Pim de Witte, founder and CEO of Medal, joins Aaron Bush to discuss his journey building a leading platform for capturing and sharing gaming moments. From running Soulsplit (the most popular Runescape private server) as a teenager to navigating early pivots at Medal, Pim shares what sparked his entrepreneurial path, how Medal evolved from a game studio into a social content ecosystem, and what drove the platform’s explosive and enduring growth over the past several years.
The conversation also dives into how Medal continues to scale, adapt, and innovate. Pim opens up about founder lessons, moving with high velocity, the future of digital content, the role of M&A in Medal’s success, and what it’s now like running two companies. Whether you want to learn from an incredible founder or better understand the world of online gaming content, this is a wide-ranging conversation worth your time.
We’d like to thank Neon – a merchant of record with customizable webshops optimized for conversion – for making this episode possible! Neon is trusted by some of the biggest names in gaming and can help you sell direct without the typical overhead.
We’d also like to thank TikTok for making this episode possible. Whether you’re launching or scaling, TikTok supports full-funnel growth with creative impact, always-on engagement, and advanced measurement.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Aaron: Hi everyone. I'm your host today, Aaron Bush, and I'm delighted to be joined by Pim de Witte, the founder and CEO of Medal. For those who don't know, Pim started Medal eight years ago and the company has grown and flourished as an ecosystem for clipping, editing and sharing gaming moments, which has been a tremendously prescient fit for today's era of short form videos.
We're gonna chat about how Pim built Medal, lessons learned along the way, and how he is thinking about the future. It's gonna be a great hour, so Pim, thank you so much for hopping on the pod today.
Pim: Thank you. As a longtime reader of the newsletter, I appreciate it, and I’m glad to be here.
Aaron: Awesome. Well, before we really dive into Medal, I want to, you know, spend some time kind of going back into the past, but I guess before we, we get started, is there anything you just want our audience to know?
Pim: , Yeah. So I, I have Tourette’s, so sometimes I twitch my eyes and do things that you'll, you'll notice and it's, yeah, you, you'll, you'll notice it throughout the call, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum.
Aaron: Yeah, no, it's all good. But appreciate the, the note. Yeah. Um, so I guess, I mean, really where I, I wanna start this conversation is with your, your first business which I think is super fascinating. So at 14 you started Soul Split, which became the largest private server on Scape and a legitimate business. And I'd love to hear more about this story in part because I think I turned out of Scape for the reasons you started your server. And, and also I'm just like curious what it was like running a business as a teenager. Would love to hear this story a bit more.
Pim: Yeah. So, naturally also kind of comes back to the fact, 'cause I've trust, I did, I got bullied lot in school. So like, my whole life was basically on the internet. 'Cause that was like the only place where like you were not, you know, different. And I, uh, so I got really, really good at Scape, right?
It was like one of the top players, I had like a YouTube account with like loads of loads of subscribers and, and then it took away like the wilderness and it took away like free trade, which is like, I, I think like super intrinsic to the game. Yep, And like shortly after that I got into, like essentially reverse engineering it, but it, it's, it's less complicated than it sounds.
There's, there's like all these communities that are basically built around people doing this. So like, there's like, and a lot of like really, really helpful people that like teach you how this works. And, and so I got into some of those communities because I was trying to basically run these servers with some friends so we could have those things again.
And then that hobby got a little bit out of control, I would say. I think, uh, by the time I was, so I learned how to program through this as well. I mean, I'd done some like websites and stuff before that, but this is like. Especially for, for games, this, this reverse engineering clients and building servers is kind of where you get the fundamentals, right?
And so I got into this scene very, very young, 13 or 14, and got really good. I, I think building the types of servers that people really, really like. I wouldn't say it wasn't necessarily like the best engineer. I, I don't think that was the case. I think I just had like a really good idea of like what people wanted 'cause I was such a big player of the game and so I just built those things. Right? The, the thing about like, the thing people don't know, like social was like my fixed server. I had launched like five that just completely failed. Nobody cared. Like it was like 10 players online or like five players online or something like that.
The only reason why, and it, and this is like big product lesson for me, the only reason why it worked is because when Scape launched the ancient prayer book, um, like the Soul Split Curse Turmoil, right? This was like a complete meta shift in the game. And so this was like one of the first updates after the removal of the World Earth and stuff that people really, really, really liked.
Right? And, um. So, I realized that like I had to get that into the server, but everybody else was like trying to reverse engineer like the animations and they were trying to reverse engineer the textures. And, and I just decided to, to copy paste the, the textures or the animations. And so I like, for instance, like the,like I just, the, the Sarah Doman sword animation where the thunder comes outta the sky. Like, I literally just like that, there's like, I found the closest VFX and animations that I could from what was already in the game. Because again, I, I played it so much. And I just copy and pasted the sprites and coded all the, the, the game effects into like the logic.
And I launched it before anybody else, and I just said that was it. Right. That worked like that. That was basically the moments where my, and then I named it Soul Split because I was like, well, okay, if this is what people care about, like Soul Split was like the number one like curse that people really, really liked.
Aaron: Yeah.
Pim: So, that, that was a good lesson that I still take with me. But it basically just meant that the simplicity and speed of doing that and like not getting all the details right, was the reason why it became so big. Because that basically become like a black hole event in like the, the privacy work community.
Because it basically every single, nobody else had it. And then we did it and everybody else made fun of us for it. At first they were like, oh, these people just like ripped it like some strange way and like, it's not real. And like, but the players didn't care. Like all, everyone was trying to, you know, put us down for it, but like, I saw my numbers go up and I was like, that's fine.
And then eventually we owned like 60% of the markets. Um, and then I think after that we just didn't screw it up,
Aaron: So yeah. That's awesome. I, I'm curious like on a more personal level, like how did, how did this change your life? Like, did you become like suddenly like cool? At school, were people trying to like bribe you to get things in the game? Like Yeah. Like how does, how did all that go?
