Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learnings so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. My guest today is Walter Driver, the co-CEO of Scopley, one of the fastest growing mobile first video game companies in the world. On April 2023, they launched Monopoly Go, which has become the most downloaded game in the United States. They doubled their revenue and then they were recently acquired for almost $5 billion. Now, if you're like me, you hear numbers like that and you got to think, "What in the heck are they doing to drive that kind of success?" Where you're going to hear for yourself in this conversation. But Walter says one particular phrase that I just love and I think it's a big factor in their success. In his words, he's not just building a company, he's building a learning machine, a work environment where people can iterate quickly, see what's working and what's not , and use that knowledge to get better. If you want to see how to build that kind of culture, keep listening. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Walter Driver. Walter, you've found it scoply in 2011 and recently you were named Mobile Game Maker of the Year for the eighth year in a row. Give us a snapshot of the business you have today. Yeah, we're one of the largest video game companies in the Western world. We have over 100 million people playing our games and that's across a diverse portfolio of products like Monopoly Go, Stumble Guys, Marvel Strike Force and Star Trek Fleet Command. Very different kinds of experiences appeal to different kinds of players and we try and create experiences that are going to matter a lot to players over a long time period. That's really been the foundation of what we've been trying to build is to create meaningful experiences where players can play and connect with like-minded people around the world. So we've been having a lot of fun building this company. Yeah, you've had a fantastic success story here and I got to ask you, where'd the name scoply come from? I get that question a lot. To be honest, the domain name was available for $8 when I'm starting the company. That was a key data point. But I think I was also, we made a list of names and we wanted a name that didn 't already mean something to someone that we could come to define. And so scoply was a word that we thought could conjure some vague ideas that ultimately could come to be defined by what we did and what we built. I want to take you back before we get into how you built this tremendous company. Tell us a childhood story that really has impacted the way how you lead. One story that comes to mind is my parents originally from Texas. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and I played football growing up. And when I was nine years old, I was playing in the under ten leagues. So I was on the younger year of that and I was the backup running back at the beginning of the season and I got elevated to be the starting running back. I liked the third game and in practice that week, I took a helmet to the ankle and chipped part of the bone off my ankle. And so I had a broken ankle. I went to the doctor and they put an air cast on it. And I showed up for the game that weekend and the coach said to my mom, like, there's no way your son's playing. He's got a broken ankle. And my mom said, we're from Texas. He'll play. And I think that was kind of having a mom that says, you know, you can play with a broken ankle, not because she forced me to do things I didn't want to do. I wanted to play. I was excited about the opportunity, but she was an extreme competitor and, you know, I think that sense of competition really shaped who I am as well. I got to ask you, were you in the games when you were a kid? I was. I mean, I wasn't an extreme gamer by most definitions, but I love to play games , video games with my friends. And that was the main point of it for me was I didn't love to play video games alone. I loved the feeling of playing games together. And I think, you know, our mission and scope is to inspire play every day because I think play is the foundation of how we form our first friendships and relationships on the playground when we're kids. And sometimes as adults, we lose touch with that sense of play and the way that it helps us build connections with new people is the most natural way to form a new relationship is to play together. And so it was really the social aspect of games as a kid that I really loved. And, you know, I don't think my parents at the time thought that it would ever become a career for me and that that time spent playing video games was probably not a great investment for my professional success. But it turned out to be a good one. I know you know that I know your father very well. He's a good friend of mine. And I understand he's been your mentor and you guys talk a lot, obviously, about a lot of things. Tell us a time when he gave you some advice that really has inspired the way how you think about leadership. Yeah, I mean, I am fortunate, I think, to have a built-in role model in my house. My dad is a natural leader. He's been a leader of virtually every organization. He's come into contact with in his life. And I think that's been a tremendous advantage for me. And, you know, one of the key pieces of advice, he actually gave my sisters in a document he wrote for them. And then they gave a copy of it to me when I was older. But one of the things that really resonated was, you know, he said that the secret of success in life is to recognize your strengths and maneuver yourself into a position where, you know, your strengths are the key vectors of success and whatever endeavor you're in to try to navigate to a position where your weaknesses are as irrelevant as possible. You know, it sounds pretty basic, but it's hard to do. And I think that advice was really foundational to really the whole idea of Sc opoe because a lot of my original inspiration for Scopoe was figuring out, you know, what it is that lights me up, what I do really well, and being hyper-aware of all the things, the many, many more things that I don't do well in trying to create an environment where, you know, I could be professionally successful. I think a lot of people start companies because, you know, they had a hard time finding a good mattress or whatever it is. For me, it was the problem that I was solving was I never had a job before, and I didn't really want to get one, to be honest. I wanted to go on an adventure, and I wanted to be, you know, I wanted that adventure to be successful and to work with amazingly talented people that could teach me things I didn't know and to be able to learn and grow and to be self-directed in kind of that exploration. And so I really designed Scopoe with that advice from my dad and mind. I understand you didn't pursue business or technology in college, but you graduated from Brown with a degree in English literature. How did that kind of formal education impact your leadership perspective? I would say my degree from Brown where it's been a lot of, you know, time and poetry classes and that kind of stuff wasn't, you know, the most directly applicable concept is starting a technology-driven video games company on the surface, but really actually it served me incredibly well because I think as a founder, CEO, leader, one of your chief jobs is really being the storyteller of the organization because you're trying to create