🎮 John Goodale was employee #60 at Unity in 2010, where he launched and rapidly expanded Unity Asia. Under his leadership, he transformed Unity into the preferred platform for game developers across the region, driving exceptional growth and establishing the company as a dominant force in the gaming industry.
Having also held key positions at Sega and Activision, John now serves as the CEO of Jam.gg, where he leads an innovative B2B cloud gaming service that offers developers powerful white-label solutions.
Tune in for exclusive insights into John’s early days at Unity, the leadership strategies that fueled Unity Asia's success, his approach to nurturing international partnerships, and his vision for the future of cloud gaming.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Goodale's leadership approach that propelled Unity Asia's success.
- Strategies for nurturing successful international partnerships.
- The future of cloud gaming.
- The importance of networking.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Here’s Waldo Recruiting
- Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
- John Goodale on LinkedIn
- Jam.gg
- https://www.jgoodale.com/
- Unity
- "Bot" Mark Subotnick on the Here's Waldo Podcast
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.
Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus. I'm the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique game recruitment firm. In every episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about the insights from their journey.
This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We hire for North America and Europe, mid level through executive game and game adjacent.
Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Wallace Poulter for introducing us. Wallace is a great guy. You should hire him. And he knows everybody today.
Today, we have John Goodale with us. John is the 28, so exact year, industry veteran who has held exec roles at the likes of Sega, Activision, and others. He is best known as being early at Unity Technologies and launching and growing Unity Asia to become a powerhouse. He is currently the CEO of a cloud gaming technology company called JamGG based in France. And he goes to all the conferences we're going to talk about. Let's get started. Thanks for being here.
John Goodale: Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate it. And actually, when you and I started talking about doing this podcast, it was 28 years. Actually, as of this month, it's now 29. So round it up to 30. It's been a great run. I love this industry.
Lizzie Mintus: I think we should have a party for your 30th.
John Goodale: Ooh, absolutely.
Lizzie Mintus: I'm now an event planner, apparently, so if you need some help, please let me know.
John Goodale: Awesome, very cool.
Lizzie Mintus: I wanted to begin with what I think is one of your shining areas of expertise, which is working in Asia, in games. It's a unique experience, so I want to talk about early Unity, how early... what is early? How early were you?
John Goodale: Okay. Yeah. So I was about employee number 60, back in 2010. And I was the first person to do anything in Asia at the company. So I launched and led Unity Asia from 2010 to 2015. Even today, many people in Asia call me the father of Unity Asia. As they say in Japan, because I speak, read and write Japanese, the Japanese tell you that I am Unity Ajano, Papa. so you kind of get there, the father of Unity Asia. And yeah, it was a phenomenal experience. It was a phenomenal time at Unity.
Unity at the time was very much living their motto of democratizing game development. And you know, Unity started as a relatively unique, Mac only games engine.
John Goodale: But even before that it got its genesis building a game, not too many people are familiar with this, but back in, I think it was 2004, the co-founders launched a game called Gooball. And it was a terrible game. And the co-founders realized, Hey, you know what? We kind of suck at making games, but our tech is really solid. And that was driven by necessity because really your only game engines at the point were the iD tech engine, you know, very early version of the Unreal engine.
And you were talking about a million dollar entry point into licensing a game engine. So game engines today have become very much commoditized, but back then it was a million dollar licensing deal or more. And so they built their own engine. And they found that, Hey, the tools we actually put together were pretty cool. And shortly before I joined, they launched a PC version. And it's really kind of grown from there.
And I would love to attribute Unity Asia's success to me and my efforts. I think perhaps I just got lucky because nobody had focused on Asia and there was such phenomenal interest in it that now somebody was there actually paying attention to the region. Yeah, it took off like crazy. And, at the time that I joined, Unity co-founder David Helgeson and then CEO called Asia, quote unquote, a rounding error on a spreadsheet. It was just insignificant revenue.
I think the year before I joined, Asia was like literally less than $10,000 in revenue. But within two years, what we grew even in the first two years was amazing. And I think a couple of the reasons for that were that nobody at Unity had any idea of Asia. And that was a really cool thing because I got to do whatever the heck I felt needed to be done.
