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ENCORE: Revolutionizing Reality: The Digital Overlay Transforming Retail and Gaming with Beau Button
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Episode Summary:
In this special encore presentation, we revisit one of our earliest and most popular conversations. Originally recorded two years ago, Greg Posner sits down with Beau Button, the visionary CTO and Co-Founder of Atlas Reality.
Beau breaks down how Atlas Reality is merging the digital and physical worlds through a "virtual real estate" metaverse that actually drives foot traffic to brick-and-mortar retail. From the transition from enterprise software to gaming to the "guerrilla warfare" of shipping a product, Beau offers a transparent look at the highs and lows of building a location-based gaming powerhouse.
Key Takeaways:
- The Bridge to Physical Retail: Discover how Atlas Reality uses a patent-pending, card-linked reward system to motivate players to shop at physical stores, turning gaming into a powerful marketing engine for retail.
- A Pragmatic View of Web3: Why Atlas Reality identifies as a Web2 game inspired by Web3 tenets. Beau explains why "ownership" and "equity" matter more than buzzwords like blockchain or NFTs.
- The Reality of Startup Growth: Beau shares the "hard way" lessons of scaling from a 12-person startup to a 30+ person company, including the transition from "just get it out the door" to sustainable engineering.
- Community as a Founder: The mental health toll and strategic value of a founder personally managing Discord and Reddit communities during the first six months of a launch.
- The Future of Work: Why low-code, no-code, and generative AI aren't threats to engineers, but tools that turn great developers into "rockstars" by handling the boilerplate work.
Memorable Quotes:
"Building software is not hard. Shipping a software product is very hard.""I’m not a gamer in the traditional sense... I appreciate the machines, the energy, and I’m inquisitive. My take from games is: I just want to know how they work.""If you’re not establishing a customer feedback loop, you are doing yourself a disservice. It’s a blessing and a curse, but it’s essential."Links & Resources:
- Atlas Reality: atlasreality.com
- Connect with Beau Button: LinkedIn
- Connect with Greg Posner: LinkedIn
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Transcript
End-of-Year Updates at PlayerDriven
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to PlayerDriven. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. I hope everybody is ready to go. With the end of the year coming up, we've been updating everything at PlayerDriven. And if you haven't checked out the new PlayerDriven.io, is now fully updated. You can check it out. We're thriving in our Discord. We're building out so much new content. And it is really coming along in a way that I was hoping for.
00:00:21
Speaker
It has been a long year, lots of great stuff has been coming out, and we appreciate you taking this ride along with us for the entire
Focus on Educational Gaming in the New Year
00:00:26
Speaker
year. As you see it with the new year coming in, we're going to be focusing more on the educational side of gaming and and just how you continue to advance in your career. It's been a really fun journey to see what people connect with, what content they engage with, and I'm really excited to keep building it out.
00:00:38
Speaker
Today
Introduction to Encore Episode with Bo Button
00:00:39
Speaker
we're going the last Encore episode of the year. I promise next week we're going come back with either Laurel Hall or Chris James, which is a new podcast, but for this podcast we're going all the way back to the beginning to our first episode ever with Bo Button from Atlas Reality. It was really a blast from the past to listen to this one. We still have the old podcast name in there. i didn't want to take that out, but it was really fun. I hope you guys and gals have a great rest of the year. i hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, check out playerdriven.io and we'll catch you soon.
Atlas Reality: Merging Digital and Physical Worlds
00:01:11
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engaged podcast. In this episode, we're speaking with Bo Button from Atlas Reality, a trailblazer revolutionizing the retail and gaming industries. Bo introduced us to his innovative platform that merges digital and physical world, creating a metaverse where players can find, collect, and own virtual goods.
00:01:30
Speaker
What truly stands out is how this technology is breathing new life into brick and mortar retail. By incorporating a patent-pending, card-linked, real-time reward system into their games, Atlas Reality motivates players to shop at physical stores, thereby enhancing the customer experience and redefining marketing.
00:01:47
Speaker
So we're titling this episode, Revolutionizing Reality, the Digital Overlay to Transforming Reality in Gaming. So first off, Beau, thank you so
Bo Button's Journey into Mobile Gaming
00:01:56
Speaker
much for joining me today. You want to give yourself a quick intro?
00:01:58
Speaker
quick intro Yeah, no, that was the most succinct, brilliant way I've ever heard our business described. So I'm going have to so to lift that from you. But yeah, I'm Beau Button. I'm one of the co-founders of Atlas Reality, formerly Cerberus Interactive. We rebranded. But my background's in tech, not video games specifically. I've been in this industry about seven years now, but prior to that, just enterprise software. And this is where I find myself, mobile location-based video games.
00:02:26
Speaker
Hey, I love it. And first of all, thanks for that. And I'd not going to take all the credit for the intro. I'll give a little bit of credit to ChatGPT and great technology. yeah yeah right I use ChatGPT for job descriptions. And like when these people get on the actual interviews with me and they talk to me, I'm like, yeah, it's a letdown, isn't it? I'm nowhere near as articulate as this that job description or post was.
00:02:48
Speaker
Hey, it's fake it until you make it. And ChatGPT is making it a lot easier for everyone there. and And it's funny, you said you're not a gamer, which is great, right? Because not everyone in gaming needs to come from gaming. But do you play any games? Are there any games that excite you on the horizon? It's weird. So I don't identify as a gamer in the traditional sense where I sit in front of a console or a PC and play the games. But if you look behind me, I obviously have games. I have gaming consoles.
00:03:13
Speaker
um I like to think that, you know, There's different angles that people can have or different perspectives of of any tech, not just gaming or any hobby. It's like I'm not a competitive sports person, but I will watch it. have no desire to play it.
00:03:27
Speaker
A lot of people who like football, they'll play football like me. I appreciate the machines. I appreciate the energy that goes into the games. And I'm really inquisitive. So my my take from games is I just want to know how they work.
00:03:39
Speaker
Um, I have leveraged some of those lessons I've learned on how these old consoles work and in what we're doing, you know, today at Atlas Reality, but I don't really play a whole lot of games. Uh, I think it's pretty sad if I said my favorite game is Excitebike on the Nintendo.
00:03:54
Speaker
Um, and I don't mean like bracing the the dirt bikes. I like building the courses. That's all I liked. I remember as a child just going home and building courses. I'd run through it once or twice and say, this was great. And then I would just forget about it. But, uh,
00:04:06
Speaker
There is one game that's a modern game called Teardown. It's available on Steam. I don't know why it resonates with me, but I'm hooked on it. I have a little Steam deck that I bought for my son, but he's a PC gamer, and he said he couldn't figure out the controls, so I started playing with it. But no, I don't play a lot of games.