something that doesn't exist today. And to do that, you need to be an extremely effective communicator of a world where it does exist in the future and be able to build sort of collective conviction of all the people you come to contact with that this reality that you're talking about will in fact become a reality over time. And so I think storytelling and communication is maybe one of the most essential skills for a founder and a leader and one that sometimes gets overlooked. Well, you're obviously a great storyteller and I understand when you first moved to Los Angeles, you were actually pursuing a screenwriter career and you actually had written a script that was getting some attention in Hollywood. Tell us about that. I did move to Los Angeles initially because I had a movie script that had gotten some attention from a production company and I arrived in LA kind of trying to figure out where that project was going and also what I really wanted to do. And I pretty quickly realized that I do love being creative professionally and I also have a strong business orientation. So I needed to be in an industry that can combine creativity and business, but I also wanted to be in a really dynamic and growing space and I felt like the feature film industry at that time was already relatively slow moving. It took years to make a movie and if you were lucky enough to write something that got made, you were going to sit in a dark room with a few hundred people in silence for a couple hours and then they would get up and walk out. And you didn't know which characters they love, which scenes mattered the most to them and there wasn't really a role for them to play in co-creating their own experience. And it felt like software was eating the world, as Mark Andries famously said, but it was going to eat entertainment as well and that interactive entertainment experiences where people could really customize experience and make decisions inside of the software that would reflect their choices and preferences and enable them to connect with other people and have an identity inside of a world. All of that was more exciting to me and it was also sort of a new frontier where it felt like it was going to be the biggest entertainment category and it is, today gaming is bigger than film, music and books combined and a growing space where we would have a lot of runway to be able to pursue bigger and bigger dreams. And I sort of made an adjacent hop from creating experiences for people in writing to creating them through games. Did you have an aha moment, Walter, where you just made you say, "Hey, I don't want to be a writer. I'm going to really make this pivot." Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is, a lot of people growing up, they're drawn to, they have an idea of a career that they want to have. They have a dream, a profession that they envision that they'll really enjoy. But you also have to think about what is the reality of that? And how do you actually spend your time? And when I was working writing, I was spending a lot of time alone with my computer with fictional characters and just writing all day, every day. And I felt, I realized I'm really extroverted and I get a lot of energy from interacting with other people. And honestly, my favorite part of being a writer was being in the room, pitching the story we were going to write and why it was going to be fantastic. And then I would go home and I'd be like, "I'll just sit here and write this thing." And I realized, if you don't love the actual process, if you don't love the reality of the work, it's impossible to be well-classified something. You have to have an inherent love of the craft and the core thing that you spend your time actually doing. And so I realized, yeah, I would be way better off in something where I worked as part of a team, where I could surround myself with people that had really complimentary skill sets. And I could put a lot of the same skills to use, but in a different context and have a different daily experience where I was energized by the people around me. How did you go about building the foundation and know how, in technology, in gaming, to start up a company like Scopley? It's been quite a process for the last 12 years. It's really required every fiber of my being on a lot of fronts. But I'm not a programmer, I'm not a game designer, I'm not a marketer, I don't have a finance background. I don't really have any specific skill sets that are relevant to any of the functional areas in our company. And so, I started with this feeling that I needed to create an environment where the most talented people in the world would want to come work. And we could get the best people in the world at all those things that I don't do as well. And so pretty foundational to starting that process was figuring out who had the skills that we needed and who had done it before and flying all over the world and interviewing people and asking lots of questions of everyone I met about who's amazing at this thing or that thing and then pulling on those threads and then being really relentless and sometimes spending years trying to talk those people into coming on board and joining us on the Scopley adventure. And so I've really learned a lot of things I needed to learn. I still don't know them well enough to do them myself at a world class level, but I'm much more fluent in all of those things because I've been surrounded by people who have taught me a lot from inside the company. And I think people sometimes underestimate how much they can learn from all of their coworkers inside of an organization and certainly where I've learned the most. You know, I think about your business, mobile gaming and I have to ask you, what went on in your mind when you first saw the iPhone in 2007? The Ivan of the iPhone certainly felt like a generational opportunity. It took a couple of years, I think for it to fully come into focus how it was going to be the biggest, you know, smartphones would be the biggest platform in the history of humanity to be able to make something once and put it in the hands of literally billions of people around the planet. And so it just obliterated a lot of the distribution obstacles for anyone who was creating, you know, consumer facing businesses. And you know, people also have it with them, you know, 24/7. It's not something that you have to go home to be in front of a desktop computer or a television. And so you can have a different kind of relationship with those products. And fundamentally it's a phone, right? It's a communication tool. And so when you have 3 billion people now that have a gaming platform with them 24/7, but it's also a communication tool where they can, you know, use it to communicate with people inside of these games, it really seemed like, you know, the opportunity of a generation that I had to focus on because it was really the most exciting thing that was going to happen for a very long time. And it kind of coincided with this shift from games being content that people would purchase and consume to pay $60 for a console game that was in a box. And then you would play it and finish it and be done with it and wait for the next thing to come out to this shift of what we call live services, which are, you know, always evolving, always on products that are really more of a destination that people can go visit. They're really social networks built around a digital playground. And