It was also a bit of a negative because nobody knew anything about Asia. And so it was just completely foreign to them. And so when I made recommendations and whatnot. They're like, okay. And I'll tell you, it was a very interesting time because they said, you can do whatever you want. I was given a super tiny budget. And they said, you can do whatever you want within that budget. And then anything you bring in, in terms of revenue beyond what we anticipate from revenue, spend it however you want.
And my first full year target at Unity, kind of interesting data points, my revenue target for all of Asia was $2 million. And that was for the calendar year 2011. I spent 330 days on the road that year preaching Unity all throughout Asia, but we far exceeded that $2 million and we did $8.7. And so I had complete autonomy to spend it, invest it however I wanted to.
And within two years, we had 200 employees in nine countries throughout the region. We had opened offices. Our first office was in Seoul shortly after followed by Tokyo. Then we also launched offices in Shanghai and in Singapore. And within two years, Asia was 45 percent of Unity's global revenue. And so, yeah, I think it was a lot of luck on my part just because I paid attention to it. There was a lot of strategy and tactical execution that was important there. And I was given free reign to do whatever I wanted to do.
I'd been doing business in Asia, my entire career. It's always been important to me for a foreign company to look and feel like a domestic company. And so that's how we ran it. And so people who dealt with Unity Japan felt like they were dealing with a local company.
Same thing is true all across Asia. And the unique benefit was that there's always this, in most countries in Asia, and it's super hard to generalize because Asia is so diverse, but in most countries in Asia they have a lot of respect for the big exec at corporate in the US, right? And so we had this really unique combination of looking, feeling, responding like a local company, with some executive oversight from a successful overseas entry. So it was a super, super interesting time.
Lizzie Mintus: And so you had your budget. Obviously, you basically lived in Asia. That's a wild amount of days on the road. But what were the first steps you took to really establish presence in Asia?
John Goodale: Yeah. The first steps were, by necessity, to try and get some significant revenue so that we can build operations. And so I focused on a very few key partners and through the efforts of my team, we launched Unity's first platform deals. And so what that meant is that we weren't selling to the developer themselves, but we were selling to platform holders who then became our distribution vehicle for the engine.
And so the very first platform deal that we did was with GREE in Tokyo. We did that in like April of 2011. And it was a several hundred thousand dollar deal whereby they bought the rights essentially to distribute it to, I forget the exact number, but it was something like, 1500 developers in on their platform. And so that was an immediate revenue injection that allowed me to then do many more grassroots things.
And what I specifically refer to in terms of the grassroots efforts were to get in touch with local fans all throughout Asia. And those fans sort of became brand ambassadors, right? So they became your most powerful evangelists and they were running events. They would invite me to events to attend with them. It was super fun, but the very first thing I did was focusing on getting some key strategic revenue in. So Gree was a platform deal that we did that probably nobody remembers now.
And then we did a platform deal with Nintendo. So Nintendo actually paid us, I can't tell you any details, but they actually paid us to build Wii support within the unity engine, right? And so that was a significant platform deal that brought in a lot of revenue.
Shortly after that, we did a platform deal, similar deal with Sony. After that we did one with Samsung. And so doing these key strategic deals gave us revenue, gave us distribution and gave us name recognition. It gave us all of that. And we were able to grow fairly successfully in Asia. And so I was a lone wolf when I started there in 2010. By the end of 2011, I think we had six employees in Asia. And by the end of year two, we had 200 plus. And so really it grew organically through grassroots efforts, through strategic deals through strategic distribution deals, these platform deals that I talk about. It was pretty crazy.
