How Studio Culture Fuels an Exit (with Seth Sivak)

What is culture, and why does it matter? Seth Sivak, the founder and ex-CEO of Proletariat, a studio most known for its title Spellbreak, joins our host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, to discuss the importance of organizational culture in the gaming industry. 

Proletariat was founded in 2012 by Seth and four other co-founders and went through various era of growth: scaling up to 80 people in person, 130 people remote during the pandemic, everyone brought back in person again, and then a sale to Blizzard Entertainment in the summer of 2022 with subsequent culture merging afterward. 

We discuss the definition of culture, who is responsible for setting it, who is responsible for maintaining it, as well as tactics to create a shared vision and shared set of norms, habits, and standards. If you are curious about what supercharges a successful game and business, this is a conversation that illuminates the balance between transparency and employee focus, how to build an effective communication decorum that scales, and why spending time on your company culture does not detract from building your product and business, but if done right, enhances and augments success.   

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming practice, "Lightspeed Gaming," the firm is investing from over $7B in early- and growth-stage capital — the by far largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alexandra: What's up, everyone, and welcome to the Naavik gaming podcast. I'm your host, Alex Takei, and this is the Interview and Insight segment. So at Naavik, we are here to help folks master the business of gaming, and so we often spend a ton of time talking about markets, genres, platforms, founder stories, technological inflections, and games and technologies that are on the frontier of the industry.

However, the things that make those markets, are companies, and companies usually hold one or multiple organizations, and organizations of people, our modern corporate retelling of tribes, develop cultures that either hinder or aid them in their mission to create a business. And in management, folks are often trained on something akin to the following definition of an organizational culture.

A system of shared values defining what is important and norms defining appropriate attitudes and behaviors that guide members attitudes and behaviors. This is from a page by Harvard Business School. Now, that was very academic, but regardless of the shades and nuances of a formal definition, culture is powerful because culture is about execution, and executing is the building block of an organization's success towards their long term vision and goals.

And so today we're going to spend some time talking about building a studio culture in the industry of video games, what it is, why it is important, how to build it, and the challenges in doing so. And I'm lucky because today joining me in the studio is a founder who is particularly passionate about this topic.

My guest is Seth Sivak, founder and CEO of Proletariat, a studio officially acquired by Blizzard in the summer of 2022. They're best known for their title called Spellbreak. And prior to founding Proletariat, Seth began his career as a gameplay engineer at Conduit Labs, and then spent time at Zynga as a PM and an EP.

He also spent a few years teaching game design at Northeastern University. And after selling Proletariat to Blizzard, he worked at Blizzard HQ as VP of development on World of Warcraft and as a Studio Head for Blizzard Boston. He is now mentoring founders and thinking about what is next. Welcome to the show, Seth.

Seth: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk about this.

Alexandra: Yeah, me too. I am so pumped to have you on for this discussion. , this is actually the first time we will cover this topic on air directly at Naavik. And so I think there's not another. We'll talk about why you're best suited for this, but this will be, you'll be an excellent steward of this conversation.

And so before we dive into our topic, I want to kick off with talking about some time and some context setting for your unique perspective on culture. You've guided Proletariat through almost 10 years before successful exit to Blizzard and along the way you dealt with scaling. a relatively large founding team, I believe there were five founders, a pandemic shifting from in person to remote and then back again, and an acquisition into a huge AAA studio and having to integrate with a new culture.

So I'm curious, can you tell me what your key chapters of Proletariat were? Perhaps break them into eras. And describe the biggest challenge faced for you guys in that era.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, I think this is, it's a great, it's a great topic to, to start it on and to really look at because of the challenges as companies grow.

One of the things that's really unique about game studios is the type of work that we do means that, that Projects and teams are often shifting a lot. You know, when you start a project with a really small team and then grow it up into full production, your culture can shift even just during that single project, not even talking about the sort of parts of the studio or the times in the studio.

So to talk a little bit about the different sort of eras, I guess we can, the earliest eras, I think for most companies are when you're sub 20 people. For us, when we were under 20 people, it was a relatively flat structure. Everybody just reported to me directly. We didn't really have any hierarchy. It was very easy for me to communicate quickly with the whole team.

And for the other founders, there were five of us, to all be able to talk quickly in that, that era is really, I think for all companies, mostly defined by. Everyone is it's very easy to keep everyone on the same page. It's very easy for you to have everyone marching in the same direction. The next phase kind of going from 20 to 40 or 50 people.

I think cultures tend to change roughly every time you double them. And so when you get to the 40 to 50 person. That becomes now, now you need actual hierarchy. You need some amount of structure for most organizations. Um, I would recommend some amount of structure and I think that really breaks down how you would communicate and how important it is to start to consistently communicate vision and really start to define how the culture exists with 20 people.

It's easy enough, I think, for people to integrate in. Without needing, , to be too defined because people are often, you're, you're a small team, you're probably working with a lot of people that you've worked with before, a lot of like referrals in the game industry, especially people. And that's very common when you start to get above 40, you know.

Or at 40 or 50, you're often bringing people in you've never worked with before. And so they really need to learn how you work, how, how the team works. And then I think going beyond that to 80 people, that was roughly the time when we actually made the shift to COVID and COVID as well to remote. So we were at the beginning of 20 or the.

The early 2020, I think we were 55 people, and then we scaled to 130 by the end of that year. So I think definitely doubling every, faster than a year is really dangerous for any culture, but the biggest shifts there, I think going to above 80. You're at this point now where not everyone knows everyone and it's very easy for people to not have any idea what other people are doing at 50 you still roughly can know everyone even know everyone by name, but I think above that you really can't in the biggest changes for us and going remote ended up really being about how how much more.

Conscious of our communication, we needed to be, and I think we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but some real heavy lessons specifically on the types of channels for communication, the best way to do it and how to how to really define that and train people on the culture. And when we talk about training people in the culture, you mentioned this at the top that there's 2 major aspects.

There's the shared aspiration, the direction you're kind of going, and then there's the habits and the norms to get there. And I think really training people on both is critical, and especially at that stage. That was really important for us at going fully remote. It was, it was about finding that communication piece.

And then after that, it was, it was really making the transition into blizzard, which was the sort of final step, which was really bringing together blizzard's culture, which was in a state of change at the time and still is, along with our culture and really trying to pick and choose what's best.

But now you're bringing a hundred ish people into a much larger organization of 4,000.

Alexandra: Okay. So your key chapters are basically sub 20, 40, 80, 80 growing to one 30 remote, and then your fifth chapter is selling into blizzard. Um, is that okay. Got it. In the beginning. So you mentioned some of the challenges that were associated with the Blizzard Era and also some of the challenges on communication structure, redefining that for you guys, the shared aspirations and norms going remote. And then you mentioned a little bit about the challenge of the, at 80, you know, even if you're in person, not everybody knows each other, right? What were some of the challenges at the very early stage in the, in the, in the 20 and the 40, or were those to you kind of like the golden days where things were easy?