the phone was really conducive to those kinds of experiences. So it has been a big part of our success at Scopoe. And I think there are many other people around my age who saw giant opportunities with the advent of the iPhone and whole industries that have been built on the back of it. I think a lot of people see those opportunities, but not a lot of people really seize them. What is it about you and your DNA that really made you want to start and build your own company? To some extent, it was just an extreme, I guess, awareness of my, of how my brain works. I had learned at a young age that I had, you know, an extraordinary, I think, amount of persistence and ability to focus and work extremely hard. If I was working on something that was self-directed that I was super interested in and I have virtually no ability to focus or concentrate or apply any kind of consistent effort to something where I was told what to do. And so I felt like I, you know, in order to be the best version of myself, I really needed to start something of my own. You know, at the same time, I also realized that I needed to really complement my skill set with partners around me and that it was going to be sort of critical, I guess, to create some magnetism around the organization that would, you know, sort of create a club that people want to be a member of. I mean, that's how I thought about it from the beginning was when you're building a company, you're really creating a club and, you know, do people want to join that club? Do they want to stay part of that club? Are they proud of their association with it? You know, and are they proud of all the associations with the other people who are members of it? And if you can get that right, then a lot of things take care of themselves. And once you lose that thread where people no longer want to be part of that club, it becomes really hard to be successful. You know, I asked you earlier about the name Scopley and you said you wanted to keep it kind of vague and it didn't cost you much to pick it up, you know, which is a great benefit. Did you and your co-founders set out to create a game company? No, I think we didn't know exactly what we were going to do when we started the company. I remember sitting with Encore Balsara, my co-founder and CTO and saying, you know, we should start a company. And he said, what are we going to do? And I said, I don't know, but it's going to be huge. You know, I think that was an unusual way to start an organization where a lot of our strategy was less about which specific products we were going to build and more about what kind of company that we were going to build to be successful. We knew that there was huge opportunity creating social experiences for people that were facilitated by play, but what kinds of play and what kinds of experiences we didn't know. But we knew that there were, you know, different challenges that you needed to build a single product that resonated in consumer facing digital experience and challenges that you needed to solve if you were going to build a company that would become an institution that could systematically kind of be successful in bringing products like that to market. And so we knew we didn't want to be a single product company that we wanted to be able to build infrastructure we could use over and over again to be systematically successful. And we knew that we were going to have to find a series of products that reson ated. And so it made the company harder to build initially because, you know, we're raising capital when you go to investors and they say, well, what are your products? What are your revenue? And you say, well, we have a few of these small products, but don't worry about them because we're actually going to make better ones and we're going to keep releasing new products in the years to come. And what you really need to focus on is this operating system that we're building and all these capabilities that we can apply across anything that we do in the future. And we're going to build a technology platform, PlayGami, that is going to help customize digital experiences and made it really hard to get started. But it actually made it way more likely we were going to be successful longer term because we were thinking about building a company rather than a product from relatively early on. And then we sort of were open minded about which products were going to best serve the vision for the company. And so we did it sort of in a reverse order to most companies in our industry. Have you ever wondered what David is thinking as he interviews our guests each week? Or have you been interested in hearing David's take on some of the questions that he asks his guests? Well, I do. And I know a lot of you do too. My name is Koolah Callahan and together with David, I host the three more questions podcast that airs every Monday. These episodes are just about 15 minutes and in them, I asked David three questions that dive deeper into the themes of his episode with his guests. David shares incredible insights and stories from his career leading young brands and all of his answers are super practical and inspiring. Like this great insight, David shared in one of our most recent three more questions episodes. Cool. I think the most important thing is that as a leader, you want to make the best decision. You don't care who has the idea. All you care about is getting to the right answer. So the first thing I would tell you is you have to have a willingness to hear everything that's out there that's going to impact the decision that you're going to make. And people got to know that you want the unvarnished truth, that you want their opinion and it doesn't have to agree with you. So many times leaders are so hell bent on getting done what they think needs to get done. They don't care what anybody has to say. They just want their decision executed. And a lot of times they find out it's not the right way to go and they have to go back and do it over it. It wastes time and money and energy. And that's why I really believe it's so important to have the mindset as the leader that you want to make the very best possible decision and that you're going to talk to the people that need to be talked to to get to that decision. So I think one of the things you've got to do when you're making a decision is say, okay, who should I go to that's going to give me the best and widest perspective on this issue so that I can end up with the best possible route to take? Get the three more questions podcasts in your feed each Monday and dive even deeper into the episodes you know and love. Just subscribe to How Leaders Lead wherever you get your podcasts. Walter, you say and I love this, it's to excel a business you need to create a narrative. And you've talked a little bit about your communication skills and how it's helped you create the story for scoply. But the narrative that you had, you're selling this dream without real products . And tell us how you formulated that narrative and brought it forward to investors and your people because you had to get people to come along with you. It's not easy to join a company that doesn't necessarily have a product. You know, I think when you're starting from zero and you aspire to build an institution that's around for 50 plus years, you have to do it one believer at a time. And the first believer has to be you, right? You have to have a clear understanding of what