Join host Lizzie Mintus, and guest Scott Hartsman, as they dive deep into the secrets to creating successful live games, streamlining hiring processes, and making tough decisions as a leader. Scott's extensive track record speaks for itself, with a portfolio of successes dating back to the early days of online gaming. From EverQuest 1 and 2 to Rift, Trove, ArcheAge, Gemstone, Scepter, and even online Warcraft, his contributions have generated billions in revenue and engaged hundreds of millions of players. Currently, he serves as an advisor at Brain Jar Games and is an active angel investor in various companies.

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

• The Secret to Creating Successful Live Games
• Future of Live Games and Industry Trends
• Early Game Testing and the Importance of Player Feedback
• Monetization Strategies in Game Development
• Advice for Aspiring Game Startup Founders
• Transforming Hiring Processes for Efficiency
• Advisory Roles and their Impact on Startups
• Navigating Good vs. 'Least Bad' Choices
• Successfully Scaling a Startup
• The Power of Genuine Curiosity in Leadership

Resources Mentioned in this episode:

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Scott Hartsman on LinkedIn
• Hartsman.bsky.social
• Brain Jar Games

Sponsor for this episode...

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

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 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 thank you to Wallace Poulter for introducing us. Wallace, you are a super connector and you know everybody. So thank you. 

Today we have Scott Hartsman with us. Scott likely ran, built, shipped, or consulted on more massive and live games than anybody else alive with successes extending back to the early era of online games. Some titles and IPs include EverQuest 1 and 2, Rift, Trove, ArcheAge, Gemstone, Scepter, and even online Warcraft. These titles represent billions in revenue and hundreds of millions of players. Let's get started. Thank you for being on the show, Scott.

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Since you've run, built, shipped, or consulted on more massive and live games than anyone else in the live, I just really like to know the secret to creating a successful live game. 

Scott Hartsman: So this has actually been something that's come up a lot in the past year, right? As more single player game companies try to get into the live games business. The biggest part of it to me is understanding the difference between making a traditional single player game versus making something that is supposed to endure, not just in the market, not just in public, but in the minds of the players.

Something that they want to do for years. Basically, it's the difference between creating games and creating hobbies. And so,I think about them in terms of, if you can conceive of a thing, an activity, a place, a virtual place to be, where people are going to be excited to be for five years, 10 years, 15 years of their time as a hobby, you might just be onto something.

Lizzie Mintus: How would you determine that? 

Scott Hartsman: Hmm, there's a few different ways to think about it. There's always the look for something that's never been done before and try to blaze a new path. That was very, very easy to do, call it 20, 25 years ago when nothing really massive or alive had existed. So everything was brand new. 

These days, I think the most likely case and one that I've had some success with was finding places where there are players that have a desire to do a thing and nobody is filling that particular need. We shipped a game at Trion Worlds called Trove, which was a voxel based MMO. And it was very intentionally supposed to not compete with Minecraft, right? Even though it was a voxel game. 

Minecraft leans into being a fully moddable sandbox. Turn it into anything you want. We wanted to make an adventure RPG. And we knew when we were looking at some of the player made mods out there for Minecraft, there were a number of adventure RPG ones, and super bluntly, the mods themselves just didn't play very well.

It wasn't their fault, it's just that the core of the game Minecraft doesn't really lend itself to being a fantasy RPG. And so we were like, well, maybe if we build one from the ground up around the whole idea of this fantasy RPG stuff that we're actually pretty good at here, maybe it'll take off and it turned out to be the number one game for the company in terms of number of players who've ever touched it.

So like I said, finding an underserved audience is a great way to go. And sometimes you can look at what players are modding for themselves to give yourself a hint of how to get there. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there are so many studios popping up, including one you advise, Barnyard Games, doing games for Fortnite and Roblox. Do you think that's a trend that will really continue? 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, so The Fortnite UEFN, the fledgling Fortnite games industry, I think is really fascinating for a few different reasons. As people want to get games online, even in the cloud era, the idea of having to deal with hosting your own servers and doing your own matchmaking and doing your own billing, or signing with different regional distributors. There's a lot of non-games work that needs to happen, that costs you money. 

And, the bet for developers like Barnyard, who are fully founded, with the idea of solely doing UEFN games, if you look at the calculus, it's like, well, we can take a smaller team and we can work a hundred percent on just the game because the infrastructure is dealt with the billings dealt with. We don't have to deal with any servers. We don't have to deal with any hardware. We don't have to deal with operations. And a lot of that work is probably 50 percent of the effort that goes into running and operating a live MMO. So if you can cut your ongoing budget and budget needs in half by,, super meaningful. And it lets you focus on just the pure fun of the game. 

So I think there are some groups and some team scales for whom that works out and just turns out to be a fantastic place to be. There's others where it's just not going to work and that's fine. I don't think it's going to be the place where all games in the future are made, but, I think it's an incredibly valuable, new alternative.

Yeah. And I think it will be there for the long haul. 

Lizzie Mintus: A new and cheaper alternative because it's more and more expensive and you need more people and the ways that you get money are shifting right now. 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's a whole part of it too. But yeah, especially as we're talking about MMOs. MMOs are purpose built and designed to use all of the most expensive parts of cloud computing. CPU is expensive, downstream bandwidth is expensive. MMOs use all of the parts of the cloud that are hyper expensive. So if you want to make an MMO, you really want to be looking for ways to have somebody else have to deal with paying for all of those, all of that server stuff. There could be a future where we end up getting better games. 

Lizzie Mintus: I saw an awesome meme that was posted about Bernie Sanders and it says, I'm once again asking you to think hard before making everything a live game. It's such a trend right now. How do you think live games will evolve over the next few years? I mean, there's so many players in the space. 

Scott Hartsman: Well, one of the things that I've found kind of interesting is that, I think there was an over index in terms of the number of people and numbers of companies that really decided to go or informed their development teams that they are required to go all in on live games, whether or not their games were a fit, whether or not their IP was a fit, whether or not that's what their audience wanted.

