only person here that shipped anything really great in VR. There's a not safer word way of who'd have to bribe to get someone to buy me a drink around here, right? It's hard, right? Because you get buried in the structure. That's the thing that, that's what I used to be able to talk to Brendan and Nate all the time.
And even when Hugo Barrett came in, I got to talk to Hugo, right? Because I built, my team built BOGO and BOGO is a virtual pet experience that Hugo used to show off the pre-release quest to everyone, like he loved it. It was such a good demo for him. So anytime I needed him, like you go with makes, make himself available to me. But as we became more Facebooky, there are so many layers of people inserted themselves in between people like me and leadership that I felt like anything I had to say was pointed or criticaL, contrarian or concerning you, you can say it right? I always tell people I always look on the negative side because producers are paid to worry about the bad. I'm always worried about that stuff. I have to teach myself to be a little more. celebratory of the positive because anytime something good happens like great. What's the next bad thing that can happen? Let me avoid that. And that's my strength and my flaw as a leader is that I dwell on the negative. I need to give more airtime to the positive. In fact, a junior producer who is now a senior producer at Bungie work for me. And she's the one who reminded me to celebrate the wins too. And I'm like, of course we do. So, it's not good to be like Tiger Dad all the time. But at a certain level, it is your job to call out the icebergs. Someone's got to stand on the mast of the bridge of the Titanic and look out for the iceberg. And someone's going to do it. And not everyone, for a lot of reasons, is incentivized. Well, it's not that big an iceberg, or I think we're going to miss it. Like, no, this is a real thing. We have to think about it, right? And I think that's another thing that you really want to celebrate or celebrate people that bring up concerns rather than disincentivize them.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it is helpful if someone pipes up in a meeting that later tells you the meeting didn't go well or something you miss something really important. That is the best to know. And a lot of people also won't tell you. They'll just let us slide.
Bernard Yee: Yeah, it's interesting, there was a thing that happened inside Meta. Something had gone wrong, and, it got up to senior leadership, and the senior leadership was like, why didn't anybody tell me any of this sooner? And the interesting thing is people knew. I think the real question should have been, what incentive systems and what cultures have we inadvertently built that prevented me from finding this out sooner. It's not like, why didn't someone tell me sooner? If this person skipped five levels or six below levels below them and just had lunch with eight people or five people, they would've found out about this. This is on everyone's minds, and this is not just true at any company. Every big company's like, "why didn't we find out about this sooner?". If you're a good leader, the question you should ask yourself is, what incentives have I created that hid this from me? Someone would've said this.
Lizzie Mintus: It's like walking on the factory floor and finding out what's really going on.
Bernard Yee: Undercover boss. That's exactly the thing, right? Just because you're Facebook doesn't mean you're immune to this or Google or General Motors or IBM. There's always this disconnect. So how do you build an incentive structure that lets the existential problems bubble up to you in a way that isn't career threatening. For the people that have the concerns. I think that's a question that a lot of the Facebook leadership is much younger than I am. Maybe they hadn't thought about this yet. Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they know everything. So those are the things I think about like when trying to start my own thing. I just had a one on one with our animator and I said, look, I know that I'm more senior and older than you, but I want you to treat me as a peer. Like you understand things I do not understand. And I need you to tell me when I'm wrong, to lead me when I don't figure, to lead me to inclusion, tell me why, show me your math, like all that stuff. I need to know, right? I want to create a culture of more peer accountability. And just because I'm the quote CEO or the founder, it doesn't make me right. And I try to stay out of other people's businesses, much like I have design opinions, but I want my designer to own that shit. You only learn that time stuff from failure and experience. So maybe it's unfair for me to expect these meteoric billionaires to sometimes understand failure. Cause maybe they've never known failure.
Lizzie Mintus: They grow so fast. The growth is crazy. And I think it's really hard to adapt. Not that it's okay, but I think when you're going from 300 to 10,000 people in a span of how many years? Yeah. Processes and systems and new culture.