00:04:24
Speaker
That's fair. you In our previous conversation, you mentioned that you're into hardware. And for those of you who aren't watching our stream, Behind Bow is a bunch of old games in the cabinet. I feel like I see some Genesis, some NES, and the s and on on top of that, you have hardware. You have the Jaguar, which you talked about last time as a unique system of its time. You got a meta quest. So you really are that hardware person that made a transition into video games. How did you go?
00:04:49
Speaker
What made that happen? How did you find that calling that way?
From Enterprise Software to Video Games
00:04:52
Speaker
It's not sexy. there's really The truth is, if my current business partner and our CEO, Samy Khan, would not have reached out to me and said, look,
00:05:03
Speaker
I want to start building video games. Do you want to help me? I would have completely just bypassed. I would have never thought of video games. It was not on the horizon for me. I would have stayed in building custom enterprise software for small to mid-sized business businesses. But Sami is the proverbial marketer and he he has a knack for finding customers. And he basically set up a website, found a bunch of video game development clients. And that's how I got into it. It's like, where's the money? So I did.
00:05:35
Speaker
It was naive of me, but I did think that building games would be more entertaining than building ERP, CRM, BPM, like fill in all of the enterprise acronyms you can. for other people. I was woefully wrong though, you know even though games are fun, building games for other people is not fun. And hence the reason we pivoted from service interactive to house reality where we started building our own games. But no, that's how I got into it. It it wasn't like I had this lifelong dream of you know owning or operating a video game development company. I did dabble with game engines. I was always curious on how games were built, but never really sat down and said, you know what, I'm gonna start a company, we're gonna build games.
00:06:15
Speaker
I think a lot of people probably start with that mindset. I know myself, right? I didn't go to school and think about, I want to be a coder. I want to be a coder. I did take a coder class and quickly scared me away thinking, hey, I can't work in video games anymore. But with your extensive technology background, right? You've had a number of startups where you worked with or for where where it was tech based, right? But not gaming, but were there any learnings there? On this show, we like to talk about the customer experience. So anything you've learned about customers and other verticals or under other industries that played a role when creating the the role of Atlas games, right You have Atlas Earth, you have Atlas Reality, of the racing that's built into it.
Customer Feedback's Role in Atlas Reality
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've learned a lot. How do I condense that into something useful? I do subscribe for the most part to the customer is right. The customer is always right, but not always.
00:07:06
Speaker
I do find myself as a co-founder, I'm very invested for better or for worse, what the customers are saying about our delivery, our product, our customer service. like that's That's how I learn.
00:07:22
Speaker
So you know i am even though I'm a co-founder, we're a 30-person company. We're not that big, but like I have a lot of friends that are involved in startups that have 12 people. And it's like, well, he's the CEO. Why would he ever check his own email? And I'm like, aye, aye, aye. Sami and I are very hands-on to the point where I do manage the Discord server. I'm a moderator in our subreddit community, but I'm listening.
00:07:44
Speaker
I'm everywhere on social media and people are sometimes shocked when I, like, I'll respond to a question. I'm just bow button on Facebook. They don't know that I'm, you know, part of the business, but I'm in every one of our community groups, which there are about 40 of for pretty much every state, just listening and responding. The bad part of that is I know the truth on like why things work certain ways or why we miss deadlines. And I think I take it a little too personal sometimes because I know the sweat that the team and the effort that the team put into those things. And when people like, this is a scam. These people should be fired. I'm just like, I wish you could just come here for a day.
00:08:23
Speaker
And I've actually gone as far as to offer and people have actually, you know, responded to this. I said, would any of you like to set up a call, a video call? I'm here. Let's get on the call and let let me learn and let me teach you. And it has helped. Sometimes it doesn't help a whole lot. But no, I mean, just I listen, you know, so it's like, you know, a circuit. I've got inputs and then outputs. And I do, for better or for worse, leverage social media and like the the sentiment, in the community to just kind of steer the company.
00:08:49
Speaker
um not Not like i was unilaterally steer it. to influence the areas of the company that I have kind of my my hands in. But yeah, just I've learned a lot from just listening to people, quite frankly. I'm not a micromanager. That's the other thing that i don't do.
00:09:03
Speaker
I operate off a trust for better or for like everything I do, honestly, is for better. More often than not, it's for the better. But I've learned. And as I continue to evolve my experience, I'm learning more and more about you can't trust everybody, even though at the surface you feel like you can. But yeah, just I trust folks. So I stay out of their hair, you know, hire really smart people, really dedicated people and let them do what they do best and not try to like influence them. unless you know that, hey, I've been down this rabbit hole and you haven't, so I'm going to help you out here, guy.
00:09:31
Speaker
you You brought up a few interesting points and I want to tap on a few different ones. The first one is that You're saying the user is always right, right? I get that. I worked in retail. I was a call center. That's what they tell you, right? but But the idea is to collect that feedback from users, right? And how do you leverage that feedback and what do you do with it? And then the other side is that you're managing your Discord server. You're managing your Reddit subreddit. your You got your game, right? How are you collecting this feedback and how do you process it internally? Are there different teams that handle it or what do you do once you get that feedback?
00:10:01
Speaker
I wish we had a formal process. um I execute my own internal sentiment analysis and determine, is this worthy of bringing it to the team? One thing I have learned in the last three years post-launch of Atlas Earth is not Most of the players aren't looking at the big picture. Quite honestly, they're not aware of what our big picture is because it's not public.
00:10:28
Speaker
So they're thinking very micro. And sometimes they'll suggest something that when you read it, you're like, man, that makes a lot of sense. But then you look at like your business objectives. It's like, well, those things are incompatible. But Generally, i literally just if if it's something I feel like the team needs to address, I'll i'll bring my partner, Samia, and we'll talk about it and then we'll task it out. Like if it's something that's a UX thing or a customer service thing. um No, we don't really have a formal process. We do have a community manager, and I am slowly but surely from my own mental health stepping away from both Discord and Reddit. um
00:11:04
Speaker
It's that early stage where I just need to know who our audience is. You know, you're marketing to people. You have an idea of of who your what your demographic is going to be. But in that first, like, zero to six months, I learned a lot about who our actual audience is. We're in the play to earn space, so we're attracting folks who probably aren't only the interested in games.