And that's kind of what I alluded to earlier when I said you kind of need to think about these things: are you creating a hobby or are you creating a fixed length game experience, right? I'll pick a title out of the air. Let's look at Tomb Raider, right? People who play Tomb Raider games have this expectation of generally what the shape of the package is going to be, right? It's going to be a fixed time experience. There's going to be a story. There's going to be notable moments in the action.

And a lot of what's been created in that IP to date, all of it has been single player, right? You can't just take that IP and say, well, we're going to make a live game out of it. I mean, you could. In some cases, the IP may not actually even help you. 

But meanwhile, let's look at an IP that did the exact opposite. Let's look at Final Fantasy, right? Final Fantasy was a single player gaming experience way back in the day. And then when they released Final Fantasy 11, they were able to make that leap. And if you look at those two, what the difference could be? 

I think that people who are inclined to enjoy fantasy, and there's just some specific things about fantasy that are universal across most of the communities on Earth, and most of the cultures out there, and the idea of banding together with friends to save the world or triumph over evil or something like that. I think there's just a lot there that's drilled into us from the time we're children, right? Fairy tales for children are basically Fantasy 101. Right. So there's a lot that's just burned into us and we have this desire to play there.

So anyway, I think what's going to happen is you're going to see more companies kind of taking a step back and retrenching a little bit as they realize that nber one, we probably, we actually don't even have a great plan for what makes this game live? What makes this game stand out? What about this is a live game makes it more desirable to the player? Because at the end of the day, theirs is the only vote that counts. Their dollar is keeping everybody in business. And so, I think more people are going to have the oops moment and then we'll start to see a little bit more sanity return.

Lizzie Mintus: I like the oops moment. So you talked about figuring out what game you should make, figuring out if it should be a live game or not. Can you talk more about actually making a live game, what goes into that in terms of making it, and then things to think about, two questions in one. After you launch it, how do you keep people coming back? How do you make this a movement for years to come, a hobby, like you said? 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's something that I think a lot of experienced game developers all come to believe. And that is, every game that ships is a miracle in its own way. I think that every single one of us can look back at all of the games that we've launched, and the ones that have gone well, have absolutely had miracle moments, where the bit of brilliance swoops in at the last minute to solve the problem, the minute of synergistic fun that you weren't expecting that people discovered that made your game 10 times better than anything in your own brain.

 When you start looking at live games and especially massive live games and open worlds, the more adjectives that you add, the greater the surface area becomes for all the number of things that can go wrong super bluntly. And so, while you're creating these, there's a lot, you have to be very good at juggling all at the same time.

It's more than just the game design and making sure that you have a compelling proposition to the user. It's also, how can we afford servers? How can we get this tested? It's, which platforms do we want to put this on? How can we afford to create it for all of these platforms? What are the things that we're missing? How can we begin to test? Do we even have a great concept? How can we pull that date back a little earlier? So maybe we figure out if we have a good concept before we fully ramp up to production, right? Because if you look at any development schedule, it's the closer you get to the end, those months are the most expensive.

So you want to find and fix all of the foundational stuff while you're as cheap as possible. Fortunately, like we mentioned earlier with Fortnite, even if you subtract Fortnite and UEFN and Roblox and all of those, just looking at the engines that are available these days and how rapidly people can begin to get their own gray box testing done, begin to get their own gameplay testing done, there's just such a wealth of tools that are available these days that I think are truly amazing. And they're really helping developers figure out some of the important stuff earlier. 

Lizzie Mintus: Earlier is key, huh? 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, it's, yeah, it's all incredibly risky, right? The last thing you want to be is a studio where you've got your game, you've ramped up into production. You're over 150 developers. You have that oops moment. You feel like you're not making progress. And then somebody calls me and goes, Hey, Scott, could you come in and spend some time with our studio? Because we think we have a problem, which is something that I've had to do, or I've been asked to do multiple times in my life. And it's been a lot of fun, but I would love those folks to not be in trouble in the first place. 

Lizzie Mintus: Well, it keeps you busy. You talked about miracle moments. 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: I'd love to hear stories, if you can share them, of miracle moments that have happened. 

Scott Hartsman: Sure. Sure. I think one of my favorite miracle moments, one of the ones that stuck to me, was from our MMO Rift. It was a rescue of mine where I got brought in after they had ramped up to development and they were trying to figure out a path from having a great team and some good technology to actually having a great shippable game.

 One of the things that we were a little shy about talking about at the time, but now that it's 10 years later, I feel like I can talk about it. All right. And that is the core element that rift the game became super notable, super known for, was more than just the rifts. It was the way this entire dynamic content layer took over zones of the world, the sky darkened invaders came through, the map the MMO plane, boring map turned into almost like an RTS tactical map. As you can see units walking around and trying to take over parts of the world, the entire plan for that layer that really kicked it over the line didn't even occur to us until about two weeks into beta.

It was a miracle moment that occurred because it was developers and. Players interacting on the beta servers with, we did a number of smart things in the testing in the run up to the test for that game by the time we did the first beta, Rift was a, is a sharded MMO too. So every server itself holds a few thousand players. And what we had done was we took the game dev team and we split us, we split ourselves up and assigned hans to watch different servers literally in real time invisibly. Watching chat, watching how players are going. And so we had, we didn't have 24 seven coverage, but we had servers covered for about 12, 16 hours a day. So we could always see what was going on. We had a debug command called invade target where you could select an object in the world and a GM could say invade target. It would spawn a bunch of invaders and they would start marching and try to take over the world.

Layers flipped out when GM started using these debug commands to try to make things interesting and see what was going to happen. It turned out that was by far the most compelling thing that we had in our game. We started sending around, we were all in chat together, so we started sending around, Hey. Go to this newbie zone, go do this, you know, hit the invade command, flood the players, just, I mean, overflow them. They seem to be loving this, right? Because they had never seen anything like that in games before. And so after that test, we did some rapid designs and, our lead designer at the time, who later became the game director, created a prototype for the actual, here is a zone being taken over officially, systemically, here's the sky darkening, here's the gameplay around it. He did a prototype of that himself in like two days, and we were playing it internally. And we rolled that prototype out next beta to see what would happen. And when that one happened, I mean, players just lost them. 

