I met Mickael through the local development community in Vancouver Canada. He’s one of the founders of Caldera Interactive which spun up in 2019. As you’ll hear, Caldera really came together in the classic game industry fable way of folks who wanted to make games, doing it on the side, then make a play to do it full-time and succeed. In this case, the play was applying for the Canadian Media Fund, or CMF. I wanted Mickael to come on and share his story so that folks could hear about how local ecosystem funding can be a source as much as the classic tales of publishers and VCs. Not an easy road, but a viable one.

Andy Mauro founded Storycraft in 2023 after spending a lot of time in the "chatbot" tech space, including a previously founded and exited company. He and I got to know each other through our mutual investor, London Venture Partners. I've always really enjoyed his insights from the tech side as he approaches building a game studio and merges his prior founding experience with being a lifelong gamer. Andy also has spent a lot of time both being and receiving Coaching and spends time in the episode to talk about how that experience has shaped him as a founder, and his team.

This episode I talk with Guy Costantini who heads up a studio that is still in stealth. His journey is a unique one as he comes from a marketing background into entrepeneur life. He's worked as some major studios - Riot, CD Projekt, and Skydance - and is now translating a decade of lessons and experiences into a unique founding journey. We talk quite a bit about how he jumped in, how he's navigating fundraising in a tough market, and how his team and co-founders have come together. All in all its quite unique. As a note, the sound here is a little rougher than past episodes -- we'll get that cleaned up in the future. This episode is also a little on the longer side -- Guy is a self-proclaimed talker, and had a lot to share.