00:11:25
Speaker
You know, these are folks who are genuinely in need of passive income. And we we kind of do that. But so, yeah, there's there's no formal process, but I take it and and we get it into the hands of if it's an engineering task, it goes into the sprint planning process. If it's a customer service task.
00:11:41
Speaker
I do manage customer service, hence the reason you know you you and I, you know the way that we we know each other is through HelpShift, but I don't necessarily sit on it for very long. If it if I feel like it's something that will make a ah difference, um I try to put it into action as fast as possible. It's interesting. you know I sit kind of on the opposite side of you, right? We're typically selling this technology, but it's interesting to hear that many people don't account for feedback, even when they're launching a game. You tell it to them, they're like, oh, we didn't even really think about that. And
00:12:13
Speaker
I would think it would be the number one priority, maybe not the number one priority, but really high up there because, again, I don't believe that the customer is always right. And I know you don't, but we say that, right? But at the same time, if you're not listening to your audience, Reddit's a great place, Discord's a great place, and I think you're probably pulling out at the right time, right? You have a game, the game is working, you have an audience. Now the toxicity is going to come, you're probably goingnna want to step back and let the community managers handle the escalated stuff. But it always shocks me that no one's really...
00:12:38
Speaker
not no one but it shocks me that people aren't listening to that feedback more often or doing something with it i think it makes sense to probably think of more formal processes to build into that yes it's probably a minor thing to think through but it's that's how the game gets used to grow right yeah it's most definitely a blessing and a curse you know like i said about macro versus micro oddly enough and and only oddly because i'm the person who loves listening to the community whereas sami You know, his his approach is he's a game designer. He's a user acquisition expert. He does marketing the way that we're engineering and designing features.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yes, we're trying to balance balance. Is it enjoyable? But we're also building a for profit business. So if you listen to the feedback from the community, they're just they're gamers. They're not necessarily concerning themselves with monetization, retention, etc.
00:13:29
Speaker
um you you you kind of You get inundated with these people who are again, just very narrow, like focusing on, well, this is not fun. Why would anybody do this? and then like Well, the reason we're doing it is because we were able to you know move the needle that we needed to move to to stay viable by 200%. But yeah, i I do believe there is a half-life where me as a founder and someone who's like in in in head or in charge of engineering, et cetera, needs to just claw back.
00:13:59
Speaker
um It became... like you said, when that toxicity, because it's play to earn, we're not crypto, there's just so many things, like so many headwinds that we're facing because of the the type of game that we've built or the platform we've built.
00:14:12
Speaker
um But no, if if if you're building a product and you're not establishing what we referred to, like when agile software development, like sort of became the the de facto standard was a customer feedback loop.
00:14:25
Speaker
if you're not establishing that feedback loop, a short feedback loop, you are doing yourself a disservice. And it's not just about the game or about the product, it's like the usability of the product. So this is very, you know, very heavily leveraged in UX.
00:14:39
Speaker
Build a model, don't build a don't write code, build an interactive model, give it to the end users, get feedback, it just saves time. And and honestly, we haven't done a great job of that, but we just recently, well, we're in the process of hiring a dedicated UI UX engineer who can help us do that because We've learned once it's in prod, it's relatively to be rigid. So if we can get those feedback that that feedback prior to us building it, shipping it, going through QA and all of that, we could save ourselves a lot of time
Revenue-Sharing and Web3 in Atlas Earth
00:15:04
Speaker
and money.
00:15:04
Speaker
I think a lot of that is it's not just game related. I think it's any SaaS platform, right? Once you build a SaaS platform, it's it's hard to pivot once you're you're there. And if you need to make a change, sometimes it's easiest to just create a whole new system on the side and do a migration. and Yeah, it's a pain in the butt. But I mean, at the same time, then you can kind of create that narrative that you want to and create that platform that you want. It's just hard. Yeah. And it it sounds like it's a no brainer. But like, I've also learned in the last 10 years, there's kind of and the only two phases of the business that I'm really experience with is that guerrilla warfare, just get it out the door. We've got to ship a product. Building software is not hard. Shipping a product, a software product is very hard. So I'm learning that the way that we think about designing the product and you know just basically articulating its requirements during that initial phase is very different
00:15:57
Speaker
than the way you need to do it when you're in that kind of like, it's a growth phase, growth phase sustainability phase. Like it's it's just, there's a transition and what we haven't perfected, even in this venture, is that transition from, ah oh we got to get it done tomorrow to like, all right, well, we can't keep doing it that way because quality is suffering, et cetera. So yeah, it's crazy, man. I'm still learning, obviously. I'm 40 years old and I've been doing this for probably 30 years, which is crazy.
00:16:21
Speaker
But every day I learn something. new about it I think it's going to make sense. And I don't want to make this really a game focused podcast, but I want to explore the metaverse and web three and everything that that's being done. So maybe do you have an elevator pitch that you normally get when you talk about Atlas Earth and how it works and how you have the game?
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I rarely, if ever, introduce Atlas Earth and mention blockchain, Web3, crypto, decentralized, like we're not that.
00:16:52
Speaker
We are heavily inspired by some of the core tenets of what Web3 promised but failed to deliver. um Not decentralization. We are a standard Web2 game, mobile only right now. So if you think about in Web3, we went from Web one was access to information and knowledge. Web two was kind of the social web.
00:17:14
Speaker
And then web three, my partner kind of described it as like, people want equity, they they want ownership. And it's kind of hard to describe what do they want to own? Well, obviously, every Facebook user would like to own a piece of Facebook. I mean, I wouldn't mind as well.
00:17:30
Speaker
um But it's it's about having skin in the game and kind of owning your data. So, you know, the NFT smart contracts that, you know, proof, um that's what i enjoy about the web 3 but all of these other things that have kind of popped up these pump and dump cryptocurrency you know scams etc and these nft games that aren't games they're technological showpieces and they're not fun like none of that really inspired us but what what was the inspiration for how our business model works in essence was the virtual real estate platforms that were built on chain and
00:18:02
Speaker
I never thought that there would be ah like, where why does why would someone demand or desire for virtual real estate? But it was very obvious that people were looking for this because they were selling you know millions of dollars of virtual real estate that wasn't anchored or related to the real world. It was a completely fictitious, you know video game map.
00:18:22
Speaker
And the only real reason people were interested in it, at least the only real real reason I saw was FOMO, fear of missing out. You know, it's like this speculative, well, Atari just built this and Snoop Dogg just built this. Well, I want to be his neighbor in this world because I clearly can't afford to be his neighbor in reality.