So yeah, a lot of serendipity happens. I think when you have super passionate developers who truly care about making players happy, and you have players who are willing to be entertained. Some real magic can happen.

Lizzie Mintus: And in terms of, I know you said as early as possible, but what does that really mean in terms of getting your game out the door or getting your game into the player's hands? And I know it's so scary for the people that make the game to get it out early, but what do you advise? Is it as early as possible or?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. So one of the things that more, a lot of developers are starting up these days, basically here we are in the year 2024 secrets don't really exist. Right? Secrets are harder and harder to keep. There's always stuff leaking out because somebody updated their LinkedIn and now we all know that, Oh, Borderlands 27 is a game because an artist just updated his LinkedIn.

So basically, people have kind of embraced that. Our studios have kind of embraced that and they're doing more testing through their own development, with players every week. And there's a few different studios that are doing this. One of them is actually even live streaming. They're in development, dirty, early, rough, wild, unfinished gameplay. And they put it up there for the whole world to see. So I think, largely, one of the things that has added most of that risk is that there was always such a fear of leaks and such a fear of the world knowing, it was always perceived that a leak is going to kill our game. Culturally that's not really the case in. Culturally, that's absolutely not the case. 

The greater fear for the vast majority, sorry the greater danger for the vast majority of games and the vast majority of studios out there that you want your game and nobody cares and you can't get above the noise. Yeah And so, since nobody cares, it is such a huge risk, you may as well spend down some of the development risk by getting some human beings into your game, even if it's NDA, even if it's a private Discord, whatever, as early as possible.

So it's not just the game development team drinking their own Kool Aid. One of them is actually even live think more game development teams don't want to be in that boat, right? They don't want to be in a silo just developing in the dark for years. I think there's something super energizing for a lot of people about the rubber meeting the road and players being able to observe players in the game and figure out, Hey, do we have a great idea or are we kind of cracked? Yeah. Figure that stuff out while you're cheap. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Otherwise, it's truly a miracle. 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that used to be the thing, as far back as the 90s, there was this school of game development thought. It was the, and then it all magically comes together in the end. There were lots of game developers that super prided themselves on their philosophy. These days I think we're a little more sane than we were back then. And I think that very few people have embraced that as a sustainable way of developing games because super bluntly, it was never super sustainable.

All of those miracles came at the cost of real people's sanity, family time. It's all crunchy. It was healthy. Exactly. Most of those studios also had endemic crunch cultures. And so that's another thing I'm glad has largely disappeared. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That makes sense that the two would go hand in hand. Yeah. Can you talk about working on a live game as an employee and what you might want to think about? 

Scott Hartsman: The problem is what don't you want to think about? I mean, so I've been a designer, I've been an engineer, I've been a head of engineering and I've been an EP on live MMOs. I mean, so there's so much of it, right? There's the, what is the right amount of friction in getting into our game for our audience, for our style of game, then there's the, how much progression is there and in what ways is it a vertical progression? Is it a horizontal progression? Are we banking on replayability? Are we not banking on replayability? And then assuming that you have a big vertical progression, one of the places that most live games end up weak, largely because it's so damn expensive to fix this, is that at the end of the progression, what's next?

What is your elder game? What does your end game look like for people? Endgame content and endgame stuff to do is the most expensive things to be created in massive live games, which is one of the reasons that you see so many games pivoting into much more replayable experiences as opposed to the big huge expensive, heavy narrative stuff that is also then expected to have an Elder game.

It's one of the reasons that you can't go 20 seconds on Steam without seeing the word roguelite or roguelike basically everywhere. And I say that as a huge fan of roguelites and roguelites. I play the hell out of them. I think they're fantastic. But that building and replayability from the get go gets you an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude cheaper game to make where people can stay engaged for hundreds and hundreds or thousands of hours. 

So, you really need to figure out, if I had to boil all of that down, it would be looking at the game that you have, that you're trying to make, figuring out the human beings who are gathered together, can we make this game?

Is there something about us that means we will accept exceedingly well at this particular kind of game. And then there is, can we find the audience for this game? What is our unfair advantage? And what is our secret in connecting with that audience? Because if you don't have a secret, you're gonna have a hard time getting involved in the noise, right?

In the old day, it was called, what is your X factor? These, you hear people talk about what is your differentiator. But you've got to have some thesis as to why a given audience is going to find your game compelling. And then there's the eternal one of live games, which is, can we afford to operate it? And there's a bunch of different things that factor into that. There's, what does your ongoing monetization look like on the scale from ultra player friendly to ultra hyper aggressive? Because again, these games are the most expensive ones to make. But at the same time, if you go hyper aggressive, you're going to burn out your audience, turn off your audience.

But if you go too light, you're never going to be able to afford to operate. And so there's a big, huge balance to be found there. And the thing that I've personally found super engaging about this, and one of the reasons I made a career in these things is, I love being in environments where there is that much to think about, where it is a nonstop, it is a never ending stream of inputs. It's the heartbeat that never that never turns off. And yeah, it's just fascinating. Always has been.

Lizzie Mintus: I love your love for it. In terms of monetization, I mean, is it just a math equation to find that sweet spot? Is it seeing what your target audience is used to or would accept? How do you wrap your mind around that? 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. There's a few different ways to, for any of these topics, you can think about six or seven different aspects or a dozen aspects, an arbitrary number of aspects. And you will drive yourself crazy if you leave all of them variable and try to make sense of it. 

A very good friend of mine, actually the CEO of Barnyard, he was the first to really, he also has an engineering, came from an engineering background, and he was like, look, we need to find one variable that we think we can fix and then hypothesize the rest from there, which is a, that is a very engineering way of trying to solve the problem. And so it's basically put a stake in it, right? You got to put a stake in the ground. 

