Jordan Weisman is a 40-year industry legend with four entrepreneurial company exits to Disney, Microsoft, Topps, and Paradox Interactive. His achievements include winning over 100 awards, becoming a New York Times bestselling author, and co-creating iconic tabletop games such as BattleTech, Shadowrun, MechWarrior, and Earthdawn. Today, he is the CEO of Endless Adventures Inc., a no-code game creation platform designed to empower game designers, storytellers, authors, and artists to create their own narrative video games and drive innovation.

From founding groundbreaking companies like FASA to spearheading innovative projects at Microsoft and launching Endless Adventures, tune in to learn about Jordan's journey and the key lessons he's learned along the way.

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

• The Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur
• Lessons in Community Building and Game Design
• Acquisition by Microsoft and Transition to Corporate Life
• Lessons in Entrepreneurship

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Jordan Weisman on LinkedIn
• Endless Adventures Incorporated

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

We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives and programmers to understand the why behind their needs before introducing today's guest. I want to give a big thank you to Ed Fries and Mitch Gittleman for introducing us at your legend and. Everybody has a nice story. And Mitch, you're delightful. I met Mitch and I met Jordan separately. And then it was like, you have the same sense of humor. I can see why you would be business partners. So wonderful people. 

Today we have Jordan Weisman with us. Jordan is a 40 year game industry veteran with four entrepreneurial company exits to the Disney family, Microsoft Topps and paradox interactive.

He served as creative director for the launch of Xbox. He was at Disney Imagineering and ran studios at Topps, Paradox, and Walmart. He has won many awards, including a Peabody Innovation Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards and is a New York Times bestselling author. His latest adventure is Endless Adventures.

Endless Adventures' goal is to empower people to make their own narrative video games and fuel innovation in the genre. Let's get started. Thanks so much for being here. 

Jordan Weisman: Thank you, Lizzie, for inviting me. Nice to have the opportunity to talk. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, we'd love to hear more about your latest adventure, Endless Adventures.

Jordan Weisman: Yes, that does get to be an overused word in the concept. So Endless Adventures is as you said. We're designing what we call forges and forges are genre specific, no code, video game authoring platforms. So our first one, which is called Adventure Forge, focuses on the very broad spectrum of narrative gaming, which from the way we envision, it takes you everything from kind of text based choose your own adventures, to visual novels, hidden object games, and dating sims, all the way up into very sophisticated, isometric RPGs, like the ones we were making at Harebrained Schemes.

So it intentionally brings together what were historically several different types of tool sets into one to be able to empower designers and writers and artists to really mix all those different tools together, those different techniques of telling stories and interactive fiction and gameplay together in hopefully lots of news and innovative ways.

Lizzie Mintus: So it was a pain point that you had personally and you decided to start a company to solve it? 

Jordan Weisman: Well, yeah, I mean, I've been in the very fortunate position to tell my stories, both in tabletop and video games for several decades. And I think that there's just a lot of voices we're not hearing in the game space, which I think would be not only good for society, but good for business because the whole world plays games. But the whole world doesn't make games yet. And I think that we can find some great games and really important stories by dramatically broadening the access to creating these kind of games. 

Lizzie Mintus: Very true and inspiring. So I want to ask how many companies have you founded? Many. 

Jordan Weisman: Oh God. It's probably about 10 when you add them all together. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. 

Jordan Weisman: So I'm one of the worst types of people, a serial entrepreneur. It's like being a serial murderer only having more work, more corpses in your wake. So yeah, it's been about 10. And I'd say about more than half of those have been with my wife, Dawn, as a partner and co-founder. I've worked with her many times on many businesses, so that's always been really fun. Part of the dynamic. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's a special skill. I was just chatting with my husband if we could work together, he said hard no.

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, it's always been part of our dynamic. We've always loved creating together. We tried it when we were first married, and that was a disaster. But then we tried it again about five, six years later and it worked well. And so we've been doing it ever since.

Lizzie Mintus: Power couple. So I want to go to the beginning of your journey with FASA, like NASA, but with an F. Was this your first company and what inspired you to start this? 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, if we don't include all the things I did in high school, which were being a high school student and trying stupid things, it was my first. And what inspired it was that I was playing a tabletop game called traveler, which was a science fiction kind of equivalent to Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. And I started drafting up blueprints for spaceships to use in the game with your little miniature figurines. And people started seeing those and say, Hey, those are cool. Can we get copies? And so I was like, well, maybe there's a business here. 