00:18:40
Speaker
you know we We took some of those things like, well, what's driving people? But we also like we we weren't ignorant to the fact that that play to earn mechanic was also very instrumental. People want to earn something. Now, obviously, in these Web3 games, they're earning a cryptocurrency or a crypto token. And you know what that value is like, it's crazy. You don't know. So we took all of that and said, let's build it on standard Web2 Rails. Let's use fiat and let's build a play to earn game where in essence, it's a revenue sharing opportunity.
00:19:10
Speaker
we're just not a greedy game studio. We make money. You obviously buy things in the game using in-app purchases. You watch ads, or like you had mentioned, when you ah opened the the show, we have our Atlas merchant platform, which allows us to actually drive business to brick and mortar, you know restaurants, gas stations, whatever.
00:19:29
Speaker
And, um, We monetize that very well, but at the end of the day, the money that the players are actually earning is coming from our revenues. This is not like we have not found some magical way to just mysteriously pull money out of of thin air. It's just we're we're we're not being greedy about how we you know basically use our revenues, our profits, really. I think that's such a genius thing. i You know, I thought about it and I'm familiar with the Pokemon Go's of the world. They get you out of your house, get you moving, right? And it's stuff. But then I saw what you were doing and you you had gift cards Jamba Juice. You had gift cards to, I think, Starbucks and other retailers out there. was like, that's genius. Like, I go to these places anyway, right? Why not play the game and actually get real rewards? And um ah I don't know if I'm a believer of the NFT side of things, right? Web3 is still a concept that's trying to...
00:20:19
Speaker
really formalized, I think, and I'm not sure that's the right word to use here, right? I remember Web 2 coming up, right, with the social side, and no one knew what Web 2 was going to be, and then a few months later, you're like, oh, yeah, Web 2, it's been here now for a few weeks, and like, oh, okay, it happened, like, I must have missed it, but I feel like Web 3 is going to be similar. I'm wondering if, you know, Are you looking into anything Web3 related? Obviously, you're taking bits and pieces of it here and you're not going to say Frankensteining it, but you're making it work, I think, in a better way than it is today. But but do you have any predictions or do you have, ah I guess, do you believe in this concept of the metaverse and NFT and blockchain? Or is it things that you just think are fluff right now that people are throwing around as buzzwords? I mean, and NFTs are not buzzwords. I'm intimately familiar with authoring smart contracts.
00:21:01
Speaker
I love... from a tech perspective, you know how would I do that with just a standard relational database in a silo in my own private cloud, like the transparency and the the public you know scrutiny,
NFT Interoperability and User Experience Focus
00:21:17
Speaker
that's brilliant. If you've got something that demands that level of transparency and you know let's say you do need the decentralization aspect of it, I'm less concerned about decentralization as it relates to like,
00:21:29
Speaker
governments and foreign, you know, po like that doesn't, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. And, you know, i it is what it is. But from like ah a software development perspective, distributed computing descent, like those two things make a lot of sense. To answer the question, though, is smart contracts, NFT is not fluff, blockchain is not fluff. It's legitimate. It's just like when A relational database is introduced or a new NoSQL or document database.
00:21:54
Speaker
It's a legitimate technology. It has, you know, you can use it in the wrong way. You can use it in the right way. i mean, we're seeing a little bit of both right now. I'm not convinced that the way that games are being built on the chain right now is is the right way. I've seen a few companies that i think are heading in the right way. And I'd like to think that Sami and I and our team are also heading in the right way because we spent probably the last nine months working on.
00:22:17
Speaker
And it sounds as a software engineer, as an entrepreneur, I like to just create things. But I've learned and and and starting and winding down businesses, you do have to protect it. So we've been working with several patent attorneys on patenting, like how we think. And NFT should be leveraged in not just one game in multiple games like this promise of interoperability is just no one's achieved it. And quite frankly, the approaches that we're seeing are just unsustainable, unrealistic. So Sami and I have kind of come up with a way that I think is going to allow that to work. And we are going to introduce a game, not just as a showcase of how we envision it working, but it's going to be the first of many games that do allow genuine interoperability of digital assets that will be minted on on chain. Yeah, i saw I was browsing your website yesterday, and I love how you publish parts of your roadmap here, and one of them was like a MasterCard integration. So all of a sudden, it's not me having to sell fiat or or Ethereum or whatever to be able to do this, right? I could actually hook up my own my own card. and and
00:23:20
Speaker
ah I feel like you're you're a gradual entry into Web3, even though I know you're saying you're a Web2 game, and I love that aspect of it because you're not throwing those words around. You're you're making it comfortable no hey, I'm playing a game.
00:23:32
Speaker
but all this stuff is still existing, but you don't need to know about it. It's just existing. I think most of the Web3 projects that that either failed or or failing, or maybe they have some traction, would have found more success if they just would have been quiet about the underlying tech.
00:23:49
Speaker
The only thing I can think of that that would have provoked a a co-founder to to start talking about Web3 is investment. Like, We had it some of our investors were like, man, you guys should be targeting web three. And I'm just like, you've had a glass of the Kool-Aid. Can you tell me why? and they're like, well, it's really easy to raise money in web three. And it's like, I get it. You know, I think the same the same reason Sami and I aren't greedy with our profits is the same reason why I wasn't jumping in the web three. It's like,
00:24:20
Speaker
I want to learn more about it. And I did that. I spent four months deep dive and just got my feet like it was just learned a lot. And I realized, OK, you know, this is something. But I think the way to do this is to just build a good game and then figure out how we can either transition. And to be clear, Atlas Earth will probably never be on chain, but there will be crypto off ramps in the future. So just like you said, you shop at Starbucks. Well, if you have a Coinbase wallet and you want Ethereum,
00:24:48
Speaker
Well, why cash your money out into your checking account to go buy it? like Let me just give you Ethereum. So there will be some dovetails into Web3 or blockchain in Atlas Earth, but the next game will be 100% on chain. But yeah, it's worked really well for us. The other thing, and like the elephant in the room here is onboarding users into Web3.
00:25:07
Speaker
It's getting easier, but it's still terrible. And what Sami and I have learned from building games, our own you know two successful games, Atlas Empires and Atlas Earth is, first time user experience is everything.
00:25:20
Speaker
Everything. if If you get people in there and you're spending, you know, XYZ for user acquisition costs, but you lose them, what are you doing? So that first time user experience needs to be as frictionless as possible. So if you look at our first game, Atlas Empires, it has a really long tutorial that's moving things and telling you, click here and do this. And it's it's like a lot of the games in that genre of the You know, tower defense or, you know, strategy games, clash of clan like games, whereas Atlas Earth is we've got a video.