And actually as harsh as this may sound, I was not based in Asia at the time. I still had a home and a family in the US where I am now. And it sounds kind of terrible to say, but not having to be home at night, not having to bid on kids' sports games or whatnot, it gave me the flexibility to work 18, 20 hour days. And again, like I said, that sounds terrible, but we did deal with it. Family traveled with me occasionally and all that sort of stuff. So it was a tough balance to manage. But it was, it was actually one of my biggest mentors in the industry who helped me realize how to do that sort of business and do it with a balanced life. So phenomenal times at Unity. Very good run. Very exciting.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging the toll that it took on you personally, or the balance that you had to create, because I see a lot of LinkedIn posts. Like for instance, the Starbucks CEO just announced newsmaking a hundred and something million dollars and people are so upset, but it's like, do you know how much stress this person deals with? Do you know what sacrifices they are making and how actually challenging that is? So I think a lot of people don't realize how hard it is to be an executive. And everyone's like, oh, wow, John, you did all this in Asia, but obviously you had to put in so much work to do it.
John Goodale: It's tough. And just fun fact, across all airlines, I have more than 10 million lifetime flight miles. I understand I'm like in the top 1 percent of frequent flyers. And that stuff does take a toll. You know, fortunately I balance that with I love exploring this big blue rock that we live on. And so I've traveled to and done business in close to 70 countries. My wife and I have been to 38 together. And so I just love exploring this world we live on. So that actually helps balance that, just discovery and whatnot.
Lizzie Mintus: I love it. There's nothing I love more than going to a new country and just exploring, and having no agenda or having some local take you around. Traveling is pretty brilliant for me too.
John Goodale: I did some university lectures in Moldova last year. I'd never been to Moldova before. Most Americans couldn't tell you where Moldova is at. I happen to know. But, you know, it was fascinating to go and explore that former communist bloc country. Right? Super fascinating. So I love that sort of stuff.
Lizzie Mintus: I want to know a little bit more about Asia. You said that you made it feel like a local company. Obviously you established a business entity there. And I know you have a lot of background working in Asia, but If anyone is listening to a company that wants to start expanding into Asia, how do you deal with the cultural differences? And how do you become an Asian company when you are in fact an American company, truly?
John Goodale: Yeah, it's an outstanding question. And there's a number of ways in which you can do that. And so, yes, we actually did launch Unity offices and local entities in Japan, Korea, Singapore, and China. But it took a while to build those up, right? And so in those specific offices, it became quite easy. But what we did building up to that, and also in countries where we'd never had an office, we set up very strong partnerships with local distribution partners. And so those local distribution partners could fill in those cultural gaps.
And as well traveled as I am all throughout Asia. I don't consider myself to know 100 percent of it, right? And so it really helps to have those local partners either through an office or through a distributorship. But yeah, it's very important. Now we couldn't do things like Japanese language contracts, for example. All that, you know, just from a corporate governance perspective, needed to be done in English. But, but most of the, certainly your larger developers, they understand that
. But I will tell you one of the most interesting contracts that I ever Was a deal that we did with Samsung. And it was actually done with Samsung korea, but the contracting entity was Samsung Brazil. And we had a two column contract- one in english and one in portuguese. And it stated very clearly that if there were any discrepancy between the two, the english language prevailed. But i've done a few things like that just helped us feel more local to the companies that we were, we're interested in.
And I do think it's incredibly important to study all of the cultures in which you want to do business, but more importantly, to fall in love with those cultures. And somebody once said of me, and it's one of the highest compliments I've ever been praised was, nobody knows and loves all the cultures of Asia better than John Goodale. So certainly one of the highest compliments I've ever been praised but it's important to know and understand those cultures.
I wrote an article on doing business in Asia, and I talk about the number one success factors in doing business in Japan, in China, in Korea, in Southeast Asia. Again, hard to generalize because it's so different. But I did approach some generalities in each of those regions. But it's important to understand What drives your customer. What's important to them?
One of the things I talk about in China, for example, is probably not a whole lot of westerners understand this, but the local Chinese populace is very patriotic. They love their country. And so if you can tap into that interest and show interest yourself in what's important to drive the local populace, it helps you so much in business.
Lizzie Mintus: I mean, probably if you can do that with anything, any interest anybody has that you are working with in business, it will be helpful.
John Goodale: And it gets deeper once you get into the actual cultural elements, right? And so it just plays that much more of a role.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I think showing you care is important. I have a friend who runs a venture capital firm in Seattle and also in Taiwan. And I went to Taiwan and visited and he said, he was laughing. All these Americans come in and in America, you fly in for a business meeting and you just execute, you do the deal.
