Shawn Foust is the Co-founder and COO of Fortis Games, a global game studio with a mission to create worlds that matter – that challenge minds, build connections, and inspire communities. Before founding Fortis, Shawn was VP of Central Operations at WB Games after its acquisition of PlexChat, which he co-founded and led as CEO. Prior to that, he served as SVP of Business Operations at Machine Zone following its acquisition of Quark Games, where he was also CEO.

Tune in to learn about his journey from a lawyer to an executive and founder of multiple studios. The episode also touches on Sean's personal experiences with layoffs from both perspectives, scaling global remote teams, and navigating the ups and downs of startup life.

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

• Successfully Securing Startup Funding
• Strategies to Scale a Globally Remote Studio with Over 350 Employees
• Multifaceted Perspective on Game Industry Layoffs
• The Challenges of Being a Founder

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Shawn Foust on LinkedIn
• Fortis Games

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, 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's taken them to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from the journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Hirsvolda Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. 

Today we have Shawn Foust with us. Sean is the COO of Fortis and focuses on product, publishing, community, and corporate development. He's managed to work in games for over a decade, often resorting to founding companies so he has a place to work. Shawn's very funny too.

Throughout his career, he's worked as a lawyer, a business developer, a game designer, a producer, a founder, an executive, and a wandering sage, consultant of dubious value. He's won a few, he's lost a few. Throughout all of these ups and downs, he remains passionate about games as a creative medium, and a way to bring people together.

Fortis, as a global remote company working in their design lane, is an attempt to follow that passion at a grand scale. In his free time, he writes blogs and biographies about himself in third person, which is not weird at all. Sean, thank you so much for your humor and for being here. 

Shawn Foust: It's the simple things in life, Lizzie. Drafting an autobiography for yourself for your profile that is wildly over the top, which I had a lot of fun doing that.

Lizzie Mintus: You're the best person on LinkedIn because you're so funny and you're just yourself and you don't take it too seriously. So if anyone doesn't follow Sean, you must. And I'm still waiting, by the way. You posted that you need a different headshot from the glowering selfie from your yard, but you didn't even update it. What's up?

Shawn Foust: I actually have a potential update to that potential poll, which I think has the potential to shake the industry at its core. I'm just waiting for the right moment to drop it. Yeah. I find LinkedIn just. this very interesting environment, where I really get excited by algorithmic feeds and how they develop over time and how certain like rituals and lore and practice kind of come to define those feeds over time.

And I feel like the LinkedIn feed is this, achieve this very unique sort of style of performance. And I find interacting and trolling with that ecosystem borderline irresistible, which is why I try to keep my interactions with it limited because I really have a hard time not posting.

Lizzie Mintus: Well, I love observing. It's fun. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, so any humor is always much appreciated. Odd profile pictures, funny stuff in your bio. It's good. Okay. So tell everybody about Fortis Games. 

Shawn Foust: So Fortis is, I think, like an interesting outgrowth from an interesting period of time. Following the end of my time at Warner Brothers, it was still like ahead of the pandemic and, there was a lot of interesting things happening at that time and place, right?

Like games are experiencing this massive surge because so many people are stuck inside of their homes. They're also experiencing this massive surge because there's this massive influx of capital around web three at that period of time. And there's just a lot of questions in my head around like where work was going as well and how people are going to interact and what kind of models you could use prior to the pandemic.

I had never really considered the idea of remote work seriously. It hadn't been something that I'd spent a lot of time thinking about. And all of a sudden this was all there. And the question was, all right, What do you do? You've left a safe job with a highly reputable company and making interesting games for millions of people. It seems like a bad idea. What are you going to do with that?

And that started a conversation between Steve Chang and myself, who's my partner in Fortis. And that began this question around what were the assumptions that the industry were governed by and how many of them did we think were still true? And a couple of things that really resonated between the two of us was we felt that decision making around creative products had sort of entered a rut that was really harming the U.S. game ecosystem in particular, but I think broader than that, we felt there were a lot of assumptions around talent and where you could find it and how it might be stitched together into creative teams that were potentially no longer true, in part because of the pandemic, but in part because of things like cost structure and how that works when you're trying to create creative products and the risks that's associated with the ups and downs of doing that.

Also just how decisions and leadership worked. There was a style of leader that I think does traditionally pretty well by traditional metrics. And I've been the beneficiary of that, like being able to speak on your feet pretty well to charismatically present a vision, like those things are major advantages, but they're not the only things that matter in a leader. And I think that a lot of these other things, we felt potentially became more important in a remote environment. For example, the ability to sit there and think deeply about a topic and communicate about it carefully and thoughtfully. The ability to lead through different styles of communication and work. And so like these things kind of like all boiled together into a belief that perhaps you could found a new developer that was oriented, against a different set of principles. 