you're trying to do and why and you have to be able to inspire one other person to believe in that. And then you got to add a second person, a third person, a fourth person, a 50 people and 200 people and tell it's millions of people. And when millions of people believe in what a company's potential is, it becomes a reality. But it always starts, you know, in someone's brain or a few people's brain. And you know, I was really, I guess, focused not just on the specific contours of like, this is exactly what it's going to look like because I knew it was going to change. So we talked a lot about, you know, what kinds of behaviors are we going to focus on inside the organization and that our strategy was not going to be about a specific product. Like we're going to make role-playing games as, you know, our strategy was really that we're going to make experiences that matter to a lot to people and experiences that matter a lot to them over a long period of time. And that we're going to be really agile and dynamic in figuring out where the market is headed because this is, it's a big TAM, but it's a very fast moving TAM. And we thought the most dynamic and agile companies were going to be most successful. And to build a company that can change faster and learn faster than any other company in the space is, you know, something that really was a key objective for us. And we started saying, you know, relatively early on in the company life-sale, that we weren't trying to build a company, we're trying to build a learning machine. And that feeling that if we could learn faster than any other company in our industry, ultimately we would come out ahead over time because that knowledge would compound. And if we were just learning, you know, 3% faster than anybody else, we would end up in an amazing place. And that attracted, you know, the kinds of people who are very open-minded about the specific tactics, but I think inspired by the mentality and that enabled us to, I think, evolve very quickly and make a lot of tactical pivots when we needed to and seize new opportunities while still having this through line of, you know, how we thought about the company itself as a learning machine. I love that idea of the learning machine. How did you institutionalize that inside the company as you've grown it? We focused a lot on, you know, I think celebrating the process rather than the outcomes and focusing on inputs rather than outputs and being really comfortable with failure because in order to learn fast, you have to be operating at the frontier of your current capabilities, right? You have to be trying to do things that you're not, you don't know how to do. And that process is really messy. It involves failing a lot. And it also necessitates really rapid iteration. And so iterate to greatness is one of our five cultural tenets at Scopley that we've been talking about for a long time. And if you're willing to fail quickly and iterate relentlessly, those are the key ingredients for learning. And Winston Churchill famously said that success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And for me that resonates as much as anything in a startup because if you create a culture where people are hiding failure or they're not comfortable with it or they want to have a neat and tidy answer for everything they're doing, then you're going to end up doing things you already have done in the past and you're not going to learn and grow at the rate you need to. You really just have to get people comfortable systematically with messiness, ambiguity, and uncertainty and forward propulsion because you've got to move through those learnings as quickly as possible. One of the ways you've differentiated yourself as I understand it is you've created a studio ecosystem. Tell us about what it is and how you created it. Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that was key to our blueprint for an enduring company was that we were going to have different kinds of products. We were going to make products that were different genres of games that appealed to different demographics. And to do that successfully, you need groups of people that are extremely passionate about those specific kinds of products and eat, breathe, and sleep in most strategy games or whatever the genre might be. And those people are different than the people who want to make word games. And so we needed to create, as you said, an ecosystem that was not monolithic where you could have teams that had their own sense of identity and culture and their own ways of doing things that would be supported by central resources that hopefully it could be a force multiplier in what they're doing and make them more likely to be successful in a systematic way because we give them access to technology and publishing capabilities. But a core part of it is that we needed to be the partner of choice to the best game makers in the world. And that means that if we were trying to hire people, we needed them to believe that this was the place they could do the best work of their career. And if we were trying to buy a company and it was a competitive process, that the people leading that organization would, you know, in their heart of hearts, hope that they wound up at Scopley because they thought it would be a more fulfilling experience and their product would be more successful and they would be more successful. And so just spent a lot of time trying to make sure that this experience can be the best experience of people's professional lives. That was really the first goal that we set as a company was that, you know, 70% of people in the organization could say that this was the best experience of their professional lives. And when you see the work you're doing through that lens, you know, it changes how you think about all kinds of details in the organization. And if you do it well, as I said, a lot of things really take care of itself. As I understand it, you have a highly successful partnership with your Co-CEO. And a lot of people will tell you that having co-leaders in any organization is a formula for disaster. I mean, but yet it's worked for you guys. Why is that? Yeah. I have a Co-CEO Javier Ferreira who's been an extraordinary partner of the last almost 10 years now at Scopley. And yeah, people have asked us that question many times, like, how do you do this with two people? And, you know, when the company has had a 70% company or growth rate for 10 years, you know, our question is sort of like, how do you do it with one? Because you can't be everywhere you need to be. You can't focus on everything that requires attention when you're maintaining everything you're currently doing and trying to create a future things that are going to propel next year and the year after that and the year after that's growth. And so we really believe that people make better decisions when there's a dialectic, when there's some discussion and debate and pretty much every major decision that we've had over the last decade, we've discussed it and really stressed tested it between us. And I think that's sharpened our respective thinking on everything that we're doing and helped us fill in a lot of gaps in our own experience and our our own blind spots. And so, you know, we tried to model that for the whole organization and say that, you know, one of the most important aspects of being a leader is, you know, especially as a company becomes more successful is really