Seth: I mean, I think it is. It definitely feels in some ways easier because you don't have to have as much, at least in my experience, you don't, we didn't need as much like processor structure in place. It was, it was very easy in person. You know, when we went remote, for example. There was a handful of people who I never had standing meetings with because they would just swing by my desk or by my office.

And I think everyone is sort of experienced that in what an in person culture can be versus a remote one, where I then needed to actually schedule time with those people because there wasn't the ability to just swing by my office and have a five minute conversation in the early days. I think a lot of the challenge ends up.

Some of the challenges are the same, no matter what, which is, have you really defined your shared aspiration as a team and what you're willing to do your core values? Um, we definitely had our core values evolve. I think early on we, you know, and this is, this is, I think, true for, for a lot of cultures.

Maybe when they start out, like, we, we had much more of a focus on, um, Getting the work done and making sure that we were delivering on what we needed to, to stay alive as a company versus later on, we put a little bit more emphasis on building an organization where people could really grow their careers and have their best work getting done where that really wasn't an option at 20 people, because we were too, we were too busy to trying to stay alive, to be worrying about how we can create great careers for the employees, because it was like, we only have, you know, Nine months of runway and we need to figure it out.

So I think a lot of the cultural challenges there end up being finding the balance. Right. And that's one of the arguments I always hear against teams or leaders investing in some of this stuff of really thinking through their core values, or, you know, it's always like, Hey, that is that more important than me making sure that we can make payroll and it's like, The answer is no, but there's definitely a balance because the more you ignore it, I think that you build up debt, you build up cultural debt as you grow, if you're not addressing this and you're not looking at it and you can really lead to cultural drift and going in ways that you, you wouldn't want as a leader.

Alexandra: Yeah. And I think you're, you know, you're actually jumping ahead to a little bit about why this matters so much. And I think you actually shared a quote the other day that, you know, it was like, quote, think about all the time you spend correcting the culture, which is why you should invest in it now. Because it helps guide.

The whole system to be moving in the right direction. And I asked that question mostly because I want to, before we move to the definition of culture and why it specifically matters, I want to ask you, you know, how much of Proletariat success do you attribute to culture? , and I think it's kind of a tricky question because it's something that is a bit more pervasive and it's, uh, would call this an intangible in the balance sheet.

But, um, how much? Yeah. If you had to say an answer, what do you say?

Seth: It's funny. I mean, I think. When you talk to most people that have run, companies at a large scale or had a successful outcome, like Proletariat's acquisition, it's the very common answer. When people ask why a lot of folks point to, we had a great team and that that is 100 percent true at Proletariat as well.

I think, but what the deeper side of that is, is what that. Having the culture around that team, what it allowed us to do, which was we were able to punch above our weight class. Like, we delivered something like spell break with a much smaller team than probably should have been able to do it a lot faster.

And we were able to do that because of some of the culture we had built. , and I think, um, The talent, the level of talent we were able to attract was because we had built a great culture and it became a self fulfilling prophecy that we would, we would attract great people. We would treat them really well.

They would have, there would be a great culture and then they would invite their friends to come join. And that was really what drove our growth on, you know, with the team. And that's a, so I think when you look at success, , the culture is a huge factor, because it was a reflection of the team and what we were able to do.

Uh, and I think, you know, the, the, whenever I really want to. Like get asked about what made Proletariat successful. The, the sort of real answer is we survived long enough to get lucky. And that's true for every business, but we are able to do that because of the, the aspects of the culture that made that possible, the grittiness to survive.

Almost 10 years in this industry through ups and downs. And, you know, we did not have every, every game was not successful up until the right. And I think you only do that with a strong culture.

Alexandra: Yeah, well, I think that's very well said. And I think, , that is actually, I want to break that down. You know, when we say culture, what does it mean specifically?

Like when you say grittiness, what does that mean? At the beginning of this episode, I shared a definition of culture from HBS, but another definition would be a basic set of assumptions that a given group has invented and discovered or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration.

And I think that's a bunch of other fancy, fancy academic jargon, but I would want to kind of pin it to you. What do you think is your definition of culture, especially in the video game industry?

Seth: Yeah. I mean, when I really think about culture, I think it's, it's the, the two things we had talked about a little bit before it's that shared aspirational vision.

And I think that that's really about, you know, What are we trying to do as a team? What's the destination we're going for? I mean, like, there are lots of ways to make money, but if you're a video game company, you're not drilling for oil. Um, and what types of games do you wanna make? What, what is the thing that you want to all build to, to, to do together?

And the other aspect of that is the, the habits and norms. And a lot of, I think one of the good ways to, one, one way to consider culture is a culture is the, the. Type of behavior that you allow to happen. And so that is really one of the ways that defines culture. Like, are you a culture that respects, um, deadlines?

Well, people are allowed to miss deadlines. What does that mean about your culture and how do you, how do you manage that? How do you deal with people missing deadlines? Is it okay to miss a deadline once? Is it not okay to miss a deadline three times? And I think that's often the, the sort of. Cultural aspects.

I mean, a lot of people talk about it as how, how the team acts when the, when the leader is not in the room. And I think that's a little bit unfair because then that's putting a lot of the onus on the leader to be the one enforcing the rules. But that's not the way it should actually work. And I think so by definition, it's, it's really about what are you trying to build?

Where are you trying to go? And what are you willing to do to get there?

Alexandra: And yeah, we're going to break that down a little bit more later about, you know, how to cultivate the specific culture. So what are the strategies and tactics, tactics to build shared aspiration and build what you would call habits, norms, and standards.

But you actually just mentioned something. You said culture is, um, you know, how people behave when the leader is not in the room. , when it comes to, obviously we broke down the definition of culture, shared aspirations, and then habits, norms, and standards, who sets that culture from the beginning? And who defines it?

Is it the founders? Is it just leaders? Who in your mind is responsible for building the culture or establishing it in the beginning?

Seth: Yeah. I mean, I think the way it, the way it worked at, at Proletariat is it was definitely like a founder driven company. So we would star by figuring out, you know, when you look at the shared aspiration, That's made up of vision, mission values.

And we would, we would start there by creating, what do we, where do we want to go? And then we would always get feedback from the wider team. And especially later on, the team was much more involved in it, including, you know, we, we went from four core values to adding a fifth explicitly based on the team's feedback outside of like the founding team.

So I think in some ways the onus is on leadership or the founders or, or, um, whoever is in the sort of. In charge role to start by helping to define what that's going to be, but they shouldn't do it in a vacuum because these rules only work if people adhere to them. So if you create a mission vision set of values that your team is just not interested or not capable of, applying, then it doesn't matter like what you've created.