And I've laid that out in some of the blogs, but really what we're trying to say is, Hey, we think this global remote approach could work. We think that taking a cross section of humanity's talent and putting it into this environment around the idea that many genres have stagnated, many games have found an audience, but that audience has been left with really nothing new for a long period of time, but there's an opportunity around design and investing in that and thinking about the tough problems. 

That really animated the initial pitch and we went out looking for partners. And it was interesting. Like the entire journey was interesting. I can't tell you how much people wanted us to fall within a certain set of patterns that were understood and ultimately we found a partner that made a lot of sense for us and that's been great. And this is what we've been doing for the last two and a half years. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats on finding your partner. What was that journey like? You said that you picked the person that aligned with you most. And I think there are a lot of people, especially right now, that are so desperate for capital that becomes maybe less of a consideration. Can you talk about how you ensure that you found the right partner? 

Shawn Foust: I think part of going out looking for capital really comes down to the principles at play for what you will accept. And those principles, I think, tend to be related really strongly to what you're passionate about, what your history, what your network is like, and it has a pretty significant impact on the ability to get capital.

So for example, I think it's gotten better over the last five years, but geography has a pretty significant impact on availability of capital. Money wants to move in places where it is easy to understand what's going to happen to that money, what the protections are, right? Like well ordered regulatory regimes, all these things stack up. So that's like a principle where it's like, if I'm a VC, do I want to figure out a novel corporate structure in a place I don't understand. So that already splits the world pretty quickly between a set of haves and have nots. 

And then you start to layer on more things, which is what network do you have? Do you know these people on a personal level? Do you come to them by trusted intermediaries? Typically they're founders, right? Do you have a pitch that fits into a pattern that they believe is investable? 

The industry I think is predominated by a group of people that are very strong at pattern recognition, less strong at pattern creation. And so the general idea is that if you're going to go out for capital and you can't frame what you're doing within a pattern that makes sense, you're going to have a harder time unless the caliber of your team is so high that people are essentially saying, Hey, the pattern I'm investing in is just the team, right?

And I think that has really dramatic implications for who is likely to get capital and what the options are going to be. And when things are flush, things expand outward a little bit. It gets a little bit easier for a broader group of people to potentially get capital. And when things become difficult, well, there's a flight to safety. And I think that's really what we've seen over the last year. 

When we were coming out, the industry was flush. It has a good reputation. I have a reasonable reputation. And I think it made it possible for us to pitch a broader set of ideas than what would normally be available to most people. And even then, I think we found an atypical backer and that was based off of a very strong alignment around what our goals were. And that's probably advice that I think I offered to most people, which is just don't know where the right partner is going to come from. And it is better to go broad and then work from the options that you have, as opposed to go narrow and don't consider alternatives.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, just like finding a job. You know about all these companies. Maybe you should go broad, check out other stuff. It'll surprise you. 

Shawn Foust: I absolutely take that approach. I have never taken the best offer from the best company that's been given to me, right? I've almost always ended up going in places that seemed atypical that other folks didn't quite understand at the time, but was based off of a set of things that I cared about a lot.

 I think some people, what they care about is safety and security and a resume that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that. I think there are good things to optimize for. I have tended, certainly once I left law to focus more on, well, if I wanted to do the sensible thing, I should have stayed as a lawyer. Now that I've done the nonsensical thing, how do I optimize for like the things that I really do care about? So a lot of that's put into Fortis. 

I think there's a very strong commercial argument behind everything we do. I don't think you should found companies without understanding how you're going to ultimately drive a good outcome. But at the same time, there's a lot of ways to drive those outcomes and I've optimized for the ways that I think resonate with me more. 

Lizzie Mintus: Sounds like you're in really clear alignment of what you want to do and the way you want to do things. So I like that you're... 

Shawn Foust: Self reflection, sitting on cliff sides, looking out over the ocean, pondering me. That's usually how these things come about.

Lizzie Mintus: No, they're hard questions to answer, and they do take a lot of thought. You can be on a cliffside, you can be wherever, but it is so important to think about that. Otherwise, you'rejust on a ride, on a bus, and you're not driving. So your funding situation is unique. 

Can you talk more about what Fortis is making for anybody that's not super aware, and then your unique structure?