managing your ego and negating that wherever possible. Because when you start actually getting positive feedback from what the company 's doing externally, you can, you know, start to feel somehow self-important. But that sense of ego, it really it's a massive inhibitor for the organization because it creates separation from all your key partners that you need to be relentlessly in relationship with. You need to be in sync with all of them. It makes you afraid to make mistakes. It makes you, you know, focused on how people are going to perceive what happens rather than what actually happens. And so I think being able to share leaders of responsibilities is, I guess, a reflection of our desire to try to get to the best outcome that we can get to, not the best outcome we can get to by ourselves. You know, you said earlier that your company was really never guided by a specific roadmap, but instead you focused on cultivating behaviors. And that I'm sure really represents the foundation for your culture. What behaviors are you really trying to drive deep in the organization? Yeah, well, we have five cultural tendencies to go up with that that we talk about a lot that have been, you know, pretty consistent throughout the life of the company. We've iterated on a few of them over time, but, you know, they're play to win, care deeply, embrace the adventure, iterate to greatness, and ignite passion and earn loyalty. And it started with play to win. I think, you know, there are some people who find a way and some people who find an excuse. And if you work with people long enough, you can tell the people who kind of consistently find a way. They're never a victim of their circumstances. When the circumstances are a problem, they figure out how to change those circumstances or, you know, solve it some other way. And I think that is a key ingredient. This idea of embracing the adventure, the kinds of people who welcome adversity and unpredictability and ambiguity. And they don't see adversity as an adversary. Like, they see it as a catalyst for personal growth and creativity and people who care deeply. We really believe that you got to care about the people you work with, you know , their personal welfare, their success. You got to care about, in our case, the software we're building, the players and the experience that they're having. You got to care about all of the details immensely because as soon as people start, you know, seeing something at a meeting where they're like, "This is not a very good plan , but it's not even worth commenting on. I'm just going to let it slide." I think that kind of indifference is really toxic in an organization. And we try to get people to care about all of those details and to care about each other. You know, this idea of igniting passion, earning loyalty is something that started with our players that we want to create really strong, passionate responses on our players. Not just something that they like, but something that they, is their favorite thing to do. And that it remains their favorite thing to do over long periods of time. But, you know, very quickly, that became something that we also, we started thinking about internally. That was true for all of our leaders across Scopoe as well, that they needed to ignite passion and earn loyalty and be worthy of loyalty for the people that they worked with and alongside. And we talked about this iterate to greatness concept, which really propels a learning machine. But I would say the crux of that is that we've found that a lot of people, they complete a task and they want to check the box and say, "This task is done. We have a plan." And, you know, it's sort of the last 10% in our industry, at least. You know, when you think that you're done going another three rounds of iteration, that's actually 90% of where the success is. And so, some people just want to be done with it and some people are willing to , you know, have the meeting run over, come back and follow up next week and push it further and listen to feedback. And, you know, I think that orientation of like, it's not good enough until we 've done, you know, multiple more passes past the point that we thought it was good enough, has been really instrumental in whatever success we've had to date. Tell us a story when you iterated for greatness, where maybe you started out with something that looked like it wasn't going to make it, but you end up with something that truly is great. Yeah. I mean, one great example of iterate to greatness in action is in April of this year, we launched Monopoly Go, which is one of the largest mobile game launches of all time. It has been a massive success and transformational product for the company. You know, from the outside, it looks like an overnight success where, you know, 60 days after launch, it's the top grossing game in America and the most downloaded game in the United States. And, you know, behind the scenes, it was a different story, you know, it was a story of failure and persistence and really like one ongoing struggle and from one failure to the next for seven years. And so we originally had a partnership with Hasbro and decided to make this game Monopoly Go and, you know, brought in some people we really believed in who had a passion for bringing that to life. And the first approach they had to the product, you know, we tested it in a few countries and it looked like it was going to be reasonably successful, but not as successful as we thought it could be and not as successful as the core team who was responsible for it thought it could be. And we made a really difficult decision to go back to the drawing board and redesign the core game loop and, you know, pursue a more uncertain outcome. And then we actually made several acquisitions of teams that we added to the core team and kept trying to find the alchemy of the right skill sets and people and continue to invest in it. And we invested because we like to follow teams that have passion and teams that are iterating and evolving their approach rapidly and this team was. And any sane sort of CFO would have probably killed this project a long time ago because it was wildly, you know, over budget and wildly late and it's been the most successful thing the company's ever done. So it's sort of counterintuitive, but things that appear like they're going well early are often things that are familiar and have smaller upside than things that, you know, might be more transformative and have higher ceilings. Those things often take longer to mature and come into focus and require more patience and more iteration. And so I think you have to be really patient with the results and impatient with the rate of learning and the velocity towards that you're making towards that outcome. But you've got to be willing to go through some messiness if you're going to try to do something you've never done before. How do you go about the process of making money, you know, scaling your products and monetizing your products? Yeah. So all of our games are free to play. We believe that we're trying to create experiences that matter to the most people possible. So we don't want to create barriers for people to engage with those experiences . And you know, we want to give them opportunities to invest in enhancing that experience in a way that is pertinent to their interest. And so, you know, for the most part, people buy virtual currency inside of those games and then