But in Taiwan, you need to go to dinner and then you need to drink. Apparently they stay out so late. I laughed, but I stayed out until 3am. And he said, you have to come back a couple of times. You have to get to know people on so much more of a personal level.
So I imagine if you, like you said, if you don't understand the culture and you're trying to do business in the way that you know, it probably really doesn't work.
John Goodale: I have this strange gastrointestinal issue where my body cannot process alcohol. It makes me feel weird. So I don't drink, but I can't tell you how many deals I've done in bars all across Asia, right? And even though drinking is the culture, they respect our culture enough that they don't force you, right? Especially when you've got a condition that prohibits you, they're totally understanding. I've had people defend me. He can't drink. Don't do that to him. And I'd be, Hey, let me drink, but call an ambulance.
Lizzie Mintus: If you phrase it like that, that's just perfect.
So you have been in the industry 29 years as we discovered in the beginning. And we're having some turbulence that might be the best way to describe it. Have you seen a similar cycle? And yeah, I just love your insights on surviving till 25 and what's going on in the industry right now.
John Goodale: Yeah. You know, I definitely have seen cycles. Certainly with the 28 financial crisis, 2008 financial crisis, that affected the games industry a lot, made things very difficult.
We saw both the highs and lows of COVID. You know, initially driving huge demand, but then so many companies in the industry in order to meet that demand overspent, overhired. And so now we're seeing this cyclical pattern again. And it's torturous. I have so many good friends who are hurting in the industry right now. And I just feel so badly for them.
But I see some interesting bright spots. So, for example, the whole layoff and company shutdown phenomena that we have experienced in the West, by and large, doesn't apply to a lot of Asia. And you still, and I want to talk about BitSummit. So I attended the Japanese Indies game show in Kyoto, Japan in July, and the developers that I met with there are not risk averse. They're taking risks, whereas so much of the West has become risk averse, that they're not doing new initiatives. They're struggling to hold people that they have, right? So many tragic layoffs like we talked about, but you're not seeing that. I particularly saw that in Japan. They're not risk averse. And so there's a lot of bright spots in the industry.
And I like to think that we can learn things from this cyclical environment, right? I think the games industry learned a lot coming out of the 2008 crisis, things to do and not do. Maybe we didn't learn enough because we didn't do that in 2020 and 2021. So maybe we continually have to relearn. But I'm hoping that we can learn some things through this to be more conservative, to not follow cheap, easy, stupid money.
That existed leading up to 28 money was cheap. It was easy. Quite frankly, a lot of it was stupid. Didn't come from the right sources. We saw way too much of that in 2020 and 2021, right? So I think we're learning from it. I see a lot of bright spots. One of those bright spots that I mentioned.
So just talking a little bit about historical trends, when I started in the video game industry in 1995, Japan was arguably the creative center of the video game world. But Japan sort of lost that. But as I travel throughout Japan nowadays, I see it resurging in a big, big way. And BitSummit, for example, it's an indies game show. You see some of the weirdest, most creative stuff at BitSummit than I've seen in the industry in almost 30 years. And so you're seeing a lot of that creative resurgence coming from areas that really dominated before and that are kind of coming back. And I think we're going to see many parts of Asia lead sort of rebuilding.
I'll tell you, I'm also super impressed with the development talent that I have seen, in the Balkan states, so like Serbia and Croatia and that area, and also in the Nordics. At the Nordic game in Malmo back in May, just saw some of the coolest games. And I'm not necessarily talking about visual brilliance. Another key trend that I am seeing come back is that there's much more of an emphasis on gameplay, making sure games are fun, right?
And some of your most successful franchises, right? Roblox, that's not graphically stimulating, right? It's getting all about gameplay and it's fun to see that back. And that too has been driven by necessity. You know, because of all the investment that happened during the pandemic, there was just a glut of really good games. And you had so many really good games trying to get the attention of limited eyeballs, right? And so by necessity developers are having to really up their game, no pun intended, on gameplay. They're having to really focus on things like characters and creating characters that you fall in love with. Stuff that kind of gave way to technical brilliance over, I think, the last decade that's coming back. And I think that's going to lead the industry through a renaissance. I really do. I'm very bullish on space.