So, one night at my game session said, Hey, I'm going to start a company and print these and see where it goes. Anybody else got a couple hundred bucks to throw in. And, Ross Babcock, who was a friend from college was like, yeah, I'm in and thus became a 20 year partnership. Formed rather casually, quickly at that night's game session. 

So yeah, I printed those up and started selling them. And then, they got the attention of Mark Miller, who was a creator of Traveler. And he was excited about it, gave us a license to do them officially as Traveler merchandise. And then, we just kept growing from there. It was just the organic thing. 

Eventually, within a handful of years, FASA was the second largest company in the industry after TSR, the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons. It was a fantastic experience, just love the memories of those days.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you share a story from those days, just about growing the company from an idea with your friend to the second largest company in the genre? 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, so there are so many. I think since the focus here is mostly on the business side, one of the first things I realized was that I couldn't manage all the aspects of the company myself. Ross was a great partner, but Ross was very kind of nine to five and it needed a lot more energy than that. And so I was putting in a huge number of hours and I started to realize my limitations on financial management. And the company structure was not where I was best. And it was draining a lot of time away from product creation, and marketing, and player engagement, which is where my strengths were. So I realized we probably needed a business manager. Someone who could handle that side of the business. 

So I talked to my dad, who's also an entrepreneur, and said, Hey, help me find the right person for this. So we went around and interviewed a bunch of people. And being a fan of history, I've read a lot of business history and realized that usually the business manager is the person who comes in and steals the business from you. So I decided to offer my dad the position because I figured, if he did that, mom would yell at him.

So I had a built in defensive mechanism. So he joined us about, Ross and I, three or four years in. I don't remember exactly. And then had the pleasure of working with him for 20 plus years. And I made his life hell, by trying to do crazy aggressive things, like we had a very successful tabletop game company, but I had this vision for creating before the term existed, creating virtual reality entertainment centers.

We started that project in 1987, and use the profits from FAFSA to fund that. But that project turned out to be about 10 times more expensive than we anticipated because we had to invent our own graphic cards, our own network cards, and we had to invent everything from scratch, because this was back when dinosaurs walked the earth.

So we took a very successful company, almost drove it out of business trying to support the next company and more. My dad just gave him endless nightmares about how to keep both companies afloat as we pursued this crazy, crazy, aggressive project.

Lizzie Mintus: And what ended up happening there? 

Jordan Weisman: Well, we opened up the Battletech center, which was the first of these virtual reality entertainment centers in Chicago in the beginning of 1990. And it became the first place in the world where people could play multiplayer immersive games like that. I got a ton of press, which was great. We had a Japanese licensee who built one in Tokyo, one in Yokohama, and we brought a licensee in California. But it was still very, still cash draining. It was a cash positive. It attracted the attention of Tim Disney from the Disney family, who was very interested in this technology and the idea of being able to build these kinds of miniature, immersive experiences. And so he came in and purchased a majority share of the company from us in 92. And together, we expanded the concept out to what we call the virtual world center and introduced more types of experiences in addition to the Battletech experience, and built 35 other centers around the world.