So I think the onus is not necessarily only on the leadership. I think it's often their job to start. , I think it's a, it's a communal, , responsibility to ensure that that really works. And when that especially comes into play with the habits, I think really strong cultures don't rely on leadership to be the ones enforcing the rules.

It's actually something that everyone enforces where it's like, Hey, you know, we don't, we don't do that here. Doesn't mean that, you know, people get away with it because. You know, the boss is not in the room. It's just, no, the whole culture is like, no, we just, we don't do that here. That's not what we do. Um, it's not like, you know, that, that I think points to the strength of a culture is if the, if everyone on the team really believes those habits and behaviors are important enough to then enforce it when they see something go against that.

Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that actually steps into some of the key attributes of a healthy culture. But, you know, you said that you mentioned you had these four core values, that you and the other founders, presumably or other leaders had determined, you know, very early in the inception of Proletariats era.

Do you mind sharing what those four core values were and why did you select those as the kind of the anchors for your culture?

Seth: Yeah. So we had, you know, our, our core values evolved a bunch from when we kind of initially started to where we ended up, and originally, and we went through a couple of different phases.

We went from four, then down to three, then back up to four and then to five. And so the five that we ended up settling on the first one is understand why, which was really important for us to drive this idea. Yeah. That you would, everyone on the team would be able to ask a question as to why something was important.

We really value transparency at Proletariat. And we wanted to put it on every individual that if they felt like they were doing something that they didn't understand why they were doing it, they should ask. And the onus was on then, you know, leadership or the other person to explain why. And this was decision transparency.

These were, this was all the way up and down. The second one was decide fast and iterate. And this is just a matter of like, you know, there's, there's lots of core values that are about this, but it's very easy to design on a whiteboard forever. And, and not make a decision. We want it to be more action oriented.

We want it to have more agency and say, Hey, good decisions, you know, like, fast decisions are good. So go ahead and make them. And then it's very rare that a decision can't be, can't be changed or reoriented. So we should make calls quickly, test them and go forward. The third one was really interesting because we went back and forth on, on the right way to frame it up.

And originally it was do more with less and the core idea behind do more with less, which like some of us really liked, and this is, this gets to some of the, some of the feedback. We had this, the do more with less idea was, was really based around. Um, we're a small team. We have to be scrappy. We have to, you know, we want to throw out playbooks and write our own.

We need to be, we want to like make big, bold bets and go after them in ways that would allow us to, to punch above our weight class, to do things that we didn't think we'd be able to do. And so that was something that the team felt that the way we defined that felt a little bit like we were asking people to, you know, to crunch.

We were asking people to do things that they wouldn't be able to do. They were going to extend beyond what was possible. And that was obviously never the intent. So we ended up changing it. You know, we just, we ended up changing the title and, and so then the next one was to take responsibility.

This was really about, being responsible for your team in terms of the way you do anything is the way you do everything kind of idea of like, Hey, you're responsible for if you, if you say you're going to do something, do it and, and, you know, do what you say. And that's, I think. A really important aspect of just being a good team member and communicating that.

And so those were our original four. And the way we wrote them is we'd write them as like original kind of titles followed by a paragraph that would really explain in detail. We would very heavily wordsmith this stuff and share it with the team because we wanted this to be stuff you would say in a meeting.

Like we want people to say like we need to decide fast and iterate. Innovate.

Alexandra: I see. Iterate.

Seth: And so, and then we would say, Hey, like, I need to understand why. Like we wanted those titles to be something we would hear in the, in the hallway in the, in the office. And, you know, and, and, and the feedback we got from the team was they wanted us to add a fifth one, which was to be respectful.

And that was interesting to us because we had weaved that kind of throughout the entire thing. Of course, we wanted to have respect be really critical. But they felt it was important to call it out. And we built the last one to really be focused on the respect, not only for each other, of course, but for the, the company, like, how are you respecting the company and the decisions you make, whether those be, you know, how you're handling your expenses or how you're talking about the team respect for our players.

Like not only for when you're interacting with them directly, we would let our team just directly interact with the community. And we felt like that was really important, but also just respect for them in terms of the decisions you make, the design decisions about their time and their money. , so we, we really wanted to have the respect to go beyond just the interpersonal interactions on the team, but be wider than that.

And so we ended up making that the fifth one.

Alexandra: I see. Got it. And you kind of answered one of my other questions, which was how important is it that these were written down? And you wrote them down. It sounds like you actually have done several drafts of writing them down. How frequently and where were these values?

Where did they sit? You know, I think, , you know, for some companies, they put the values on the wall. , you know, if we're in a virtual environment, when you guys went remote, where did you put those values so that people could constantly be reminded about them?

Seth: Yeah, I mean, so part of it, we obviously, yeah.

One of the things we would do is every, every time a new employee would join, we would do a new hire orientation. It's like very common, obviously. And we would talk a lot about the core values, but I think the way we never really put them on the wall, I think that's, that's something that can feel really corporate y and, and, you know, it's very easy to kind of sneer at core values like this.

But one of the reasons why we wanted to make them. Be titles that, you know, words that people would use is that these things only work if you use them, if they're just core values that are sitting on, you know, that are sitting on a, on a poster on a wall or, or whatever, then I think they, they have no meaning.

But I do think it's really important to write them down. I think it's important to talk about them. I think it's important to use them. Like, if you're not using the core values, whether you're using them day to day, whether you're using them to define. How you're, you're looking at your performance reviews, like looking at like, Hey, does this person adhere to our cultural values?

Then I think you're, you're then, then don't, don't do them. , you know, like there it's, it's worse to, like, I think every team should have them. Every team should talk about them and you should use them. Should you use them for absolutely everything? Should it be the only defining factor of the way you do performance reviews?

Of course not. But I think they're a really useful tool to easily communicate. What's important and I think, you know, and what's expected and what the standards are, um, and what, what we allow, what we're allowed to do and what, what we want to do. And I mean, a lot of, a lot of core values are about being aspirational because you don't do them all the time, you know, like there's the occasional time where I didn't do what I said I was going to do.

There's the occasional time where we didn't decide fast and iterate like that stuff is going to happen. But do we want to do that all the time? Yes, that's the idealized future. That's what we're all trying to aspire to be.

Alexandra: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And I think one of the other things that I'm picking up on this is I think your core values, the fifth one that your employees added was be respectful to each other, to your players, to the company.

Your first core value was about asking why your second core value was about moving fast and iterating your third core value was remind me again, what was it?

Seth: Where we decide fast and iterate, do more with less.

Alexandra: Do more with less. And then your fourth core value was, take responsibility, take responsibility.

So I want to point out that I think that there is this kind of. Just, or, you know, kind of maybe a discussion or a bias in video games that this is like two to the deciding core values is like two corporate. And I want to point out that none of those values that you have said, are unique to being in a creative organization or in the video game organization specifically.

