The intersection of anime, games, and technology takes center stage in this episode. Host Aaron Bush is joined by Kun Gao, a serial entrepreneur known for co-founding Crunchyroll, the world’s leading anime streaming platform, and now charting new paths in the games industry with GGWP, an AI-driven moderation platform, and Forge, which is enabling direct-to-consumer loyalty programs for games teams.

In this conversation, we explore the many lessons Kun learned from scaling Crunchyroll and navigating high-profile dealmaking with IP companies and stakeholders like The Chernin Group and Sony. We then dive into the founding stories of GGWP and Forge, unpack the big ideas behind both companies, and dig into how more interconnected loyalty programs can empower game developers to create deeper, more valuable connections with their players.

This episode is packed with insights into Kun’s entrepreneurial process, so make sure to tune in!

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.

Aaron: Hi, everyone. I'm your host, Aaron Bush, and today we have a truly exciting guest with a wealth of entrepreneurial wisdom and games industry insight we can learn from.

I'm here with Kun Gao, who maybe is most well-known for previously being the co-founder and CEO of Crunchyroll, the leading anime based streaming company now owned by Sony. But a few years ago, Kun moved into the games industry, where he co founded and runs not one, but now two fascinating startups, GGWP, an AI powered game moderation platform, and now Forge, which helps game teams innovate with loyalty programs.

So, as you can tell, Kun has done a lot, and so we're going to spend roughly the first half of this episode talking about what he has learned from his previous companies and then in the second half, we'll dig into his latest company forge and explore where all that is headed. So, with all of that said, welcome to the gaming podcast.

Kun Gao: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Aaron: Yeah, I'm super excited. And I think we should begin by setting some context. So let's start at the very beginning. When did you first know you wanted to be a founder? And how did you get started in your entrepreneurial journey?

Kun Gao: Yeah, so, I didn't really know at the beginning, I did my undergrad at, uh, Berkeley in computer science and for the last year, right before I went to grad school, I had the good fortune to have two options for that summer internship.

One was with VMware pre IPO, and the other was with this Silicon Valley startup called Hot or Not. And if you know Hot or Not back in the day, it's basically, you rate people on a scale of 1 to 10, and it was one of the pioneers in terms of social, social community, social networking, virtual items and the like.

And it just so happened that the founders of Hot or Not were Berkeley EECS, uh, alums and also involved in Eta Kappa Nu HKN, which was the Berkeley EECS Honor Society, which I was a part of. And so, I interviewed there, they offered me an internship position for the summer and they said, you know what, like you always have a chance to go into industry. Maybe this summer try something a little different. And I took that summer, learn how to, build product market fit, build online community, ship product really quickly, iterate really quickly. Basically all the, like a crash course in the most valuable things to learn, to be an internet entrepreneur back in the day.

And then I went on and went in and did grad school and that's when the bug kind of bit me. So first year of grad school, I was in CMU in computer science and PhD and I just couldn't get that experience out of my head. And here I was basically You know, diving deep into like academic conceptual things and on the other side was I could be working on products that could reach millions of people and touch touch their lives in a more immediate way.

And so during grad school, I started building just for fun projects here and there, just hacking tooling and was fortunate to do. Find a friend who was also from Berkeley, and we were kind of in the same predicament. He went to grad school in UIUC. I went to grad school in CMU, and we were both like, okay, well, we should just hack on things together because this is fun.

The first thing we built was a calendar application. This was before Google calendars and before. The applications on the internet were actually applications. And so you had to, like, refresh your page every time you made a new calendar entry. And we used this new technology that just came out called AJAX, which before that, you know, people didn't know it was Web 2.

0, but that was the beginning of Web 2. 0. And we made one of the first calendar applications that you can just create an, like an event in the same way how you would create on a Google calendar today. And then the next thing we built was we built a friend mapping, social mapping program.

So we basically created a really simple interface for Google Maps because they just released their API. And with Google Maps, you can't really create a map that easily, but we made it so that anyone can claim a map URL and then just share that URL with their friends and then their friends compile it and add their pins.

We did it because we were lonely. We wanted to see where all our Berkeley friends went. And then we shared it with them. And then, for some weird reason, like, it just spread really virally. So we had, I don't know, like the Harley Davidson groups of, you know, Midwest, Ohio, creating Google map, creating a frapper map on there, GeoCities page, and you know, they were sharing it to all their, uh, all their friends. And then pretty soon we got millions of users were creating maps and adding their pins to this. Uh, and then at that point, we received like an interest from VCs as well as from potential acquirers.

And then we ended up actually selling the company to maps, who was the founder of PayPal and moved out to the Bay Area. And that's kind of when I knew that not only, you know, what was, was I maybe destined to be an entrepreneur, but also that could actually be a career versus before where it was just like, okay, we're doing this for fun, but you know, the career stuff we'll have to figure out.

Aaron: No, that's a really exciting start going from tinkering around to actually being able to sell, uh, what you were able to, to build. I can see how that would inspire you to, to continue down that, that path. And, sadly, I, I've never been a user of, of hot or not, but that also sounds like a, like an interesting, startup experience to kind of get at that time when social media and like that.

Kind of early wave of that coming together was, was, was starting. So cool. Thanks for, for sharing that, that context. I guess next, Crunchyroll was your first big company and perhaps the biggest pillar of your career so far. We'd love to hear the founding story of that, how you went from selling that first company to, to Max.