And starting in the early nineties, we basically pioneered a lot of what would become a sports where we had local, regional, national and international tournaments with this multiplayer game with the championships being televised and all sorts of these kinds of things. We learned just so much, not only about the electrical and software engineering, but about the social engineering, of how multiplayer games worked and how long term kind of communities built in these kind of digital spaces. In this case, a kind of hybrid physical digital space. So it was a fascinating experience and then led us towards, back to the PC space with the creation of Fast Interactive, to kind of capitalize on everything we've learned building all these entertainment centers. And then that company did the MechWarrior series with Activision, and the MechCommander series with Spectrum Holobyte, or I guess it was called MicroDrones at that point. And then, Microsoft unded up acquiring that company, and that's how I ended up out in Seattle working for Ed as his creative director. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow, full circle. So you were running these two companies in parallel for quite some time. 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah. Not doing it anywhere near as successfully as Elon Musk theoretically does it, but yes. So admittedly, I had stepped out of kind of day to day operations that fast on the board game company to be really focused on the virtual world. Entertainment on the digital side. So I was still very involved in the larger creative directions that the products were going in. But I wasn't day to day operations. We brought in a president. Initially, Sam Lewis was president there, and so I wasn't trying to run two places day to day. I think that would have been too much for me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you'd have to go fully Elon Musk and that might have taken you a different direction. And you talked about how you learned a lot from building communities. Can you expand on your learnings from virtual world entertainment? 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah. I think there were just a ton of different kinds of things like, one in terms of the kind of design of the experience itself, which we envisioned, and eventually as it grew, and we learned into three acts. The first act is where you would meet your teammates if you hadn't brought a full team with you, meet your opponents and choose a lot of the elements of your experience, the environment, the things like weather, which vehicles or mechs you were piloting, or depending upon which of the games you were playing, and you would have a little time to talk about your strategy for doing so with your teammate. And that was an important component of the experience, right? That kind of anticipation moment, and a bit of strategic planning. Then everybody would go into a launch bay and each get into her own cockpits. And then you have the high adrenaline chaos of the virtual experience, which in those days, 10 minutes long to accomplish what you had set out and of course, no plan, survives, facing, engaging with the enemy. 

So you were, you know, um, on the radio, the, our fictitious radio, but our, our, uh, close net close circuit kind of radio to your opponent, to your teammates, all trying to figure out what to do in real time, react to the battlefield situation.

 And then actually what would prove to be the most important part of the experience, in the end the cockpit component is the highest adrenaline, but the thing that had the biggest impact on repeat play and community building was the third act, which is when we brought everybody back together, after the cockpit experience. You then relieved that experience. 

And the sophistication of this grew over the years, but it resulted eventually and we had captured the whole thing like a movie. And then replayed that forward. You now combine with your opponents again. That's where kind of a real magic happened where it's like, Oh, that was you that did that.

Because you come out of those cockpits with so much adrenaline, humans have a need to communicate when they're pumped on adrenaline. And I always call that the bus crash phenomena, right? You can ride, sit next to someone on the bus every week, every day, and you never talk to them, but the bus gets in an accident and hopefully no one's hurt, but enough to drive all of our adrenaline up. And now you're talking to, Oh, what did you see? I saw this, and you have this kind of a need to communicate. So capitalizing on that adrenaline rush to create connections and community, not only drove a lot of repeat play for immediate sense, but also drove a lot of introductions and friendships, which of course resulted in longer term association and immersion into the community of each of those centers.

So that was an interesting early learning. Another early learning was that every audience is a pyramid. And the tip of the pyramid is your most devoted players. And they're also your largest revenue source and the classic kind of 80 20 rule, right? The 20 percent of the top of the pyramid is delivering you 80 percent of the revenue. And the bottom 80 percent of the pyramid is only delivering 20 percent of the revenue. And the top of the pyramid is very vocal, and the bottom of the pyramid is very quiet. And so it's a huge temptation and we felt prone to that temptation to cater to the top of the pyramid. And by producing our feature sets and other aspects of the product would lean into that 20 percent, cause we're like, well, there's where all the money's coming from.

The problem is that as you do so, you are often by nature, making the product harder to make it less accessible, making it harder to get involved into the community or into the product. And so the base of the pyramid starts to shrink. At the beginning, you're not concerned about that because it was a very small percentage of your revenue.

But the truth is, all audiences, that audience pyramid will always snap back into proportion. So if the base of your pyramid shrinks, the top of your pyramid will shrink as well, because it's always a funnel, right? And you have to have that funnel wide at the bottom as possible. And so we felt prone to that and we realized, we realized it and then had to start to autocorrect right and move back towards making sure that we had a balanced approach between what we were doing to satisfy the tip of the pyramid and the base of the pyramid. 

That also goes along with the social kind of engineering of the space right, the idea that any kind of community can become very cliquish and not welcoming to new people, right. The kind of classic, Oh, I don't want to play with them. They're a rookie kind of thing. Well, that is also a quick way to kill that base of that pyramid. 

If people come into a place, whether it's virtual or physical and they don't feel welcome, they're not sticking around, right? So we needed to actually change things in how the community worked and the incentives that we were driving our experienced players, our top of the pyramid, to make the new players an important component, right? To really encourage them to be welcoming. I think one of the places that came to pass first was when we did Battletech online, which we did with a group called Kesma. It was one of the very first massively multiplayer games online, because Kesma had done the very first and we were the second of that game that they did. 