00:25:49
Speaker
It's about 40 seconds. We've got a real person. He's talking real language and you get it and you get in the game and then it's stuck. We gave you what you need to get hooked. And it's proven to be very, very successful.
00:26:01
Speaker
that mechanic or that approach. It's an interesting take, right? Because yeah I think, you know again, as a sales engineer, I've been putting more videos out there to my team. Like people just want to watch short videos, right? Don't go make a 15 minute video about a demo, right? Do a short, less than a minute clip on how to do something and people will eat that up, right? And I think the TikTok makes much more sense.
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah. It's that short form video. You mentioned user acquisition costs, probably retention. do you monitor you must monitor all this? Do you use specific tools to be able to capture that data? Do you save it somewhere? How do you
Data Tracking and Automation Tools
00:26:35
Speaker
ingest all that? Yeah.
00:26:36
Speaker
So in in Atlas Empires, we had to build out our own analytical pipeline. So we ingested all of our ad spend, all of our ad revenue. all of the kind of performance data that we needed.
00:26:49
Speaker
We use the product called Apache Spark, um which is just a big data platform. We actually use the managed version of it from a company called Databricks. But thankfully, the MMPs that we use for tracking user acquisition, user install attribution, they've gotten very intelligent. So we do track all of that. so down to the creative, the campaign, the network, we can track lifetime value of cohorts.
00:27:16
Speaker
And we didn't have to write any of that, which I was very thankful for, because managing the game, managing the lov ops live ops, and then having to manage all of these analytical things was just, it was a bit much.
00:27:27
Speaker
But yeah, we do use, i I'm pretty sure I can say we are at a just customer. Adjust is a pretty big MMP out there. And they've really innovated in the space of revenue tracking. It's all in the dashboard so we can see everything. And Sami, he's on the user acquisition and marketing side. I do. I stay out of that.
00:27:48
Speaker
i'm from I know how to poke around and look at things, but i don't I don't personally concern myself with that. We do synchronize every day and he kind of shares the progress, but that's not my life, thankfully. do you when you when you look at these data When you look at this data, right you have concept of VIPs, right? do you Do you do any communication with some of your top players to get an understanding what they're liking and what they're not liking to kind of, again, use that feedback to to make decisions or at least think through?
00:28:17
Speaker
David O' unfortunately, right now we don't actually we we could identify there's obviously characteristics of a VIP we know who our whales are because they're on the leaderboards but. David We haven't really tear tailored anything specifically to gather feedback from them, I kind of think of our discord server as our VIPs, these are the diehard just hardcore gamers.
00:28:45
Speaker
generally more technically inclined, better at articulating like why or how a problem you know came about. But um no, not right now. It's it's probably something that, you know again, Sami's gonna come up with something in the next you know couple of months. we've We've started to do a lot of,
00:29:01
Speaker
we weve built journeys. So there's a lot of automation now as you navigate and progress through the game. Whereas, you know, previously we'd just get you in the game and then we'd send an email or we'd send a text message or we'd send a push notification, but we're using a platform called one signal that lets us kind of map out, you know, where a player is and what they should see next from a messaging to, to kind of provoke them to do more in the game, et cetera. But,
00:29:27
Speaker
No, we haven't really done anything with our VIPs. We're in touch with the President of the United States in the game. He's a a YouTube kind of sensation, but that's basically it. okay we We work with OneSignal quite a bit. It's ah interesting to hear how the different tool sets that we work with. i love OneSignal being able to push notifications, push messaging to the appropriate people, get the right data from it. It's funny when you start looking at this whole tool set that exists in not just the gaming world, but we focus a lot on gaming, obviously. like Adjust something we deal with a lot, OneSignal. There's so many different platforms. As someone that likes technology, right it's it's a fun place to see what can speak to what, what stories you can tell. Yeah, the interoperability is really what I'm excited about. A lot of these tools are starting to operate in a more open fashion instead of in these walled gardens.
00:30:14
Speaker
So the the data, like when a player does something in our game, we basically synchronize with one signal. So you know if they've opted in to push notifications or SMS,
00:30:26
Speaker
Steininger, About a year ago we purchased the short code, so we can directly message at high rates to our customers. Chris The open rates on SMS or texts are way higher than push obviously way higher than email so they're way more effective at getting people into the game at specific times like when we have events but. Yeah, I'm i'm a big fan of OneSignal. Their journey journey product is a visual, it's a canvas. And and basically someone like Sami, who's you know reasonably technical, but he's not an engineer, he can go in there and basically design whatever he wants. He doesn't need to come to me and say, hey, when somebody buys their 10th piece of land, I want to send them a push notification or I want to send them an in-app message that directs them to the shop or anything. He can do all that himself, which is really helpful because it allows him to experiment without kind of,
00:31:13
Speaker
distracting the engineering team Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. um Backing up a minute, right? You you managing your Discord server, managing your your subreddit. What kind of toll does that take on a human, right? Obviously, there's some good stuff on there, right? You see all the good stuff, but like, what's a day like? You're just monitoring the flow, see what's coming in. If someone seems pissed off, you go you go work with them. is there it's's It's a lot of data, right? And how do you handle that?
00:31:37
Speaker
Oof. So I'm sitting in front of a Samsung Odyssey ARC It's, I think it's a 57 inch curved monitor and I've got it broken out into nine individual screens. So there's Discord, there's Reddit.
00:31:53
Speaker
I also use a desktop client for, a it's hard to describe what it is, it's called Ram Box. Basically it allows you to use web mail or any web application in a way that makes it feel more inherently desktop oriented.
00:32:06
Speaker
But it does take a toll, I'm not gonna lie. um my my attention span, like having all of this information in front of me is useful. But, uh, like I mentioned a moment ago, I've had to claw that back.
00:32:20
Speaker
There was about nine months from launch until, you know, when we, we had traction out the door, which was great, but like we were still troubleshooting. We had a lot of, ah performance issues. So I just needed to know what the community was saying so I could be on top of it. But, um,
00:32:37
Speaker
it really did. I can't say it put me into a depressive state, but I also can't say that it it it didn't. I was going through a phase where I was just like, ah know something's wrong and I can't quite pinpoint what it is.