And, you know, then turned around and eventually created Crunchyroll. What happened there?

Kun Gao: Yeah, so after the acquisition, we, myself and my co founder, we joined Max's company. And we were working on ways to integrate what we built with social mapping into other social and photo experiences that was part of Sly at that time.

While, you know, we were doing this in our, you know, nights and weekends, we continue to, to tinker because that was just, you know, fun and intellectually, you know, stimulating, we ended up getting, essentially, the band back together. So, a few of our Berkeley friends from our EECS honor society, they were all, you know, in the Bay area working at like, startups like I don't know, and, we would get together on weekends and just try to think of both cool things that we can just build and test and throw out there in like a few weeks. So we were, we were really just. Tinkering and then seeing where, where, where it kind of took us.

So we had a lot of different ideas. Some of the things that we worked on was like a deal search website, a domain search website all sorts of different application potentially could just, you know, launch out there and, and pretty quickly try to see if there's a traction or not Crunchyroll.

That one was really interesting because that was really one that we were trying to solve our own, our own problem, which was every, when Thursday we would, after we get back home from, from like work, we would want to, we want to watch the latest episode of Naruto and Naruto, back then there was no streaming website for, for anime.

So you couldn't just like go find it, you had to go to a torrent website, you had to download the torrent, you had to wait for the downloads to complete because in the very beginning, everyone's trying to pile in to get the episodes, so then no one's uploading because no one has the thing, everyone's downloading, and so it's really slow, sometimes you maybe you get a virus, you don't even know, or the thing gets corrupted, and so we're like, this is a pretty, you know, terrible experience.

And at the time, one of our, one of our friends was, the founders of YouTube. They were building and innovating on streaming video online. And we thought, why not build a streaming website with anime. And it so happened also that because YouTube force the like a 10 minute upload.

So you couldn't upload anything more than 10 minutes in the very beginning. Anime episodes were something like 25 minutes. So they would get chopped up into three pieces if you upload it to YouTube. And so that's like a discovery nightmare because you'll be watching one of three of that episode and then you couldn't find two or three and you're like, Oh, what do I do?

So. For Crunchyroll, we basically had to learn and build a lot of the tech that was involved with video streaming, video delivery at the time, because there wasn't really anything can take off the shelf. There wasn't a AWS, if you will. So we were building like the server code, the video delivery code, , the logic to replicate video files between hard drives because sometimes the hard drives fail anyway, it was, it was quite like a interesting academic challenge, but at the end of the day, what that got us able to do was solve the problem of delivering video, long form video to users.

And then we, uploaded like our anime collections and then we shared it with our friends. And then pretty soon they, they were like sharing it with their friends. And then pretty soon everyone was uploading their anime collections. And then. Then over time, pretty quickly, we were able to grow to a pretty large audience of users who are uploading their anime collections, curating it, and then making sure that it was a good community experience for every, for everyone.

Aaron: Yeah, and for context, this was 2006ish, is that right?

Kun Gao: That's right.

Aaron: Yeah, so this was, you know, I guess I don't even remember like the exact timing of when Netflix started rolling out their streaming and stuff but this was if anything like right before like any of like the major streaming players were were really getting going too so you really were pioneering what this whole streaming online as a subscription service really is in a lot of ways is that correct?

Kun Gao: I think it was uh maybe a a special time and a special vintage if you will if you look at the successful video platforms that have come out, YouTube, Twitch, Crunchyroll, we were all founded around the same time, like 2004, 2006 time period. So it was at the point where the technology was getting there, but also you had to be a bit of a first mover.

And, and, and then those were the ones that ended up being successful.

Aaron: Got it. So I imagine that even though you were part of a cohort, there was still so much new to figure out, right? There was figuring out the content side, which you talked about how it initially started with fan uploads, but you had to shift over to.

A licensing model and working with all of these IP companies, which, I imagine a business like this at the time was also very new for them to, to wrap their heads around and figure out how to build a business model where you all benefit together. You scaled to over a hundred million registered users, which, you know, that level of scale to I'm sure had all sorts of technical implications and over your history worked with all sorts of various large stakeholders as well, right from the churning group to, you know, eventually Sony acquiring the company, most recently, and so I'm, I'm curious, this is a big question and you could, you could take this, you know, any direction you think is most interesting, but when you look back, like what were some of those largest obstacles you had to overcome at the time, whether it was things that you had to innovate from the ground up that didn't exist or like have to figure out how to work with all these various stakeholders would love to just hear a story or two of what you had to go through and figure out?

Kun Gao: So I think maybe one of the first hurdles we came across was, when, as we're growing pretty quickly, we realized that we need to venture venture capital and, and, because video serving was quite extensive back in the day. And because there were no video premium video services, there were no video ads.

You couldn't just make money on video. So we were asking our audience for donations. We're like, Hey, give us a donation. And then. We'll put a star next to your name because, you know, that's the only way we can thank you. But, now everyone in the community can see that whoever donated has a star.

So they're supporting the community. And we were able to kind of get by for a bit, but as we continue to scale, we just needed venture capital. And, because it's such a new category, when we went to talk to VCs, even though we had millions of users, they didn't really understand anime as a category. I don't know if really anyone had.