And learning what we had from the Battletech centers, we kind of incorporated that into the design of the online game, in which the most valuable resource in the game was players. The way we did that is that defenses could be automated and we're resource based, right? But offensive behaviors required humans. So it changed the dynamic of not being interested in rookies to the different clans, or the different kind of factions, actively recruiting and being there literally taking shifts, hanging out in the new player lobbies and saying, Oh, come join us. We're going to, I'll be your mentor. I'll teach you how to play the game. And we have some resources. We'll get you a better Mac! So when you make new players the most valuable thing, it changes the entire kind of dynamic into something that's very, very welcoming. 

Lizzie Mintus: Brilliant. I think that's very relevant for many people today as well.

 Tell me about getting acquired by Microsoft, whatever you can share from that. And then about your accomplishments once you joined Microsoft. And the transition I'm curious about too, like being this entrepreneur to working at a much larger company. 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, it was really interesting. I turned 40 just about the time it happened, and I had never worked for anybody else. I've been fortunate enough for the last 20 years, just always been doing my own thing. So it was the first time I ever had a boss, and that was a very new experience. Luckily, Ed and it's a very good boss. But it was really interesting. It was kind of the opposite of what I'd had, right? I always had kind of complete freedom of motion, if you will, and very little resources, right? So we're always trying to figure out how do we do the impossible with almost no resources. 

At Microsoft, we had basically unlimited resources, or at least as it appeared to me, from my humble, previous experiences. We had just incredible resources to allocate, but we also had a much tougher path to implementing them. I've learned that this is true now that I've worked at several large organizations. It's very hard to get a clean agenda at a large organization because you've got so many different groups doing so many different things. And often those agendas can be in conflict with each other, most of the time unintentionally, but they can restrict the motion of any one agenda because of its potential conflict with other agendas. And this makes it hard to go take mountains, right, to go take the hill because you're potentially constrained by other things that the organization is trying to do that's unrelated to your project. So that was challenging. 

 And also in doing the kind of relationship building with exterior companies. As part of the role I played was to establish relationships for Microsoft in LA for film and television and publishing. You know, built and did all the initial deals for publishing all of our books based on our games and all those kinds of media things, which I'd been doing on my own for all these years or with Tim Disney. Now we needed to establish all that for Microsoft and all the IPs we were creating there. 

And that was a lot of fun, but I also kind of started to get the feeling, at Microsoft, I could open any door, but it was almost impossible to walk through it. Because, again, we could get access to anybody and had the resources to do amazing things. It was just very hard sometimes to get them done, right? And again, this is from my perspective in the context of, you know, we were accomplishing this incredible agenda, incredible thing all the way along, you know, turning Microsoft, which was, A PC only game company and only recently a successful PC game company, into a council manufacturer and council company with an organization that, at the beginning really didn't understand the difference between those things, right? So there was just a huge amount of kind of internal learning and external relationship buildings. There was a lot. It was exhilarating and sometimes frustrating, but incredibly exciting experience. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, can you talk about your accomplishments when you were at Microsoft and how you managed to navigate and get stuff done? 

Jordan Weisman: Well, I think in terms of accomplishments there, I'm very proud of the teams that we built. The team, when I started, there was only less than 300 and our team that we brought from Chicago was 60 of them. And then when I left, we were at 1500 people. So that was a crazy amount of growth. 

One of the first games we did when I got there, we were working on MechWarrior 3 and Mech Commander but then I had a new IP that I'd created called Crimson Skies, that I really had fun with. And I was very proud of the PC game we did with that. And then Crimson Skies became one of the early Xbox titles. I didn't have as much direct involvement in, but was very excited to see the universe and characters I'd created and brought to life in both of those platforms. The PC one I was very involved in, the Xbox one not as much. 

I think I am proud of the kind of design philosophy that I was able to put together and propagate through all of the teams, which centered around this concept of what I called, Essence for an Overview. As designers, especially back in those days, we would sit down and write these giant documents, right? cause we were, you know, this was prior to the whole, agile, very waterfall based. And so you had these huge documents, like writing down everything we're going to do for the next four years which was, of course, insane. I don't know what we were thinking in those days, but you'd have these giant docs. And then, what I realized is that when we built those giant docs, we often lost track of what we were really trying to make. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Right. 