I think all of those core values probably could have been in another company, versus a video game startup. , do you think that there's anything different about the game development industry that would change the way that you would formulate a game? Your values and your, your values, or are those values that you just said, you know, potentially something that could only exist at Proletariat and not another company.

Seth: Oh, no, I don't think that there's any, you know, I think a hundred percent those values, you know, we're probably not the first people to come up with those, I think. , so I do think they could work in other, in other instances at other companies, uh, as far as being unique about the game industry, I think one of the biggest.

Factors that's different in games versus some other industries is you're in a really passion driven industry. And for a lot of people, their hobby is their job. And I think that there's reasons to speak to the core, like in your core values about those types of things where, you know, and I think some of it is also.

There, there is, there is an, some establishment norms and things like that have happened in the industry over time, I think things like, , you know, traditionally game companies are not very transparent. So the idea of understanding why is like, you know, oftentimes teams can be very compartmentalized.

And so then you don't know. And so I think that, I think all of the, all of the core values that we chose for Proletariat, uh, you know, I don't I think that they're, they would be, they would be they would work in other organizations, they would work in things that are not game companies. And, you know, we tried to write some specific parts of this, like more in our, in our like mission and vision.

As to what was specific for game company, which was really about building innovative games that we felt were on the frontier of gaming and allowing the team to do their best work. And that was especially at the bigger scale, when we were above the 80 people that became really important to, to us was how do we, how do we get the best team together and create an environment where they can do their best work, but also making it clear that what we're going after are things that are really hard, like innovation on the frontier of gaming is not easy.

Alexandra: Yeah. And I think that's for you guys cultivating that specific culture at your studio is something I want to talk about the strategies and the tactics that you use to do that. , and so we've discussed again, your habits, norms, and standards and your core values and those things being shared aspirations or shared aspiration being, we want to create something great on the frontier and innovation of gaming.

, How did you get everybody aligned on that? Um, did you write a vision statement? How often did you share that vision statement? Who was sharing that vision statement? How often were you sharing it? I'm curious to know, you know, in terms of like that shared vision, what the actual methodology was for inculcating that into the DNA of the company.

Seth: Yeah, I mean, I think if, uh, if I, if I could do it again, I would have maybe more, we would have been more rigorous on the timing, the exact timing we did it. It was actually a mix of basically major milestones that forced big pivots in the culture. Just either that would be number of people or a project comes out and it works or project comes out and it totally fails.

That gives us a moment of reflection of like, hey, is this is this culture working for us still? Because I can tell you when we did that big, the sort of like larger reset when we were really growing the team to grow to the 5 core values, it was just very obvious that so many of the cultural, you know, the core values plus the behaviors, the norms and values there.

The norms and behaviors were just, they were just bursting at the seams. Like the stuff that had worked for 40 people just didn't work at 85. And, and so we, we felt. We needed to readdress this and in some cases we would just do it once a year basically as part of like a like leadership offsite. We would really discuss it.

We're just like, is this culture working for us still? And we would have the conversation, which I think is really important to just have when when. Leaders are talking about their future strategy, which is just, Hey, these are the things, these are our goals. This is what we want to do. Have an honest conversation of, do you have the culture to do that?

Like what is working in your culture? What is working on your team to make you think you can do that? And what are the challenges the team's going to face to be able to deliver those goals? And I think sometimes it's easy for people to just. Ignore that or not really think about it. But I think spending a little bit of time, you know, there's certainly diminishing returns, the deeper you spend tons of time at this.

Cause again, you're a small company. You need to be moving fast. I understand that, but I think there's some minimum amount of work that you can do that actually really provides a lot of value to thinking about what, what is working for your culture, what worked last year, like post morteming your culture once a year and saying, Hey, what do we still like about our culture?

What do we not like, what do we need to change? And knowing that you can change it.

Alexandra: Yeah. How do you, I guess I'm curious as to say, like, you know, when it gets to the boots on the ground tactics about how you actually change it. Um, and you know that we've just, you've discussed shared aspirations, habits and norms and standards and norms are not necessarily the same as rules.

Rules are very enforceable. Norms are maybe something that just, emerge. , and, and norms are maybe things that are not necessarily like this was illegal or something like that, but a norm would be like, Hey, when we, when this happens, we do a versus B, can you give an example of something that you guys were trying to change?

That wasn't working contributing towards that shared aspiration. And then how did you actually get it there over time.

Seth: So I think one of the, I think with the more so on the behaviors, um, it's a little bit easier to talk about, like, what are, what are some things that we actually really shifted, I think with the shared aspiration, you know, that's, that's all about moving towards where the mission and vision is going.

And I think the way. You know, if you're, if you're not headed in the right direction for that strategically, I think that that's like a deeper conversation on where the company's going. I think culturally on the behavior side, an example I can give you is, especially during COVID, we ended up in a situation where we just, our communication was just insane.

We were, and the example I'll give you is we weren't really, we were using, uh, email and Slack and discord. For people that would send me stuff for approval. And that was just like, this is, this is not working. Like, you know, I was losing stuff. Things were, you know, and then this is one of those challenges of scale, right?

Like we were just, we were bursting at the seams with like the, we were, we were things were slipping through the cracks. And so what we did is we, we created a new, we created a cultural communication document that outlined exactly like how we communicate here at Proletariat. What is a good email? What goes into a good email?

What's a good email structure? What's a good meeting? What goes into a good meeting? How do we use Slack? Like what is acceptable in Slack? What's not acceptable? Slack, what are the expectations? And then every time we had a new employee join, we would give them that document. And that was part of their onboarding.

And it was just a, like, it was like a user manual for how we communicate on this team. And it was incredibly valuable to fix some of this stuff. And I think, you know, we started to use people, everyone's probably, this is something that everyone's probably experienced some people on their team. Use threads in Slack.

Alexandra: Some people do not.

Seth: And I'm sure people have done this. And so what we did is we, we defined very clearly what, you know, there was one channel that we had that was just industry news. And the whole idea for the, for the structure was you would post the, you know, the link and then all discussion would be threaded.

And it was funny that anytime someone would break that norm, I didn't need to step in and fix it. Someone else on the team would, and oftentimes it wasn't leadership, but this is one of those things when you talk about, like, I think if I could give like two, I guess, examples for you as concrete things, one is to just define this stuff, like, don't be bashful about it.

Just define what you want, like what behaviors you want to see. What is good here? What is a good meeting? Because it can be so, so often people don't define that. And then it's not clear. , and you know, and, and it's not that hard to do. I've been, you know, this is when we got to that conversation that you mentioned earlier about like, how much time do you spend correcting this stuff?

Like how often do you correct people on the way that they're writing an email of like, Hey, this needs to be more clear or, you know, whatever, please don't send me. Please don't send me approval requests in Slack and instead just define that. But then the other side of it is you really need to not only, you know, a lot of this is leadership.