Shawn Foust: Yeah, we haven't put a lot out there yet. Our games are moving towards that point where we're going to start putting them out there. And that's exciting. Generally, we have a few things that we really care about. I really care about the accessibility of the experience. So we'll always be on the phone. We'll always be free to play. That's not to say that the other experiences aren't amazing. I play a ton of them. They are fantastic, but there is something really specific around the world and a game that excites me. I think there's a really good business associated with it. It's a tough business, but I really, really think it's fascinating that a hundred million people, a billion people can play the same game. That just boggles my mind. There's been no point in human history where that's ever been true. And it's something that I've really spent a lot of my career trying to figure out how to get more people into spaces where people from different backgrounds, different creeds, races, whatever, right, have a place where they can communicate and interact.

And I think ideally, collectively, problem solving ways that I think are worth having because it restores some faith in humanity at times. We have a number of games in development and so we'll start putting them out there in the upcoming years, some will be cross platform, some of them will be just focused on the phone. It sort of depends on the experience and the audience that we're going for. We're quite broad on genre and demographics. 

And that's partly when we started the company, it was certainly a time and place where a lot was in transition. And so part of it is giving the portfolio enough range that it could survive significant shifts inside of the industry.

Lizzie Mintus: I like it. 

Shawn Foust: Yeah. That was the theory at least. So we'll see how it plays out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe there'll be a back on the cliff pondering. 

Shawn Foust: That's right. 

Lizzie Mintus: Just kidding. Okay, so your team is remote, and I know you're a global team, and remote work is a very hot topic in the recruiting world these days. Some are five days a week, RTO, many companies are mandating it. Some are still fully remote. I'd love to hear about how you implemented remote work. And I know it was a time when that was just obviously what you were doing in the pandemic, but global remote work is a whole other set of challenges. 

So how have you gone about assembling a remote team and how have you overcome some of the inevitable challenges that come with bringing people together from different parts of the world, different backgrounds, different beliefs, systems entirely? 

Shawn Foust: It's certainly a learning curve. A couple of thoughts up front. Um, I think remote is doable, but I think it's different on a couple of different levels and how it's experienced depends quite a lot on who you are, your background. And I think it's worth mentioning up front.

For example, it doesn't surprise me at all that managers want to go back to the office generally, because managing is much worse in a remote environment. So much for the reason why people become managers are because they like the people dynamics of a job and they like the impact and the feedback that they get. They are often high EQ or, people that can really get a lot out of the signals and tells that exist inside of an in person conversation. And losing that really blunts your feeling of effectiveness as a manager. And since as a manager, I think people tend to probably overly associate their personal feelings with how everyone else is feeling about it.

I think being an individual contributor is better if you are remote, if you are a senior, or at least out of the junior portion of your career. And the ability to have a personal space that is well designed and well suited to you being productive and having fewer distractions, I think, are is a significant value add, particularly for people that deal with things like social anxiety and any number of other things that make a work in like an office environment actually a bit more challenging, right? 

Artists, I often come across artists. You need a certain lighting, you need a certain level of focus. You need a certain level of consistency in what you're doing. And that's just harder to achieve, in an in-person environment. Now the part that's rough for our industry is that so much of the industry is built off of creative trust.

And creative trust is much, much harder to come by in a remote environment. What we have found is that you have to make a couple of pretty significant changes to how you recruit and sort of interact with people. 

The first is there's enough sociology out there to suggest that when a person comes into any space, there's a natural desire to conform. You just don't want to be the odd one out when 10 people are doing something. My favorite exercise is, an elevator where everyone's facing the wrong way and eventually, the person turns around and faces the same way as everyone else, even though it's the wrong way. And he kind of knows the wrong way, but it doesn't matter because the active standing facing the other way is really sort of alienating and feels really bad, right?

That's what our office does in certain respects is that it just constantly pulls people towards a core of what the company is. So they can be much further away from that core when they start and eventually they're going to get there. Remote, that's not true, right? Really what you are is another zoom screen. And as much as you try to push culture into each one of those zoom calls, there's nothing quite like showing up in an office and feeling like this is how this place works and getting that immediate, constant feedback. 

So we had to be a lot more specific about who we would hire. We realized that people needed to naturally already be exhibiting the style and way of working that we wanted, as well as the sort of set of cultural values that we cared most about. So our solution to that was we implemented a prompt system for literally everything, like every single hire that you have every executive. It doesn't matter. I have executives that I've known and I treasure and I love that. I've worked with for years. All of them had to go through the process, right?

And what we're solving for is, listen, this is remote. You're going to communicate asynchronously more often than you're used to. We have time zones that are spread across 10 hours, right? You need to be effective in communicating this way, in structuring and thinking this way. We also have found that if you're going to work across a number of different cultures, the odds that someone is working in their second or third language is much higher.