Pim: So this is actually, this has happened once. So, yeah. A lot of people at my school played the server. I didn't necessarily become cool because of it, but what kind of happened is like. I, I once, when I, so I'm from Netherland, so I ride my bike from and to school.
And one time when I left the, the, the, the bike stand, a bunch of like bully kids came to my, came to my bike and they like locked. So, so they put like their, their, their two legs over, like the front of my bike, so you can't really steer or drive anymore. And then they, they grouped around me and then they were, they maybe like spawn them stuff and give it to them.
And which is like, I mean, by the way, like the other thing is at this point, like I'm a pretty big guy, right? So like this wasn't necessarily like I'm, I'm scared thing. Also, like I knew that after I got home, I could just revert to our accounts so but, uh, but, so, but, but like, yeah, it, it's like, it's like some, it was an interesting like, shift for life.
I was very, very lucky that a lot of my closest friends I made during elementary school and, and the irony of this whole situation is that by the time I was 18 years old, and like this progressed a little bit further, most of the people that tried to bully me than applied for jobs at my company.
And, and a lot of like, you know, and I think, that was an interesting sort of experience. I, you know, like time passes and I actually hired some of them. And, but it was, it is, it is an interesting sort of lesson about. I, I think like my way of, I think as teenagers, everybody's just trying to like build some form of status and I think for me, I was just doing that on the internet.
And then once that hit, I think that kind of transferred into like a lot of other things. Um, I did get to the point to where I didn't really love living in the Netherlands anymore for this reason. Because like everybody kind of like knew how much like money was being made and like, things like that.
Everybody was like rumors. These are all kids, right? Yeah. And I was a kid and so I didn't really have like a super normal life. So I moved to London when I was pretty young. Um. Then to the US.
Aaron: Gotcha. Well I could honestly spend the whole hour just, just digging into this. I missed old school Scape. Yeah. And, and stuff too, but
Pim: Yeah, Jagex, if you're listening, I will reopen Soul Split.
Aaron: There you go. Jagex send, and I will give you all of it. Just send me a note. Take him up on this. I'm sure we got someone from Jagex listening.
Pim: Yeah, exactly. I'll let people host it themselves and give you a cut.
Aaron: There you go. So we do need to spend most of this conversation on, on Medal, but one final question here just to kind of close out the story. Maybe you could just kind of tell us like how and why did you eventually wind it down and, and more generally, like how did this experience making private servers shape your trajectory as an entrepreneur?
Pim: Yeah. So, I can't, obviously still, I can't say too much about like the shutdown, like what I'll say, it was very amicable. Everyone has like their reasons and I think, uh, the truth is this thing set me up for life, right? In terms of like skills and, and so I, I, it, it basically like, so I spent three years after this working for doctors have orders 'cause I didn't need to make money, right?
I could literally just go work on what I wanted to. And uh, so it set me up for life in that way. And I think I, I'm super grateful. The shutdown itself was like rough, right? I think you, you can kind of read the leafs, like Jagex got sold at some point during that period, right? And so, sort of the, the, the opinions and everything changed.
You know, I'll, I'll leave it at that. And I think like the people that I, brand like Jagex are, are, are like incredible. Phil is incredible. So, yeah, I, I also have a good relationship with them now. But yeah, I mean we also got really big, right? And I think like if you're a company like Scape, then you, you, your Jagex, you have to, you have to protect your shareholders and you have to do what you gotta do.
Aaron: Makes sense. Yeah. So I guess, just going forward to, to Medal, you started Medal eight years ago, so you've been working on it, for a while at this point. And, I believe you started it as a mobile game studio and, you know, and soon pivoted it into to being, you know, the, the tooling and platform company that it ultimately became.
I'm curious like, like what were, what were you making initially and what exactly did you see when making games that led to such a big change in direction?
Pim: So, a few things. One, I did not like, just personally, did not enjoy making games. And the main reason for this was, it's very, like as a games company, you have to basically grind to hit.
A breakout, which is not all skill, right? It's like unlike a platform like platforms, it's like you're compounding every day, right? Like you're compounding, the users go up, they're using it across every game, right? With video games, you just have like a flash in the pan and then kind of it's assumed that then after it goes away and you focus on the next thing, which I didn't like that way of living life, which is I think that that's like if I, if I truly boil down to it. Games are extremely necessary, obviously, but for me personally, I, I, it, it felt not like the right fit for me to do that, even though I loved video games. And I just wanted to know that, like what I was working on, 'cause, and also like for context, right? I had just come from doctor sub orders.
I had just come from like very like critical like infrastructure tech and like, so for me that felt like really not. In my heart. And so I wanted to do something different. And, and it also happened to be the case that we were spending, like, we didn't have enough money to go, like, by the way, and the way you solve this to some extent is be part of like a larger network where you can sort of make sure that your games are being played right.
Which is why like the publisher roll up strategy and what God US is, is being done successfully. I think we didn't have that, right. We didn't have a network. Most people didn't wanna publish. Our game was funny. We pitched Supercell on the idea before of Get, right before Brawl Stars came out and there was like, dual joysticks will never work. Like this will never be a thing. It's only a thing in China. Like people, like we were actively, like people didn't want to touch our game. Even though like we actually still have a build internally, we like really we listed as one of the fun perks to work here. Yeah. And, yeah, so, so that, and then as, and then we, so we realized that the Deco Center just stacked against us and we actually got pretty good day one retention. We didn't have enough money to acquire users for day 30. And at this point we had already kind of started working on Medal because we wanted to do Medal.
Because what we figured out was if we just have one moment every day where we kind of send this push notification for everybody to Dallas Medal to go play our game, we can sort of bypass this like user acquisition requirement, which, you know, I was young at the time, obviously makes very little sense, but that's how it started. And, so we built, first version of Medal, which was just like a Discord bot that, just like all the clips that came in and you, you could up output them. And then there was like a global ranking that was the first version and people loved it. It spread organically on Discord, pretty nicely.