I think needs to really embody this because you, you lead by example. So you really need to hold yourselves to the standards of the behaviors that you want to see. And I think that's really critical. But the other side of that is you need to identify people on the team and everyone knows that these people exist and they may not always be leaders that are just the centers of gravity of the culture.

There are people that They're on the team that other folks look up to or that other people emulate. And those are the types of people you want to make sure are deputized and trained up on how the people, how the culture should interact and how people should, how people should act in, you know, in their day to day work.

And then those are the people that you can really rely on to have the gravity and the ability to help, to help enforce the culture across the entire team. And so you should identify those people. You should talk to them about it. You should, you know, and you, and it's not. You're not like, you know, doing anything special here.

It's just like, Hey, people seem to really look up to you. I want to make sure you're aware of like the best way, you know, that you were running your meetings really well, because everyone's going to look to you on how you're doing it. Or everyone's going to look to you on how you write your emails. And, and that's like, you know, finding those people, especially outside of leadership really helps strengthen the culture.

Cause then it makes it okay for everyone else because it is a cultural behavior on whether or not. Can someone else enforce a rule or do they have to wait for a leader to do it? Because some cultures would say only leaders can do it. And I would think like, no, you'd want everyone to.

Alexandra: I see. Yeah. And you talked a lot about the communication, establishing that structure, and then, you know, you're talking here about finding, I guess what I would call like, uh, early evangelists of the culture as well.

Like people that, that, that can, uh, proselytize the culture, uh, for fear of being too religious sounding, but essentially that, , you know, be, The take, take, take the thing that has been designated by leaders and then embody it and then also enforce it. Norm it habituated themselves. , and you know, actually, we chatted a little bit about, you know, you're saying like, Hey, like I needed to create this structure and slack to get approval.

Were there any times where and that sounds like it had an effective. Outcome. It resulted in the behavior that you wanted. , we had a brief chat a little bit about how sometimes you want something, you want a, but then B happens instead of a, were there any times at Proletariat where you tried to get people to do a certain thing because this is the outcome you wanted, but the thing and the way that you decided to do it, the tactic backfired.

Seth: Try to think of a good example for this one. I think, I think oftentimes something, this is something that can be. This is often can be a trap with, , with the way teams define. Their, their sort of career ladders and growth where there can be parts of this that may not be aligned with what the company really needs, but people want to do, they want to adhere to what their, you know, growth trajectory tells them as possible.

And this is one of those things where we moved to having a, you know, as we grew, we wanted to create a more defined ladder structure for careers. And that's, I think, important to make sure there's internal equity and that you're communicating that, but one of the challenges of that can be the more detailed this becomes.

It becomes a real issue where someone's like, Hey, I want to become senior, but in order to do that, I need to be able to do X. And so therefore it starts to like really create, I think, incentives that may not be intended. Um, and so that was something that we tried to combat by balancing both like internal equity with some amount of personalization.

And I think that that's one of the risks that you can run into with looking at how you would, a lot of this ends up being. You know, how are you incentivizing and making the choices that you'd want to make for individuals versus teams, I think that's often where this stuff starts to diverge is that individuals are maybe incentivized in a certain way, but the team or the organization is actually incentivized in a different way.

Alexandra: Interesting.

Seth: That's a very good example of having those things be kind of not those things. I feel like at most, a lot of companies easily slip out of lockstep. , and so I think that a lot of companies battle with the, you know, setting up an incentive structure that rewards team play as well as individual and IC contributions.

Alexandra: And I was just curious to see whether or not those you had any had any had any of those problems at Proletariat. , so we talked a little bit about communication structure and putting some structure at your company, , a Proletariat around it. , I want to ask you about a quote that I read the other day in, Creativity Inc, which is a book written by Ed Catmull, the CEO and founder of Pixar, and he said that communication should not mirror organizational structure. , obviously in a physical office place, you know, it's very easy for everybody to talk to everybody, but at that age, that even more multiplies, I think, in a remote environment.

What do you think about that quote? And it just says something that you also believe.

Seth: I mean, I, yes, I mean, I, I think from my experience, that's definitely the, the challenge of hierarchies in a way. A lot of this structure works. There's, there's, um, I think, as, as we talked about the different phases that companies go through, and I think as companies grow, leadership is needing to shift away from focusing on, like, you know, Making a great product to making teams that can create great products to building an organization that can hold a team that can make a great product.

And I think all of those end up having unique challenges in balancing specifically like the way teams communicate. I think the. Biggest thing with, , the, this is one of the reasons why we had to understand why being a core value at Proletariat is we wanted to make it that, you know, even the most junior person on the team could, could go ask a question about whatever, whatever was interesting to them or someone on a different team, because as you, as you grow, we talked about the 80 person.

You don't know what other people are doing. And I think on some level there, you know, it can be really valuable where information is power there to make better decisions. And it can often be really difficult from the top level to know who should know what to make a better decision, because if they don't have the context, it can be really difficult to know where, where the seams are, so I do think, you know, with having. Having this is where transparency becomes incredibly important. And I think the real value behind building a culture that is okay with this. Um, and that is transparent really allows for and I think it sort of becomes something that cultures end up. Relying really heavily on the fact that things are transparent in order to have the best information.

It's like their, their whole decision making structure changes because they want to know, hey, I want to know the metrics and the results of the last thing before I make the next decision that changes the whole ritual of how they make the road map process or whatever it might be.

Alexandra: Interesting. In that tactic, in that vein of transparency, and you, you know, you, you mentioned this earlier that the game industry is a tortatively secret and that's a mistake.

And you guys pride yourselves or, or a culture that pride themselves on a high level of transparency. What is a good level of transparency to you and how did you decide the line here? You know, is there such a thing as being overly transparent?

Seth: I mean, this is definitely an interesting balance.

And I think not every team has the luxury of being able to be incredibly transparent, right? Because I think, you know, or as transparent as they may want to be. And some of that is defined by like, obviously, if you're a public company, there's certain information you can't disclose. , but I think for most organizations that are smaller, or especially the ones that are maybe private, , I think they can be pretty transparent, and I think the balance and the trade off ends up being how much do you want to expose to the team in terms of their own ability to manage the ups and downs, the roller coaster itself.

And, you know, as we were going through, you know, we went through. Two different acquisition processes at Proletariat. And I tried to be as transparent with the team as I could on the status of those. And, you know, so an example I'll give you is when we were talking through potential options, I, we, we use code names and we wouldn't, I wouldn't tell the team who exactly we were talking to because we were really worried that, you know, I, I trusted the team completely, but we also just, you know, Didn't want to make it too easy for someone to accidentally like say the name of a company we were talking to, which could really hurt a process like that in process.

But I was willing to tell them, you know, here, the, that we're talking to four different companies, this is the status of it. And, and, you know, those types of details. And I think that that was really helpful for them to just know, cause I would also show them how much runway we had, um, you know, and like where, where we were at with how long we would have until.