Let's take a, take one thesis. And we're going to say, for instance, that our development team wants to be the kind of development team that is going to make the most player-friendly monetization in the history of games. Bam. There's our stake in the ground. Okay, cool. Now let's look at all of these other aspects and try to figure out what we can do with those other aspects to make this one core thesis come true. If we can't find a way to make that one core thesis come true, then we go, okay. Well, we tried. How close to that can we get? Right?

Can we get 10 percent of the line? Okay, so what's going to bang? And it's a factor of iteration, or it's a matter of iteration. So one of the things, like I said, you, you want to think about what will your, what will an audience tolerate? What will the players on a given platform tolerate because sometimes for the same game, different platforms have different rules entirely.

One of the things that I got a huge kick out of was Genshin Impact. Their audience, especially their mobile audience. Every time, one of their high spending players buys, spends 5,000 on something, you'll frequently see them bragging about it in global chat, on the fors and stuff like that. And then all of the free to play players will say, Thank you for keeping our game free for us. Right? It's not, they don't really view it culturally as, Oh, you're bad. You spent real money. 

Now, try that in, for example, World of Warcraft. Go spend a whole bunch of money there, violate the terms of service. Not only is the company going to come after you, but the players are going to dislike you, right? And so there's just so much culturally from audience to audience, from platform to platform that changes also. So you really have to be in tune with the audience where you're trying to end up.

And then again, it also comes down to what's the cost in terms of operation, server hardware, customer service, all of the stuff you need to pay for to keep it running. But then there's also what's the cost of ongoing live content, right? Back in the day, the general thought was you would launch one of these things and you would shrink the team and the team would move on to, the core team would move on to new games and a smaller team would be working on live.

These days, if you have a successful game, that's a terrible, terrible way to do business because these games can last 10, 15, 20, 25 years. One of the IPs that I worked on early in my career is still alive like almost 30 years later. Yeah. So these days, what you really want to do is you actually want to grow the team if you can afford it, right? Because you want to be able to create constant, interesting live content stuff for people to do. I don't mean just a new course armor to sell or a new thing to sell. I mean, new, interesting stuff to do, but then you also want people to have a longer term view of stuff to do like the longer term expansions, whether it's expansions, whether it's bigger updates, whether it's leaks, what have you, but these days, I think games can actually support that kind of investment. They can justify that kind of mess. So, 

Lizzie Mintus: yeah.

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: A lot. So in terms of content, 

Scott Hartsman: yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: How much content would you advise assuming you have had your game in beta or you think you know, right, that it's going to be a hit. Then how much content do you want to have ready when you launch? Or is that a variable based on so many different things? How should you think about it? Maybe? 

Scott Hartsman: It is a variable. But at the same time, there's a, there's an analogy. I forget the name of the right name to attribute this quote to. There's an analogy in scheduling, which is, everything is going to take twice as long as you think it is, even if you take this law into account. Right? And so content is the same way. No matter how much content you make, you're probably going to need twice as much, even if you take this law into account. 

If we're talking about, like, for example, a linear MMO experience, I'll use that as just an example of vertical progression MMO. There are a lot of factors that you can adjust to make the journey longer or shorter, right? At the expense of making it grinded or not, right? Let's think, let's talk about the two extremes. 

The extreme number one is, I log into the game, I push one button, I am now max level, poof, I'm at endgame, right? It took me one second. The other extreme is, the amount of time taken approaches infinity, right, where the grind, the game is nothing but the grind forever and ever, and the nber always goes up, and there is. And so, again, for a given game, for a given design, for a given audience, for a given platform, the same exact rules apply as with monetization. You need to figure out what's going to fit with that audience. And a lot of the time, you can look at what they're already playing. What games they love, right? That's a big part of it. 

There is no shortage of agencies out there to work with to do that level of psychographic research on what is demographic research, psychographic research.What are they playing? What do they enjoy? What do they love about them? What do they not? 

One thing though that I would caution anybody who goes that route is, understanding what people say and understanding what people do are frequently two different topics. One of the things that, again, going all the way back to the original EverQuest era, people complained about the grind. Holy crap, people complained about the grind. They were so grindy to get all the way to level 60 back in the day that, oh my god, it's such a grind. 

You want to know what the biggest quit point was for players? When their XP bar filled up for the last time and they could not, there was no more XP, there was no more progress bar to fill. People wanted it, right? And every time there was more progress bar to fill, we would set new records in terms of who's all coming back to play and, who's all picking up the game and who's all bringing their friends.

So like I said, do research, but temper it with reality. And that's one of the things where I think modern data architecture helps a lot. Back in 2004, we were doing some of the first work before freight, before the words BI existed, business intelligence. We were actually doing some of that work on early MMOs and way smarter people have since come in and revolutionized that old industry. Right. And, but all of that data works, I mean, looking at what you do versus what you say, there's a combination of those two things that are incredibly valuable. 

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. That's true in life too. 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, absolutely. 

Lizzie Mintus: Outside of games, right? 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the nice thing about that too is that you can actually begin that work even before you have real players in your game.

You can look at your own internal testers and see how they're playing, right? That's not a thing that you have to go all the way to live. Actually, you shouldn't go all the way to live. The teams that I counsel. I want them to have instrentation and telemetry and all of that stuff in, during production, at least the basics of it, so they can see, what did they do early, what did their early private testers do? That kind of stuff is invalid. 

Lizzie Mintus: Makes sense. So you advise a lot of startups and I want to ask you some questions that I hope will benefit anybody who's running. Or thinking about founding a game startup. So if you're thinking about starting a game company, what experiences should you personally seek out ahead of time to prepare you?

Scott Hartsman: I think if you're standing in the mirror and punching yourself repeatedly, you can get okay with that feeling. Chances are you could found a startup just fine. So, okay. Slightly more seriously, I think having a holistic view and being involved in lots of different aspects of the way a game gets made is one of the things that is absolutely, absolutely invaluable.

I mean, I'm not even going to go into the part about being passionate for games and being passionate for entertaining players, right? That's like table stakes. If you really want to be excellent, be somebody who can see a game from development, through testing, through operation, through live, from design, and then across a dev team, from design, to engineering, to art, to audio, to community.