And so we were like, oh, this is, interestingly, this is very different from the game that we built. And then I, we started talking to those users and, and you know, we realized that the reason why they weren't posting that much is because it was really, really hard to go from like the recorder they were using to their phone.
Which is where they were trying to post most of the time. And then also we realized that all of the recording software was kind of built for this like long form, format and like that just didn't lend well to MeDal. So we built a recorder. First version of the recorder was literally just CPU ENC coding.
It didn't have GPU it, I'll put it video at 24 FPS, which as a gamer, you know, is like not very good, but it worked everywhere and it thinks with your phone, and that was kind of like the first thing that like made it work.
Aaron: And this was like 2017, 2018, that era?
Pim: Yeah. So I, I technically, so I looked it up the other day. I think we technically launched a recorder on Cinco de Mayo, May 5th in 2018. I, yeah, we still have some, some photos. We just, it was just recently we brought up post the anniversary.
Aaron: Gotcha. Well that's awesome. So, I mean, there is the, you know, a popular saying in tech, come for the tools, stay for the network, that, yeah, you know, clearly has played a big role in, in many companies, including some of the largest social media platforms. Like, was that mindset pretty core to you guys? You talked about, you know, building the, the Discord bots and, and such, like, how did you like really like formulate getting this, this network off the ground?
Pim: Yeah, I, so I think initially it's important to assume that you cannot build a network. You have to tie into existing networks. So like, in many ways. Many people had tried to build this type of company before, but it was before Discord existed. And so I, I, I would attribute our existence for like. A good portion to the fact that Discord existed when we launched.
Right. And so, because it was almost like, it was like the, the vector for the growth, right? Like the, the, the internet cables, like they were basically laid. And like if you think about these tools, right? It's all about KF factor. So it's about the amount of new users that each new user brings in. And so if the connectivity of gamers is not that high and they only send like 0.5 clips per day or whatever, instead of like 1.5, then that's the difference between life and death, right?
Yeah. And, so I attribute a lot to the fact that we invested in Discord early as a platform. By the way, I still think investing in Discord as a platform is very like underappreciated. It's actually, I think it's crazy. And, like the Discord graph is like one of the most open, like, and I, and I, I give Jason a lot of credit for this, right.
He, he probably would with suit a lot of pressure for this, but like Discord guy is generally one of the most open and like accessible graph for. For, for companies to build products on. Right? And, and it's directly integrated with, with a lot of friends. So, so yeah, so I, I attribute that like a lot of the earliest success and, how I think about comfort tool.
Safer the network. I think this was, so we use this, we use this phrase a lot internally, but I think a lot of people that get this wrong, they assume that you have to build a tool in the network together, right? And I think so, so, and the truth is that like consumer is all about, like I always tell people razor blades, not Swiss Army knives, right?
So if you. If you do this value proposition, it was like a lot of my competitors tried to do like Instagram for games and like, you know, they tried to like really make this clear. They tried to pay a lot of money for like large traders to join. And that didn't work out so well. And I think the, the bet that we made, which was a very conscious bet that we made.
At the time was very controversial was we are going to spend all of our resources on building really, really good capture. Because what that will do is once we succeed at that, we'll have so many users that we can see the network. So we always sort of described it as a clipping tool. Yes, we made sure there was a profile and like that wedge, like wouldn't go away, but the network on Med
al actually didn't start succeeding until the pr the 2020 presidential election, which was like.
So to give you an idea, that's three years. Yeah. Or something like that. Like two or three years. Right. And, and by this time, right, we, we already ha like by this time we already had like a hundred thousand DAUs, right? Like it was already growing very, very clearly. But like for instance, like a lot of people assume that you launch these things and they just grow.
We actually initially just like did paid user acquisition with like a search and things like that, right. And because. So a lot of people don't understand like, there's not one way to do this. There's like many, many different ways. And like there was, COVID was the point for us where we could just stop advertising and everything started taking off organically and then still the network wasn't really working.
And then the presidential election was this like super weird moment where like all of socials was completely flooded with politics. And so people started all of a sudden spending like more time on Medal. And this was a strange inflection point that just never really quite went away. And like, just like weird things like that.
Like that was mostly luck, right? But um, yeah, so, so I think comfort tool, safe for network, yes. Like we use the strategy, but also like there's loads of tools that can be turned into networks later. I think this will be a big trend of like this wave of the internet, right? I think the way I like to describe it is like.
Habits like clipping, they're basically, the best analogy is they're like interest graphs. So like if, if you divide social networks in, in categories, there's content graphs, right? And then there's interest graphs, and then there's social graphs. Interest graph is where it's, it is like a mix. So like a, a person can be an interest or a content can interest. So like on Twitter for instance, it's a mix, right? YouTube is like, the atomic unit is very much content, right? Twitter, it's like, it's like the person and the tweet. So, so basically social when you're, when you're a tool, right? You have to go up market very, very, very, very, very, very quickly.
But these tools individually are also interest graph. So like it's an interest graph. The tool itself. Right? Which is why you see like modern communities take off because it is essentially like, and I think this is, this is the important thing, that if you are a game, right, your game is the interest.
And so you have a, a graph in that that you can leverage into, into like a wider net, right? It doesn't have to be that you sold for every interest initially. I think this is what like roadblocks did incredibly well. This is what like Fortnite creative is trying to do GTA five also, like look at it, right?
There was just an like, this is the clearest example, GTA V, just like, just realized that people liked roleplaying. Right? And that people liked roleplaying, GTFI, right? Yeah. And then that became a whole thing and that now drives a big part of the business. Right? And so I think a lot of, and, and also I think people are starting to realize that this like super noisy, social media landscape is actually getting sort of.
Turned into these smaller pockets of interest graphs. Right. And I think, so this is, I think like, and broadly I think, so games themselves, game mechanics are interest graphs. And so I think game developers are leveraging that into the next network. So I think my recommendation would be skip the social and the content and like all the stuff that, like previous internet was built on, go hyper narrow. Right? And then just like let people. Discover things with the things that they already like about your tool.