 Until we would need, you know, the next round of funding or publishing deal or whatever it might be. And so I think from a transparency standpoint, it's it, I think teams need to decide what, what they're comfortable with. My, my general rule on this is to try and share as much as possible.

Possible that I think allows people to make the best decisions for people that want to know more. I would often, you know, there were, there were some folks, whether they be junior or senior on the team that would occasionally come up to me after a meeting or ping me on slack or whatever. And they would be like, Hey, Seth, I'd really love to know more about X, Y, or Z.

And I would often just like. Ask them, you know, what, why do they want to know more? Like, what do they want to know about this? Because there is some risk, you know, there is something nice, um, about like out of sight, out of mind. Like, how much do you want to know about how, you know, how much whiplash we have in talking with these teams?

Because everyone that's worked in a startup knows that, like, you know, the, like, you know, you come out of a pitch, you're like, we totally nailed it. It's amazing. And then you get an email the next day and you're like, oh, we're, you know, we're screwed. Um, and so how exposed do people want to be to that? Yeah.

And, and I think I would let people make that decision for themselves. Like if they wanted to get on the roller coaster with the leadership team, they could do that. If they didn't, then that's totally understandable as well because they also trusted us to make the decisions. Um, so I think, you know, the best things to do to be transparent, you know, the core, I guess two core things I could say is you really need to build credibility in order to have transparency.

And so I think leadership. You know, one of the biggest things that leadership can do is to deliver bad news is to like deliver results, whether they be good or bad and not try to like sweep them under the rug or be like, Hey, guys, like, you know, we celebrate the win. We hit our goal and then like say nothing when it doesn't happen.

I think being able to deliver both of those is really important. And the other factor is just. Making it really clear that you shouldn't surprise your team. If your team is being surprised for whatever reason, your transparency is probably failed. Like, obviously, there's, there's, you know, crazy events that occur where, you know, you had you, no one saw it coming and a publisher cancels your deal or whatever.

But if you saw this coming and your team is going to be surprised, there's probably a way to communicate some of this to set the expectation as to what's going to happen. And so I think those are two really critical ways that people can can build that transparency.

Alexandra: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you also made the case for the other point, which is the other question was, what are the good arguments for secrecy?

And I think in some of those things you mentioned, , you know, having people accidentally have a conversation about a deal in a coffee shop and having that front risk of that, which is a very legitimate concern, , or, you know, making sure that they Want to be on the emotional whiplash in the same way that maybe the founders of the leadership have the responsibility to be, , and, you know, wanting to protect and shield them from that.

And so I think that that's actually really an interesting line, and I'm curious to see how you decided to tell it, , as it's something that I think all startups, regardless of whether or not you're in the video game industry or not. Really have to navigate in terms of like, how much do I tell the company about, you know, the business, how the business is performing deals that are happening, et cetera.

And so I think that we've started talking about some of the challenges to building culture. And you talked about some of the challenges of building culture on a growing team in terms of headcount. And you've told us a couple of stories about, you know, when you went remote, when you got bigger, you put all this new communication structure in place.

But early, you mentioned something fairly interesting, which was, , You know, you had said at some point there was definitely times where I didn't do what I was said I was going to do, , which was against one of your core values. And I guess what should you do if you have key leadership that doesn't follow the cultural norms?

And, you know, Austin also over time that obviously makes your employees think that that leadership team isn't walking the talk. , has that did that ever happen at Proletariat and how did you handle it?

Seth: We were, we were pretty lucky that that wasn't too much of an issue for us at Proletariat on the leadership side.

Because I think the leadership mostly all, , we're all pretty, pretty strongly aligned, um, with the culture and what we liked about the culture. I think it's definitely a challenge though on the leadership side. . To make sure, like, it's very easy for a single leader if they are not leading, by example, or they are not enforcing some parts of the culture, , the way they should to really cause strong cultural drift because all it takes is a few examples of this to then set a new norm.

And so I think it's very easy, you know, one of the, one of the key things I think is important when hiring, , is to, you know, a lot of, I, I get, I get annoyed when people say like, oh, we're going to, you know, we want to have an interview for culture fit. And it's, it's like, not really what you want. I think what you're really looking for is, is vision fit.

And you're hoping that they'll add to your culture. And I think I find that it's, you know, very common that you would, you know, people will totally align with the shared aspiration. You know, they want to make the same amazing games you want to make. And so that could be a good reason to hire them and bring them in.

But if they can't adhere. To the norms, whether that be because of skill or other behaviors, like they can't, you know, you're, you're part of the norm is at your, at your company is like we hit our deadlines. And, and if they can't adhere to that, then I think you, you, they can't stay because it's at any time that you allow for.

This sort of thing, even if it is like, Hey, this is, this is one of the challenges that people have all the time with like the, you know, you, you hear about the, you know, the like rockstar, you know, whatever it is, engineer, artist, who's also an asshole. And it's like, okay, well, with that, in that case, which I'm sorry, can we swear on this podcast?

I apologize if we can't, but, uh, but people know that, you know, the challenge with accepting that. Is you're making an exception to your rule and you have to be really careful about that. And like, you know, was Proletariat a hundred percent great on this? Like, no, like, I don't think anyone is perfect, but when you think about the challenges here, it's like, well, if you, if you know that that's the archetype, if you know that that's expected and you don't attempt to work with that person to address their behavior, to make sure they're adhering to your norms, that's a new norm.

Like you're just like, your culture is just not what you say it is. Right. And, and I think that's true up and down the board. And that's, that's This is why I think it's really important to have honest conversations on a regular, not like, you know, every week or every month, but maybe once a year on the leadership side of like, Hey, you know, we would talk about this.

I would send out a, um, a form to the leadership team before we do our offsite to like planning offsite. And I would just put up the core values. And we would ask a couple of questions and the first question would just be like, you know, like, do you still like this core value? And it would just be like on a one to one to, you know, it'd be like, yes, I do.

Eh, I don't care. No, I don't. And we would get that feedback and then all of this stuff was used just for discussion. But we'd ask that question. We'd also ask, like, do you think we adhere to this value? Or how well do you think we adhere to this value on like a one to five scale? And that was always really valuable to be like, Hey, like we, you know, we feel like we hit the, understand why all the way up, we feel like we're about like a three on decide fast and iterate.

We feel like we're, you know, like, and, and seeing the values that people would put in on each one of those was a really useful way to be like, Hey, is this value still working for us? Or if we're not able to hit this value, like, why are we still, why are we still doing it? Should it still matter? And so I think.

Re evaluating those and having an honest conversation of just what are the strengths and weaknesses of your culture are a really important part of any strategy discussion.