Jordan Weisman: So developed this concept, the Essence Score and the Overview. The essence was 50 words maximum. And you had to kind of encompass what the pitch to the player was within 50 words.

 My designers initially all just were like, that's insane. I can't sum up my brilliance in 50 words. I'm like, well, if you can't do it now, then some poor schmuck in marketing three years from now, who only gets 10 words is really not going to be able to do it. So if you don't have a finite point, if your vision isn't clear enough now about what that's going to be, then we're lost in three years from now and millions of dollars later, right? So, that became a very difficult thing for us to do to be able to write those with that kind of clarity. 

And I always said that basically what you're creating is a scalpel. And that scalpel is now going to be used to cut away all the features that don't actually add up to that statement. And you weren't allowed to talk about features in the essence. I mean, in 50 words, you didn't have space to talk about features. You had to really step back and think, what is the goal of these features? What are they trying to accomplish? 

In the essence core and the core document. You now had one to two pages, and there again, you weren't supposed to talk about features. You were supposed to talk about making that 50 word one and break it now into like five or so actual larger goal statements that you're trying to accomplish. And then the overview, where you actually had like I think five or six pages now you can talk about features that will be used to accomplish those goals. And that became, I think, very. solid kind of way for us to evaluate titles to determine, you know, did we understand enough of what they were before we started trying to make them? 

And also, the other key component was, as you make them, don't unconsciously drift from these statements. You will need to change them because, especially over a large project, these things do change and evolve, but you need to explicitly go back and say, we are making a change to the essence or to the overview or the core. And make that change. And then update it so that it's accurate to your new understanding, your new beliefs, and not just kind of casually drift away from it. Those documents should always be accurate to what you're currently making. So I was proud of that approach. 

And then I think the other big thing that we did there that I was very excited about was working with Steven Spielberg on the film, Artificial Intelligence and the games that we were making from that. And the only one that actually finally got made was, what later became called the Alternate Reality Game, which was to be originally published, and lay a foundation for the video games that we were making based on the movie, and to help market the film.

The games we were making, there were five that were in development at one point, but those all eventually got shut down as the movie just didn't have the audience connection that we were looking for. And I was concerned about that from the beginning, from the very first meeting when This could be an incredible movie, but I don't know if it's going to connect with the audience. Our initial targeted audience for 1835, males, because of the story of a young boy desperate for mother's love, which may make us all cry, but I don't know if it's going to make you want to go out and buy a video game, you know? 

But it was an incredible experience working with Stephen and Kathleen Kennedy. It became a great venue to explore these ideas I had about what storytelling was going to be organic to the web and the concept of giant collaborative audiences working together in what I call the hive mind.

So, that proved to be a wonderful experience and it can only be done because I was ready to get fired for it because I went and pitched it to Ed. Ed thought it was really interesting. He said, but this is kind of more in marketing. So you better pitch it to Robbie Bach. And I pitched it to Robbie and Robbie said, it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, you're going to spend millions of dollars to make all this content. You're going to hide it all over the world and you're going to tell no one it exists. It's like, yep. And he's like that, I don't think we're doing that. And I said, oh, okay. 

And then I went and pitched it to Steven and Kathy and they were like, this sounds fascinating. Yeah. Well, I thought it could help both the film and the video games. Then they said, yeah, I said, well, maybe then we could split it between the marketing paying for it between Microsoft. And I think it was Warner brothers at the time who did the film and they were like, sure. And I said, but I have this budgetary thing at the moment. I can't get the Microsoft money for a while. So maybe we could start with the Warner Brothers money and then the Microsoft money will come in afterwards. And they were like, sure. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, how did Microsoft react? 

Jordan Weisman: Well, so when I got to my favorite phone call of all time was Kathleen Kennedy calling the head of marketing at Warner Brothers and saying, so I'm gonna send this guy over named Jordan.

You're going to give him a big, big check. You're not allowed to ask what it's for. And from now on you send him all your marketing stuff and he's going to make what the changes he wants and you're going to just run with it. You're not allowed to ask why. And I was like, no one can make that phone call but her. And I said, it must be good to be king. And she said, oh yeah, no, it is good to be king. 