Aaron: Awesome. Sounds smart.
Pim: Yeah.
Aaron: So I want to talk about how you manage the inflection of the business in a second. And, and I, I, I tease this in the intro, but once you found, I, you know, your product market fit. like, just to kind of say it explicitly for those who are still wrapping their head around Medal a bit, like what exactly was the, the mission of the company that you ended up settling on and like, what exactly like had you built at that point in time?
Pim: It's enabling people to create memories while they're physically apart.
So fundamentally, it is about creating a memory, right? So for instance,, Medal is a recorder. It detects when you start playing a game, when you hit a button and it records the last 15, 30, 60, whatever you set it to. You can also use it to do full system recording if you want to, but it's not like the, the main thing we're known for.
And then, you can, you basically, it uploads in the background. You get a link to share with your friends. You can put in discord. You also have a Medal profile that you can share it to. And then some of those moments that you turn public, go viral to the community. And, and then, you know, it's like, there's like a Reddit like system, if you will.
I think initially, so everything can be described as letting people just express memories in virtual worlds. Like I think the, the best way I describe the company is like, it's the iPhone camera for video games, right? And then on top of that, it's the cloud business. And there's, it like the, the social network business, the cloud business is monetized with subscriptions and the social network business is monetized with ads.
Right. And it, it, like, it's, it's quite simple in terms of like how you manage the inflection point. So the thing about Medal is the amount of like, absolutely, like everything is on fire situations, I can count on like two hands. And I think it was also because I had handled skill before with Soul Split, right?
So like I, and by the way, like keeping like thousands of like live concurrent connections in a game server is much more difficult than scaling up like HTP rest services. Sure. So, so we had kind of like, it's kind of strange because we, I think we kind of had seen this before. The hardest thing I think was the hiring piece is I think I overhired initially because I didn't know what like great talent looked like, and I think that was like just a hard earned lesson over many years.
Aaron: Gotcha. So I guess just to put a bit more context on this, and we can kind of dig into a couple of the details here, just to give the audience a sense of like kind of the tailwinds and like what all you kind of saw unfold. Yeah. All, all at once., I mean, obviously you focused on short form video and then TikTok came out, YouTube copied, and it, it became like the new popular means of consuming content online.
Around this time too, is when COVID happened, and so people were just like exploding their, you know, digital engagement around all of this, of course is when Fortnite blew up the Roblox, you know, took a giant leap and so you guys were like facing all of these like waves. And I mean, I imagine like, you know, on one hand it feels great to like be validated, um, at an, an accelerated rate in this way, but like, take me behind the scenes a little bit.
Like when you're seeing hypergrowth like this, like. Like, like how did you grow as a leader? Like, like how did you kind of like figure out how to manage this? What was that like?
Pim: Yeah. I don't, I don't think there was, like, I know in like the movies it's like one sexy moment and like that def defines everything.
But that really was never the case for us. Like I think for us, we, yes, COVID was crazy, like COVID was probably the only time I'd also like what people don't know is like we were almost out of money, like right before COVID, right? So like, I think we had maybe six months of money left in the bank when COVID hit.
And, I actually like, you know, and, and like, you know, as you know, like the entire economy crashed. Like when that happened. And so I called my investors and, and maker's funds, thankfully agreed like within a week or so to like lead the series B at like, like they didn't use that situation to their advantage at all.
They put like a really nice up, round down, immediately let the series B at like an $80 million valuation or something eternally grateful to them. I, but what I had done like right before that is I had gotten a call with my team and I said, guys, like this is looking really, really bad. Does anybody want to, like, get some more equity and like, trade in some of your salary?
And I, I did the same, because we just, like, we didn't know whether we were gonna make it, right? And like I, I've never done this. Also, one of the things I did was I said, I'll make sure that when we do the next round, you can sell that and, and then, um, most of those people that then sold it at the, like a very, very, very nice, high valuation, made good money.
But, yeah, I, so that was probably one of the crazier things. But then meanwhile, right, usage was going up, costs were going up. We had to like, take all the hosting costs, like down to like a minimum. Like we also at this point, like we removed like. Uploading as much as we did. So like we made people having to like, choose what to upload.
We just brought that back because the business is, is profitable now, like five years later, right?
Aaron: Yeah.
Pim: And yeah. So, yeah, I think they were just like every day as it comes. I don't think there was like one moment. Like, but those were the crazy ones. And then also one of the things that we did really, really well is like, because of.
The fact that we sit across games, like we get a lot of data for our growth team that can figure out like which games are retaining really, really well and like which ones to invest in. Right? So one of the things that we did is we called Valant really, really early, as like the next big thing, and we started working with a lot of valant influencers and eSports teams.
And um, so I think that was probably the biggest. And then people started requesting all sorts of features for Valant. At one point, Valant was like 40% of the users. Which then is also a problem.
Aaron: Right. And now that's Roblox for you guys, right?
Pim: Yeah, it's public. So it's on trends on Medal tv. It's kind of like Google trends for games.
You can see exactly how it's broken down. But yeah, GTA five Roblox. Um, but Roblox, it's fine because Roblox has so many sub games, right? Like with, with Roblox.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.
Pim: It’s a platform. It's a platform. Yeah. So that's not as much of an issue. Yeah.
Aaron: Gotcha. So I mean obviously like the, these COVID times, they present growth headaches more in a good way.
But, but naturally, I mean, as we saw across much of the games industry, much of the tech industry, there also was the COVID hangover that, you know, hurt even more at a lot of ways. But from what I have have heard and I think seen from you guys, you guys were Medal, was able to work through that pretty effectively and not get, you know, so negatively impacted by I guess growth tailing back mm-hmm. In a meaningful way, leading to declines. How, what, what made you guys different or special or something you did to, to buck that trend?
Pim: Yeah, so I don't think that it didn't affect us. I think we just realized that it was going to affect us a lot sooner and everybody else.