they use that virtual currency around all kinds of ways to customize their experience and enhance it. And it varies, you know, both across products but also by player. And I think, you know, one of the key elements of our, I guess, business strategy is that, you know, people like to have discretion over how they invest. When you have agency and choice, it becomes a reflection of who you are and your own unique identity and your own preferences versus when you're charged something like a flat rate. If we just said there's a free version, there's a premium version and for $12 a month and everyone gets the same premium version, you know, that premium version isn't really a reflection of your personal taste and who you are. And the way you get charged for that, it sort of happens to you. Like you get a bill every month and it's coming at you rather than saying, you know, I'm opting in to make this purchase right now because I feel, you know, like it 's a worthwhile purchase to make. And we have to earn, you know, the desire for people to purchase over and over again, you know, every time it's got to be worthwhile because if they didn't feel satisfied the last time they spent money over our games, they never have to do it again. So I think that creates a nice forcing function to make sure that, you know, the value that people are getting from investing money in those experiences is worthwhile because if it's not, they stop doing it very quickly and it becomes very clear that it's not going to be a successful product. You know, you've developed these great partner relationships with IB holders like Mattel, Marvel, Disney, Warner Brothers, and you know, it's basically a who's who list goes on and on. What do you lead on this front? You know, because obviously, I mean, you know, everybody would like to partner with these people, but they're partnering with Scopley. Yeah. We've had really phenomenal partnerships with a lot of the companies that you mentioned and it started early in the company life cycle. We believe that people cared about a lot of these brands and these worlds, but creating an immersive digital experience where people could come spend time in, you know , the world of wheel of fortune or the walking dead and the early days of the company was creating that world was challenging for the people who own those IPs as a very different skill set. And we thought we were building, you know, that expertise. And so we signed some early partnerships and with some folks who really trusted us to try to, when we didn't have a track record, to try and create worlds that people wanted to spend time in. And then we had some early success and that track record started to build on itself and enable more opportunities. But, you know, I think the thing that's been most helpful is that those partners have all of them been, say, really intellectually engaged with understanding, you know, why things are successful in our industry. And in the case of Monopoly Go, we, you know, Hasbro was like, wait, you're soft launching this product and a bunch of geographies and it's doing reasonably well. And we did a play test across our entire company with thousands of people and people loved it. And now you're saying you're going to go back to the drawing board and reset the whole thing. And we said, yeah, like, and we showed them some data and, you know, why we thought we could do better. And to their credit, they said, we understand, like, when we trust you that, let's try and do something better. And now it's a much more successful product for both of us. So we tried to approach all those partnerships with, you know, the orientation of like, let's really learn what's important to them and share what's important to us and how our business really works. And believe that, you know, when you create shared context, you can actually make much better decisions in a partnership. And, you know, we've also been blessed with partners that were really open minded about trying to get to the right answer, whatever that look like in all those relationships. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Walter Driver in just a moment. Now, let me tell you something. If you want to succeed as a tech startup, you've got to excel at learning. Like Walter points out, that means you've got to get good at understanding data. Speaking of that, Will Ahmed is the founder and CEO of the wearable tech company Woop. And for him, it's key to prioritize the right data. You know, we didn't view that our core function needed to be push notifications or telling the time or allowing you to call an Uber or look at your email. But we did view that the core use case for Woop was to improve health and to do that in a world class way better than anyone else. And then the most accurate product, the best coaching, the best interface. And by focusing on those areas, it let us down a much more minimalistic, I would say, design for our hardware. And that's, I think, been really good to us. At the end of the day, I think people will evaluate whether they should wear Woop or not purely through a lens of health. And today we're proud to say that if you've been on Woop for a year, you have a lower resting heart rate, you have a higher heart rate variability, you're getting more sleep. So we're actually changing behavior and improving health. You know, it's so easy to get head fake by all the data and feedback that you hear, but effective leaders know what to pay attention to in order to make the best decisions. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Will, Episode 64 here on How Leaders Lead. Will you're one busy guy, for sure, because I know over the last 10 years, you 've made at least 10 acquisitions. I mean, tell us a story about the one that had the biggest impact on your company. Cool. Yeah, we have done a lot of acquisitions. And we kind of believed that in the gaming world, like no matter how much talent and innovation you have inside your company, there's always more happening outside. And so, you know, one of the key ideas of fueling this learning machine was that we have to be engaged in programmatic exploration of all the M &A opportunities that are out there. And I think one of the ways that that has made us better is that we might look at 500 companies a year to do a one deal a year. And so, I'd say that across all those deals we've done, they've really all been very successful. I would do all of them again. But we got very close to doing some deals that would have not been so successful and might have torpedoed the company entirely. And so, our sort of anti-port folio deals that we thought about seriously and didn't do, you know, it was pretty terrifying. But I believe that that building that muscle of looking at lots of stuff and engaging with a lot of curiosity to understand these teams, what they care about, why they've been successful, where they're going, makes you, you know, a lot more sophisticated in terms of what you're looking for. It's sort of like being a baseball player gets to watch 100 pitches go by before you even start your at bat. And you're just much more prepared to know what you're looking for. And we've made a bunch of these acquisitions. And I think the best thing I could say about all of them is that we've had a lot of leaders of those companies we've bought who also have engaged in a really open exploration of what's important to them and what's important to us and how do we build a