Bernard Yee: You know, it's funny. I think of indie teams and often people think of these like outlier teams, like the first game is super successful, but I think a lot of really good indie teams have the weight of AAA or big commercial game experience and failures behind them. One of the founders of the super giant worked on command and conquer out of EALA. And that was like a death march and didn't do well. I'm guessing that if you asked him, what did he learn from it? It was a shit ton, right? And that probably informed how he thinks about his work at a studio, his indie studio, right? But you don't necessarily think about that. Cause you think of them as a student is like an indie hit studio, right? You forget about all the bad lessons, all the scars you've learned from the other stuff. I think failure is a really good teacher. I know it's, I know it's a cliche but I see it all the time. The time to fail isn't when you're a multi -billion dollar company or trillion -dollar company, the time to fail, hopefully is you learn earlier. And then you can apply those lessons.
Lizzie Mintus: That's an interesting perspective because sometimes hiring managers tell me they don't like a certain studio because the game didn't do well. But maybe people learn so much
Bernard Yee: When I'm being interviewed, I'll often ask the interviewer: I've got a couple answers to that. You want to hear a successful exercise, this scenario, or a failure scenario. Because I can talk about either. I think in a good interview you talk about at least 1 success and 1 failure, right? Because if every example is super successful, then would you learn from it? It's really hard to have survivorship bias, right? Like, what did you learn from that? Are you lucky? Are you good? Failures we tend to dwell over, I feel like a good interviewer will allow a candidate the confidence. The safety of talking about a failure. Don't make me think you're God's gift, best things in sliced bread. Talk me through a failure case. And I think that's really good.
Lizzie Mintus: And not that you volunteer too much or you care too much , it's your failure.
Bernard Yee: Yeah. Those are, that's the, that's, those are the terrible answers. And everyone knows, right?
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, for sure. But some people have a harder time being real with you and vulnerable.
Bernard Yee: And I think for people who are listeners here who are interviewing, I got really good at it because I interviewed people a lot inside the company. I probably interviewed a hundred people, 150 people inside this company inside Meta, Facebook, Oculus in my time there. So practice is really important, right? Getting someone who's maybe more senior to run through a practice interview with you and who's not afraid to give you real feedback. Like, Hey, that felt really disingenuous or something. I think that's the best way to practice, practice, practice, right? How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Lizzie Mintus: Yes, and people always say they don't know what went wrong and it is frustrating. Sometimes you would take a test at a big company. And that company is going to keep their test for the next five years. So they're not going to give you feedback on the test. So, you know you failed, but you don't know how. So I think having been able to bounce ideas off somebody else is key and get that real feedback.
Bernard Yee: Yeah. And there's lots of communities to do that. A lot of the Facebook layoff people were giving each other interviews just to help everyone's interviewing skills get up Cause, so whatever, you lay off 11,000 people and you have a broad variety of people, seniority, experience, and discipline. People were setting up informal interview groups where they would give each other feedback, and it was fantastic. Like, just making people better interviewers. Yeah, so that's really useful for people. Like, practice is never every time I've not done well in an interview. It's because I didn't prepare for it enough., I think.
Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. People don't take it seriously. I think they're taking it more seriously now, though. But what's really frustrating to me is when people say, "I applied for a thousand jobs"." You're doing it wrong. How could you even apply for a thousand jobs? Who do you know? How can you stand out? How can you be a little bit more logical about your search instead of just blasting into the abyss and then getting disappointed?
Bernard Yee: Yeah. Someone said, I saw someone on Twitter say- "You apply for a thousand jobs? I don't think there's a thousand jobs. I'm qualified to work in the entire world!" What do you mean a thousand jobs? I hear you, but it's also scary, right? It's just, it's the time of economic and social unrest, and people get desperate and scared, and they react like they do a lot of shallow breathing. And it's hard to slow things down, right? That's one thing I learned from competing as an athlete, like a very mediocre athlete. When things get stressful, you have to slow things down. That is true for sports, and that's true for your job situation. Slow things down. There's no use in staying up to 1 a.m to sending out more implications .
Lizzie Mintus: Or getting laid off and kind of adding a couple of sentences to your old resume and then just blasting it off that day.