And so like there was a period, so there was, there was a period and I, I believe it was. End of 2022 when a few things were true. So like we were, we stopped growing. 'Cause the COVID pullback, we knew that Discord was trying to launch a competing product at the time. And, so we had a call with, with, with the whole team and we said, guys, like we have to go back to in person, right?
We have to go back, together in office because we were not as fast. We knew that we were not as fast as anymore as we used to because I think like working remotely just wasn't the same. And then, and then, so we did that really, really early and then very quickly after that, the social, like the connected, the, the, the content, so the content graph started working after presidential presidential election.
The social graph where people actually started following each other, interacting, kind of started working like two or three months after we got back to in person. And so we, we basically just, that was super effective for like games like Roblox, right? Where a lot of people are trying to connect with each other.
So we found essentially like a second leg of growth, like very, very quickly after COVID, which is I think why it went like mostly unnoticed 'cause it felt, looked like just a continuation on the charts. And then the other thing that's really, really interesting about Medal is like, similar to like Instagram, right?
Like and Snapchat, a lot of the time is spent on yourself. And so if you're a platform like Discord and like to be clear, I dunno, Discord specifics, obviously respect them tremendously. But if you're a platform like Discord or, or any social network where basically the number of users depend entirely on the number of other users that are there to activate other users, right? Because it's cha, right? Then you are, and same thing for games, right? Like player liquidity, right? If there's not as many people online because you have less hours in the day to play video games, then there's less activation points. And so the amount of users as a result, because the graph hold everything together, goes down.
Yeah. Even if it's just people, like even goes down. Even if people play one, one hour less per day, for instance. Right. Something as simple as that. We'll, we'll have like an exponential decline effect like small exponential. But is there, and so ee didn't have that problem because most of people's time on Medal was spent on themselves anyways.
Like, it didn't depend on other people being there. Like first and foremost, people love recording themselves. Like same thing about like, Snapchat, Instagram, like a lot of the time in the app is spent on the camera and the lenses, right? So same thing was true for Medal. So we had both the benefit of that, and the fact that we found like a really, really good growth lever, which allowed us to just continue growing.
And I think I, I have to check the numbers, but I think we're probably 10 x now. What we were at the end of.
Aaron: That's amazing. Yeah. And I know over this time period too, M&A, uh, acquiring a handful of companies played a role and in some of this, could you just break down like how you approach M&A over this time, what you learned from, from doing deals?
Pim: Yeah. I think the number one thing that I learned, and, and to be clear, I think every single one of the deals was like a combination of team and like tech and strategic overlap. I think a number of things that I learned is that everything hangs on the team. It's like even, like even if the product metrics are great or whatever, like the, the, the team is what makes it happen.
And, I think like in the, for instance, in the case of Mega Cool, the entire team stuck around with the company. Majority of them are still here. And only reason CO isn't is because she couldn't move to New York. Which like I would've totally, you know, like if I could, I would've opened up an office just in San Francisco just for her.
And, I, so when you, when you find it. And, and so there's not that many people that are into clips as much as us. And so when you find a really, really good team, it's, it's, it's incredibly important that you hire them because, there just aren't, there just aren't that many people that care initially.
Right. And, and I think we also kind of like, so. It was also a really tough market to win, like for us, and I think it was kind of clear to everyone during COVID that we were going to win. And so I, knowing how, how hard this market was, I just, I reached out to different CEOs and was like, Hey, like I'd be pretty interested in just working together and just like giving you guys like stock and like, like merging you guys in as like part of the company.
I actually like people, dunno this, I closed Fuse and Gift Your Game on the same day. So I literally, I flew to LA I met with James from Give Your Game in the afternoon, shook hands on terms. Then I, then I went down to Jonathan from Fuse and had dinner and stayed there and then shook terms with them, while closing my, my, series C round. I'm pretty sure that's, that's what they call founder
Aaron: I'm pretty sure that's, that's what they call founder mode these days.
Pim: Yeah. But, but the point, the point being, right, like I think everybody kind of knew that like we were winning. And by the way, like I, I'm pretty sure that like these were all very, very good founders. Right. And, and I think, you know, like Fuse, I think, like, you know, would it have been like a different go to market?
The editing first, like it was, was like a very, very, a strong product. I think they were unable to control their full destiny because they were like inside another platform. Um, and then, gif your game was like incredible technology, right? Was Engine level replay, but the problem was that it only worked for like single game.
So if the game went down or like in players, it didn't really work. So both of these companies had like very unique problems of like. Had they not had those, like they would've probably been much bigger. And I think so for, and they, they had incredible teams. Like we knew this and so we brought them in the most of the teams, like, so like on the Medal editor was the fuse editor. The, the current upload pipeline for Medal was the mega cool upload pipeline that they had for mobile game studios. And, the live streaming system that, that is in the group share system was built by the team who built the live stream platform for the Middle East.
'cause they had like really, really like interesting latency requirements and were very, very good at this. So it's all about the teams. I think at the end of the day making sure the teams are like talking to each other and are like, you are close with the founders and like you really get along is super important.
And then if there's interest to do something, like there's usually a way to do it. I think it's, it's you know, thankfully the VCs also were, we're quite supportive.
Aaron: Yeah.
Pim: But, and, and then yeah, but at the end of the day, it's all about people.
Aaron: So yeah, that's what I was kind of lead into.
It sounds like a lot of the lessons learned when, when you look back across Medal, have something to do with the people. And one, one other pattern I just kind of caught onto from listening to a couple other interviews with you when, when preparing for this one was, you're like pretty constant focused on like high velocity.
And I'm curious, you know, like as Medal has gone through evolutions, how has that mindset played into the company at different stages and how have you thought about ingraining that, like into the DNA of the business so that when you bring in new teams or you go back in person or whatever changes you're making, that it, you know, it kind of like reflects your speed and ambition as a founder.
Pim: I mean, this is gonna sound like cliche, but I have like three core values that I try to like live by, which is trust, excellence, and velocity. So trust. So trust is built through excellence, which is like both in, like how you treat people, how you do your work. Then, if you have excellence and trust, that automatically drives velocity.