And giving people the opportunity to think and write and to completely own the communication that they're going to send to you, right, without the immediate pressure of, hey, this pause after I asked you this question has gone on for more than four seconds and now it's awkward, right? That just enables a much broader group of people to potentially join the company. So we've used prompting extensively. We have modeled the prompts around being very open ended and that's mostly like an invitation for a person to say, Hey, this is how I think about an ambiguous open ended topic. Here's how I organize an abstract idea down into a specific viewpoint on a thing.

And we're really looking for people that we want to think beside. So we value experience. We value resume. We value soft skill communication, but I'd say we value it a lot less than your standard company, which might really highly index off of a few half hour conversations for making a decision and a resume. 

And that's really made a huge change and how successful we are in recruiting people. And we've gotten a lot better at understanding it, there's some group of people that don't want to do that work up front. And I'm like, great, you'd hate it here. Like I know for sure you would hate it here. There's some people that are concerned around like, hey, are you getting free work from us? I was like, listen, I've just asked you about the most unique thing you've learned in the industry for the last three years. 90 percent of the time it's going to have no relevance to anything that we are doing. And really what I'm trying to figure out is, do you know, do you have an insightful thing? Do you have something to add to the conversation? You can choose anything you want, right?

And so what I find is that it's just a helpful filtering mechanism that people are going to work well for, just really want to answer these questions and really want to have the space and time to think and offer a communication that they think is authentic to them rather than, What's your greatest weakness? Oh, I work too much. Getting out of that performative interview and into a real conversation. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. Thank you. I work with so many startups that are trying to figure out how to hire. And so it's always nice to hear from somebody that has scaled their company. 

How big is Fortis now? How many people? LinkedIn says 355. 

Shawn Foust: Yeah. We're like a little bit north of 350 right now. 

Right. 

Lizzie Mintus: In under three years. So that's incredible. You clearly have the system and process down... 

Shawn Foust: I don't know if we have that, I think what we have is like, we've moved from V1 to V7 on our journey. That's probably got 15 versions or more, but like we've gotten better about what matters and we've gotten more confident about it as the data sort of reflects the rough conclusions that we've been drawing. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And you can look at your own data too. And I think so important for everyone that's running a company. How many people do you talk to and how many people do you screen? How many people do you interview? How many people make it to different processes, different stages in your interview? And then how many do you hire? Because if your numbers are really bad, maybe you're, you think you're looking for someone really unique, but maybe you also don't have it figured out. It's a lot.

Shawn Foust: It's really interesting. Like another thing that I do in this company I haven't done before is that I don't actively try to tell people to join, right? When I was in a startup, it was around like pitching, getting people excited and motivated. Like come over here. It'd be great. Blah, blah, blah.

Here it's very much like, if you don't like anything that year you're hearing, just don't continue. We get like 5000 - 6,000 applications a week, right? People want to work in a remote environment that allows them to be creative. People across the world have talents, but they don't have equal access to opportunity, like a global remote company that gives them the opportunity. It's exciting and motivating. And so what we've just learned is you have to be motivated to work in a certain way and be excited in a certain way. 

And like creative choices, like what company you go to, that's just a personal thing. And we want people to be really happy on the other side of making the choice and we don't get it right every time, but not everything is perfect, but I do think we've gotten better.

Lizzie Mintus: Right. I like the prompts. That's very unique. And your thoughts on global remote work too. I think a lot of companies that I talked to for recruiting are trying to figure out the best way to go about remote work because from a talent perspective, the pandemic is the best thing that ever happened. I recruited people to Bend, Oregon.

I recruited people to specific areas in LA, which that's a complete nightmare. They're like, Oh, I had the map. I used to have the map on my desk when I used to work for company in the office. They're like Oh, I live, I don't know, whatever area in LA. And that would be a two hour commute each way. It's just so crazy to think about. So you have to do so much better, more access to truly the best people. 

Shawn Foust: And I also think there's just a reality around cost structure that people aren't talking about. It's been a long time since. California has produced a scale successful game company. I don't think people haven't talked about it much that much. But think about it, like when winners, the last company that broke out and became massive out of California, right? Was it Riot? It's like 10, 12 years ago, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Like a lot before that, right? 

Shawn Foust: When I look at the math of it, especially once you move into live operations and these types of things, and you're competing against places that have cost structures that are like half, third or fifth, right?

 I think it has a significant impact and like the ability to take bets to generate new things. And that's something that I've been fixated on. I love California. I love the talent. I love the people. There's a lot to be said about it, but there is a core math problem around how do you sustain, scale, and build it. And, I think it's gotten pretty challenging in California over time. 