To marketing and see how all of the work flows between those groups, being able to look at all of that from a 10, 000 foot view and being able to go, Oh, now I see how all of these pieces flow together. That to me, at least, has been the absolute most invaluable part of any of this because really you want to be able to see, you want to have at least a thin understanding of as much of that picture as possible while also having as deep of an understanding among at least one or two of the areas yourself.

You're never going to be an expert in everything. I'm not. Like I said, I was an engineer and I was a designer. What artists do 30 years on is still magic to me. Right. I mean, it is miraculous that artists can make art. I don't get it. Audio, creative audio people, same thing. But I have a super deep knowledge of the design and engineering side. Okay, cool. So I've gotten that, but then I've also got the producer view of being able to watch everything, how it goes from development through testing to operations to marketing, blah. Having both levels of that knowledge, I think, is absolutely tremendous.

Absolutely. 

Lizzie Mintus: What about at a startup versus a large company?

Scott Hartsman: The thing about startups is that you don't have any backup. Right. At startups, it is you and a small nber of people who are going to invariably have to wear a vastly larger nber of hats every, and I don't mean just in terms of making the game, right?

I mean, making coffee, I mean, getting groceries, I mean, everything. Making phone calls, dealing with the accountants, dealing with your hosting. You need to deal with a lot. And meanwhile, which is ironic, I find it kind of ironic that people who have come up through that environment usually have a much thicker skin. They have that breadth of knowledge of all the things it takes to build a huge success.

Meanwhile, they are way less likely to get funded than person nber 2000 on big, huge, massive AAA success. Even though person nber 2000, yes, they were associated with big, massive success, but how much of that do they really know and how much of that were they personally responsible for. And so I think it's kind of fascinating. One of the other interesting things about startups is that, your whole advantage, the only advantage you have in a startup is speed. Right. And so getting used to operating quickly, getting used to getting feedback quickly, is the only power that you have, right? You are out resourced on the other side. You are out hired. You are not going to out recruit. You are not going to out operate, right? There's a million things that you're not going to be able to do as well as them. The one thing you have is your brains and your speed. 

I do counsel a lot of startups to guard their speed jealously. It can become very easy for a lot of people who go from big co to startup to kind of fight the last battle, right? There's a risk of them doing a lot of things where big co, we had problem A, B, and C. We're going to institute a bunch of policies at the startup, so A, B, and C aren't problems anymore. And unfortunately, A, B, and C may be also slow down the development team.

I counsel people, guard your speed jealously. Yes, do policy, do process, do whatever you need to do. However, do it light enough to where, basically, what I counsel people policy and process is just enough and not one step more. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. I counseled them on recruiting too, right? Same thing. You're a startup. You're not going to pay people more. 

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: You're not going to be able to offer them all these RITC benefits.

You have to find the right person that's interested in your startup, but once you find them, You better be faster than whatever company is also interviewing them. That's how you can win. 

Scott Hartsman: So funny enough, one of the companies that I did join pre revenue. They were a series C startup, but they were still a startup.

 When I dove into their hiring pipeline, it was taking them three to four weeks between the interview and offer. And I came in there and I'm like, Oh, we're lucky that these folks are talking to us. I don't know what you think is so desirable about us that you want people to wait that long. And we ended up getting it down to literally at least a couple of times, having an offer in hand for a candidate, at the end of their day of in house interview, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's the ideal for me. 

Now, it takes work and it takes coordination, right? Because you have to pull all of your people together and pow wow, while the candidate's still in the room, or no, still in the building. You have to have your finance people ready to sign off. You have, there's a bunch of stuff you have to do. But that should be the goal, right?

You want to make this painless. You want to make it actually not painless. You want to make it feel great. You want to make it feel great to the candidate, right? That's one of the other reasons, recruiting is another passion of mine. I mean, just from the inside hiring manager point of view. And I've always felt super strongly too, that one of the places I think a lot of companies fall down, they don't really have a guide, right?

If there's a candidate that you really want, who is their buddy on the inside that they can call? Right? That is going to get questions answered for them. That is going to assuage them of any doubts. That is going to help keep them excited about the process.

As a hiring manager, I always loved doing that for my own directors, for my own candidates. Because yeah, it meant some 8 PM phone calls. It meant talking to spouses. It meant some extra dinners. Okay. So what? That's great, right? If, because if this is a relationship, if you're hiring somebody, hopefully this is a relationship that's going to last years, right? Yeah. Get off on a good foot. 

Lizzie Mintus: And you can win in speed, but you can also win in care. And so many people don't care and make people feel bad throughout the process. The recruiter never gets back to them. They don't get feedback. It's taking a long time and they're frustrated. And that if you're a startup and you're fast and you take them out to dinner or do something really nice, or maybe you talk to their spouse about the offer and their relocation concerns. I laugh because I've definitely done that too.

But that going above and beyond. Or my favorite, the call with the executive at the end, like, let me tell you about my high level vision. Do you have any questions? People love to talk to somebody high up and make them feel special. 

Scott Hartsman: And funny enough. So that's the thing where I've done that as a board member for companies and as an investor for companies where I've done recruiting calls for CEOs all the time where, I just did one with a, with another startup.

That's still semi stealth. So I can't really talk about it. They just brought on an art director and the CEO wanted me to spend some time with the art director, just talk about big studio versus startup life because he came out of a massively successful big studio and this is his first or second startup. And we had a great chat and he's a cool guy and it was fun. It was a fun talk. Right. And he ended up joining the startup. Awesome. But I think having a passion for, having a passion for human beings, I think is an important part. It's an incredibly important part of making life games, because you need to be both passionate about your players and your teams making games.

And really, those are the things that drive me more than anything else in games, players and developers, 

Lizzie Mintus: too. Okay, so you're an advisor and a board member. Can you talk about what advisors and board members actually do, or maybe what they should do, and what new founders should consider when bringing either on.