Lizzie Mintus: Good. Yeah. I'm excited. I feel like the election will be done. Interest rates will drop. There were a lot of learnings. For me, what was so interesting were these companies, I think the best way to say it is overpaying. Paying more than really was necessary for talent because there were so many big players driving it up. But just because Meta or some large company offers somebody so much money, as a start-up, it would be fiscally irresponsible for you to match that. There was so much of that going on, and I think people like you said, are also looking at burn rates and having all of their staff in a very expensive location versus maybe having a team somewhere else in the world.
And I was excited to have you on because I think that is a big thought right now in the industry. But people do have to figure out how do I work with this different culture and how do I blend the teams together and make sure that they really function.
John Goodale: Yeah, so immediately before this call, I had a call with a games tech company in Brno in the Czech Republic. Fascinating, very talented bunch of guys. I won't mention them specifically by name. But they talked about the cost advantages of doing business in the Czech Republic and things like that are very real, very similar in Poland.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah.
John Goodale: I have a son who lives in Poland, so I spend a significant amount of time there. But yeah, you're seeing a lot of talent flee to some of these lower cost areas, which I think is enabling much more realistic salaries and burn rates and all of that.
Look, technically today, what I'm running is a startup. And so, yeah, I have to watch all of that super, super carefully. And we take advantage of things like we don't have very much fixed overhead. We don't have an office, everybody's remote. Now it takes a special kind of employee to be a hundred percent remote. You've got to make sure you hire the right people, people that are self driven, self accountable. And we do make up for it with things like, we all get together once a quarter and stuff like that. So you're looking at companies spend much more wisely these days. And quite frankly, some of the companies like in the Czech Republic, in Ukraine, some of these lower cost areas are definitely benefiting. And you're seeing a lot of interesting hires in those regions.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, absolutely. I like it. People are building out huge teams. And I think it also perhaps makes your game or platform better because if you have more opinions, more voices, people with different experiences, completely different experiences living in another country, it seems like it would be better. So it's an interesting experiment.
John Goodale: No, that has been interesting. But I'm still seeing quite a few companies that are still largely remote. And you know, that said, it's important for developers to huddle in the same room, right? So that sort of stuff is important. But I think the more intelligently executing companies are having a hybrid scenario. And I think that's highly effective.
You know, I talked about low cost countries like the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Poland. I talked about them taking advantage, some of this. The concern is, well, what does the AAA developer living in LA do? They can't compete with that. And that's a huge concern. You're seeing, I think, a lot of these AAA developers who are having a hard time in these very expensive areas, they're starting to do a lot of remote work and work remotely. And they're lowering their cost basis so that they're not as expensive. So I see a lot of that, which I believe is also a positive trend in the industry.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, for sure. But I feel like a lot of these companies still want to have a core team in a major metro, the shiny, I'm just going to throw it out there, Ex-Riot, whatever people on their team so they can have that vra for right now.
You hinted at the startup that you are running. Can you please share more about what it is?
John Goodale: Sure. So the company that I'm running was founded in April, 2020.
Lizzie Mintus: Just like me.
John Goodale: Money was cheap, right? Money was cheap, money was easy. Money wasn't necessarily always smart. The company had raised a bunch of money to launch A B to C retro games channel. And so you could, through this B to C portal, stream games, retro games from the classics, right? Capcom, SNK, Atari, all these companies. We had all of these licenses, in which we were able to stream those games to consumers. And we did really cool things. And by the way, I wasn't there at the outset. I'm a recently incoming CEO. But we did cool things like couch in the cloud.
You know, when I was growing up, multiplayer gaming was sitting with a controller. On the couch next to your buddy also with a controller and that was multiplayer gaming, right? Couch in the cloud Enabled someone playing like street fighter 2 for example to be playing, you know in la with their buddy in Tokyo, right? So we did these really cool things.