Lizzie Mintus: Plus it's the worst from a tax and business ops perspective. 

Shawn Foust: Several things stack up. I still think the talent pool and the base is... 

Lizzie Mintus: It's incredible. 

Shawn Foust: It's incredible. But you've got to solve multiple layers of the problem, right? It's not just, Hey, is there a talent that is capable of making a great game? I think that talent exists. Is there talent that's capable of making a great game for less than 50 million? I'm more skeptical unless you start to introduce pretty significant changes in platform or production needs.

So I could believe that a really great game could be built out of AI potentially. I could believe that if a new platform popped up that the cost structure would drop down a bit, but for anything that's got a reasonable level of maturity, I think, the expenses matter. 

Lizzie Mintus: The math doesn't math.

Well, I think now is a big time. It's a big shift, a big time of change, a big time of rethinking things. The pandemic was too, but people really have to look at alternative ways to get their game done. And there are some success stories lately and a lot of failures. So how can you analyze those? How can you learn? Do you have some good ideas? 

Shawn Foust: Their principles by which I've made decisions, Lizzie. I'm not, I don't think I'm like an oracle in this industry. I just think you got to make decisions and you got to try to figure out how to build businesses, because I think we all know that this industry is up and down and I've had to lay people off before.

I'm sure at some point in the future I will have to again. And it is a uniquely unpleasant experience. There's nothing better than giving someone their first job in games. There's nothing worse than taking that job away. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So today is a good day to talk about that. I was just noodling on a semi-offensive LinkedIn post about it. But gosh, there have been companies that have done it in horrific manners lately and deleted their entire company existence. Done crazy stuff like that.

Do you have any insights into the best ways to execute a layout from your experience that you can share? It's an unpleasant situation, but there's for sure an optimal way to do it where people may want to even come back. 

Shawn Foust: I think there's any number of ways to approach the topic so much of it is driven by circumstance. Like a lot of the messier layoffs tend to be, the decision was left for too long and there really is no other option than doing something quite harsh. Now the question was like, should they have done something less harsh two months earlier. And I don't know, right? 

I tend to empathize with the group that has laid off pretty deeply, having experienced personally myself in the past. And I also tend to empathize with the managers and executives making the decision. There are some people that, yeah, you know what? They're narcissistic sociopaths. I don't care about anyone. It's only about them. They just want more profit. Yeah, sure. Fine. 

Frankly, most people that I think want to go in the games and build careers don't fall into that profile. And so the decision to do a layoff is excruciating and they tend to put it off for very long until there are no other options. And then it tends to be pretty harsh and underworked relative to really solid communication. You know what? It's super easy to judge the outputs of these things. But I certainly, not inclined to. 

Lizzie Mintus: It is and I think that unless you operate a business, no one can really understand the hard business decisions that you have to make all the time and the sleepless nights come with that. And I do see posts that are crappy about layoffs And that it's understandable that people impacted by layoffs are crappy. But I do think that there's a way for management to own up and communicate.

If someone's like, Hey, these are, this is what happened. Here's where we are, mistakes were made. It is unfortunate. Let me know how I can help you. That's a very different message than like an email on a Sunday night and being locked out and no other communication. 

Shawn Foust: I think a lot of the... so that's true. I think a lot of what makes things particularly painful now was that so much of the market was hinged off of growth for so long. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Shawn Foust: It was like hiring and how you thought about it was really around how to keep on generating growth. And with the increase in rates and everything else that's going on in the background, all of a sudden the pendulum swung and it was now about profit.

And so much of the layoffs are really around saying, listen, I, as an executive or as a manager, I'm now valued off of my margin, as opposed to my ability to produce growth. And as a result of that, I'm executing a layoff in order to increase margin. I'm going to go from a 10 percent margin to a 20 percent margin. And that's really, really brutal. Because essentially what the person on the other side of that layoff is looking at is, I am basically being traded in order to move this number incrementally up, right? 

I don't actually think there's a good way to navigate the frustration around that. There's a reality around high rates and environments that create a flight towards safety, which is a flight towards margin and a flight towards margin. And the incentives that are associated with that tend to be cutting, often over cutting in order to get to a place where you have a fairly strong balance sheet.

And I don't think any worker can ever really be told in that sort of environment, like, Hey, you should feel all right about us making this balance sheet improvement. Like it's just not like a really graceful way of doing it. And I think that's what a number of companies are going through and doing right now.

And I get frustrated. 

Lizzie Mintus: On both sides. 