The idea, obviously, that again, it would be as big as it is today. And so it was not very straightforward to raise, venture, venture capital. So, we've made the rounds, uh, and I think we were fortunate in that one of the VCs that we talked to, Vinrock there, partner there at the time, David Semenov, actually had a media background, which was unique for Silicon Valley, because most Silicon Valley VCs do not have, , the, like a traditional media background.

And so he saw something interesting in us. He invested and when he invested, we basically we knew what we needed to do, which was okay, we know we can get the users. We know we can deliver on the technology side, even though it was quite a lot of heavy lifting. We were engineers. We can figure it out. We didn't know how to do, how to get licenses.

So we were like, okay, what do we do? And, out of the founding team, I was maybe fortunate or unfortunate to, to draw the lucky or unlucky straw to, to go to Japan and, and figure out licenses. And I didn't know where to start because, you know, like we, we knew anime came from Japan, but where, where in Japan does it come from?

So we just started knocking on doors. We talked to our friends and asked, Hey, do any of you guys work? Or know anyone who worked in, in Japan and kind of just going and until we found, folks who lived in Japan who worked in the media industry in Japan, but they weren't anime people. And so we met with them and asked them, Hey, do you know anyone in the anime industry?

And so we kept doing that until we were able to, build enough of a network to finally start talking to the actual licensors of anime. And then the challenge became. While they were licensed for anime, they didn't have the rights to license streaming anime because The concept of a streaming right did not exist back then.

It wasn't a thing where you, you can go to them and say, give me the streaming rights. And they say, okay, because no one had the streaming rights because it wasn't invented. Uh, so they weren't just sitting, it wasn't like they were sitting on it. And so we had to work with them to say, well, here's how we would define a streaming, right?

It's from, you know, point A to point B from our servers to our branded front end. Like what constitutes streaming all, what's still geo blocking, all those kinds of things we have to work through. And so we also pioneered the licensing of streaming rights when it comes to, when it comes to anime for, aside from the business side, I think the biggest cultural hurdle for us was really making sure that we, uh, made the proper investment to build those relationships long term, because if you, if you know, business in Japan, it's not very transactional.

You need to be persistent and to basically show that you're going to be part of that industry for a long time because they want partners were there for a long time and our biggest hurdle in that was. When we first showed up, they didn't like us. They, they hated us. They were like, Hey, aren't you guys the ones who have that site that people are streaming our shows on?

And we're like, yeah, but, uh, but then we're like, well, we want to work with you. So like, we're here if, if you tell us to remove all this stuff, we'll remove it. But that just means all those bands. Are going to go to like some other place and they're probably not going to want to work with you, or they might not, you know, be willing or whatever, but you know, we're here and we want to work with you to make this into a real business for the, you know, for the, for the anime industry.

And, you know, the first few meetings were pretty rough. Like they would, uh, you know, they would not want to meet with us. They would passive aggressively look at us in the meeting or something like that. But over time they were like, okay, these guys aren't going away. They keep showing up. And so I guess it's either like work with them or they'll never, you know, they'll never go away.

And so, we basically were able to convince them that, you know, we're going to be a good partner, long term partners and that, we really cared about anime. And then, we wanted to build, build this long term. And so that's how we got our first set of licenses. This was in December, 2008, January, 2009.

And then from there we had this big milestone moment where our licensors told us, Hey, like you have a UGC platform today, tomorrow it needs to be a premium platform, and we don't want our content on a place where there's also UGC content, so what are you gonna do about it? And so we were like, well, that means we just have to remove everything.

And only upload the stuff that we have licenses to. And so immediately our collection and they went from like a thousand to like 15, and then, we had to basically, re commence our community and tell them why we're doing this, because this is the path to making anime and the medium that they love into a real business.

And they were extremely supportive. It was fortunate for us that beyond just the streaming, we built a ton of community features, things like forums and comments and things like that, that really got, built a very core community that's very sticky, that was there not just to stream the content, but also felt like they were participating in this movement of being able to bring anime to the rest of the world.

And so I think those were some of the more notable milestones in the early years.

Aaron: No, that's a really fascinating story. I mean we could dedicate this entire episode to Crunchyroll too because there's there's so much to dig into here. Maybe a couple more quick questions and we can move on to other games industry things.

But one thing I'm curious about that I've just picked up from our conversation is that community like really from from day one was extremely core to what you built at Crunchyroll and you know, however you managed it, you know, it gave you the goodwill with them so completely. You know, change the business model and the way that the company operates with their support any, you know, key insight or lesson learned or the tactic that you use to, you know, so successfully kickstart a community, have it be so supportive and, you know, ultimately stick with you for a long period of time.

Kun Gao: It was a very organic process and it took a long time in terms of trust building. I think one of the first things we did was we. As soon as we launched the basic video experience, we started building a forum and with the forum, we just put ourselves out there, we introduced ourselves, we said, Hey, we're Shinji, we're the folks who build the site, we basically want to, you know, see, you know, anime become more popular, you know, we're available anytime, like let's talk, go.

And then in, in anime, at least everyone kind of creates like a, like a pseudonym so we just had a lot of fans who created pseudonyms for themselves, started talking with us, started talking with each other. And then, in the beginning, when we create a forum, one of the really important things was.