Alexandra: Yeah. And that's actually like a very like tactical and excellent example of of how to evaluate it and measure it over time. I think, Actually, like I took a course called lead labs during my MBA, and we did something very similar where we were tasked as a group of 10 to create and cultivate a specific culture for an entire semester.

So we sat down at the beginning of day 2 and came up with, I think, 5 to 7, probably too long, but 5 to 7 core values that we wanted to adhere to and every week. We would pull the team to see whether or not like we were actually doing those things, and one of ours was we want this to feel like a safe space for everybody to share their ideas.

, and we would get feedback back and you're like, Oh, one on safety. Oh no. That's not good. Right. And then we would. Recalibrate to see like, what are we doing in the room? What norms and behavior are we displaying that makes so and so person feel unsafe? And so that actually goes to my next question.

It sounds like you sent this kind of document to your to the leadership team before going on an off site. Did you ever pull your employees on this culture? And did you ever solicit feedback? I think you mentioned that there you add the fifth value because your employees , requested it. Um, how did you do that?

And was that through a similar polling process that you discovered that there was a value that went might have been missing?

Seth: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we would definitely pull the whole team on this. Like we would, we would send out surveys that would talk about this. , when we would, when we would, , look at just feedback from the team on the, on the values.

Because again, we only wanted to do the values if people were using them. Right. This wasn't just like a performative thing. This was just like, Hey, is this valuable? Like, is this useful for us to have these things, to have these things defined so everyone understands it? And I think it is, I think it is valuable.

 And so we would definitely send out reforms. The way we go through the process is typically we would do the offsite and we only did this, You know, two or three times this way, because we were sort of always evolving the process and when we were much smaller, it wasn't this scale, right? Because it was 20 people as much easier to have a conversation than it was to do.

You know, we didn't need like Google forms, but we would, we would come back and present to the team and be like, Hey, this is what we think the mission and mission and vision is right now. These are our goals for the next year. Here's our core values and here's how we're sort of changing them. And we would basically ask for feedback and we'd have people kind of solicited, like, Both verbatim and directly, then we would actually put all the words into a document and we would let people basically make recommendations.

And so there would be a lot of like a whole, like wordsmithing phase where people would go back and forth and we would discuss it and we would have conversations and that's where you get changes like the, you know, the real deep conversation about like, do more with less. And we would talk about this on a leadership level, which was like, Hey, we really like this.

We like what this, what this communicates, but we also understood. How some people interpreted that. And so we tried to find a middle ground that would get both what we liked about it and make sure that we were covering what the concerns were from other people on the team, we would often ask like, you know, on teams of just, Hey, like, you know, what do people think about these core values?

Do you feel like you're adhering to these? And, you know, I think we, we put more emphasis on pulling the leadership on some of that and actually having like, Hey, as a leader, do you think your team embodies this thing? That was mostly just for like a logistics and scale reason more so than any specific choice.

But I do think. That information, you know, I, I wouldn't just like use that information, like a algorithm to then decide what your culture is like. That's just seeds for a conversation. And I think, you know, the, the example you gave of the MBA one is a really interesting one that proves how difficult and how important it is to have some of these conversations.

So say your team's getting a one. On safety, but yet like you're looking at your results and you're looking at how the team's working together and it's actually like working better than it ever has before. So then I think you need to have this really uncomfortable conversation of like, is safety really that important?

Is there some perception here where we are? We're having this in some way, like what's happening? So that's why I think you have to look at both culture and strategy and performance at the same time. Like there, there, there, you can't just. They're not in a vacuum. You can't decouple them. You have to look at them together.

And I think that's why there's value in kind of doing all this at once. When you're doing your strategy session, come up with your goals and what you want next for the year. Then look at your culture and be like, what, like what, like try to predict in the future. Like what is really working in our culture?

Like, Hey, we want to do something really innovative. Talk deeply. Like, is our culture that pliable? Like, are we in a place culturally where we can accept that level of innovation or disruption or. Or, you know, we expect that there's going to be a lot of, a lot of kind of, uh, you know, this is going to be a chaotic year.

There's going to be a bunch of changes. We're going to like move people around. We want to, and like, are we ready for that? And if not, how do we get ready for that? How do we establish that culture?

Alexandra: Yeah. I think that's a very astute point to get. You cannot evaluate it in a vacuum because that's exactly, I think one of the predicaments is that the performance of the company and the performance of the team could be totally fine.

Even when you're not. Adhering to a specific value. And I think it's very interesting that you mentioned this concept of we did pull a lot of our employees and we did have group conversations about it, but we also did this mostly through leadership leadership. Do you think your team exhibits these values for the sake of scale?

 And I wanted to kind of ask you maybe like an elephant in the room question, I think a lot of people are afraid of, and this is also maybe. Prompted by my recent reading of creativity Inc, but point in time when the company was huge, I mean like thousands, right? They ran this thing called notes day.

, and notes day, what the inception of notes day came about because key leadership at Pixar was like, we want to keep the quality of our movies the way that they are to keep, you know, our, to, to your saying to our shared aspiration. But the budget is too big. And we need to bring the budgets of these movies down.

And they just didn't know what to do. They were like, we don't know how to lower the budget. But then someone was like, why don't we ask the company? And all the people that work here about how we can make this process more efficient and how we can lower the budget. So they had this huge thing called notes day where every single employee like got to participate in like giving feedback on how to solve this problem about lowering the budget.

That obviously. Rolled into discovering lots of other cultural problems. Lots of different challenges operating inefficiencies between different teams, animation and storyboarding and a bunch of others, right? And I think one of the challenges was that once they had notes day, every employee expected that the company would change everything that they gave feedback on.

So how do you balance Tapping your employees and asking them for their honest feedback in the expectation that they might have after having one of those kinds of conversations, which is I expect leadership to change all the things I gave feedback on.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. This is a, this is one of those things that is really important.

I think in a, in any game company outside of like even just talking about the culture, but often people are working in games because they really love games and you need to figure out a process that people can give feedback on your game as well, and how do you do that? And I think the expectation though, is if you're, you know, if your role on the team is you are, you know , I'm trying to think of maybe like a , front end engineer, but you're giving feedback, , on the, the balance of the RPG system.

The expectation is like, you're sending that feedback over and that the, you know, the designer that's in charge of that will take a look at that feedback and potentially address it, but potentially not. But like the person who, the, the, the responsibility of actually making the final decision is on that, like, you know, that system designer.

Um, and I think, With something like you mentioned there, a big part of this is setting the expectation when we did this with the team where it was like, Hey, we want to get everyone's feedback. But we can't take it all because even within the team, there's going to be contradiction. And ultimately, like my role is in the CEO role was to be the final decider.

Now, ideally you're in a position where like everyone understands the decision and, you know, and I don't even really need to decide the decisions kind of made for me. But if there was a decision that had to be made, it was like mine to make. And so I think part of it is just setting the expectation of like, Hey, we want you all involved, but also you're all giving your own sort of personal.