Scott Hartsman: Certainly, certainly. There are as many different ways to package what an advisor does as there are companies who want to work with advisors, right, because everybody needs something different. And in my case, a lot of the time, I can only really speak for myself. So there's one company that I'm working with, where the founder is a previouscal, tech industry founder who has a personal passion for games, but has never really worked in games before.

So I'm kind of being a games industry guide, games connection guide, games investor, connector, that kind of person. Where it's like on the business side, on coming up with a concept, iterate quickly. He doesn't need that for me at all, right? He absolutely doesn't need that for me.

 And in terms of mechanics, what that really turns into is he and I PM each other on Discord usually two, three times a week with a random one sentence here or there. And there's usually one call every three or four weeks depending on whatever he needs. And we talk about what's troubling him. How can I help? What's going well, what's going poorly.

Scott Hartsman: And I think one of the most valuable things that I can do is, having been a CEO, it's lonely. You don't have a ton of peers, right? There's not a lot of people that you can share everything with and be able to be a super non judgmental person. Slightly separated, just a pair of ears who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Who knows, when to offer advice or when just to listen and go, wow, that sucks. Right. You'll get through it, and you just went to cheerlead.I think that's a big part of it too. And then, it can range from stuff like that to all the way down to being in the nitty gritty. So a different startup that I was working with. 

For instance, they were hyper talented on the creative side, hyper talented, they didn't need anything about product help, they didn't need anything, but they didn't know how to make a budget to save their life. And so I was like, cool, I will be your pretend fake CFO for a day and I will make you a budget. Here's a template for how, here's a budget that you're going to be able to use to operate your studio for the next four years. They are still using a variant of that budget. And it's four years later. So I'm kind of proud of that one.

My old fo would be proud of me for doing that too. But seriously, a lot of it comes down to whatever I can do to help. I want to do that. So yeah, and sometimes it's pure product help. Like, hey, do we have a good game here at all? Or do we have a good portfolio? What about our product strategy needs to change? What about our technology to change? Those are areas that again, I can go pretty deep on. So yeah, stuff like that. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you would say that you want to understand your strengths and weaknesses as a company and then find people to sit on your board or advise you that have the strengths that you don't have.

So you have somebody to ask the questions to. 

Scott Hartsman: 100 percent Wow. That is a fantastic story. Very well done. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. 

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about the difference between being able to make good choices versus least bad choices? 

Scott Hartsman: Hmm. Yeah. The ideal for a game developer is they get to go make good choices, right? The problem is that the reality of games, if you're not in that, number one, number two, number three, chances are you're strapped for resources. And so a lot of the time you need to make what's the least bad choice, right?

 The more strapped you are, the more in trouble you are, the less likely your choices are going to ever be, your options are ever going to be, option A, which is amazing and option B, which is fantastic, right? Yeah. This is horrible. And this is slightly less horrible or it's horrible to different people, right? There have been a very small number of times in my career where we actually got to make good choices over the long haul. In all of the games, we got to make good choices from time to time, right?

But there were very few where you were able to make good choices all the time. And I think that the one of the prob one of the risks that happens when you're always choosing, lesser of two evils, is that You're kind of having to take your eye off the ball of providing surprise and delight.

Playing games is an emotional experience. And people don't play games for the real world impact that it's going to have. It's all emotional, it's all an emotional reason. Really want to be focused on the surprise and delight side as much as possible and over delivering and providing a great game. And so in moments like that, where you're able to really focus on, Hey, this is good and this is great. Okay, cool. 

These are fun choices to make as opposed to one company I got called into, when they were nine figures in debt. And there were a whole lot of least worst choices to be made. It was, do we lay off half the company? Or do we go out of business and now nobody has a job, right? Those are the least worst decisions and you're not providing joy. Neither of them is about providing joy. Yeah. But there are decisions that have to be made.

And, there is a lot to be said for living to fight another day. But the problem with making least worst decisions is that a lot of times they can cascade. In some ways, it's no different to taking out a ninth mortgage on your home, right? The more mortgages you take out, the less likely you are to ever pay them back. And you're going to lose the house, right? Going through least bad, least worst decisions are kind of like that too, where if you find yourself constantly being forced to make least bad, least bad, least bad, there's always a negative impact on either some portion of your team or some portion of your audience.

And those all are the only thing that really remedies those are, is time. It's consistent behavior to the good over long periods of time. But that requires money. 

One company whose name I won't mention got to the point where there were probably about four or 5, 000 people. And they didn't even have a budget because they didn't need one. Nobody had spending gaps because they didn't need it. Money was infinite and money was coming in. Right? It took them years to even get, like, spending approval of the concept of spending approval. Which, to me, is hilariously laughable. I've never worked at a company that worked like that. But when you're doing that, you get to make nothing but. Today, will we have ice cream or will we have cotton candy? Right? It's, what's it gonna be? Which is a very privileged place to be. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. But I always tell people if you are in that really privileged place and you have cotton candy at work and you got a bonus, that's two times your salary.

Scott Hartsman: Mm-Hmm. . 

Lizzie Mintus: It's great. And it's important to think, this is a unique circumstance. And to consider that maybe it's such a unique circumstance, it might not last. And you have to prepare to not be in that situation. 'cause it's not gonna perpetuate forever, right? Everything. goes down after a while.

Scott Hartsman: That is really true, right? Because if you look at, actually I should say, in the 99 percent case, I would agree with what you said. There are some companies that have managed to get to be number one and still maintain private ownership, because so much of what causes companies to have to change like that is because of the way company ownership works.

As soon as companies go public, for instance, everybody is so much more accountable. People are now, either trying to impress on the quarter or impress on the year, one or the other. And it's a whole different ball of wax. 

Let's talk about Valve, right? Valve is still owned by a dude. Right? And it is nber one in its thing, and he does tremendous things for his staff, right? They do, and they have Yeah, exactly. There's no shortage of it, and you know what? That's his call to make, and good for him. Right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. 