Really just a star small, right? You, when you, when you launch a forum and the community is not that big, you don't want to have like a huge forum with like 50 different threads because everyone just gets lost. Like which thread do you want to go to? You want to make sure that there always feels like there's some activity going on.

And so we started with like one thread, which was like introduce yourself. And then we added more. And then every week when we had a major product update or major change to the, to the site, we, we, we talked about it. We said, Hey, here's what we changed. Here's why. And then tell us what you think. And so, and also we asked a lot of feedback from the community and said, Hey, if you want to see what features you like, or things like that, let us, let us know.

And so over time, this was over like three years, we built a lot of trust and with the community and to the point where at the, at, at the, at the moment when we made the cutover from UGC into completely premium, we, we had like two factions, almost one faction was like, I'm just here for the streaming.

They're removing everything. These guys suck. I'm out of here. And then the other faction was like, well, you have to believe in these guys. Like, you know, they like, they're, they're trying to do something really good for the industry. I believe in it. I think it was a mission worthwhile. Yeah. Don't just leave.

Come back. It's going to keep getting better from this point on. And then there were like basically trying to convince each other or, you know, other people who are in the middle that, okay, like this is kind of the thing that you want to, you want to, you want to keep coming back to because it's only going to get better.

And so I think the power of community really is something that. You have to make a lot of investment and start small and grow over a long period of time, but if you do, then it's like the most powerful thing in the world.

Aaron: I love it. One more question about Crunchyroll. The business went through a few changes in ownership from the Churnin Group owning a controlling stake, to Otter Media, to that falling under Warner Bros, and then ultimately Crunchyroll being sold to Sony.

You know, I imagined that was, you know, an interesting experience going you know, through all of that deal making and also just seeing the way that all of these companies that are, you know, really well known and respected in the entertainment world operate any interesting insights or lessons learned from all of that deal making or just being connected to, to all of these well known businesses.

Kun Gao: Sure. So, so, you know, your media landscape. Well, with the, with the churning group, that's actually founded by Peter churning. He was the president of Fox back in the day, and he started turning group as a new type of media company. And at that time we were We were looking to raise our next round after our, our, our initial venture round and those primarily for, for growth.

And we basically talked to, all the media players in the space and we thought, okay, we really wanted a partner who, was really, really smart, especially about the media side, because we were really coming at it from just a product and maybe like a licensing perspective we weren't really adverse in more the traditional media side of the space. And so we really wanted a strategic partner to, you know, to work with to grow the business. And so that's when turning came in and after the investment about a year or so later the Turing Group created a new entity called Otter Media.

And so that was an entity still, controlled by the Turing Group. And except they brought on a new investor, one key, one very key investor in AT& T. And so AT& T was actually a, a joint partner in Otter Media. So our day to day didn't really change other than AT& T, started helping out with.

More broad distribution, like how do we get Crunchyroll into DirecTV? How do we get Crunchyroll into all of our retail installations and things like that? I think the WarnerMedia part was also part of that continuum, I would say, which is as we were looking to continue to grow, what we realized was that with most media properties, especially ones that were looking at like a 360 view of media.

It's not just about streaming, right? If you look at Disney, it's the streaming is just one part of it, but there's theatrical release, there's home video or DVDs, uh, there is, , merchandising, there's the theme parks, and, yeah, we, we, we wanted a partner that would help us across the board with all of that.

And with how one, Warner, it was. It made a lot of sense because they were, you know, they had Cartoon Network, they had DC Comics and IP, and they were already doing crossover between DC and anime at the time. They had home video distribution, obviously theatrical distribution, and so it worked on a lot of different levels, and it also so happened that Warner and AT& T were going through an acquisition of their own.

And so that's kind of how all of it came, came together. And I think, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, AT& T, I think, and ended their venture into media a few years later, and then they ended up selling and unwinding all of their media assets, including one or. And then at that time, and then Crunchyroll, which was sold to, Sony, but Sony is an amazing home for Crunchyroll, because they're very invested long term in anime.

And what I would say is that if you're doing these kinds of deals or looking for strategic investors or potential acquirers, make sure that there's real long term alignment with the company that, you're, you're looking to join first and foremost.

Aaron: Awesome. Really fascinating history there. And, and again, big congrats on your success with, with Crunchyroll.

I wish we had more time to, to dig into even more, more details there, but we got to talk about the games [industry. And so, you know, from Crunchyroll, you went on to co found GGWP with Dennis, George, and Lang, and, and George has been on our podcast a couple of times, and it's always great to chat with him, too.

But, for those who don't know, maybe you could just quickly tell us what GGWP is, and how you just generally went from Crunchyroll to entering the games industry.

Kun Gao: GGWP is, stands for Good Game Well Played, and the reason we came up with the name was, You know, back in the day we, you know, we're playing say Starcraft at the end of the match, you would say GG or GGWP, right?

It's kind of like a, like a, like a good mannered, very polite thing to say. And the reason we, we, we had the idea for the company was We, , after, after I , left Crunchyroll, this was in like 2019, uh, uh, actually I had, I wanted to travel the world in 2020, didn't happen because of COVID, everyone got locked down at home in March, and then, with nothing to do, just went online, reconnected with friends and we played video games and as you know, my, my, myself and our, my, my co founders are playing, we, Realized that gaming was just as toxic as we remember when we were in college, maybe even more so.

