1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Felix Hartmann, Hartmann Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So, I’m going to give the audience a pointer. Actually, quite a number of years ago, before the pandemic, I wrote a series called “Man and Superman: Human History Bifurcates,” which addresses exactly this. It’s all available on my blog for you to read. My thesis was that people who do not choose to augment are going to be at a disadvantage, and now we are seeing more real manifestations of that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Felix Hartmann, Hartmann Capital (Part 1)

Felix Hartmann, Managing Partner at Hartmann Capital, discusses his firm’s investment thesis. This segment triggered an excellent discussion on Human Augmentation.

8 Validated Enterprise Software Startup Ideas for the DataStax-1Mby1M Challenge

The DataStax-1Mby1M Fall 2021 Startup Challenge launched on September 9th. Here is the kick-off video with Chet Kapoor, CEO of DataStax, Ed Anuff, Chief Product Officer of DataStax discussing the program with me.

DataStax has significant enterprise customers that are using their Apache Cassandra-based database products to solve real world problems. They are putting these use cases out in the public domain for startups to build companies around. DataStax would be helping the startups on the technical and customer acquisition side, and 1Mby1M would be helping the startups on the positioning, mentoring, and financing side. $10,000 of grant money is also included in this challenge.

Let’s look at some of the use cases. They’re all related to the increasingly digital nature of most businesses. The ever-growing use of IoT is a good example. Verticals that manage many assets need real-time access to data for visibility and decision purposes. Organizations interacting directly with customers need to ensure they are engaged with the right customer, and they have a digital twin of the customer to drive services and experiences. These experiences and services are entirely digital and depend on real-time data access. Finally, organizations drive their intelligence and decisions by understanding and leveraging the increasingly vast amount of data they manage. Here are more details.

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many games have been funded on the various crowdfunding platforms?

Scott Hartsman: I wish I knew the answer but I’m afraid I don’t.

Sramana Mitra: Is it hundreds or thousands of games?

Scott Hartsman: The order of magnitude, at this point, I would say is around hundreds. I would say there are hundreds of campaigns. I do not know how many of them actually have succeeded and got funding, and from there, turned into shipped products. One risk >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve said several times that one of the organizing principles of your portfolio is that you want the business model to be fair for the customer. Can you talk about this a bit? You are coming from where the customer will subscribe into your games and you started monetizing right away. Now the world has moved to free-to-play, you don’t monetize games right away. It has a gestation period and you start monetizing later. How do you determine what is fair? How long does it take to reach the level of monetization that you were earlier monetizing at? What are the economics of the business now?

Scott Hartsman: Let me start out with the highest philosophical point. Here’s how I think of things in terms of fair and how we think about them internally as a whole. There are two ways to think about the psychology of sales in free-to-play games. Number one is when I pay for a thing, I get a thing that I genuinely value and that I’m happy for. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you are working with third parties who are developing the games, and you are going to publish them as part of your core business, how do you determine which ones you want to bet on?

Scott Hartsman: It’s the kind of methodology you would actually expect out of a game developer because that’s really what we are here.  I was a game developer long before I was an executive. At our core, we are a company of gamers. We love games and we love playing them. So the first thing we do is we test them out internally. ArchaAge, for instance, was in playable form before we signed it. It was more of, “Let’s rally the troops, and see if we are genuinely excited about the kind of game this is going to be. Can we see the success path?” Then we look at the developers. Are they going to have the ability to create the AAA experience that we want to ship?

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there developer tools out there that a Joe Developer can afford to develop on and are high quality tools?

Scott Hartsman: Yes, these are definitely commercial-grade high-quality tools for a far smaller price point.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these are there?

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Rift started with a certain storyline. You were basically allowing people to subscribe to the game and play however long and in whatever way they wanted. When you introduced free-to-play, obviously that storyline had to accommodate that model of commerce in the game. Can you talk about that in concrete terms?

Scott Hartsman: The overall goal was to provide a premium experience at a free-to-play price point. With that in mind, we intentionally adopted a strategy of making sure that the entire content, story, and physical locations of the game would remain free-to-play at all times. Then, on top of that, we would have a micro-transaction store that housed a bunch of purchases the players could make if they chose to support the game further. We typically break down those items into three categories: convenience, cosmetics, and the ability to catch up to your friends. >>>