You don't really need to do anything. So if you, if you just literally get these three things right, then like everything else kind of sold us itself. Now practically, how has that evolved? 'cause like obviously I didn't have that clarity, like this was like a, like a, the last few years thing. Right? So a lot of it was from, so Ken, who is now the CTO and president of Medal who came in through the Give Your Game acquisition.
I think he really helped me understand just better. I was originally like always optimizing for speed and I think speed and velocity are very different things. Like one is like you're optimizing for like the speed of coming outta the churn risk with speed, you're not necessarily thinking about that as much, right?
He's a race car driver, so it always makes these, he's not. And, so, I think a lot of early consumer is all about shots on goal and like, and like the quality of the shots on goal don't matter that much. Like, like the, the analogy of Soul Split, right? Like just replace the sprites with the, and, and the clapping emoji and this, the sero domin thunder, right?
Like that drove I think my mentality. I think now once. Things start working. It's also about how do you leverage that thing that's working into more things as opposed to always trying to think through like, what's like the next net new thing. And I think the right roadmap has kind of a combination of the two.
I think you never wanna lose at like new bets mentality because I think that's just drives great companies. But at the same time, I think, you know, if you, if you asked the team, like I think we, we could have executed better over COVID had we focused less on speed, more on velocity for, for instance, right?
So lessons on, lessons on both sides. But I think it is tricky. You just have to like, basically, make sure that every week you're working on both, but that you never stop paying intentions to the things that are working. And how do I define things that are working, which is basically anything that's growing, like at the rate of maus organically or higher.
Right? And then adjust it for, adjusted for frequency use over time. So like if the amount of the time people are using things after launch goes up, it's usually a good sign. If there is a direct correlation between retention increases and what you launch, it's usually a good thing if the thing that you launch is growing faster than maus, right?
That's usually a good thing. And then usually if something's going slower than maus, uh, in terms of like people doing that actual thing versus like the baseline of the platform, it's usually just time to cut it. So I think we just have like a very specific way of, of, of measuring and doing things. And we were also been like super data driven.
So our, you know, for a entrepreneurial is our entire thing is hooked up to amplitude, which is great for this. And it's everything is like instrumented very, very closely. And so that's the ground truth for like most of our decisions.
Aaron: Gotcha. That's super interesting. Yeah., So let's, let's go ahead and zoom to the present.
What, what's up with MeDal today? What's the state of the business like since, you know, since you started eight years ago? Like what are some of the newer things that have been added to the, the platform? Would love to just kind of get the present state view.
Pim: Yeah, so, so one of the things that we've learned and is that the more people we connect, the faster we grow.
So a lot of, a lot of it's like, one of the features we recently launched is like when you just finished a game, actually show you like, who, which other Medal users were in this game. And the cool thing about this is the bigger we get, the more effective this gets. And so what we're noticing is like the more we connect people, the, the more people like Medal and um.
So a lot of the focus is actually, is on super simple things like this. In terms of new bets. One of the things you're gonna see from us is we're building like a very, very AI first editor. Which, which I mean, you, you could expect this like, and you want to interact with things this way now, right?
So,, I think. People want, like our current editor still feels a bit like it was built in 2021. I think a lot of technologies have changed where like, you know, you can, you can actually just like program effect, like an LM can just program effects for you now, right? Using like FF MPAC commands and you can just run those, right?
Securely obviously 'cause you only run the filters, but, um, yeah, like as, as an example, right? And like all these things you can do now, and I think, uh. So editing is a big focus for us. Connecting people is a big focus for us. We're doing a lot of things around working with game developers, so we just got integrated into the first EAFC game in Korea which is like our first like, full in-game integration where like you have like the Medal, like close to home page of the game and it's a cool loop.
So, so I think the, the, the three top priorities are connectedness. Self-expressions or editing, um, and developers. And I think like the, the last one is important because I think for us, it is becoming increasingly clear that like not a lot of. Like larger platforms care that deeply about developers, game developers specifically.
And so we're trying to make sure that like developers have the tools they need to get their game exposed because Medal is the exact audience that you'd want for that, right? Because they're the people that share content. So we're, we're starting to work with, like, we just launched an events SDK, which is like primarily for Roblox Studios GD five servers use a lock Micro servers. We're testing this stuff on servers, but you can expect it to also go into larger game studios. And then basically using the Medal content to connect the dots in the graph, right? So, you know, when you're, when you're on EAFC homepage, you watch a clip that makes you want to participate, right?
And then participate to make sure that you're the next player that gets discovered there, right? And so, I think, working with game developers have like from some of these like really close loop ecosystems that makes our game better is a big priority for us.
Aaron: Yeah. No, that, I mean, that's awesome. It makes a ton of sense.
So I, I didn't realize you guys had started embedding yourselves into to games at this point. I mean, I mean, we have a bunch of, you know, leaders of game studios and developers that listen to the, the podcast, is there like a certain type of game that should consider working with Medal that isn't yet you have any dream games or studios that you would like Medal to work with?
Pim: Yeah, the, the best games are, are multiplayer one, so people where there is inherently sharing going on already. Those are really, really good. The games where a lot of really unusual, unexpected things happen, they perform like really, really well. And like usually so clips do two things. So clips, and we did a bunch of research on this.
When we acquired mega, uh, it basically lifts so per user, it lifts. On the entire user base reengagement by about 5%. So like the new users coming back per day. Because what happens is, you send a link to your friend and your friend wants to play the game, right? And then also it, it increases the, we also measure it on mobile that it increases baseline organic by about 5% a day, right?
About 5% a day. So, so baseline, right? So like a thousand users per month, like 50 came from direct attribution, and then another 50 were reactivated because of that, right? So it's a 10% just base lift. Once you get games, uh, once you get clips implemented. And, uh, so I think that the game, and then, you know, it obviously depends on the implementation, but I think PC is, is sort of where things are at.