And so we said, we should figure out why someone isn't doing anything about this. So we, we talked to our friends in the games industry and learn a lot through that process and, and, and came to the conclusion that there was a solution that wasn't really there, which was. How do you leverage the power of AI to help make, make gaming a better and safer, safer player place for players.

And at that, at that point, there wasn't really any AI approach to this problem. It was. All manual, if you saw something, that's right, 2020, if you saw something, you report it, and then maybe someone in customer support might see your, your, your complaint, and then they have to dig through chat logs to see what's going on, and then this is, would be like, I don't know, a week later, and then the person who maybe was shouting the obscenity, they probably already forgot about the incident, and, and so, like, it's just really, really complicated to, to have humans do it, and it isn't happening millions and millions of times every single day across, you know, some of the biggest games.

And at that point, we were like, okay, well, why don't we, we build something in this space where we use AI to create fundamentally a different approach that we think will solve or help solve, , solve this problem for the, for the industry. And so that's kind of how, you know, we came about, we came about this again, maybe solving a bit of our own problem, which is.

So to not get, not get, you know, harassed ourselves in, in, in games.

Aaron: No, I think a lot of people would agree with that problem. So I want to, you know, zoom out a little bit here, and just kind of talk about you as an entrepreneur, since you, you know, by this point, you had. Experienced, you know, founding and selling a couple of businesses.

You had worked in a couple of different industries. How would you, how have you evolved as an entrepreneur, you know, up to that point? In time, and, you know, how are you able to kind of immediately take lessons learned from from Crunchyroll and your previous work to, you know, go ahead and help make GGWP, you know, more of a success out of the gate.

Kun Gao: I think the lessons here are maybe. There's like ones that are on the, on the operations side. So with Crunchyroll, that was my first big company. And we, when I left, we, we had like a few hundred folks, or, or a full time. And just growing from like a couple of people to hundreds of people, like we took a, it took a lot, a lot of learning to basically learn, okay, how do you grow and manage large, large, large teams.

And so those are all things on the operation side that we, you know, obviously brought over to GWP and to Forge. And a lot of that is. It's just a lot of best practice that you really don't know as a, as maybe like a, like a founder without some of that experience. But what, what I would say is that a lot of those things are best done in advance.

So for example, as you're growing really quickly, you don't, you want to put in place framework or, proceed process or, ways to kind of, you know, scale your business in a way that. You know, you don't want to play catch up. Like if you have those processes in place, your life becomes a lot easier. If you didn't, it just becomes a lot harder and it's more difficult to fix.

So a lot of those would be things around like HR, finance, legal operations, and things like that. And then the other part of it is really just. Like how, how do you operate as, as a, as an entrepreneur? Right. So I think that really comes down to your individual, uh, preference or your individual instinct, if you will.

My approach has always been from my background as a, as an engineer, really. And so it's really about problem solving, like how do we solve problems? So for GWP as well as for Forge, we're really trying to figure out, okay, what is this problem? That someone has and how do we solve it? And then if it's a big enough problem and it's a good enough solution, we think that there's going to be a meaningful, meaningful like business that comes that comes out of it.

But a lot of that is just, you know, iterating quickly, learning, taking, learning from the data, getting feedback, and then just continuing to build and to, and to innovate.

Aaron: Got it. And, you know, obviously you're, you weren't the only serial entrepreneur, you know, as the founder too. And so I'm sure the, the damp, the dynamics of working with other great people who have kind of figured out their way of operating and, you know, putting heads together, I'm sure helped you guys accelerate there too.

But has there been anything surprising about building a company in the games industry versus elsewhere in entertainment or compared to the other industries that you've worked on? In the past, or even just about, you know, GGWP specifically and forged to, you know, being more B2C versus or more B2B versus B2C,

Kun Gao: So with Crunchyroll, even though it looks like a B2C business, which it is, we are still acting as a bit of a middleman almost, right? Because we have to go convince the licensors why we should get their license. And why we should be the ones to distribute it. And it's kind of reversed from, from maybe, maybe us, but in Japan, if you're the licensor, you're the one that, you're, you're, you're, you're the seller, but you're the one that has more control if you, if you will.

And so it's actually on the buyer to convince the seller why they should sell to the, to the buyer. So even though we're the ones showing up with money, it's not actually. So much about exactly how much money it's also about, okay, what are you going to do for my property? How are you going to distribute it?

How are you going to make sure it gets properly taken care of and what are your plans for merchandising and things like that? And so, we, in a sense, almost did kind of like have a B to B type of approach to our licensors, which is like, how do we. Make sure that they feel, that they're taking care of and their, their voices heard and, and part of that part of that is the economics, right?

But another part of it is also how, what are we doing to invest to make, make their, their, their properties more, more successful, longer term. And then once we have the titles, then we have to figure out what is the B2C aspect of it, right? And that's really more like, okay, now that we have these titles, what is the.

Programming strategy, like how do we optimize the windowing for a premium versus ads versus for free? What platforms do we put it on? What, you know, community experiences do we build? You know, how much we invest in each country versus mobile versus consoles, things, things like that. And so I would say we already had some of that experience.

Gaming definitely takes, takes it to a whole new level because, with anime, there's maybe like 20, 30 licensors you talk to and games, there's like thousands of game studios. So games is extremely, much more long tail, and you don't ever see. Anime hits from like a, like a one person studio, because that just doesn't exist.