From a user metrics perspective Jam's consumer portal was quite successful. They had 8 million users at its peak. They were about 1.4 million monthly active users and was running very successfully in more than a hundred countries. From a user metrics perspective, it was quite expensive. However, although we solved the tech piece, we didn't own any of the content. And those licensing costs were just cost prohibitive. And so at the point, the company realized it was going to run out of cash. One of our licensors suggested to us. They said, we're going to You can't afford to license our content. We get that. But we love your tech. How about if we license your tech?
And so that began a B2B pivot. And the original co-founding CEO, not a B2B guy, not his world. And so he actually stepped aside, is now running his own B2C games company. And the board of directors brought me in to lead that B2B pivot. And so today we support not just retro content, but we support modern games.
And so essentially what we offer as a company is a white label solution for a developer of any size to stand up their own cloud gaming service. We have some enterprise customers. We haven't launched our self serve, sort of SaaS model yet, but it's very close. And so we're operating this white label service for companies to stand up their games in the cloud. And so that's what we're doing. It's a phenomenally brilliant team that I work with. They're all in Europe. I'm the only guy based in the U S. But I spend an awful lot of time in Europe, as you probably see from my LinkedIn posts. And it's a phenomenal thing.
And cloud gaming a very interesting piece. Everybody's familiar with Game Pass, right? I'm a subscriber. Most people are familiar with Amazon Luna's cloud gaming service, NVIDIA's GeForce Now, right? Everybody's somewhat familiar with and playing in that space to one degree or another.
And what's interesting is that we're in the midst of a three year period where the entire games industry is forecast to grow only 10 percent But in that same year period cloud gaming albeit from a much smaller start is forecast to grow 3.4x. And so it's rapidly rapidly growing. And it's a fascinating space and it's been one that I've been involved with from the very beginning.
So not many people are very familiar with the first cloud gaming platform, but it actually launched in 1994. It launched in 1994 in Japan. It launched in 1995 as Sega Channel. And it was really quite brilliant in its conception. It allowed players to play Sega Genesis games without having a Sega Genesis. And what they did, cause this was largely pre internet, they streamed those content via coax cable, not even over an internet connection, but via coax cable to a set top box. And Sega channel, a project, which I had some involvement with, that was their business model. And it was way early. But so I've been hugely bullish on cloud gaming.
We can talk about how, as I like to say history is littered with the carcasses of dead cloud gaming initiatives, some very prominent. I won't talk about them, but there's a lot of reasons for that. And I believe traditionally cloud gaming has four major obstacles, four walls. They've been infrastructure access tools and costs. And even when Stadia launched relatively recently those walls were still very high. There's perhaps other reasons why Stadia didn't make it, but that's another discussion that's probably controversial, so I won't go there. But those four walls, they're lowering, and they are enabling what I believe is a very bullish cloud gaming opportunity.
Lizzie Mintus: And what is the future of cloud gaming? Where do you think it's going to be when it 3.5x's in the next three years?
John Goodale: Yeah, 3.4. Don't overestimate me. We're early yet, right? But I believe the foundations are being laid for it now. And, and I actually foresee a future where the vast majority of games are played via cloud gaming. It's all gonna stream to your content.
Now, how close is that? I could argue that we'll see it in the next five years I know some people who are even a bit more bullish and say it could be three years. Some of a bit more pessimistic and think it's 10 But I believe certainly by the end of this decade, the majority of games content will be via streaming.
A lot of reasons for that, I published an article on that too if you want to reference it. Yeah I'm very bullish on the space. It's an exciting space.
Lizzie Mintus: I'll follow along with what you're up to too.
John Goodale: Thank you.
Lizzie Mintus: You're welcome. So, I like to ask people about their biggest lessons, because everybody can learn from all these business lessons.
What did you find out through your career in leadership, in Asia, in the game industry that you would have liked somebody to tell you ahead of time? What is your life hack or game hack that you can share with other people?
John Goodale: Interesting. And ironically, I think the answers to that question are going to be applicable to beyond games. And it's things like, networking. So, so important. I didn't really place an emphasis on that early in my career. But I wish somebody had told me to focus on that a bit more. I was so focused on doing my job that I, I didn't necessarily do that very well.