00:32:50
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure it's the emotional rollercoaster that having all this information just thrown at me. I designed the system where it was a push system. So all of these alerts and notifications, I had discord on my phone. I was just like,
00:33:04
Speaker
holy hell, like I just, I need to take a break from this. And I did. And honestly, my mood, my energy, like everything just kind of came back to where it was. And i was like, I would have never thought that could that could create or manifest itself as a physical health issue, but it certainly did. So yeah, it's not for the faint of heart. I don't necessarily suggest everybody go in there and you just just own those things.
00:33:25
Speaker
It was important to me to own it, but now I know for the next, you know, kind of a I guess game rebuild, I'll be involved to a certain point when i start to get that that sensation. All right, I'll back away from it.
00:33:36
Speaker
If you look back in your history, right, again, technologists moving to gaming.
Reflections on Business Perseverance and Challenges
00:33:40
Speaker
If you could look back at yourself, Beau, in the last six months to year, would have you done anything different? Would have you approached a problem that you had differently? Would have different decision or do you just live with your choices and then pivot from there?
00:33:52
Speaker
That's a good one. I mean, I think most people who are familiar with the technical problems that Atlas Earth had, they probably would suspect I would say, yeah, I bet he would do something very different.
00:34:07
Speaker
To be quite honest with you, we wouldn't be here if I would have gone back and done anything different. I'll never second guess those decisions. I pride myself on delivering. I can't say it's going to be, you know, it's like a pilot.
00:34:19
Speaker
As long as you're landed like you're good it's not all going to be smooth, but I guarantee I'll land it. I've never missed the landing, but it has been i mean some of them are rocky but like perseverance like people they lose a lot of faith on not one of those people like obviously.
00:34:36
Speaker
problems, they're not good, the optics, they're not good, but you just have to stay headstrong and say, all right, we're gonna work through this. Like this is yet just one more thing. So I just treat all of those things as as lessons. you know I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot from those painful moments where your production environment is literally on fire and Reddit is is telling you that you should jump off a cliff. It's like, yeah, some people might buckle under pressure, but I just took that as an opportunity to figure out, well, where did we kind of go wrong And more often than not, it's not so much that we could have done things differently because, yeah, if we would have started the game development lifecycle and we had $100 million, dollars I would have hired more engineers.
00:35:16
Speaker
But the fact is, is we didn't have $100 million, you know, dollars in the bank. So I hired the people that I could afford, that passed all of my checks and I interviewed. So I couldn't have done anything different, honestly. So, yeah, I mean, now the next one, I will approach it slightly different, but I wouldn't say i would ever go back and change anything. I'm here.
00:35:37
Speaker
As a CTO founder, how do you keep organization of your thoughts? Are you a OneNote user? Are you a Drive user? Do you take notes? You just keep everything in there i hope that you remember when it's time. Is there is there a system that you have?
00:35:51
Speaker
I wish there was a system. do... i do I'm very capable of keeping a virtual to-do list in my head. It's a very long to-do list. If I include the things that my fiance wants me to do around the house, that my children need me to do.
00:36:09
Speaker
I also have an ex-wife. I've got a mom who needs me. I've got sisters. like It's a very long list. But like I said, I always stick i will deliver. I'm only one person, though. i'm not I can't operate in parallel. at At one point my life, I thought I could multitask. But And I was convinced that you can multitask despite every book you ever read saying focus on one thing, get it done, move on to the next, do it in serial.
00:36:33
Speaker
um The truth is, is you have to do it in serial. There's just no way. i't I haven't met anybody. I know some people are convinced, but Yeah, I use, ah oddly enough, it's a very simple application. It's called Microsoft To-Do.
00:36:47
Speaker
It's not sophisticated. It was actually an acquisition. I forget the name of the company that they acquired, but there's a desktop app. There's a mobile app on Android. And anytime that I think I need to do something that I might,
00:36:57
Speaker
Maybe it's not a significant thing that just like stands out. I'll put it in that. But that's that's as sophisticated as it gets for me. Right now I've got about, there's 27 to-dos on my to-do list. I'll probably not get most of those done in May. But yeah, I do try to clear it out at the end of the month and go through and say, do I...
00:37:16
Speaker
still need to do this because some things I put in there then I realized iron well I didn't need to do that but I just didn't want to forget but no I don't really have a sophisticated process I probably should start focusing on that because as I get older it's getting increasingly more difficult yeah i I like the concept of a to-do list I remember when i transitioned from being a ah a customer support agent where I would see how many tickets I closed a day to becoming more of a project manager that At the end of the day, it's like, oh, I got nothing done
The Utility of Checklists
00:37:43
Speaker
today. Yeah. And support. I closed 50 tickets a day here. I do nothing. But once you have a checkbox or a list, you can start crossing things off or or at least start attacking. I feel like you feel more fulfilled inside once you were able to start getting some of that stuff done. And I think there's no an ever growing list. Yeah, I actually read. Well, I say I read. I listened to an audio book that was ah about using checklists.
00:38:04
Speaker
And two thirds of the audio book was about how doctors and the health care industry use this checklist for like surgical procedures. And it really enlightened me on how effective something as simple as a checklist could be, not only to make sure that you don't forget an important step in a, you know, a surgical procedure, but that closure, just knowing that I've done that, there's like a dopamine hit, like you said, like it, it's a sense of, you know, satisfaction that is
00:38:35
Speaker
If you don't have it, it's missing and I didn't know I needed it, but i did I do need it. I love checking things off. Now, I don't aggressively just go through the to-do list to just get those dopamine hits. There are days, if not sometimes, potentially a week or two that go by where I'm just like, I don't feel like knocking anything off the checklist. I need to fix that, but yeah.
00:38:54
Speaker
It's useful. Yeah, we actually, ah we work with a company called Odin. I'm not sure if you've used Odin before. It's ah it's an add-on for Unity. It's called Odin and Inspector. and It basically builds lists directly into Unity. So like if you're an engineer and you need to know what steps I need to do to be able to push this to release it, we'll always show you the same thing over and over again. It's basically an internal checklist for and they're super popular. So it's an interesting i'll have to look at that. We're a Unity customer. I love Unity, but...
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, we we do have our own project management. so we We didn't build it. forgive We use a project management application. It's from Microsoft. It's called Azure DevOps. that got a It's like Jira or at any Atlassian product. But um I wish all of these things could could speak to one another or if there was just one consistent user interface. Because like I also use, like in Outlook, when someone tags me in a Word doc, I get a daily feed, but they're all just disconnected.