You can't make anime with one person, but in games, you could literally be one person and you can make like a break, huge breakout game that everyone loves. And so, there's a lot of really interesting dynamic where there's just a lot more serendipity that comes from the games in the industry.

Aaron: Got it.

And before we talk about Forge, any fun updates or anything else you want to add to the conversation about GGWP right now, like any, you know, milestones you've hit recently or new features people can look forward to wherever you want to take this, just anything our audience might find new and interesting about GGWP.

Kun Gao: I mean, we, we, we definitely have some interesting updates. I. I should probably defer this to George and Dennis for them to tell folks about, but definitely keep, keep your ears, ears open. We're working on some really interesting things.

Aaron: Okay, well, let's go ahead and talk about Forge, which is your, your newest company.

And I guess to start when, when did you start it and what's the big idea here?

Kun Gao: So as we were building GWP, we started talking to more and more game studios, game developers and game publishers, obviously. And, through that process, we really learned a lot, not only about what their challenges are.

On the, moderation toxicity side, but also what are their broader challenges overall. And one of the things that we kept consistently hearing from game partners was that their biggest challenge was how to, how to find, how to find gamers, how to get gamers to play, to play their games. And essentially their challenge is this discovery.

And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that. Discoveries is essentially broken, broken for games. So you have, I don't know, thousands of new games that launch every year. Like last year, maybe less than 10 percent of actual gameplay was for the new games. So, all every, every new game launching is competing with every game, not just every new game launching, but every game that's in the existence for, I don't know, the last decade or, or, or maybe even two decades.

And so how do you, how do you stand out in, in that, in that, really crowded space? Now, the other challenge there is games are only sitting behind like a few very select wall gardens, right? You have your steams, your console platforms, your iOS, Androids, and that's basically it. So how do you, how do you stand out in those platforms when you have very little influence over their, their algorithm, their recommendations, even if a player.

 Installs and downloads your game and plays your game, you might still not be able to communicate with that player that's actively playing in your game. You have no way of communicating with them outside of your game. And so, games are really, like, I think, stuck in a bit of a hard spot. Now, the interesting thing here, though, and I'll kind of point to an analogy, is that maybe like 10, 15 years ago, almost every major brand didn't have direct to consumer distribution.

They were all sitting behind Amazon. They're all sitting behind department stores. But over a few short years, they basically realized that in order to really thrive, they need their own direct to consumer distribution. They need to be able to talk to their customers directly. They need to be able to do business with their customers direct directly.

They need to be able to create ways to reward their most loyal. Customers, if you will, and so today I can't think of really any brand that doesn't have a direct to consumer e commerce destination that directly engages with their with their customers. It doesn't mean that they're not inside of Amazon.

They're not inside of like department stores. It means that they're doing that in addition, but now with at least their direct to consumer destination, they have the ability to much better understand who are their users, be able to communicate with them, be able to reward them for their engagement, reward them for their purchase, reward them for their loyalty, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we think that that moment is, is, is going to come for, for games as well. And in the same way that brands. didn't need to build their own e commerce store from scratch. We don't think games need to build their own direct to consumer platforms from scratch. And so we're at Forge, we're building the underlying plumbing, the underlying data, the underlying CMS, and all the functionality that basically allows any game to create their own direct to player Destination so that they can create a gamification.

They can better understand their players. They can reward incentivize their players, not just inside of their game, but in all the different touch points that that player is engaging with the game outside of the game.

Aaron: I like it. I mean, I think the direction of that vision is spot on just because you see elsewhere in the industry, there is a desire to.

Go direct and have more direct relationships with consumers. I mean, you see it increasingly in discord channels, right? Where many communities are formed. There's this enormous wave of, you know, direct to consumer, like payment, you know, related platforms, which, you know, it's just as much for economic reasons as anything too.

But, the idea of building a fabric that, kind of connects, you know, much of these, direct to player experiences and kind of weaves them into an integrated experience in, in one place. That's a big idea that, that resonates with me, so maybe we can dig even a little bit deeper here. I, I really liked the idea of the, like the loyalty aspect and helping these, these gamers not just have a place to build relationships, but to reward loyalty and provide that.

incentive for the players to be there and be part of that, you know, that experience. Could you just share a little bit more about what you envision or what you've built with these loyalty programs? How that works? Maybe an example here would be really interesting.

Kun Gao: So a lot of games will have various touch points across different social gaming, and community platforms.

And on each of these platforms, maybe they'll have a Twitter account, they'll have a Discord community, they'll have a YouTube page for their game trailers, they'll have a Steam page, they'll have maybe like an Xbox presence, they'll have a webshop. There's nothing that ties any of these things, together.

And so the game doesn't really know. the same player is on one platform and and what that player is doing on a different platform and it's there's really no way for them to connect the dots. And so, each platform, there isn't really that concept of like loyalty to the, at least to the game. And so how, how does the game create that direct to consumer experience?

Well, before Forge, they, they kind of have to build it, right? They have to figure out, okay, how do we integrate with social accounts. How do we integrate with steam? How do we integrate with discord? How do we basically figure out how to get a player to connect all these accounts together? And how did all the data plumbing work?

Okay, now, how do we actually incentivize them? What is the mechanism for incentivization? And so we've made all of that super simple. And we've made that essentially self serve. And you can do it with no coding. So as an example, a game can create, essentially, and launch their, we call it a Forge Direct page, which is essentially a customizable page that is sitting on the game's domain page, domain name, that the game can, can program, and by programming, I mean, create quests.