I wish that I had been trained on how to manage a P&L. So somebody formally taught me how to manage a P&L. I learned it by trial and error. I've had some errors, right? But so in university, I studied international business with minors in marketing and with Pacific Rim studies. And I spent about eight years of my life in Japan. So speak, read and write Japanese. But as I look back at my collegiate experience, I had two accounting courses, right? That didn't teach me how to do P and L management.
I really wish that somebody had taught me P&L management, how to read financial statements, how to do all that stuff that I had to do by trial and error. I did learn some of it from mentors in the industry, but I've never had any sort of formal training to it. And my career would have been much easier. And I think everybody's career, even if you're a QA tester, learn how to manage P&Ls, manage budgets, learn how to read financial statements. I think it's important for everybody. And I wish that I had some formal training on that. But you know, I think that's applicable beyond games, right? So I don't know that it's a game specific answer.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's okay. No, I think they should teach finances more in school than for the general population, running a business or not.
John Goodale: I don't think necessarily just. In school, but one of the things that I have tried to do as a leader is to teach my team members how to do that.
At Gamescom in Cologne last month, I had a lot of investor meetings because we're also raising capital at the moment. So I had a lot of investor meetings. My operations director was with me and she was doing the real work. She was meeting with customers and whatnot. I was doing a dog and pony show. But she had a free hour when I had a really super important investor meeting. And I'm like, Hey, Christine, come with me. And she was able to sit in on that VC meeting, something she'd never really done before. And she came from that saying, I learned so much. I wish I'd been taught that because yeah, I did it by trial and error.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there's a lot to learn there. That's sweet that you brought her along.
What about the biggest success in your career? It's always interesting. What do you feel is your biggest accomplishment?
John Goodale: My, without question, my biggest accomplishment was the success I had at Unity. What I was able to grow there was truly special. And it was rewarding. You know, when Unity got a new CEO in late 2014, I knew the writing was on the wall for me because a lot of CEOs, when they come into an organization, they kind of shuffle the old executive team out the door and bring in their own people, right? Very common. It happens. So I fully expected that. When David Helgeson called me and said, Hey, we're going to have a new unity CEO announced in two hours. I knew my time was limited.
But that said, in 2020, when Unity did their IPO five years after I had left, I heard from John Riccatello, and he said, Hey, John, we wouldn't have the Unity we have today without you. And so I'd like to invite you to the bell ringing ceremony. And so it was personally very, very rewarding and not rewarding from a financial perspective, there was a little bit of that, but it was rewarding because of how many people within the organization, how many people in the industry I was able to positively affect.
I get chills up and down my spine speaking about it, but I've been able to have that sort of strong impact. And so my goal ever since having tasted that, my goal ever since is to have that sort of influence on the community, on employees, all of that. So that time is certainly one I view as the most successful.
Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. That's such a good story. Yeah, that's important. But I think that also makes you successful if you have this bigger goal and vision that is greater good and not like, hey, I just want to make a lot of money doing XYZ. It's another secret to the success, I think.
I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, Jam. gg. For investment career opportunities, work with John...
John Goodale: It's very much a placeholder site. There's not a whole lot up there, but there will be in the coming months. Yeah, we're doing some pretty cool stuff.
Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I'm excited. Yeah. Maybe we can time it with the announcement. We'll have to coordinate.
But my last question, who has been your biggest mentor and what is the best advice that they have ever given you?
John Goodale: Yes. Without question, it is Mr. Shinobu Toyoda. Toyoda san is legendary in the industry. So Toyoda san's Japanese, obviously. He studied at Keio University, which is sort of like Harvard or Yale, Japan equivalent thereof, right? Super elite university, graduated in economics. Super, super smart guy. He was actually working for Mitsubishi Industries when Sega recruited him. And he was executive vice president at Sega of America for I think something like 17 years and He was my mentor at Sega.
And the seven years that I was at Sega were very interesting because I was never an employee. I was always a contractor. And so as a contractor I was sort of the guy that they threw stuff at that didn't have a project owner. And so I was executive producer on some titles. I did both inbound and outbound licensing. I did a little bit of third party relations. I did a little bit of product advantage and I did everything. So it was a phenomenal exposure to the industry and Shinobu was my mentor in all of that.