00:39:52
Speaker
So if we take a look at it again, in the last six months, are there any major learnings? Like what what would you say was like a light bulb moment that maybe it was more than six months, right? But what was that light bulb moment that went up to say, hey, this is a nugget I want to continue to remember or use, if any of that makes sense. This is going to sound obvious. If anybody who's listening is a software engineer, they're going to just mumble under their breath, duh.
00:40:15
Speaker
Going back to like the two kind of approaches to building a bit like you have to get the product out the door and then like the team or maybe even like the style of project management that you use to to get to market is very different than like the team or management style that you're going to use to like evolve the product and remain viable but uh testing software testing i'm as an engineering lead as a person who kind of steers the engineering team i'm not against not testing extensively
00:40:48
Speaker
um There's books, articles written about testing in production. So like how do you simulate load? Do you spend four months trying to build out virtual users that perform very differently than organic users just to find out that the four months you spent testing your software, like stress testing was just inadequate because the way that players actually played the game was completely different.
00:41:11
Speaker
um But the lesson I did learn from from not testing enough was that You need, regardless, if if you have a date that you need to hit, you know, if there's a ah ah timed event, like some some opportunity in the market that you're like, if I don't get this product launched before this day, we're not going to make it or it's just not going to be useful.
00:41:31
Speaker
And you can't include testing, you know, either from a time perspective or a resource perspective. I could have had more people and I probably could have been able to to test more, but we had a fixed number of people and we just didn't have the the budget time-wise to test. But um I learned that lesson the hard way, very, very hard way, especially with a game with this skill. We we had no idea how successful it was going to be. um But it was very successful, very heavily used.
00:41:58
Speaker
And we ultimately found out that we made some poor architectural decisions. So just focus on testing. and And this is something that a lot of engineers, juniors don't necessarily, ah i can't say they don't appreciate it, but like they'll write code and they're like, oh, QA will ultimately figure out if there's any issues. But like really so subscribe to like a,
00:42:17
Speaker
a hybrid, not entirely test-driven development, but when you're building the product, make sure that everything that you're building, like specifically on the backend, is built in such a way that you can test it. So if you have a third-party dependency, build your component that consumes it in such a way that you can simulate, well, if that third party is offline, how does my component? It sounds like a no-brainer because it is. like In the enterprise world, we would have never shipped anything without full test coverage.
00:42:43
Speaker
We were in this startup guerrilla warfare, get it out the door. And it wasn't that we we we weren't aware that we weren't testing. It was above board. Hey, we're cutting corners here.
00:42:54
Speaker
um But that bit me in the ass bad. And I'll never do that again. So if if someone says we have to hit this June deadline, but we only have four people and I do the math and it says I need seven people, we're going to get seven people or I'm not involved with it. That's it. I'm done.
00:43:11
Speaker
I'm out. Testing. Everyone that's listening, remember, always test. Don't test the production, even though it's the easiest way to do it. um We're actually seeing a big spike in LiveOps, I feel like, in 2023. I know it's been around for more of the years than that, but I feel like LiveOps helps kind of keep an eye on all these different metrics on what's connecting, what's working, and what's not working. and We're seeing more and more companies release different LiveOps products, which I think can help with stuff like that.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah, no doubt. um I think for us, we we didn't put any energy into how our systems would behave if other components that were out of our control went down or performed in an and less than ideal way.
00:43:53
Speaker
So there's a, I guess you call it like an expression or an approach like graceful degradation. So instead of your software just coming to a screeching halt Are there ways for you to engineer your services in such a way that if and a downstream service does go offline, that the game doesn't go offline and players can still do something, but maybe an element of the game is is down? Amazon has this. I know I've used the Amazon mobile app where it's like I click add to cart and it's like, I'm sorry, the cart service is unavailable. I'm like, well, help.
00:44:25
Speaker
Well, I can still browse, but I mean, that's a pretty essential component of an e-commerce engine is the the shopping cart. But it did kind of enlighten me a little bit. It's like, I would have never thought about that if you would have tasked out 10 years ago, like building e-commerce, it would have been so tightly coupled together um that if if one thing didn't work, none of it will work. But yeah, that's it's it's permanently etched in the back. Like when I think about how I'm going to approach the next game that we're building,
00:44:53
Speaker
we're going to spend a lot more time on building highly testable software.
Low-Code Platforms and Generative AI Enthusiasm
00:44:57
Speaker
Are there any trends in the ah industry that are really exciting to you that you you can't wait to either get your hands on? I mean, I know you're already dabbling with some of this, right? But but is there anything else, that whether it be a generative AI or anything like that, that you're looking to, hey, how can I incorporate this?
00:45:12
Speaker
I guess, what excites you? Yeah, so I'm in love with low code, no code, which is kind of ironic. As an engineer, you would think that I would do everything within my control to make sure that the robot overlords don't replace me.
00:45:26
Speaker
But I learned probably about 10, maybe 15 years ago that like what excited me the most about software engineering was not software engineering.
00:45:37
Speaker
It's not that I can't wait to sit in front of an IDE or a text editor and write code. What I love is solving problems. And it just so happens that my medium of choice is digital software. Like I could go build physical things.
00:45:55
Speaker
I'd imagine that the the satisfaction of building, like if you're a woodworker or a metal worker, it's the same. It's like, are you in love with metal? Are you in love with like the fact that you can build something that's useful?
00:46:07
Speaker
So it was, it was something I've always, you know, in the enterprise space, they use these tools called BPM business process management. So it's like drag and drop, like when a new customer, you know, send an invoice and, you know,
00:46:20
Speaker
Prior to me being introduced to BPMs, we were writing everything from scratch. So when I saw BPMs, I'm thinking, good God, this would have saved me hundreds of hours. But then you look at the cost of a BPM, it's like, wouldn't save me any money, but it would have made my life easier. So low code, no code has evolved and it's at a great place. We have a lot, there's a lot of room for improvement, but the intersection of AI and low code, no code, specifically on like the generative AI,
00:46:50
Speaker
and And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert with anything ML, AI, big, like, I know how it works at the the most basic level. But I think where I'm really, what I'm really excited about is being able to describe what I need for a boilerplate project in plain English, instead of having to click and do this and go to GitHub or go to Stack Exchange and like I'm spending, like if I were to create a mobile app from scratch that needs to be cross platform, I'd argue you you're you're at hundreds of hours of just not wasted time. you know If you're a consultant, you're getting paid, but it's just yet more things that you have to do that really aren't fun. So um I'm keeping track of where the generative AI and the low code, no code, or software engineering and specific um are are going to intersect because
00:47:44
Speaker
I think I had mentioned to you when we first started talking, like, if you're not super useful now, these tools won't make you super useful. But if you're super useful now, you're going to be a rock star. It's going to be incredible. So like being able to provision, you know, a mobile app in 10, 15 minutes by just describing basically, I need a mobile app that uses.NET, C Sharp, cross platform, you know, Maui, that has an RSS reader just in English and have the boilerplate code be generated for you. So then you can go in and add the layer that is unique about what what the idea or the app is. So yeah, that's that's something i'm I'm closely following. I haven't done a whole lot of actual work with it.