We, we always also working on, on mobile things with PC is where, where the majority of the users are. And then, increasingly we're working on working with game developers on launches. So if you go to the Medal nighters, the new game section, this has worked incredibly well. And, and you know, Medal as it grows, right, it basically becomes almost like an invisible game store, right?
Like it doesn't make sense that you have to be locked into game store. Gardens essentially, like if you can just discover it through the clips anywhere right then that's, it's the most open way. And, and most, like, I, I do this thing where I go to conferences and I ask people, when I do a talk, like, raise your hand if you discovered your last game through a clip.
And usually about half the room raises their hand. So I think it's like this large, like still like underappreciated channel that people should just be investing in. And yeah, happy, happy to chat. ,Multiplayer server based games are, are the best, but I think, it, it works. It works for any game.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I hope, I hope some people listening, uh, take you up on this, but I guess even just to, kind of paint the picture of where you guys are now, like are there any stats you can share about your users or clips or anything to kind of Yeah, yeah. Share that scale.
Pim: Yeah. I guess we haven't shared in a long time. I think, I think we're currently have close to 2 million daily active users. Yeah. And it's growing super quickly, so we're growing faster than we ever have.
Aaron: That’s amazing.
Pim: I believe we add something like we add in the tens of thousands of users per day, organically. And average user actually I'll do the, um, total clips per day.
So we just crossed 1 billion clips per year taken. And I think the current rate is over 5 million a day. Just to give some context on how fast that's growing, that's crazy. And it might already be at six. I don't really know. But yeah, so it's like we, we supply, right? Like if you look at like, the content on, on TikTok and YouTube, like the majority of it in some capacity is coming from Medal, right?
Like, and, and like I think also like as we move into, you know, people getting, you know, getting more free time 'cause LMS and stuff make them like more productive, I think. Gaming just grows, right? I actually am not able to, like, I'm not at all a believer of the narrative of like, the PC game industry is not doing well.
I think you just have to look at Roblox, right? I think like game developers just have to accept that. Like games are becoming more trends like, right? And then sometimes you can leverage that trend into an interest graph and like, make people retain. But like, that's increasingly rare. And like, I, so I think like gaming just has to realize that it's changing.
But if, if you look at the fundamentals, I don't think they're that bad. And I also think that like, if you ask a teenager like what they want. It's still, it's still a pc. Right? And it's still because like, and, and, and, and, and that's true because the PC is where you can, like most closely express skill level online, right?
So I think increasingly increasing trends towards super competitive high performance games that are inherently multiplayer server based. And, and I think also like the fact that the barriers are getting broken down with like Roblox, where you can, like the switching costs, like you don't need to download things to go back and forth.
I think that will continue to be a trend. And so I think like broadly, Medal is just really well positioned. I, I think it also breaks the narrative of like, PC gaming is like not a good spot. Like the truth is, like if you look at our growth, it completely disagrees with this, right? And I think the best teams just execute, right?
And they find a way. And I think most people that, that like blame the PC market for being bad, like objectively, it's just because better teams are currently performing better, right? And those, those teams are Roblox studios. So I, I think at the end of the day, we just have to changed as an industry a bit, and I think into shorter cycles, right?
Faster releases, more experimentation, and using all the tools that we now have access to, thanks to ai, right? And more investment in like UGCI think. Like this is obviously where things are going. So, so I think as a result of that, things will just continue to accelerate. I think there's also a bunch of really cool unlocks on the horizon for, um, like, I think, I think actually like what backbone is doing, for instance, with like making mobile gaming accessible is like super underappreciated.
Like, I think, I think we're gonna see a, an in disclaimer, I have small investor in backbone, but I think it's like things like that basically where like X Cloud, like the infrastructure pieces on, are getting laid, to the point where I think. PC content becomes like the base, right? And then the, the places you can play, that just changes, right?
I think we're not far off from like game streaming, like truly working on like TVs and like being decoupled from the hardware. I don't think we're that far off from, from, from it like working on mobile. So I think, and then also what happened with Epic and, and Apple is like, I think we'll start, we'll start feeling the effects of that.
So I think the whole industry is, is as like we get to a GI, which like I do think we will, right? Is going to explode because that's what people are going to spend a lot of time on. And, yeah, so I'm excited. I think looking forward to seeing it through all the way. I think getting, there's no bigger honor than getting to spend your time connecting people who are physically apart, right? And developers.
Aaron: Yeah. I mean, this has been amazing to, to learn about where you guys are today. Um, I guess one, one question related to all this change that I have is clearly you guys were early to short form video and just like that massive. Change in content online. Um, and that propelled you guys, it propelled all sorts of other platforms and, and companies too.
I'm curious, like as you look at the next few years, do you like what other changes in content are you anticipating? Like, is Gen Alpha gonna do things differently? Like, how is AI really going to play into this? How are you?
Pim: Okay. Yeah, so I think that the big change that you'll see is that like people are like, especially kids are just expecting different things from computers, like look at JGBT, right?
They're just expecting things to be more interactive and smart. And so I think, I think the main change that we'll see is, is actually the like in game character objects and not incurring games, like new games being built around. 'cause cyber interaction methods. Right. I think if, if the AI gets good enough, it is, it, it is like it solves player liquidity essentially.
Right? And, and, so I think this is a big change that, that we'll start seeing coming. I also think solving player liquidity, I. Becomes both harder and easier. Harder because AI content, unlike video platforms, is competing for time increasingly more, and it's very, very good at it. Easier because if you can build better games when using these tools, and people are spending more time on video games because they have like a lot more free time, then that same thing that happened during COVID with player liquidity ends up becoming easier, right?
So, um, I, and then the tooling, right? I think we're gonna just see a lot more games get released a lot quicker, and that's exciting. I, I can't for, look, I can't wait to, to play them.
Aaron: Yeah. No, that's, uh, that's super exciting. So, I guess, I mean, tying all this together, you, you've talked a little bit about. How all of this coming together is changing your roadmap and yeah, you know, you're evolving your editor, but you know, like when you think about the future of Medal and you're looking out a few years from now, like what ultimately are you envisioning? Like how do you want the Medal of five years from now or however long from now to look different from today?