Shawn Foust: I just, I get how these things happen. Yeah. I appreciate how they happen. I see the incentives and I just tend to think people always follow their incentives. And those incentives often generate outcomes that are unsatisfying when they're misaligned between leadership and an employee.

Lizzie Mintus: It's true. Good insights.

I want to hear about your career as a lawyer. So many people on my podcast have started their career in law and then transitioned to be an executive in games. But you graduated and you worked in law in games for a while, right? 

Shawn Foust: I started out as an entertainment attorney in L. A. working for Sheppard Mullin, which is a pretty well regarded law firm. I never expected to end up in entertainment. That wasn't really my goal. It just sort of happened. And I found the movie industry to be really fantastic if you really loved movies. 

But I wasn't really that. I was more of a gaming nerd. And so I asked my firm to let me try to build a practice around video games. They were super generous and supportive. Eventually, I moved into that industry because mobile and social kind of popped up at the same time. I made that transition really lucky for me because it really changed the nature of the industry.

 And then relatively quickly, I started interacting with my clients and just realized I began to like the business side of the conversation more than I like the legal side. The legal side was like fascinating and interesting, but the heart wants what the heart wants. So, ultimately, I made a decision to leave kind of like during the height of the Great Recession. Again, terrible idea. 

On the other side of that, I got laid off six months later, which didn't feel great. So this is what I mean about the empathy for people that are dealing with it. I think the person doing the layoff, it was really hard for them. I think being laid off didn't feel good either. I think it hits self identity in a pretty serious way. And it was just a question of what I wanted to do after that. And so the obvious solution is just go back to the law firm. Didn't take the obvious solution, sort of doubled down on trying to figure things out, started up a company, tried to get it rolling, didn't really go anywhere.

And then ultimately joined another company, called PlayMesh. And from there I transitioned into eventually being a game designer and then a product person. And then CEO of that. 

Lizzie Mintus: Was that Quark Games? 

Shawn Foust: That became Quark Games. Yeah. Rebranded. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. So you took an entry-ish level roll In games after law.

Shawn Foust: So I became a general counsel slash head of business development. And then at the next company at Play Mesh, I had that same role. But while I was doing that role, I would sit in on product meetings and offer thoughts or suggestions. And eventually the CEO said, Hey, why don't you try designing some of the stuff and seeing what you think?

And so then I started to do that sort of work and eventually became a product owner. And then when the CEO took a step back, the other founders put me forward to be CEO. And that was Quirk. And some of my closest working partners from that time still work with me today, people like Carol Liao and Calvin Lau. 

Lizzie Mintus: Truly, especially when you're in a remote environment and you have those people you've worked with forever. And then Quark got acquired by Machine Zone. I'd love to hear more about that interaction because I think game company sales are not really talked about so much.

So what can you say from that experience? 

Shawn Foust: It was really interesting because Machine Zone worked in the 4x space, which PlayMesh plus Quark had worked in for a long time. And they had brought that space to like a much, much higher level of economic outcome, right? I mean, Machine Zone was a machine, right? And headed up by a CEO named Gabe Layden, who I think just had this very, I think strong, bold vision for what that space could accomplish. So they were familiar from us from the work that we had done before. And ultimately when we were looking for what we're going to do next with the company, it sparked up that conversation and ultimately led to the acquisition of the company.

And I think some number of people that were part of that acquisition are still there and have become leaders in that company. And that's really cool. Like when a pairing works out, I think that's always just pretty hopeful. It's nice. It's nice when it works out on the other side.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, definitely feels good. It's fun for me when you hire someone and then you see them get promoted. I mean, the same thing in a different lens, but it's super gratifying. 

So obviously so many things went right at Quark. You got promoted, you sold the company. I always like to highlight in the podcast that being a founder is not always as glamorous as people might think. Maybe often not as glamorous as one might think. Do you have any stories from just the ups and downs of running that business that you could share? Hard decisions, issues you had to overcome. 

Shawn Foust: I mean, the most enjoyable, exciting, enticing time of a startup is when you have the original idea. And it's pretty much all downhill from there. Like the idea of doing it is fun because it's not really confined by the reality of doing it, right? And once you start, then there's a honeymoon phase of, oh my gosh, I'm doing it, this is great, I'm always doing this thing, I always wanted to do this, okay, it's fantastic. And then the honeymoon phase gives them a way eventually to the realities of executing.

Okay, I've spent a while on this. I've put time and capital and energy into this and I need to convert it into an outcome. And that's really like where a lot of the founder struggles come from, where a lot of the emotional sort of ups and downs begin to really start to surface. 