And probably the most important thing he ever taught me was to treat everybody with respect, no matter what their position in the industry, no matter who it is. Just to treat everybody with phenomenal respect. And quite frankly, I've probably fallen short on that over the years, but that's probably the most important thing he's taught me, but he also taught me things like professionalism, just acting in a professional manager. He actually did do some teaching on how to manage a P&L because I had a P&L that I managed at Sega, even as a contractor.
And I mentioned before, one of the highest compliments that ever been paid to me. The absolute highest one that was ever paid to me was by Toyota san. And, when I left SEGA, he followed me in my career. And he was my Japan country manager at Unity. And he ran that office brilliantly. And we were at Tokyo Game Show a few years back, and he introduced me to some of his associates.
John Goodale: And he said, this is John. He worked for me at Sega, but now the student has become the master. And I wanted to just break down in a puddle of tears. It was just, it was so sweet, right? But by absolutely, he's been my greatest mentor in the industry. And I hope that I've had a chance to pay it forward to some people.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Did you recruit him to be your mentor or was he assigned?
John Goodale: He was assigned. Yeah. And that too was a very interesting, a completely accidental entry into the games market. I was actually doing MM&Aconsulting in the early nineties for Fujitsu. When Fujitsu in Japan launched their first consumer PC, it was called the FM towns, their first consumer PC.
And they had this brilliant idea, despite Japan being the center of the video game world, they had this brilliant idea to bundle American games with their consumer PCs sold in Japan. And I was specifically working for their client server research group, doing a lot of M&A consulting in the pre internet world. And the consumer groups said to this group, I was working with, they said, Hey, you've got an American there. Can he help us license games from America? And, again, this was pre internet and I grew up in arcades, right? And I said, Sure, I'd be happy to help out with that.
I'm not afraid to pick up a phone. I'm not from that industry, but again, pre internet, not afraid to pick up a phone. One of the seven games that I licensed for the FM towns in Japan was a game from Sega. It was a game called Bug. some of the audience members may remember Bug on the Sega Saturn. It was a 2D side scrolling platform and Sega of America published a PC version of that.
So I was in Sega's San Francisco offices in 1995, closing that deal, when the licensing director I was meeting with said, Hey, we don't believe that this business is big enough to support a full time person. So I'm leaving. And he said, I understand you're a contractor to Fujitsu. Would you also consult to SEGA to take this business over. I'm like, sure, that sounds interesting. And he's like, okay, let me have you talk to my boss, Shinobu Toyoda. And so that was the beginning of a really, really great relationship.
And I saw Bot interviewed on your podcast earlier. I love Bot. Bot's awesome, right? And in there they talked about he started as a QA tester for Sega at like $9 an hour. Well, because Sega didn't believe in this business, You knowToyoda san essentially told me says, well, we can only afford to pay you $1,000 a month and that has to include your expenses, but we'll pay you upside to any similar licensing deals that you do. Clearly that experiment worked well. And that was my start to the industry. So that was my introduction to Shinobu. That was my start to the industry, completely accidental, but incredibly rewarding.
Lizzie Mintus: But it's also you saying yes, and saying yes to doing anything, which is just like Bot did, and honestly, just like the majority of people on my podcast. Yes, I can do this. No, I don't know how to do it, but I will figure it out.
John Goodale: I'll figure it out. Yeah, absolutely.
Lizzie Mintus: We've been talking to John Goodale, CEO of Jam.gg. John, where can people go to contact you or learn more about you?
John Goodale: So I actually have sort of this personal branding site. It's simply J. Goodale. So J the letter Goodale, J G O O D A L E dot com. And all of my contact information is there. Some of my core operating business and life philosophies are in there. Some of the projects I'm working on are in there. So it's just kind of a general informational site. And my contact info is there.
Of course, I'm on LinkedIn very actively as well. And because I do business all over the world, I'm on all the SMS platforms. So what's that- Messenger, Line, you know? I'm happy to chat with people. Absolutely love this industry and love love hanging out with industry folks.
Lizzie Mintus: Thanks, John. This has been great.
John Goodale: Thank you, Lizzie.
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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