So how did Microsoft react? So we did the campaign and it launched and it got all sorts of incredible press, an idea of the year kind of thing from time magazine, all sorts of stuff like that. And Robbie comes in with like this big New York Times article about it and puts it down on the desk and said, I thought I said we weren't doing that. I said, oh Robbie, I misunderstood. I thought you just didn't have the money then, but do you now? And he was like, yes, asshole. I do now.

So sometimes there's an advantage. It's like those movies where you've been told you only have 10 days to live. So you do all the things that you say, all the things you really wanted to say, and then it matters as it manages to go better. And so that's true in business sometimes too. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's such a great story. Thank you. And then, you obviously had an itch to start a new business because that's innately who you are as a person. And the internet told me you started WizKids, and it went from a startup to over 30 million in sales in two years. Can you please share how you came up with the idea and a bit about that journey?

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, that was a wild ride. It was one that I started with my wife, and the idea for it actually was watching my two elder sons, who at the time were, I think if memory serves, and I'm really bad at memory, I think they were eight and ten years old at the time, somewhere in that neighborhood. 

And they really wanted to play a tabletop miniatures game. The dominant one at the time was Warhammer. And so they went out. They saved up all their money because it's very expensive, and they went out and they bought it. And then, the rule books were like this thick, several inches thick. And they required them to super glue figures together, which is not really a great thing for eight and 10 year olds to do. And then, painting them is not really within the motor control of an eight or 10 year old either. So it was a disaster. 

And it made me realize just that our industry and the industry that I been with at that point for more than 20 years was exclusionary, right? It was pushing people away who wanted to play these kinds of games, but we had all these barriers to entry from the cost to the complication, to even the painting of the figures.

So I just started noodling on that for a long time and trying to think about something that would work for the retailers, work for the distributors, work for the players and work for the company itself, trying to find a solution for all the different... People always say think outside the box. I usually start by making a box. And it's like, who do we have to solve for, right? So for that product, I had to solve for a player. I had to solve for the retailer, I had to solve for the distributor, and I had to solve for manufacturing, right? And so then each idea I would come up with, I would plot in that box for, how did it meet those criteria, right, looking for one that met all the criteria necessary.

And actually it was Thanksgiving. I remember because of my wife. Dawn was yelling at me. She's like, sit down, come and carve the turkey. I'm like, wait, wait, I think this thing's going to work. I think it's going to make us rich. She's like, yeah, I've heard that one before. So what it was, it was solving for how to get rid of the big rule books. And the solution I had come up with was I have to put the information for the figure on the figure itself.

And so I was looking through my desk one day and saw a radio. slide rule. It's two disks that spin in relation to each other. And I just said, wait a minute, if I put that on the bottom of the figure and each time the figure takes damage, you rotate it, it shows new information. This is the equivalent of what would be in a normal rule book and a big table. I've now taken the table and I put it on the figure itself. And in doing that, the figure now has an arc, right? It can change over the course of its playing. So I got really excited about it. 

Anyway, So I made a prototype for that. I actually took it to FASA because FASA was still running in Chicago at this point, I'm in Seattle. My dad and Ross are in Chicago running FASA. And I said, so I'm really excited about this idea. It was an expensive idea because you had to do all these plastic, sculpt all these figures to do plastic injection molds and all these other kinds of stuff.

So it was an expensive idea. And they were like, no, we don't see it. And it's too big of a gamble for us. Okay. I said, well, I'm going to go do it myself. And they're like, okay. So, I put in a little bit of angel financing. And we brought it to market. And I think the product design was really important, and that was very well received. But community development was also equally important. Ray Weers joined us. It was my wife's brother and where I worked together with him to kind of build this community. So he would travel to game stores and conventions, demo the product, find people that were excited about it. We would then embrace them as what we eventually called, our emissaries, something like that. But they were basically our volunteer team that would go out and do demonstrations of the games and then run tournaments and leagues at different stores.

And then we had a whole kind of online system for how to reward them with figures for the things they were doing. And we managed to build a really great community on top of a really great product. And that's why it just grew like crazy.

We also learned that, that superheated growth, meant that the figures that the volunteers were getting as rewards started to have, like, really high, high secondary market value, which was, nice for the volunteers, but it also started to attract people into the program who weren't really interested in the community or the game. They were just interested in the eBay value of the pieces they were getting. 