Bernard Yee: I tore apart my whole resume after I got laid off and I rewrote it from the ground up. It actually took me a colleague to tell me that. You think I should know. She was another producer, and she was like, "Throw it all away, start from scratch"." And it was so liberating to do that. That was really helpful, but you think with all my experience, I'd know that shit, and it took a friend to tell me.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I remember job seeking and it was super confusing. And it's really helpful to have someone else tell you "Maybe you should do this," or "You don't need to have your experiences, working at Molly moon's on your resume," and stuff like that. You mentioned that you think the Apple headsets are going to be huge. Tell me more about the future of virtual reality, mixed reality, and where you think things are headed.
Bernard Yee: So one of the things we knew early on, even early pre-rift days, like Crescent Bay, is when you put on the headset, it's all black, right? Yeah. And we heard this early on, even where there's probably a gender difference where a woman sitting around her room is probably more uncomfortable with being vulnerable than a man, right? There's something fundamentally different about the way women see social safety than men. But even for men, like being in a headset and seeing black all around you is disconcerting. Like you don't see a floor, your entire brain has evolved from whatever, like we crawled out of the ocean. We have a ground here, like this is part of our life. So what I think the Apple headset and I think Quest Three do is, pass through mixed reality, augmented reality stuff. Like you see your room, like you put the headset on and you still see the room. This continuity of user experience is going to make people like at a lizard brain level, more comfortable using the hardware than even the Quest Two, which is a great device. I think that's going to change how people think about this thing. It becomes not like this weird Marquis de sade kind of device you put on to freak yourself out. Like it's going to be the smoother extension of your life, right? You put on the headset, you still see your room. UI comes up in front of you. You can choose to go into VR. You can stay in mixed reality. I think that's just going to be a better user experience for lots of people. And I think the Apple headset, it's interesting because they're clear, it seems like they're going for. I'm not on the developer list or anything like that yet. They're going for a device that has more accessibility. It's a little more mainstream. And those are the kind of game we're trying to make, a little more of a mainstream game, not an extraction shooter in VR. That approach as well as Apple's sort of reputation for great hardware is really powerful. I also think they're doing something that's very smart in that the Apple Vision Pro is essentially a developer's kit. It's expensive, right? So when you build a PlayStation Five game, you buy a PS Five dev kit. PS Five dev kit is like tens of thousands of dollars, right? It's expensive. It's a high -end PC and you buy it because you believe in the future of the PlayStation Five, right? I don't know how much it is, but it's 20,000 PCs to build PlayStation Five games. So when the PS Five comes out for 400 bucks, all my games are going to run on it. So I think what they did was something really clever, which is they built a fairly polished dev kit for people to play with. When the next headset comes out, which I assume there is. That's a rumor; it's going to be a lot cheaper. And everyone who's been messing around on the Apple Vision Pro, now the audience is here. The price point's here. I'm ready to go. We did that with Crescent Bay on Rift. But I think maybe Santa Cruz had a little bit of that, but I think they're really like seeding the market with. With really robust DK one and DK two in the early Oculus days before my time, like it was the same thing. I think that's a really important thing. And I think Apple's doing it in a way that is really great. There are more people now excited about it than Meta was, even though the Quest Pro is a really great piece of hardware. There's something about Apple bringing, coming to the market, like it's a little bit of sizzle. I think they can sell people a $1,500 device that maybe Meta had a harder time with. Because you already spent $1,200 on an Apple iPhone 14 Max Pro. If the next device is the same price, you can buy the Apple phone, you can buy this, and they're both like, 'oh yeah, I buy, I bought that and I'll buy this,' right? So it's like a different value proposition to the consumer. And the consumers aren't always rational buyers all the time. We all get caught up in the hype and this price psychology. The device is a little more lifestyle, a little more mainstream appeal, a little sexier in hardware. I think they're seeding the market with really cool things that will appear on this device that aren't meant to be consumer sales driven. And by the time the next device comes out, it could be really significant. So I'm pretty excited about it.
Lizzie Mintus: I like that you're thinking of V2 already, but just like any new piece of hardware that comes out, it's always so expensive, the first one and the early adopters look at it and they'll play with it.