00:48:27
Speaker
um I do use ChatGPT, not for software engineering, but for more of like just writing things in very articulate ways. But yeah, I'm excited about where that's going. Yeah, I think it's a a great point, right? It's not going to make an unsuccessful worker successful.
00:48:43
Speaker
It's someone that can understand how can I layer this on what I do for my daily job to make it better. And everyone I talk to, I say, if you're not using either ChatGPT or one of those tools on your daily basis to help enhance your work, it's not going to do your work.
00:48:58
Speaker
you're going to fall behind very quickly, right? It makes my emails go from and okay email to a great email. It makes my presentations go from a crummy presentation to a smart, like, it's just tons out there. And yeah, being able to become the ah composer who can put all this stuff together, I think that's that's where you're going to succeed if you can start to learn how to use these tools now. And I think people, I think coding is a great example of it, right? I i can't code, but if I type this stuff in, I can elaborate what I want to do. It builds it for me.
00:49:26
Speaker
It's not gonna make it successful, but at least I can get ah started with that, right? It's it's a starting spot for everything. It's also very useful for learning. The the few times I did leverage ChatGPT for tech-related stuff,
00:49:39
Speaker
I was, let's say for instance, there's a language that I've been dabbling with. I'm a.NET developer. I program in C Sharp. That's pretty much the only language that if someone asked me, what are you an expert? like It's C Sharp.
00:49:52
Speaker
I know PHP. I've played with Ruby. I've played with Python. i can Obviously, I can read all of these programming languages, but... if you said write a program in this language, I wouldn't even know like, well, what tools do I need to install? I'd have to go Google it. So I'm trying to learn Rust. It's ah a language that's very popular nowadays, very lightweight, very safe. And i was like, you know let me go ask ChatGPT how Rust compares or like how would one who's a C-sharp developer, you know, we live in a world in.NET, it's a managed language. So we've got
00:50:26
Speaker
garbage collection. I don't worry about memory and, you know, maybe I'm a little spoiled, but it's also that that comes with a certain amount of overhead. And that's a lot of overhead in some instances. So I went to chat GPT and it described to me in a way that made sense to me as a.NET developer, the way that things work in in Rust. And I was like, well, hell, there's no article on the internet that was written that did it that well. So I'm using it as an education tool on the engineering side. I don't necessarily, like if you said, wanted to do my work.
00:50:56
Speaker
But I'm learning quicker because it knows all of this and can put those things. Now, you do have to fact check it. But thankfully, with a code, if it doesn't compile, there's clearly something wrong with it.
00:51:09
Speaker
And for anyone listening, fact check anything ChatGPT tells you. Yes, yes. It may make you sound smarter, but you need to fact check that to make sure that that it's right or else you're to look like a fool.
00:51:20
Speaker
On the flip side, what trends, and I think I might know your answer, are keeping you up at night? Are you nervous about?
00:51:29
Speaker
Oh, man. Trends that are keeping me up. I don't necessarily lose sleep over trends, but I know you threw around that metaverse word and like this illusion. like I'm looking at my Oculus MetaQuest Pro, whatever they call it nowadays. Yeah.
00:51:46
Speaker
I don't see it and I certainly don't want to contribute to a future where people are at home with their VR goggles instead of going out and interacting with humans in brick and mortar.
Concerns Over the Metaverse's Societal Impact
00:51:57
Speaker
But I am concerned for society as a whole, like the current generation, if you grow up or are growing up with a VR headset or an AR headset, or even take a step back. Like we just had some family in town town and it was brought to my attention that the children born during the pandemic didn't really know how to, so they weren't socialized.
00:52:19
Speaker
Because a child that was born five years ago, if I wave to them, they get all giggly and smiley. But I've been seeing more babies. And I'm a ah baby fanatic. I've got three kids. And it's just, it's an odd thing. I love children.
00:52:32
Speaker
And it's like, you'd wave to these these kids that were born during this bubble, and they just don't know how to respond to it. Like, oh, who's this gross looking old guy kind of deal. But like, you can't, we can't,
00:52:44
Speaker
we can't let go of that. We can't, you know, not, not socialize. So like the the metaverse, this illusion where we're going to walk down virtual shopping aisles and go look at virtual goods, just have Amazon ship it straight to me.
00:52:58
Speaker
I don't like it. I don't think that's going to stick. I hope I pray whatever I need to do a rain dance. I don't want that. I think what we're doing at Atlas Reality, which is building that kind of collaboration between or that what we call that virtuous cycle between the real world and the virtual or the alternate reality is the way to go. But yeah, the metaverse and, you know, 3D environments, that that's that's the one thing I'm just like, I don't get it. And maybe I am wrong.
00:53:25
Speaker
But jen generally speaking, like historically, when those things don't make sense to me, they don't stay around for very long. So, you know, and some people thought the same thing about Web3 because I was very, if you're, if you are a a follower of mine on LinkedIn, I was talking a lot of smack about Web3, but I never said it wasn't going to stay as a tech.
00:53:48
Speaker
Blockchain is here. It's a really great tech, but this, this idea that everything needs to be minted on the blockchain. No, get out of here. Well, Bo, that's all I have for you today. I appreciate you coming on. You had some great stories to tell. For anyone listening, check out Atlas Reality. You can check out Atlas Earth. They're all available iOS, Play Store. there anything else, Bo, you want to share with ah where people can find you or anything in general?
00:54:14
Speaker
No, don't be shy. I'm a LinkedIn person. I don't post much on any other social network, but yeah, you can add me, follow me. I do share a lot of... Lessons learned. i'm I'm talking a lot less about Web3 now and talking about remote work and you know engineering from afar kind of stuff and building teams.
00:54:32
Speaker
A lot of people ask me, what's the most difficult thing you do as a technologist? And I'm like, hire, hire. but Everything else has been solved, but like no one's really solved the hiring problem. But no, that's it. Thank you for your time. It's it's been great, man.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, thank you, Bowen. I hope you have a great rest of your day and thanks for listening.