And so we had this wonderfully warm and welcoming community. And we started to undermine it because it became too highly rewarded to take those roles and people with the wrong intentions were getting involved. And so it caused us to kind of sit back and this was about year three or something, to back and rethink that whole program to make sure that it had kind of more important emotional rewards than it had financial rewards, because emotional rewards would be important to the people who cared about the community and cared about the game, as opposed to, if you were just trying to score on eBay. The emotional rewards weren't going to do that for you. So it was another good lesson in community development, and how to build something that has a longer curve, to make sure that it can survive for decades.And those games, Hero Clicks and Mage Knight, they're now over 20 years old as well, so managed to continue on. 

Lizzie Mintus: What was the emotional reward that you were given? 

Jordan Weisman: So most of it surrounded access. We were still rewarding them with figures, things like that. But they weren't as exclusive as they were before. So they didn't quite have the secondary market value, right? Which was important. And then what we started to really do is spend a lot more time on it, every time we'd go to a convention, which we would do conventions all around the country. We would host events for our volunteers. Where they would come and we'd have an evening of just hanging out together with all the designers and the people from the company, we would show them new things that were coming. We'd give them sneak peeks. We'd get their input. And so it was much more about being a valued insider. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, 

Jordan Weisman: then it was about stuff you could sell on eBay. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And what was the outcome of that? The eBay versus events from ROI perspective? 

Jordan Weisman: I think the big thing was the community kind of right itself and places which were getting, you know, negative experiences. Like Players who were getting negative experiences because they're you know that their envoy, that was the word, their envoy was not there for the right reasons. Those aren't those who went away and on voice who were there for the right reason got involved and so their experiences went better. 

And so the sales curve continued to go up instead of where we were starting to worry that it was flattening because of the community. Because all games are really about community and connecting with people, whether they're video games or tabletop games. And that's why I always look at my career as in reality, everything I've ever done, it's just 3 links of the same table. It's about socialization. It's about storytelling and it's about mechanics. And the mechanics is only in service of the socialization, the storytelling, because we're social animals, right? 

And I mean, we're animals that are built for socialization and for storytelling. That's what our brain does, right? It turns everything into a story, and then it wants to share those stories. So to me, even though it looks like a wide range of different industries and technologies, it always comes back to those same three things.

Lizzie Mintus: So you've started a lot of companies. And I think a lot of listeners are somewhere in an entrepreneurial journey. What advice do you have? 

You touched a little bit about building the founding team and just the foundational building blocks day one, getting your startup off the ground, getting the idea. What advice and stories do you have?

Jordan Weisman: First I think, be very critical of your own ideas. This is very common advice, right? Figure out how your idea fails, and try to figure it out quickly. Try to look at all the different stakeholders that your idea has to satisfy, really vet them as much as you can before you move forward. 

 Don't believe your own hype and your own bullshit. I've fallen into that mistake a couple of times. Having built two very successful companies in the tabletop industry, I started a third one thinking I knew everything. It failed because I didn't do my work. I didn't do the work. 

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me more. What didn't you do that you wish you did? 

Jordan Weisman: Oh, I didn't do the research. I assumed, Oh, I've been in this industry for 40 plus years. I know everything about it. And it's like saying, I know everything about the river. The river is constantly changing. You can't put your foot in the same place in the river twice. And just cause I've been in the industry for 40 years, that industry is never the same and I didn't do my homework. I didn't take my idea and bet it with all the different stakeholders, with the players and the retailers and the distributors. I just didn't do the homework because I bought into my own hubris, right? 

And I launched a really good design game that was a very poorly designed product. And it failed and it was an expensive failure. So yeah, just cause you're old and you've done it a lot doesn't mean you can't make these mistakes again yourself. So it's really important to make sure you're always testing your assumptions and you're always doing that. 

Next thing is, who you're doing it with. I've seen so many good ideas and good companies break up because they didn't spend enough time on understanding the expectations and relationships of the founders, right? You're going to spend a huge amount of time with this founder, as much or more than you spend with the mate you go home with, or home to. And really understanding what is our goal with this company, what's the end result, right? Are we building this to live forever? Is it something we want to sell? Where's our end goal for this company? What are our roles in this company? What is our work ethic? If we need to be here at midnight, are we here at midnight or not, right? 