And the transition into real execution and the outputs, and trying to find product market fit, I think is brutal. And when you don't find product market fit, I think it's one of the most uniquely excruciating experiences that I can describe. In games, it's doubly so. It really feels so much like a personal rejection of your effort to creatively put something out there.

And then it's doubled up often with the feedback being very clear immediately in games. Like you've watched the game. People don't seem to be into it. It's done. It's very hard to go from no one is interested in something to some, like a bunch of people are interested in something. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely.

And that then is often coupled with I failed and now I have to find a way to keep the company going. So you have to stay at the company and then you have to lay off a lot of people whose greatest sin was believing in your vision in the first place. And that's like, I can't tell you how horrible it feels, right?

The first view is like, well, man, can I just fire myself? And the answer is no. So much of the credibility of the company is tied up in you being there and figuring it out and solving it, right? But you're sitting there dealing with this massive, like I'm a fraud. Why did I do this? When I have other people do this, like you feel awful. And then simultaneously you're letting go of people that you really believed them and they really believed in you. And that feels doubly awful. And now you have a financial reality that you have to deal with, which also is horrible. I mean, that's the life cycle of anything that's not pretty successful, right?

And that's the majority of outcomes, you know, I've been fortunate where I found Pretty decent outcomes along the journey, but I absolutely had some of those moments and That's why I tend to try to be really pragmatic and practical when I talk about our industry. There was a time where I focused on what I wanted to be true and what emotionally I wanted to happen. 

And what I realized is that the business at its core and unless I'm doing any developer where I'm just doing it for the creative expression of it, it's a business and trying to place all of the things that I care about in the context of a strong, valid business argument is the thing that has really changed most about me throughout my career.

And it. Makes me, I think, more practical and pragmatic as a leader. It makes me more decisive around the things that we can do. But this is where we were talking about the layoff stuff, like, man, I just don't, I don't know how to express how terrible it feels to be a creative leader and fail your team. And to the people that are handling that with a lack of grace, that sucks. And it hurts their reputation and it'll hurt their ability to get good people into the future. But depression is a real thing, 

And people dealing with failure, it's not their best moment. Doesn't mean it's excusable, but it does mean that's at least, understandable.

Lizzie Mintus: Very empathetic. I like it. It's true. Everyone's just a person trying to do their best at their job, every day for the most part.

I want to talk about your other company to PlexChat. So you were at MZ for a while, you went from being a startup founder to working at a big -ish company. How big were they? 

Shawn Foust: But I ran into the hundreds at that point. Pretty reasonably sized. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And then, you seem to just love to do the opposite thing. And so you started another company. How did that come about? 

Shawn Foust: I mean, I had a brilliant idea. I thought there should be a Slack for gamers. I still feel very confident in that idea. I'm really happy that discord got the chance to do it.

 I really believe strongly that the community is just going to be a bigger and bigger part of how the games industry works. And I felt like it was because I saw a demographic shifting because the phone ends and accessibility, like playing games was no longer gated behind owning a PC and internet connection and a bunch of other, like high expenses, not necessarily commodity things that every household.

But the phone was something that everyone was going to have and they would have access and will constantly be playing. So in my mind, I felt like there was just going to be this deep connection between how people wanted to talk about their interests and their hobbies. I was looking at sites like Reddit and Dig, way back in the day. And I'm like, there is more here. And then I saw Slack pop up and, Slack was sort of like additional confirmation for something that I've been seeing in a number of different Asian chat apps around like Wine and Kakao. And so I've been studying all of those, WeChat, like all of those ecosystems. I think something like this will happen out here.

I think I was right. I feel pretty good about the assessment, but there's just a reality, which is like very few ideas are novel. And I think Discord really did a fantastic job of executing in the space that I saw the opportunity for. So ultimately I pivoted the business to be much more around, how do you manage a network of communities, a portfolio of communities? What do you think about that? 

 That was where PlexChat was at when we ultimately moved towards the sale. But that would be an example of like seeing the opportunity, timing, resourcing was just a bit off. And ultimately having to like pivot and figure out how to make a decent outcome out of missing what would, what was originally the primary goal.

Lizzie Mintus: It's funny to hear you talk about it in that light. Because for me, I just look and I'm like, Oh, wow, Sean sold another company and then he sold it to Warner brothers. And I think that's amazing. So it's funny to hear about you and your reality. 

Shawn Foust: Yeah, here's a lot of ways to frame and build clout and reputation and do things, right. I know how lucky I've been. I'm pretty smart. I'm pretty hard working. But I know that my career is like a set of opportunities that I got to take advantage of. 