So, for example, a game can create a quest that says, Follow us on socials. You'll get 10 points, which is customizable. You can even customize it. It be points. It could be like, uh, cookies or, or, or whatever, and then maybe 20 points if you join our Discord community. Maybe 30 points if you watch our game trailer.

Maybe, 50 points if you come back here and check in every day. Maybe 100 points if you make a purchase. And now we're able to then not only reward players that are extremely loyal and active, but also we're able to help the game connect the dots so that they can see that player across all the different personas that's engaging with, that game.

And then with those points, the game can then decide, okay, how do you want to reward those players? Those points can then be spent inside, like a web shop as a virtual currency to redeem for in game items. Those points can be, um, used to maybe join a raffle and, and maybe the winner of the raffle gets like an autographed t shirt.

So those are, there's a lot of different ways that the points can be spent as well. And we think that this is really the future of. What, you know, game engagement is going to be about. And some of these things actually already exist inside of the game. A lot of games have daily check ins. They have like gamification for, inside of their game.

But games don't really have this kind of experience outside of their game. And in order to go direct to consumer, when the player is not playing the game we, we think that games should have this outside of their game experience to continue to engage the player and then to get them to keep, keep coming back.

Aaron: Got it. Super interesting. Could you maybe just share an example or two of like the type of teams that have so far been, you know, building on Forge and, maybe just to, you know, ground it and you, you've said a lot about how it works, but, you know, kind of giving an example of, you know, like, what exactly have some of these teams done that, that's worked well for them would be cool to hear about.

Kun Gao: Yeah, We've had games that have that we're able to add through our platform like 200,000 players to their mobile game. We've had games that were able to add over 100, 000 Discord, users to their community and, games that created fairly complex social engagement, social platforms that generated, like, 10 million plus, impressions or social engagements.

But we've had games that were able to basically reward players and generate thousands of, Steam wish, wishlists. And a lot of these activities are really a compound, right? So, for example, if you have a player who maybe gets like five points or 10 points for liking your social posts, now that player's friend sees their social posts and they're like, Oh, what's this game?

Because now it's actually showing up in their friend's feed, then that really like creates a virality effect around social discovery. If you create a maybe like a daily gameplay or wishlisting, And you have a player play 30 minutes a day, plus maybe like wishlist the game and you get, I don't know, a hundred points.

Now all their friends on Steam are seeing that their friend is playing the game and wondering, Oh, I should check out that game because my friend is playing. And so these social effects can start compounding and, and really help drive discovery across all the different platforms that the game is, is participating in.

Aaron: Yeah, that's awesome. And so it sounds like basically any type of game is going to be a good fit for Forge as long as they're trying to build a community of a sort, go direct with players and build an ongoing relationship. Or are you, you know, focused more like you think mobile games are better or live service games are better?

Or how do you think about the kind of the type of games that are best fit for what you're building right now?

Kun Gao: I mean, we we've built a platform that can be customized to handle many different different use cases, and it really comes down to the type of game. Each type of game has maybe like a more specific immediate need as well as the broader need of continue to grow their off platform presences in the case of mobile games.

For example, web shops incredibly invoke some of the challenges of the web shop is if you launch a web shop, it doesn't mean the player would just. Immediately show up, right? Like you need to figure out how do you actually drive the player to your webshop, but you don't want to do it right in the middle of their checkout on iOS, because then that breaks the conversion.

It's actually a worse outcome. If you know, you just say, Hey, like go, go somewhere else as you're checking out. And so with the fortunate platform, you can start by building, essentially like what breadcrumbs to get the player to engage with your direct player presence via check ins, via socials, and then, lo and behold, there's a webshop component as well.

And we've, , started integrating with some of the popular webshop platforms, so that you can basically take in all your existing SKUs and plug it right in, and it'll all work seamlessly, and the player will get rewarded with additional bonus like a loyalty points for check out in the games direct to put, direct to consumer much point with steam, obviously getting players to be active in steam, wishlisting, writing reviews. Those are, are super helpful, especially as games are thinking about like a, like a big launch on, on steam or participating in it.

Like I'd say, next, next best, those, we, you know, have some experience around as well. And then finally, even the big games, I think, could benefit from this kind of platform. Now, we think that, this helps the more of the indie games, indie publishers a lot more because to build all this functionality, you kind of need like a team of, I don't know, 10, 20 engineers full time just to focus on building all these integrations.

which large game companies can support. Now, do they actually go about doing it? It's unclear, but they at least have the capability of doing so. But what we're saying is we want to provide this functionality to basically any game that wants to take advantage of it.

Aaron: Cool, and I'll just pause here to ask if anyone is interested in connecting with you guys at Forge or wants to learn more, where should they go?

Kun Gao: They can check out Forge gg, or they can email us. [email protected]. Or hit up, hit us up, DM us on our socials, or hit us up on, you know, LinkedIn. We're, you know, pretty accessible.

Aaron: Easy. Sounds good. So, you know, beyond the details of Forge itself as a platform and what you're building, I, I thought it was, was awesome how you are building this business with the same co founders that you work with at GGWP.