successful partnership. And that requires, you know, a lot of iteration and really making what's important to your partner important to you. Because when people feel that way, you can get a lot of things done. And you can represent, you know, everybody involves interest effectively. But that process requires a lot of effort. And, yeah, not everybody's up for that kind of effort. And fortunately, we've chosen, you know, leadership teams that, and that's been a big factor in which, you know, deals we've decided to do is which leadership teams do we believe, you know, we can work with really effectively and can teach us things we don't know and we can learn from, but that have that, you know, spirit of collaboration. I'll tell you what I'm learning a lot from this conversation. And, you know, it 's been so much fun. And I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Sure. What three words best describe you? Oh, persistent, consistent and curious. If you could be one person beside yourself, who would it be? One person beside myself. This is kind of a strange answer, but I would say one of my kids, there is this stage where they're so full of wonder and everything is brand new for them. And it looks awesome. It looks like they're having a blast all the time. And I just I love them so much that if I could spend a day as them, I feel like I might understand them better and understand what it's like to be them. And that might help me in some way. Okay, your biggest pet peeve. Yeah, I mean, my biggest pet peeve is is people who accept things the way they are without even a basic questioning of it. And when people say, you know, this is the way it is or the way it's always been done, I have a very strong allergic reaction to that orientation. The book that every entrepreneur should read. Well, I just read a book that I think every entrepreneur should read called mastery by Robert Greene. I've been a big fan of Robert Greene's works. He wrote, you know, the laws of human nature and the 48 laws of power, but I had not read mastery. And I recently finished it. And I think it's a great deep dive on masters in various fields and how they've learned from the greats in their their fields and where they've gotten their apprenticeships from and how they've, you know, put the things that they've learned to use at the highest level. It's it's inspiring and insightful. What's something about you a few people would know? I've never had soup in my life. I don't I'm not into it. I don't I don't I don 't want to eat liquid food. I like I like solid food. And soup is is not for me. So I 've done a life without soup. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would we hear? Well, I have three small children. And so they are actually pretty obsessed with the soundtrack to Hamilton right now. Just unusual for toddlers, but they they got really into the founding fathers and they want they request Hamilton soundtrack pretty much every time we're in the car. You've got your toddlers. I've got my grandkids and the same goes for them too. I think it's it's really popular for them for sure. All right. That's the end of the lightning round. Thank you very much for doing that. Walter and I just got a couple more questions for you. Recently you just sold your company to savvy games group for almost $5 billion. So congratulations again. That's fantastic. Can you talk just a little bit about how you picked your partner? Yeah, we recently completed this transaction with savvy that closed just, you know, two months ago. And you know, throughout the history of Sculptly, we've we've been approached by a number of parties that were interested in a strategic relationship. And as we scale, we also started thinking about the public markets. And you know, we were really struggling, I think, in some of those conversations to envision a world where the future potential of the business was more exciting than it was, you know, as a standalone path. And so we, you know, didn't engage in any of those transactions because I just couldn 't I couldn't imagine a world where I was more excited about the future post transaction than I that I was before. And when we met Brian Ward, the CEO of savvy, a couple of things came through. One, they had a real sense of ambition. They were interested in becoming the number one company in gaming by far, he said. And that was pretty exciting for companies like two years old and was just getting started. They had a really long term orientation . You know, they were saying like, what's possible over the next, you know, 10 years. So the opportunity to be aligned with somebody, you know, a group that had a great deal of ambition and was really had long term orientation. You know, that was exciting. I could imagine a world where scoping could achieve things we couldn't have done on our own. You know, the might have access to more capital to continue to do more M and A, which has been very successful for us so far. But now we might be able to do it on a larger scale. And so that's why we did the deal. This was we thought, you know, our future potential might be greater than our, you know, if we didn't do it. And so far, it's been a great relationship and is off to a good start. And I think it's been helpful for sure to have been on the other side of 10 M and A deals and been through that process a number of times. Because you got a you got a front load, a lot of effort on both sides to really understand each other and try and form a foundation where you can meet whatever adversity and challenges you'll face from, you know, position of common, common understanding and shared objectives. And so far so good. You know, you've said that the more you believe you're a visionary and obviously you could be a visionary. There are not many successful founders like yourself in this world. But you've said the more you believe you're a visionary, the more you could miss opportunities. Explain. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm not very bullish on the concept of a visionary. I think I think vision is collective and creativity and insights come from synthesizing lots of information that's usually out in the world. And so, you know, to the extent that you feel like your vision is is somehow predestined to lead to greatness, I think it makes you less receptive to the massive amounts of information that you're getting all the time about, you know, what the vision should be. And so I think being really open to new information and aggressively seeking it out is a key part of continuously curating and refining the vision and making sure that there's room and whatever the vision of the company is for lots of people to contribute to it. Because if it's your vision alone, you know, it's really hard to execute on a vision by yourself. But when a lot of people feel like it's their vision and they've had a chance to shape and contribute to that vision, suddenly you have lots of people who have a shared vision and it feels like it really belongs to a lot of people and that creates a much, you know, deeper sense of ownership. So I'm less bullish on the solitary founder with a great vision as I am as an amazing team and a great culture where a lot of people can participate in that vision can evolve as it needs to to be successful. Moving forward, Walter, what do you see as your unfinished business? Well, the business is always unfinished, you know, I have always described Scop ley as an