This is where it goes all the way back to the beginning of Fortis, where there's some Shawn equivalent sitting in some part of the world that is just not going to get those opportunities.

But if we gave them those opportunities, then that would be another piece of talent that would be happy and motivated and work with us. And then ultimately they would build a real career ideally for them. And we got to be a part of that. 

I love that about games. Like I really love about that, about the potential. And that's part of what like motivates me around Fortis because again, I worked hard, but I chose to pivot into video games a year before social and mobile games started, right? And I had a good network that allowed me to recover from being laid off.

And then I had a network that allowed me to help sell companies, right? I've been successful and I'm good at what I do, but... I've been good, and it's been a multiplier on the opportunities that were available to me. And I think it's ideal to create more opportunities for more people.

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. That's really inspiring. Okay, I have one last question, and I want to point people to your website, fortisgames. com. F O R T I S. 

You touched on this a little bit, but every successful person Is successful because all of the people that have helped them along the way. So who do you feel like has really helped you the most in your games career? And is there any specific advice that they've given you that it's like a Eureka moment for you? 

Shawn Foust: Sure. Well, listen. I certainly have to call out my wife's influence throughout the entire process. She and I met when we were freshmen in college and we've been together ever since. But she took very rough material and was like, I think I can work with this. And then kind of honed it over time, sanded some of the edges. And I think it made me like a much more effective and empathetic person. So credit to her there.

I have had one working partner through most of the companies. There is this woman named Carol Liao. I mentioned her briefly before she's our SVP of game development here at Fortis. And I think it's less about the things that she said, and it's more about how she showed up and demonstrated partnering and collaboration throughout time. 

 I have a certain style. I'm very reasonable on this call. I try to be reasonable, but at the end of the day, I'm some blend between what you see on the blogs and what you see in this conversation, right? Which is, I like to drive, right? I like to find a way to move forward and to solve problems and to push and to get more out of people. 

And I think Carol has shown a way of partnering and collaboration that has more balance. I think I probably would have naturally gravitated towards it. And that's why I like to work with her because she balances me out. She also demonstrates, I think, a degree of sophistication and how you invest in people and bring them along the journey. 

So, yeah, I'm going to shout at anyone out. It's got to be Carol. I'm here in part because she supported me along the way.

Lizzie Mintus: That's sweet. How did you find Carol? 

Shawn Foust: Carol was already at PlayMesh when I arrived. She was the wife of one of the founders. She was working to help. She went through, I think, like, 70 jobs while she was there, just finding ways to help. And. She was one of those people where if you gave her something, she would find a way to make progress on it. And if that meant reading 10 books and studying every single thing, like she would do that. And she just consistently did that and got stronger and stronger around how she thought about more and more systems. And she became so flexible. She had been entrepreneurial before that herself, she'd run her own thing. And so she just had a lot of potential. 

You have to look for the potential, right? You could always just decide a person's. Potential is defined by the fact that they come from some certain background with some set of ingrained advantages. And what I've just found is like the best people to build companies around are the ones that just fight, like the fight for it. They constantly fight for it. They bet on themselves and they fight for it. They take chances. They try, right? Because it's an inherently hard, ambiguous shifting battleground when you're trying to build a company and having other people that are also oriented in that way, I think makes the potential for what's possible, much greater.

And then your flexibility is also much greater in case things don't always work out. So yeah, she's been, I'd say, generally more on the production and operation side, like how to run the teams and how to really build systems that allow you to scale and effectively understand what you are doing and why. But yeah, I think I could throw her at pretty much anything she figured out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats on finding her. That's the dream team. It's so nice when you have somebody that you can work with. 

Shawn Foust: Yeah, don't recruit her away from me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, that wasn't my plan. 

Shawn Foust: Unless it's a really great job and fine, do it. You know, if she wants to work there, then fine. I'd be happy for her to be happy.

Lizzie Mintus: Watch what you say, Shawn. 

We've been talking to Sean Faust, who's the COO of Fortis Games. Sean, where can people go to see different pictures that could be your LinkedIn profile, vote on them, read your blogs, interact with you? 

Shawn Foust: If you're still here at this point, then you should apply to Fortis if you think you have something to contribute, and it makes sense. If you're still here and you're currently out of work and looking, you're trying. I've been there before. Fortis may not be the solution, but companies are getting formed every day. So, I know a lot of folks out there or I see it in the LinkedIn feed and I wish them all the best of luck.

To everyone that's on the other side of that equation, I hope you find a way to handle it as gracefully as we can, right? There you go. Thanks, Lizzie. I appreciate your time. 

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.