And I sort of even get the sense, you know, after talking to you today about the broader history that, you know, there's a theme of bringing the band, you know, back together and, you know, working again with people that you. Already have had success with and in the past which makes a ton of sense. But What's interesting about this case and we've talked about this a bit separately is that you guys are not doing this necessarily back to back you're, you're running these two companies at the same time.

And so, you know, just as an entrepreneur teaching other founders here, would love for you to just kind of share like how you've gone about that as a team running two companies at once, both, you know, from a team dynamic and then anything else operationally, I think our audience would be very curious to hear about

Kun Gao: From an operational perspective, what I would say is that Even though there may be like overlap in terms of technology or certain roles and responsibilities, it's always my recommendation, like best practice to, to make sure you segment that as, as much as possible. So for example, outside of, the, the, the founders, we have like very little or no, almost no, no, no overlap when it comes to like product engineering.

And part of it is just a startup needs to run as fast as possible at, at their goal. And, you, you don't want to ever figure out, okay, well, how am I allocating resources? It's always. You know, this is the team, they're going to go for it. Like, let's go for it. So even though we're running both businesses, the two companies are completely separate or, companies are separate organizations and with the founders ourselves, it's really like more like a one plus one equals three.

Like we. Already have a ton of operational experience and have done this multiple times. And so, we're able to be, you know, disciplined about it in terms of the approach and to make sure that we bring, bring the best of all three of us, to each of our, each of our companies. And so that means sometimes we search or, or help with one and sometimes with, with the other.

And a lot of times that's like a, like a timing thing. But at the end of the day, you, you also wanna make sure that. There's like one, you know, one person responsible or like one ringable neck, if you will, when it comes to accountability.

Aaron: Gotcha. And, similarly, it's a, so I asked about how any lessons learned from, from Crunchyroll helps you.

With GGWP, are there any, like, obvious lessons you've learned, as an entrepreneur from GGWP operating in the games industry that are helping you find more success getting off the ground with Forge?

Kun Gao: With GGWP, I think a part of my learning has been the games industry is just incredibly diverse. It's just so many different developers from all sorts of, uh, backgrounds.

They're all so passionate about building a game and they're. We, we just want to, you know, with both companies, to figure out what is their pain points and really try to help them solve those problems. And, and we believe that if we're able to really solve the problem of their problems, then that's where we'll together find success.

And, our, our belief is. Discovery and, and helping games find and connect directly with players is. Probably the biggest problem for, for games that we're working with.

Aaron: Got it. Super interesting. We're, we're coming up on time, so we can go ahead and start wrapping up. Just have a couple quick wrap up questions for you.

Obviously today we've talked a lot about your experience your, your, your companies that you're a part of right now, but I'm curious, what else in the games industry are you excited about for 2025, you know, whether just your personally. You know, excited for, for a game or a trend or companies you're watching.

Where's your head at?

Kun Gao: Well, as a play, as a, as a player, I'm really looking forward to Civ VII. Uh, I've been waiting on that one for, for quite a long time. I still remember playing, I don't know, like countless hours, you know, sometimes entire nights without, without, you know, waking up, basically playing, you know, one more turn and then realizing, oh, it's like 7am.

Well, where, where did the time go? And, and that was when, you know, like. You had like a battlecruiser and then you get destroyed by like a whole stack of spearmen or something, sometimes, because the RNG didn't, didn't work out, but we're looking forward to Civ VII. I think. Definitely really interested to see what happens with GTA, especially around how they're thinking about pricing.

If you think about pricing for games, it hasn't really changed significantly in a long time, And, accounting for inflation, I think a lot of games want to see if they're going to push the pricing on the premium, on the, on the premium side.  And then overall, I think personally just continue to be really excited about where the direction of mobile gaming is headed, obviously with, you know, the switch to, but also with just the slew of new mobile gaming hardware that's come out, all the new AMD, integrated GPU hardware, and that's really going to unlock, I think, gaming on mobile to kind of prime time.

Aaron: Sweet. All great answers. I'm with you on, I think, all of that. I'm very excited for many things for this upcoming year. One final question for you. We talk a lot about, and we see within our own business, the rising global cross section.

Of the games industry and the anime industry which, you know, has always been a thing in some parts of the world, but seems to becoming much more of a global phenomenon today. As someone who has built companies on both sides of the spectrum there, I'm curious if you have any big picture thoughts or ideas about it.

What we're seeing here that, you know, helps shine a light on where this might be going.

Kun Gao: I think the success of anime as it's really anime is a medium for, for, for expression. And the medium is incredibly rich when it comes to IP development, when it comes to storytelling, when it comes to character building, when it comes to like world building.

And the thing that anime does really well is it travels extremely well globally. It's probably one of the only things that travels extremely well as a medium globally from, from Asia. And I think we're, we'll definitely continue to see games continue to lean into that. Meaning that your game may be easier to travel more broadly if the art style is more anime like, because that's what the global audience has become more used to. And so, I think that's going to continue, and then I also think that we'll see more anime becoming adop uh, adapted into, into games much more quickly. And so I definitely see there's a lot more crossover between the two.

Aaron: Sweet. Well, let's go ahead and wrap up there. Kun, it's been a real pleasure to, to have you on the podcast and to have the opportunity to, to get to know you a bit better today. And so, thank you for coming on, and to all of our listeners and all of our viewers, also thank you so much for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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