Bernard Yee: I know it's not a consumer device. That's okay. It's meant to be for me and for influencers, and development studios are going to buy it. They're going to build things with it. They're going to ship demos with it. I think that's a really smart thing. And give people a lead time. That's why I'm really excited about their approach. It's a little bit different than Meta. They're seeding the market with a piece of hardware that is not consumer -ready, widely available for experimentation. I think that's the right thing to do.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I'm excited to see what the future holds for VR mixed reality. There are a few different options too. And I think when I first started recruiting for VR people, I don't think they felt the way they feel about NFTs right now, but maybe similar. People were really skeptical, displeased, with any new tech, but I think with all the Meta acquisitions, people see value in it. Some people- not for everyone, of course.
Bernard Yee: Yeah, I think so too. I'd be curious about how many of those people really got to see some really moving influential experiences. When I got the vValve demo, the room demo at the Valve office and here in Bellevue, I just never seen anything like it, right? Like I felt like I was in the room with these things. My body had these sensations. Like I put my face into a beam of light projecting from the floor in this VR room and my friend was giving me the demo and Doug said to me, " Does your face feel warmer?” I'm like, it does. And he said, “but you're not really putting your face into a beam of light.” And I was like, holy shit. My body is telling me things that aren't happening. Yeah. How could we not make great games from this? This has got to be a place where we're going to make something amazing. I think that those are the things that are still true. And I think that I get why people are skeptical. But I don't think they have to do with the formatic itself, I think it just has to do with maybe the execution or the kinds of games that are, like, I can't play games with movement because I get motion sick.
Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I had to take it off and sit down. I was playing some space game where I pressed a button and I transported. Made me feel so nauseous.
Bernard Yee: Oh yeah, really interesting about nausea I read that it is an evolutionary response. Often when you eat something that's bad for you to throw up, like poison, right? So, your body is telling you... You're having a response as if you ingested poison. Why the hell am I going to put on the headset again? For what? So I get there are people who are like, wanting to say, hey, these games, first-person shooters in VR. You can't make a first-person shooter in VR without smooth motion. So they talk about getting your VR legs in or something like that. That's certainly valid. Those people are making games, their games are making a ton of money that do this, but fundamentally I don't want to do that. I don't want to recreate a toxic nausea response in a body while they're playing my game because they're not going to want to come back and play my game. You don't have to be Will Wright to draw that design hypothesis. If I make you feel violently ill, like you ate poison or bad food and you're gonna throw it up, that you're gonna come back to my game. I don't need that association. Especially for a mainstream audience, I don't want them to have that reaction. That's not the kind of game that I want to make. It's not to knock on other people who do like they are more successful and maybe I hope to be, but it doesn't make sense to me.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I look forward to playing your not nauseating game. I have one more question for you. Let's say, imagine you have just won Game of the Year. Who would you think, who in your career has made the biggest impact?
Bernard Yee: Oh, that's easy. The one person I think is a guy named Doug Church. He was a project lead of some of Looking Glass games, Ultima Underworld and System Shock and Thief. He is a brilliant programmer. When he was working on those games, doing the first two and a half D, 3D renders, he was in the same kind of breath as Carmack, a designer. I think he's as visionary as Will Wright. He's kind of a reclusive person.I was a game reviewer, and I just had this intense curiosity about how he made these games that were really different, and we became friends. And he's given me really good advice throughout my career. Just being in his orbit and looking glasses, orbit has introduced me to people that I would never meet otherwise. He's generous with his time and his advice to me and other people. He's a good friend. I mean, I invited him to my wedding. So not only was he like a professional, guiding light advisor in inadvertent advocate for me. When I moved to Seattle to work at Bungie, we own an apartment in New York City and my son was in school and went on Pullum, like I lived with him for a year. Like he's like moving with me. He's just been a good friend and a brilliant person to just listen and talk to. He also made me realize, as good as he is as a designer, people like that need producers, right? They need people to help orient them. They need people to push on them. So, I said, Doug is brilliant, but that doesn't mean he can do everything and he taught me that lesson also. If we had the funding and he was available, just like, just come work with us, man. I'd love to make a game with him. He's in Sweden working at Embark doing some crazy procedural gameplay stuff. But anyway, that's who I think.
Lizzie Mintus: How did you connect with him again?