adventure with no destination in mind as it's a process of becoming. And I do it because I like to learn and grow as fast as I can and to challenge myself and to do it alongside people that I respect and admire and to belong to something larger than myself. And that is what I hope we can kind of keep continuing in the next decade. You know, we've had a really huge explosion in our audience over the last year, we've ten ex-amount of players that are playing our games every month. That really excites me. The chance to make products that are not just some people's favorite thing to do, but they really, you know, shape the culture and achieve a different degree of familiarity to large amounts of people, but still have that intense resonance with the people who love it most. And this still lasts for a long time. I think, you know, our ambition to create things that have really brought appeal continues to grow with the scale of our audience. And yeah, I guess I also look forward to seeing what everybody who comes to work at Scopley is capable of. I mean, you know, as a company scales, it increasingly becomes more about being surprised by the innovation and the determination of people across the organization that is about what you personally are making happen. And I find, you know, there's nothing that excites me more than being surprised by something amazing that's happening in the company. And when you feel like, man, I never would have thought of this or I never would have thought this would be successful and hear somebody's taken some initiative and driven some innovation. And I find that super energizing. When you're an entrepreneur like yourself, you know, it's 24/7, it seems like, how do you make your relationship at home work? And how do you view that as a role as a leader? Yeah, it's a great question. And one that I think people don't talk about enough, people just talk about the version of yourself that shows up once you get to the office. And that version of yourself is predicated on a lot of things going right, you know, outside the office at home. And I've been married to my wife, Gabe, for almost 10 years now , which is basically the entire scopey story. And so she's seen it all. But in order to be able to perform your best at work, like you have to be in relationship and in sync on the home front when you're going through turmoil and you feel disconnected or, you know, something is off in your relationship at home is really hard to bring your best self to work. And so I would encourage all entrepreneurs and leaders to make sure that they're keeping their primary relationships, the forefront of, you know, what they're doing, not just because it makes them better at work, but because ultimately that, you know, the quality or primary relationships, the term is a lot of the quality of your life. I would say that nobody does this who's married, you know, builds a company without a ton of support and understanding and somebody else holding down all kinds of other things in their life. It really does take teamwork to make the dream work. And I've been really fortunate that I've had a partner that's helped me, you know, be able to pursue my dreams at work while still pursuing the dreams I had for, you know, having a great marriage and having amazing kids and doing it all while she was building her own business. So yeah, I've been very fortunate and we encourage everybody to invest in that, their primary relationships. Last question, Walter, what's the best piece of advice you can give an aspiring leader? I think the most important thing for someone who's, you know, I give this advice to somebody who started something from zero versus somebody who's, you know, doing a turnaround of a fortune 50 company. I think learning how, you know, to manage your own inner world and the state you're in is a dramatically underrated capability because building a company is really stressful, it's challenging, it can produce a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. But what the organization needs if you're trying to create something that didn't exist before is emotional consistency. And you know, that's the foundation on which an institution can be built. It has to have somebody showing up and bringing the same energy and optimism day after day for years to have a chance for sort of scale to accrue around this company. And if you're tired, if you're drained, if you're not inspired, if you're not curating a diet of the right brain food and thinking about who you're spending your time with and making sure your relationships outside of work are in a great place, you know, then you're going to be in a bad state. And that state is going to color how you perceive opportunities and threats and it's going to impact your decision making and ultimately make you a far less effective leader. And so it's sort of, you know, I think leadership, people see it as something that is about how you interact with others and tell other people what to do. But for me, I think it's about managing yourself because if you're a leader, there's there's no one else to manage you. You have to learn how to manage yourself and it really starts with managing your inner world and creating a sense, you know, of calm determination because I think a calm mind is the greatest weapon a leader can have. Well, Walter, I had a lot of fun doing my research for this podcast and I knew I was going to really enjoy this conversation. And I have congratulations on all your success and for you, I know the best is yet to come. I mean, I just love the approach that you're taking to build your company. Well, thanks for having me, David. I had a lot of fun as well and I'm a big fan of your podcast and for listening to many more episodes in the future. Keep doing what you're doing. Thank you. I appreciate it. Now, I got to be honest, I'm not too sure about Walter's take on soup. I thought everybody likes soup. But otherwise, I've got to tip my hat to him. He's one hack of a leader and you can really hear how intentional Walter is about the culture they're building in Scopley. And one of the biggest tenants of that culture is how they want to be a learning machine. I just love that phrase, learning machine. If you follow the long here much, you know, I'm passionate about the power of learning for leaders. But learning is a key part of a healthy culture too. It means being willing to fail quickly, get feedback and iterate again. It takes persistence and curiosity and a team that's comfortable with getting it wrong sometimes so they can get it right most of the time. If you can create a company that's a learning machine, you'll stay agile and ahead of the competition and you'll have a culture where curious and creative people can really thrive. So this week, consider how your team and your company culture prioritizes learning and feedback. Then just go look for one opportunity you have to get better at it. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders make their organization a learning machine. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, the former CEO of Celebrity Cruises. I rose from the very bottom to the very top and I also wanted to share that if I can do it, so can you. You just need to just be purposeful about it and think about what you want and don't take no for an answer. Just keep going as far as you can go. So be sure to come back next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [ Silence ]