And there aren't any right or wrong answers to any of these questions. There's just the need for you to be on the same page about them with your founder with your fellow founders. And then negotiate the divorce right up front, just like a prenup in a wedding. Say, okay, so let's assume we get into this a couple years from now. And now we're not agreeing on something. What happens? 

You want a mechanism to resolve. Loggerheads between founders because otherwise the company will come to a halt or just implode, right? So you need to be able to think about that ahead of time and just put it down. And hope you never have to open that file again. But if you do it's there and you now have a framework to resolve those issues and continue to capture the value you've created as a team. So I think that's really important and I see that mistake all the time.

 The other thing is Nothing is designed for everybody. Figure out who specifically you're designing it for. And in the beginning, the smaller the audience you could design for the better, because if you can design a product for a niche that isn't being reached, you'll have a much more cost effective way to reach them, right, because you know where these people live, digitally and physically. So designing small products for small audiences is the right way to start rather than trying to start with giant ideas for giant audiences. It's just prohibitive. You can't afford to get there, right? 

Each product is a stepping stone to the next product and each audience can be a stepping stone to the next audience, but figure out the smallest one you can start with, and knock it out of the park for those people and turn them into fans who then will speak highly of you when you move to your next product and your next adjacent audience. 

I use the example of a juggler at a reticence fair, like whenever a juggler starts to show, he just grabs two random people and says, do me a favor on the count of three, just yell. Those two of them yell. Ooh, and five more people. I'll go, okay. Hey guys, now just on the count of three, everybody yells. Ah. You know, ah, five more people ago. So and then again, we're about 15 people. Now he actually does a show, right? You have to think small, start small, build goodwill, and that brings in larger audiences over time.

Lizzie Mintus: Great advice. Thank you. I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your current company website, endlessadventuresinc. com. 

The last question is, can you talk to me about people who have made the biggest impact on your career and any specific advice that really sticks with you today?

Jordan Weisman: Yes, the website should be adventureforge.games. The other one will redirect, but it's okay. Anyway, but yeah, adventureforge.games is the best site to go to. 

So in terms of people, yeah, I've been very blessed with some great mentors over the years. One of the largest is my father, who both as a child and then as a partner for all those years. He's incredibly, incredibly helpful in so many aspects of helping me form as a person and as a company leader. 

You know, I think, I go back like Mark Miller, who was the very first to bring me into the larger table top industry at that time. He was a great source of inspiration and enabling and someone I could turn to for questions in those early days. 

Dave Artisan, who was one of the cofound co creators of D&d, also filled that role for me later. It was a great. I got to work with him a lot and became a good friend with him. So that was really good.

Steve Arnold, actually kind of started as my counselor. And then I worked as a junior counselor and a counselor for him. And then, in one summer I showed him both my Apple two computer and the movie Star Wars. And then a handful of years later, he was founding LucasArts with George Lucas. So he has continued throughout my career to be a supporting mentor. 

I got the list. You know, Ed. Ed has been great. I think that one is really interesting because he was both a great mentor and I think a great learner, because he was a huge game fan, but he was very new to making games when we met. And I'm very impressed with how he moved through that learning curve and that he's a really good listener, which is, I think, key to being any kind of good manager, is how well you listen, not how much you speak.

So yeah, if you've been doing things as long as I have, there's a long list of people and all of them have had a huge impact. I mean, even all the way back to like my history teacher in high school. It was like, we read the history book and then he asked the question of, well, how do you know any of that's right? And a simple question like that was like, Oh yeah, good question. It was like, you know, let's start off by going to the original sources. Do the research yourself, but creating that kind of inquisitive self actuating mind is critical. Anyway, I could go on and on, but that's some of the highlights.

Lizzie Mintus: That's great. It's funny the things that people say. I mean, you probably said that all the time, just on a whim, but it's stuck with you forever. 

We've been talking to Jordan, the CEO of Endless Adventures. Jordan, where can people go to work with you or find out more about you? 

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, I'm actually not very good on social media, but I'm going to get better. So eventually I'll be on a Facebook page and things like that. I guess the Wikipedia page is mostly right, but I'm not allowed to edit it, so it's not all right. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I do get there every once in a while, so it might be a nice place to reach out to me.

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Thank you. 

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