To say like feedback, which you absolutely should, because your perspective, especially in an 80 plus person organization, a hundred, 150, you know, at blizzard 4, 000, right. Like you're in a position where you should speak for yourself, but your, your perspective, your position, your day to day, all of those things are going to be very different from many other people inside the organization.

And it's leadership's job to attempt to look at all of that and try to find the compromise. And this is one of the biggest challenges in doing that. And like, that's where. The team needs to trust the leadership that they're making, the best decision that is trying to balance all of those factors. And so I think for something like, you know, for any of these cultural pieces, it's really about understanding that like, hey, there is a balance here of not only what's best for the team, but also like what was best for the business.

Like what are we, how, like how can we make sure that we, we continue to operate as a company, which I think is some of the argument that people have on. Not investing in their culture is like, Oh, well, you know, they think about it in a silo. Like, you know, that cultural stuff is like trust falls and what you do on corporate retreats and what big companies do with big budgets.

And it's like, no, these are deeply tied together and you shouldn't really, you know, but there's, there's, but there's a reality here that like, if the company goes out of business, it doesn't matter what the culture was. Because it can't exist without the company working. So you have to have that balance of like, we have to have the strategy.

And this is where the challenges of compromising, you know, your values of like, Hey, sometimes like, you know, unfortunately we missed the deadline. We had to crunch. Like we want to make sure that we never, you know, we try as hard as we can to never crunch, but if the option is crunched to make sure we don't.

Go out of business or or crunch like I think most teams are going to say we have to make the hard decision here and we'll do everything we can to try and never make that happen again. But those things occur. That's just like the nature of the way games are built. They're very unpredictable and challenging.

Alexandra: Yeah, that's I mean, I think that's very well said again. And I think. You're right. There will be no culture if there is no business. And so we're running up on time here and I kind of want to conclude with some key takeaways and words of advice. , so a lot of our examples today came from your Proletariat era.

And I'm wondering and curious. Is there is something that you wish you had done? You know, when it comes to culture specifically in the early, early stages of Proletariat, that would have future proofed problems down the road. And if so, what is it?

Seth: I think, some of the, the best things we could have done early on is I think we, we were always operating on just like, you know, cause The nature of the organization was we were betting the company on every, on, on like the next game.

It wasn't, we weren't thinking ahead. I think if you asked any of the founders, if we thought we would be still a company and, you know, almost 10 years in before I, before we sold to blizzard, everyone would have been like, no way we maybe make it four years. So we just weren't planning ahead at all.

Like, you know, the idea that we, like, it was never in the plans to be 130 people making basically like, you know, effectively a, you know, a game. A double A bridging to triple A game with Spellbreak. Like that was never, we never thought we'd get there. So we never planned or made any intentional choices around that.

And so we were often constantly going back and being like, Oh, I think if I was going to do it all again, you know, changes to how we did. Like a lot of these things are logistical in nature, but they really matter somewhat culturally, like even even going down to how you do titles, right? How are you doing compensation?

How you are looking at, like, the structure of these teams because all of those pieces factor in to the way people look at, like how they communicate. And I think if there's something I could have done very early on, it's just like we should have done that, like cultural communication document on day one.

That should have just been like, Hey, if there's anything that I learned. Much later on is just like, I should have been really explicit when people join the organization, even if you were employee number eight, um, versus employee number 88. Like, I want to train you on how things get done here. I want to spend explicit time investing in you so that you are trained up on doing that.

And so you don't have those awkward moments or those embarrassing moments where you send the wrong email or you do the wrong thing. And instead you are onboarded much faster, not only into like your job of closing bugs or, or whatever, whatever it might be. but you are, you are onboarded into being part of this organization culturally.

And I think that that's something that we didn't realize until we were kind of forced into it, um, by going remote while we were still scaling really rapidly.

Alexandra: Got it. And yeah, I think that that also probably lends to my next question, which is if you had to tell the audience three pieces of advice when it comes to building a video game studios culture, what would those three things be?

Seth: I mean, I think the first piece of advice is like, like, care about your culture, like talk about it, realize that you, you know, if you, if you aren't doing anything about your culture, it's going to grow. Well, you know, you need to actively prune and cultivate it. If not, it's going to grow wild and it's on you to really do that.

I think the second piece of advice is to just be really explicit, like, like be explicit about your culture, about what you want and, and really be, , be exacting about it. , and I think the third piece is, is make enroll everybody in the process and make sure that everyone is bought in because a culture only works when you If it's actually being used, if you have, you know, we've talked about this a couple of times now, but just having a culture or having core values that sit on a poster that are never brought up, it's just going to weaken things.

And if you don't define your culture and have actually talked about it explicitly, it's going to be hidden. And that only, not only does that make it much harder for people to onboard and to join your organization effectively, it means you can have wildly different cultures across wildly different parts of your organization, which could lead to all sorts of difficult challenges.

Alexandra: Okay. And then finally, how do you, how do teams get better at building culture? Given the three pieces of advice you just gave, if they're bad at it. What resources can they utilize? Or if their culture is hidden, how do they?

Seth: Yeah, I mean, I think, the, the best thing to do is to just start now and just be like, Hey, can you not only you as a leader, but can your team is your team able to articulate what are the important parts about this culture?

 And, and by asking it more conversationally, I think you might get better. Responses of like, what are the real strengths of our culture? And I think if you want to get better about this, one is to just talk about it. And really just have it be, Hey, like what, like, let's really talk about how we behave, how we act, and how we could improve that.

And I think just by talking about it, it means you can now more easily measure it and discuss it and improve it. So I think that's my biggest piece of advice. If you're, if you're a leader in an organization, whether you be the CEO or just like a brand new manager, I think start talking to your team about.

The culture of your team, the culture of the wider organization, and just, if they can articulate it, then you need, there's some work you need to do to really define that. And I think that that's step one. Step one is defining, you know, both what the culture is today and then to what you want the culture to be.

Alexandra: Awesome. Well, these are excellent parting words of advice. And I really appreciate this conversation and learning about all the different areas of Proletariat. You know, as I said before, you are the perfect guest for this type of topic, given there's just so many stages of Proletariat that you guided it through from being a super small company to being remote to being remote.

A big remote company to being, bringing it back in person again, and then also selling to a very large company. It was amazing to have you on air and we're unfortunately up on time, but thank you so much for coming on.

Seth: Yeah, no, thank you for letting me soapbox culture for, you know, an hour or whatever it was.

Um, I really, I really appreciate it. I think it's an important topic that we should talk about more in the industry.

Alexandra: Yeah, well said. Well, as always friends, if you have any feedback or ideas, hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open. And with that, that's our episode. See you next time.

If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you wanna reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you wanna learn more about what Naavik has to offer, make sure to check out our website www.naavik.co there. You can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Naavik Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services.

Again, that is www.naavik.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.