There might not be a hotter startup in the Silicon Beach area than Scopely right now, and it's easy to see why. The Culver City-based company bills itself as a touchscreen entertainment network, collaborating with game developers and global entertainment companies to bring cutting edge distribution and monetization technologies to free-to-play games.
Co-Founder and CTO Ankur Bulsara heads the tech operations for the company, bringing to the table a wealth of software development experience.
What are the most important tech developments you’re keeping an eye on this year?
Broadly speaking, the cloud continues to provide a practically infinite amount of computing power, allowing us to retain, process and analyze vast amounts of data. Simultaneously, mobile devices continue to increase the amount of data they provide via an increasing numbers of sensors. These two factors, unlimited computation and unlimited observation, provide the fertile ground for technological opportunity. As we ponder which problems to solve, it is a useful reminder that we have unlimited resources at our disposal.
More specifically, are there trends you notice?
Big data: This is probably the most rapidly evolving sub-sector of technology. We now have a plethora (some would say over-abundance) of tools and vendors to store and process vast quantities of data. The challenge then becomes choosing the right set of tools and processes for your organization. Tools that were unheard of a few years ago, such as Presto and Spark, are becoming the household names of data organizations today.
Serverless development: Hardware continues to become a diminishing abstraction that can be ignored. Services like AWS Lambda, or Azure Functions, along with SaaS-hosted application services (databases, queueing systems, cache systems) mean that development is less a combination of software plus hardware, and more a combination of software plus services. This changes the talent, development, deployment and cost profiles associated with software engineering.
Accessible machine learning (ML): Researchers once believed it would take at least another decade to write an AI that could master Go. This type of Deep Learning used in that ML is now broadly available to consumer developers and is being used to solve problems in transportation, genetics and imaging. Google’s Cloud Machine Learning and AWS’s Machine Learning Service are examples of powerful machine learning that is available as turn-key service. This opens up a wealth of possibilities to the “average” developer that doesn’t have formal education/experience in these areas.
Daydream: Google seems intent on pushing ahead on an aggressive mobile VR agenda. Their Daydream platform is one to watch this holiday season as OEMs begin to release the first Daydream-enabled headsets and the Google Play VR store comes to life. Will Daydream finally push mobile VR out of the fringes of early-adopter hobby enthusiasts and into the mainstream to create a viable monetizable marketplace?
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
The set of problems that we’re focused on largely mirror the set of problems that the mobile gaming industry faces as a whole. The cost of acquisition continues to increase, the number of products in market continues to increase, and yet, the constraint remains users' limited attention and appetite for apps. To address these issues, we are investing heavily in personalization and marketing tech. Our thesis is that if we can create uniquely personalized experiences, we can drive long-term retention and engagement. Additionally, the more we know about our users, the better we can target similar “look alike” users in our acquisition efforts at a more efficient cost profile. Of course, both of these efforts require an increased investment in data and analytics, but let’s assume that as a given. With respect to personalization, we’ll continue to improve hyper-segmentation, 1-to-1 CRM, in-game personalization, predictive awareness of users and other user-centric modes of interaction. On the marketing front, we’re exploring a range of machine learning capabilities to give us that edge over other less sophisticated marketers. The faster that we can correctly identify and predict healthy sources of installs, the more efficient our marketing spend becomes.
What are the biggest technological hurdles your team has faced, and how did you overcome them?
The technical problems are all relatively solvable, especially in today’s landscape of accessible and powerful cloud and platform computing. The more challenging problems for us have been hiring, distributed engineering, cost optimization and the usual spat of growing pains for a hyper-growth startup. All Gerald Weinberg, the famed author on the psychology of software development, once said: “No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem.” Recognizing that truth will orient you towards a people-focused approach to problem solving. When the right people are coupled with the right motivations, anything is solvable.
What are some lessons you’ve learned about working in LA that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
There is tremendous talent in SoCal, it just might not pattern-match against what you’re used to seeing, especially if you’re coming from the East Coast or the Bay Area. For example, some of our best engineering hires are from schools most people haven’t heard of, or didn’t even formally study computer science. So be open and adaptable in your hiring, and look at trajectory, drive and talent.
Lastly, expect to travel to the Bay either to raise funds or to hunt down some talent. As rental prices rise astronomically in the Bay, it gets easier and easier to poach ;)
What do you look for when hiring employees?
Technical skill and cultural fit form the usual tag-team, and we’re rigorous on both. It doesn’t matter how good you are technically, you have to be the right fit for our team and company culture, and vice-versa. But the other thing we look at is trajectory. Accomplishments in a vacuum are not as important as accomplishments in the context of a rate of time. We like to see candidates that have a rocket ship trajectory. Our company grows quickly, we need people that can grow just as fast.
What else do you want the LA startup community to know about what you’re working on?
Scopely is a different kind of mobile publisher. We’re building a publishing platform that can publish any type of mobile game, and pairing that with a network of genre-specific world-class developers from around the globe. We have one of the most exciting slates of games upcoming in mobile gaming and we’ve been able to achieve that by this distributed development model that allows us to pair the right IP with the right gaming studio.
This combination of platform and games means we’re working on a very wide range of problems, everything from big data and analytics, hyper-segmentation, anti-cheat systems, matchmaking and the classic set of traditional gaming problems. That is: we solve general computer problems, not just gaming problems.
Image via Scopely