Scott Hartsman: Same thing, like, when you look at Epic. I think it's brilliant that Tim has done what he's done in maintaining majority control. Right. So yes, other people own parts of the company. Nobody can tell him, boo, he's still the one who gets to say final yes and no on everything. I don't know this from the inside, but the assumption is they had a lawsuit against Google, which they came out with in favor of Epic. They are pushing a lot on what's going on into Fortnite as a metaverse of really, releasing UEFN. 

Those are not the thing, oh, releasing a that doesn't make money, because they're going to build it up over years and years and years and maybe even decades. Those are the kinds of investments and the kinds of things that only happen when a private human is the one who goes, yeah, we're doing right. It's very, very rare that any of that would ever have the big pull. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's interesting to think about as an employee too, if you're considering jobs. And I like what you said about the least bad decisions, because I see so much hate for a lot of CEOs and executives. But I think it's really important to think about it as a CEO, you have to make horrible decisions. And it's terrible. And it may not be necessarily fully the fall of you, right? There are a lot of factors and you're delivering the bad news.

And someone told me the other day that being a CEO is just being okay with public hatred. You said punching yourself in the face, but it is like people on the internet hate you and talk about you. And so I don't think that every CEO of a large company is necessarily the worst person in the world when there are massive layoffs and bad things happen to the company.

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, it's very true, right? There is no shortage of bad behavior, but at the same time, not every piece of bad news, right? I would say the vast majority of cases, especially in non-public companies that don't have hard public earnings requirements, my first reaction to seeing a lot of news like that is if they did that, wow, the other choice must have been horrible. Right. But the average observer doesn't think that way because the average observer has really never been in that boat. 

Like, for example, let's talk about Unity, for instance. 

Lizzie Mintus: Let's talk about unique pricing. You hate it. What's the alternative? Look at the alternative.

They just did their layoff. Have you seen their financials? 

Scott Hartsman: That's exactly 100 percent correct. It's because like, look, they grew too fast on the amount of revenue for their business model. 

Lizzie Mintus: Now they're losing so much money. They have to change some factor. 

Scott Hartsman: Yep. Now, did they absolutely screw the pooch on rollout?

Totally. 

Lizzie Mintus: But they had to do that. 

Scott Hartsman: The alternative was, well, 

Lizzie Mintus: We're here. Yeah. 

Scott Hartsman: And, again, it's tragic. It's sad. I wish that none of it would have happened. I wish that they were phenomenally profitable and stable because I like, I love that they exist. Right.

I think they have a very, very important place in the games industry. They've brought so much to the accessibility of game development. I want them to be stable and successful in the long term. But, yeah, I mean, it's frying pan fire. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hard times out there. So you were EP, GM, CCO, and then CEO of Trion Worlds. And it was a venture backed startup, right? 

Scott Hartsman: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. And you grew the annual revenue from 40 million to 120 million and made the company profitable. 

Scott Hartsman: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: How did you accomplish this? 

Scott Hartsman: Well, I mean, so for starters, the first one was my, basically I had been the EP of the inaugural game. We had launched it. It was a bigger success than expected. I had hoped to actually grow the team at that point. Unfortunately, the company had committed money to games two and three, so we actually had to shrink the team. So we were trapped in a cycle of underinvestment where we didn't have enough, we didn't have enough hands to both feed the beast of the live game as well as creating long term content. We just didn't. And most games will eventually decline as that happens. Actually, every game that behaves that way will decline, period. 

So I actually left the company shortly thereafter for a bunch of reasons I won't get into and it was about a year later, the chairman of the board called me and went, Hey, would you consider coming back and running it?

 I was like, Oh, we're going to make a change. Okay. Sure. What's it look like? And so I got all of the financials and all of the transactions. I actually asked for, in addition to looking at all of the official reports, I actually asked for bank ledgers. I was like, look, I just want to see every transaction for the last year. I know it's going to be too much. I need to look at this myself. And yeah, the company was running in the red. I mean, millions of dollars in the red every month, millions of dollars every month in the red. , and so there very much was a, well, it's immediately obvious that the cost needs to come down by about two thirds. Not even half, two thirds, or zero people will have jobs. So that's worse. Immediately, yeah, it was again, the least worst. 

The least worst is we stay in business and half the people get to keep their jobs, which is what we did. From there, fortunately there was enough talent that was bought into, there's enough remaining talent that was bought into the mission and really believed that if we did the following things, we could really turn this around.

The idea was we were going to invest more in the flagship title. We were going to kick off an incubation. The way that the prior company had kicked off it's sequel, its games, two and three, it was a very 1990s, early 2000s way of doing it. It wasn't how you would kick off live or free to play games in a responsible, correct way, where you come up with a thesis, you try to prove your thesis cheaply, you iterate up from very small groups, you only scale when you're confident, and so on. You're never going to zero the risk, but again, it's all about minimizing. So we kicked off our incubation process, and we called it the labs process, where we solicited, like, Open solicitation of games from the entire company.

Write a one pager, right, and put them in public for everybody to read them. Let's vote on them. Let's see which ones we think we can make. How do these games take advantage of our superpowers? How do these games have an audience that we think, that we know we will be uniquely good at targeting?

Trove was the first one of the games to pass through that, through that, uh, , Uh, through that gauntlet, uh, Trove was two developers. It was two human beings for the first, I don't know, nine months? Right? It was two han beings, and that's all it took. And we were playtesting a game being made by two people.

That's as cheap of a new game as you could possibly make, right? And we added people very strategically and very slowly. We ran it like a startup. , and uh, again, it went on to be a big massive success. Because again, we had de-risked every step of the way. Every step of the way was about removing some piece of risk or proving some, concrete thing. And we were very honest with ourselves too. One of the things that happens at big co's when it comes to their their new product gauntlet Is you end up you can end up and you don't always end up but you can end up with people just gaming them, just kind of gaming it and playing to the judges as opposed to, really playing to the process as opposed to really solving the problems concretely.

We didn't have any of that, right? We were all very, very open and honest with, yeah, this is, okay, overall you're doing great, but wow, this is terrible. And then the dev team would go, yeah, and we're going to deal with that next milestone, we're going to deal with that probably three months from now, we're going to deal, we agree, and we're going to deal with that about six months from now.