Pim: At the end of the day, we're solving the same problem that we had as game developers ourself, which is that we couldn't get our game game discovered even though people wanted to share stuff. Right. And, so, and that, and that is, that is why we do what we do, right? So, if you look at, at Medal games grow seamlessly because of people are expressing themselves inside these games using clips.
And that becomes like a meaningful contributor to growth for game developers. And then, right, it becomes a place that connects everything, the servers, the uh, the, the different games that you play, right? And then as, right as I just described, as people get more productive and, and spend more time playing video games.
I think self-expression in digital worlds when you're physically apart is going to be just the primary way that we do things. Because spending time scrolling at linear feed that is like a bunch of AI generated stuff is not as interesting as like spending real meaningful time with your friends, even if you can't physically be apart.
Right? And so, I. That's where it goes. At the end of the day, this just becomes a massive network and, but the one that is more like the browser and that it's very, very open, unlike like platforms today.
Aaron: Yeah. That's exciting. Yep. I look forward to.
Pim: And also because we monetize with ads, by the way, like we do, we like, we wouldn't need to charge like fees, right?
Because we actually monetize the engagement and subscriptions, right? Like we, the, the, the incentives for us are directly aligned with developers.
Aaron: Yeah. Super interesting. Yep, So we're, we're nearing the close of the, the episode here, but I had a couple final questions for you. One, it looks like last year Medal spun out another business highlight.
Would love to learn the story here, how you thought about spinning out and running a completely different business.
Pim: So it was actually quite simple. We just realized that capture was going to become increasingly important for lms. So language models for those who don#t have like GBT, because it would allow them to tell what's going on.
In your screen, right? And then obviously we separate them for privacy reasons. So you actually send, but it would basically allow, so you didn't have to write prompts, put in screenshots. And so we just understood that that capture the same systems that we had built for Medal were going to be critical for AI.
And I think I that for us, we had already built the most performant recorder for video games, and we realized, okay, we have, you know, we have to do something here. And so I initially coded like a first prototype of highlight where I just loaded the Che GBT web app into Medal and the recorder. I just had it write prompts based on the screen and with one engineer on my team, Karthik and we, we showed it to the board in January and everyone was like, wow, this is cool. So we, also, it has nothing to do with video games and it's like, it's more for like companies and enterprise. But I spun it out. We have some very big news to announce around it soon. Cool. And, yeah, I mean, it's going incredibly well. It's called highlight AI, so the best way to describe it, it's like clipping, but you're clipping context of your screen to central models instead of the games themselves. And everything feels that way. You'll, you'll see it's how you've always wanted to interact with these things, And, yeah, I look forward to people trying it out.
Aaron: I look forward to, to trying it out. But I, I guess final question about this though. Like, at least according to LinkedIn, you're the CEO of this company as well. So now you're, you're running two companies. Yeah. How, how is that, how are, how are you doing that? How does, how does that transition then?
Pim: It honestly, so, so I, the joke, the joke I tell people is like, because I have, because I use it, I get a lot more productive.
And that's obviously a bit cliche, but it, it is actually true, if you ask my team, but the, the reality is like highlight started as an internal team. Medal has five co-founders highlight as four co-founders. The way that I solve it is I set up the incentives incredibly well for other people so that like, I'm not a dependency.
I spend most of my time building things in the company. Like I don't really manage that many people directly, right? I always like, and so the way that we're set up precisely allows for these things to occur. So it, it really feels like running an internal team, right? Like I can kind of show you the, the highlight team is, is right here.
And the Medal, the Medal, you can't, you can't really see it fully, but the Medal team is like right behind it, right? It's like we're all just like one. Like one office. Like, it doesn't feel like really like truly separate things, It's just that like if you're going to go after enterprise and companies, you have to work with different VCs, like different requirements, different team.
I had to go recruit early employees, and um, yeah, it was just a different situation and so, we're very happy we did it, You know, I'm, I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. Like I think for us, like this is, this is very much we're just going to hire incredible leadership at highlight to do. To, to run increasingly like enterprise and things like that. And so yeah. It's, it's going well.
Aaron: Yeah. I admire your long-term commitment. Yeah. To, to all of this. I think there's something. Yeah. And then also big thanks to Ken.
Pim: Like, Ken has stepped in in this leading Medal in, in like very interesting directions. And that's what the, Ken has allowed me to do this basically.
And, go Ken. I think everyone's very happy. Go, Ken.
Aaron: Two, two final closing questions for you, Pim. First of all, yeah, I mean we've spent a lot of time talking about your, your slice of the world, what you're thinking about at work every day, but you know, when you're looking out across the rest of the industry, what else are you excited about? Whether it's a trend or a game you're looking forward to, what are you looking forward to for the rest of the year or so?
Pim: Ooh, that's a good question. I. I am looking forward to having time to play more Rocket League.
Aaron: I, I see that hat. Yep.
Pim: It's been, it's been such a crazy like after, right. You know, as you know, like running two things.
It's, it's eachs way into all times. So I haven't played, ranked in, in probably a month or two, And I am, I am looking forward to getting back in and realizing how bad I am compared to everybody else after the met us changed six times in 60 days.
Aaron: That's the way it goes. I feel you on this. I definitely understand.
And, and final question, just if anyone listening wants to reach out to you or Medal, where is the best place to do that?
Pim: It’s yeah, it's just first name, so [email protected]. I'm also on Twitter, or just my full name, and de Witte, or I guess it's called X now.
Aaron: Yep. There you go. Sweet. Well, awesome. Well, let's go ahead and, and wrap up here.
Pim, thank you so much for joining me today. I, I really enjoyed getting to spend time with you and learning about everything you're working on at Medal and now Beyond. So, so best of luck to, to you and the whole team on everything here.
Pim: I appreciate it.
Aaron: And to all of our listeners, thank you as always for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you in the next one.
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.