Bernard Yee: I was a game reviewer. Yeah. And I played Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld was this first physics two and a half D game with like emergent gameplay and nothing like that existed before ever in PC games that I knew. I reviewed the game and I wrote the most glowing review for it. And I just called up the studio and I was like, "who's Doug Church and how can I talk to him?". And back then, he was kind of a nobody, right? It's just a new studio. And we just got on the phone and we said, talking, right? Like, tell me about your game. So I was a journalist and a lawyer and part of being a good journalist and lawyer is being curious about your subject matter, right? You have to ask questions and learn how to learn things. And I was just so curious about how this little team of MIT nerds. Like, decided to get together and made a thing that really was, I had never seen before. And we just became friends. We stayed in touch because a game would come out and I'd touch base with him and we'd talk and, they'd invite me to the launch parties and I'd go hang out with them and meet the team. Seamus Blackley, Xbox guy, came out of that group. Irrational, Ken Levine came out of that group. Everyone may not know, but Half Life was directly inspired by Doug's work. His work has been so influential on so many people. Mostly we became friends because I could pick up the phone and talk to him. I was not interested in brown nosing him. I was just really curious about how he built this thing and how they do this. And he became like one of the central figures. Like when I got my job at Bungie, apparently the head of production called Doug and said like, tell me about this guy. And, you should hire him. So they did, right? That's how I got to know him and I still talk to him a bunch. We ride our bikes together virtually on something called Zwift. Which is like a video game platform and we have a discord, video chat running at 5 PM in Stockholm. It's 9 am here in Seattle and we try to do it right now. The weather's nice. And he's out riding during the day, but we try to still do that, once a week. And we talk about games, we talk about bikes, we talk about food. There's no one been more helpful to my career as Doug, and hands down, as a friend, he's been so helpful to me just as a friend as a human being, like giving me a bedroom in his place and when we're on a budget because I was paying rent and in mortgage in New York and paying him rent here in Seattle, when he heard about that, he refused to cash in on my rent checks. That's a friend, right? He's just like a wonderful human being. Very reclusive, he's shied away from fame. If he had any bone of self promotion in his body, he'd be running games now, but he's the person he wants to do the work. He's not interested in talking to the press. Although he talked to me, I don't know why, but yeah, that's what I would think. Thanks Doug.
Lizzie Mintus: But thank you. You called him, you made it happen. It's like a butterfly effect, but you took the first action.
Bernard Yee: That's the thing, right? Like, you gotta do it. That's how life works. That's how you make stuff happen. Just reach out. Fucking do it. Just pick up the phone. I tell my son, ask her out. You want that internship. Here's a person; make the call, right? And the worst thing you could do is hear a no and then move on to the next thing. I have to follow that advice myself. It's much easier said than done. I get it. For everyone who's interviewing. I totally get it. It helps when you're just deeply curious about a thing- I just want to know more. It makes it a lot easier rather than feeling like I'm networking. I just want to understand this thing, go to the person who did it.
Lizzie Mintus: If you're genuine, people will talk to you. People you wouldn't think would talk to you because they're so used to getting pinged all the time with sales and just BS. But if you really want to know about how something happened, I was so amazed when I started my business, people just talk and help and people, you'd never think...
Bernard Yee: I found that true, even in trying to raise money, like there are things that I had no idea how many people that were able to help before I asked and just thought about it for a second and went through my network and said, who can help me? And I'm like, holy shit, a lot of people tell me.
Lizzie Mintus: Totally, but you have to ask and make it happen.
Bernard Yee: Yeah, it was intense.
Lizzie Mintus: Well, congrats on everything so exciting. We've been talking to Bernie who's the founder of a new company called wind up minds Bernie where can people go to learn more about you or get in touch?
Bernard Yee: I'm on LinkedIn. I've been using that a lot more since I was laid off. It's pretty cool. You go can go to www.windupminds.com and see what we're working on. We'll probably, by the time this hits the air, we should have announced and thanked our investors, angel investors, venture funds. My team, we're interviewing one more designer and could be another woman. We should be like 5 to 3 years or something like that, uh, 6 to 3, 6 to 2. You'll see our lineup and our team and what we've worked on before. It's a really great group of veterans and more junior people. Hopefully we'll even see a little bit more about what we're working on.
Lizzie Mintus: Looking forward to it. Thank you so much.
Bernard Yee: Thanks for having me on, Lizzie. This is great.
Thanks so much for listening to the show this week to catch all the latest from His Waldo. you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.
Share this story