Awesome. We just had an honest conversation about what's good and what sucks. You guys already agree you're going to fix the suck? Fantastic. And away we go, right? So yeah, we kicked off the first party business. And then we also launched a third party publishing business where Archeage was one of the game names that we talked about earlier, where we invited outside game developers to put their games on our platform. ArcheAge is a Korean game made by a company called XL Games in Seoul. We were the North American and European publisher in 38 countries. The team that went on to make PUBG, they're funny enough, I am, I'm the proud owner of the greatest off by one error in games history, possibly the PUBG team, I pub, we published their game, I flew out to Korea and we signed their previous game.

So, however, and part of what really impressed me actually was the EP of that game. He was sharp. He was right. I mean, the game itself was probably, I mean, Generously, we'll call it a seven out of 10. Right. It just didn't have the legs and it had problems, but it was fun.

At the core of it was fun. We saw something in him. We were like, we wanna work with that guy. There's something about that guy where he's gonna make great games and yeah. His next game was PUBG and he is now currently the CEO of Krafton. Right. So he's, uh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chung and Kim. Fantastic guy. But anyway, so we opened that whole publishing business. And so with, with our first party development, which was doing pretty well for us, once we had changed the way we began to green light games and changed the way we determined what to invest in, how to invest in live games.

And then, on the publishing side, it was okay, how do we figure out which outside people we want to work with? How do we figure out what a pipeline looks like for new games? Do we want to have a pipeline or do we want to just remain opportunistic and open to opportunities, right? Having to think through was definitely a thing that I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who enjoyed all of the gnarly, there's too much information stuff.

They loved it as much as I did. They thrived in it. We had a bunch of people out there doing that actually. And there's a small number of them that are actually in charge of a few different games at Amazon. And they're publishing groups. I look forward to seeing what comes out of those folks in the future. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, everyone in games comes full circle. 

Scott Hartsman: 100%. I mean, yeah, there's like old EverQuest people working together with old try on people working together, and they're all working on games together these days.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's the fun part about recruiting. Although sometimes it's hard. They're interviewing and they don't want to give away that they're interviewing and everyone at the studio they're interviewing at knows everybody at their current studio, but totally always a short people. Everyone just 

Scott Hartsman: Yes, absolutely. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's how it goes. I have one last question. I know you are a proponent of being genuinely curious as a superpower. Can you share what has led you to that conclusion? 

Scott Hartsman: I talked about this a little bit earlier. And so when we were talking about one of the superpowers for people, or one of the things that can really help people as they go from big co to startup, having that curiosity around, well, how do all of the parts of this thing work is a huge step up. One of the other ways that I kind of think about it is having a compulsion to always looking under rocks, and invariably then taking ownership of whatever you find until whatever mess you found gets fixed, out from under that rock.

You kind of have to be one of the people who, you know, runs toward the fire. You see the mess and you go, aha, it's a mess. I know what urgency is. I know how we can follow up on this. I think I have gotten it, I will say though, that's gotten me in trouble, no small number of times also. 

So for instance, early in the EverQuest days, EverQuest had a built in ticketing system for players to, it was a petition system for players to send petitions to GMs. And there was a queue, and the queue was server by server. So your server had its own queue. Your GM watched your server's queue, ostensibly, took the tickets and handled all of the tickets and made customers happy. During the first launch that I was involved with for EverQuest, , me and the new studio head at the time, , it was launch day, so we were like, hey, let's go over to CS and QA and see how things are going from their point of view or in tech support and QA, tech support and CS and see how things are going. We were mobbed. We had the most excited, happy people coming up to us going, holy shit. Hi, uh, nice to meet you. And apparently this was something that had never been done before, right? The people who were in charge didn't really spend time and didn't really want to ask, Hey, how's it going? What stuff are you seeing, right? , which led to the creation of actual processes for people to act, for those folks to actually send information over and the product team to actually do something with it. So that was the good side of that. 

The bad side of it, well, bad for me, I would fairly frequently after that, I would work late and since the GMs were working 24 7, there were people there. If I was leaving work at 2am, I'd go hang out in the GM, hang out with the GMs for a while. I became friends with the night GMs. 

One time, there was an abnormally busy night. A lot of the queues are, there was a problem like the internet or something, and a lot, all of the queues on all of the shards were in red. Red is bad, right? There were probably 30 or 40 petitions stacked up on each server. The person who was the lead GM at the time, or the manager, I forget exactly who it was, either didn't know I was there, didn't care, or didn't know who I was, one or the other, and went, well, board's red, wipe them out. And all of the GMs were instructed to go onto their servers and delete all the tickets out of their queue So we can make the board look good. 

And that was when I learned that, Hey, maybe that's not the greatest ability for folks to be able to do is just wipe out all the tickets. And I was like, is that a thing that happens? Yeah. We usually get asked to do that three, four times a week. Oh! Holy shit! We, we, what? Right? 

And so, I had been at the company for, I don't know, five months at this point, right? I was still viewed as the new not trusted guy by some parts of the company. I bounced off the CEO and the head of service, Hey, I'd like to make this command go away and I'd like to replace it with, here's a thing that has an audit trail and you can see who has whatever and blah, blah, blah.

Apparently that was heresy. Because the hunan in charge of the group, his response was, how dare you impugn my blah blah blah blah blah, and he took it very personally and was very insulted in all of that. And I was like, I'm just trying to make players happy, and I thought you would care about that too. I need to re-point myself here, because apparently this is not what I thought it was.

And so, like I said, being curious. Being curious, being open to learning things even when they're disappointing, being unafraid to take ownership, but also being unafraid to be slapped down, and don't let that stop you. Keep trying. 

Lizzie Mintus: Some good advice. We've been talking to Scott Hertzman. Scott, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you, or hire you to run their AAA company?

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely . Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I am found on Bluesky at Hartsman.bsky.social. I can be found on X or on Twitter now called X for whatever reason at Hartsman and I'm also Scott@hartsman.com, which I check periodically. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Scott Hartsman: Right on. Great talking with you.

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