This week's guest is Brie Code, founder and CEO of TRU LUV. In Brie's own words, TRU LUV is building "ritual and emotionally-conscious AI," which sounds ambitious and potentially world-changing because it is. Brie's background as a game developer led her to explore alternate types and motivations for game-like experiences, and that resulted in constructing AI in a mobile app that espouses a "tend-and-befriend" approach.
This week's guest is Brie Code, founder and CEO of TRU LUV. In Brie's own words, TRU LUV is building "ritual and emotionally-conscious AI," which sounds ambitious and potentially world-changing because it is. Brie's background as a game developer led her to explore alternate types and motivations for game-like experiences, and that resulted in constructing AI in a mobile app that espouses a "tend-and-befriend" approach.
Links for this week's episode:
Darrell Etherington 0:00
Hello, and welcome to found I'm Darrell Etherington, and I'm joined by my arch nemesis and co host, Jordan crook
Jordan Crook 0:06
archnemesis. here to here to save the day. I'm the good guy, you have to be the villain. I know just how it works hero, and you're the villain.
Darrell Etherington 0:15
Not sure about that one. Anyways, we have a great show. If you've listened to our first episode last week, you already know all about this. But just in case, I'll remind you that found is a new show from TechCrunch. And we interview a different founder every week all about the startup experience. And that includes making the leap and figuring out like, I want to do this, I want to quit, I'm gonna go do my own thing. also raising money and making tough choices, hiring the right people, whatever. It's all in there, Jordan, what do you think about our show so far? And the conversations we've had?
Jordan Crook 0:45
It's really opened my eyes. I mean, you know that people are different across the board. But having these like really honest and open conversations with founders show you shows you just how different each individual takes the role of it's not a formulaic thing. There's no like copy and paste for founders, everyone is so different and has their own unique approach. I've absolutely loved it.
Darrell Etherington 1:05
Yes, there's no recipe for success. But you will find a generous list of ingredients here on found
Jordan Crook 1:11
who that made me hungry for soup.
Darrell Etherington 1:25
Our guest this week is Brie code.
Jordan Crook 1:27
Her company is true love it is a mobile development studio, but they're working on a totally different kind of product from your usual game or app. They're working on emotional, artificial intelligence campaigns to stop because when you say emotional, artificial intelligence, I just want everyone to let that kind of like wash over them. And think about what it means. Yeah, it's got it's got a little bit of black mirror sprinkled in there. But it's also got like this warm, fuzzy kind of vibe going on. It's a lot. And so is this episode, by the way?
Darrell Etherington 2:00
Yes, for sure. I mean, our conversation was it was one of the most unusual in a good way conversations with founders I think I've ever had, I mean, for all of us here, you know, including myself, Jordan, and even our producer shot it was it was something that we felt a little bit life changing at the end of it all say
Jordan Crook 2:19
yeah, do you know like the feeling when you're like a little kid and you experience like a thunderstorm or lightning for the first time or like the emotional experience, you can have it like a your first concert or music festival where you're just like, wow, I was so moved by this thing. Like, I think we all left the episode being like, deep breath. Wow, I feel different than I did an hour ago.
Darrell Etherington 2:44
I think those are great analogies. Because it's like expanded our awareness of like, this type of experience was possible. Like you didn't know this was this experience possible previously. And that is that may sound like a lot of hype, but get ready. It's true.
Jordan Crook 2:59
Yeah. Seriously, it's like an emotional breakthrough in therapy. Go ahead and grab a blanket and a cup of chamomile tea and just enjoy.
Brie Code 3:14
So we're joined today on found by Brie code. And Brie is the founder of true love, which is a studio making games experiences, mobile experiences for for phones and devices. And I don't know if that's an accurate description, you might be far beyond that. I don't want to put words in your mouth. So I'll I'll let you go ahead and do that. Right? Um, yeah, so true love is based in Toronto, and we make what we call ritual and emotionally conscious AI. We've taken the gamification model and kind of transmuted it into something entirely new. A new kind of experience, mostly based on if you could think of games as something like sports or that games tend to be based on a sense of rising challenge over time. What recreate feels more like the feelings of playing like dolls or house or cuddling with someone, and is based on a sense of deepening connection over time. Right, and then that's exemplified in your product. Hashtag self care, right? Which is available now. On iOS. It's iOS exclusively right there. It's also on Android Wear small team, and the iOS version is the one that we're updating right now. Gotcha. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's very, I highly recommend everybody go Take it, take it, take it for a spin if you haven't, because it's it's very different from what you might expect if you go in
Darrell Etherington 4:40
from the perspective of like having all the experience or games I don't know if this is fair to say, but it feels like it permits you. I felt like I got a lot of permission to just kind of like, oh, like, tap around and kind of enjoy it. I felt a lack of stress or anxiety that I sometimes feel when I go into Like gaming environments, which I think is part of the appeal of games as well, right. But it was very nice to be permitted not to feel those things and to just kind of explore.
Brie Code 5:09
I think it's really beautiful that that's the experience you had. That's what we're going for the app that's out in the market right now, we released in middle of 2018. And since then, we've been working on expanding the model based on what we learned from what people felt in that app. And we're starting to extend the app in new directions. Now, based on some of what we figured out. When we released it, we just wanted to test like, Is it possible to create an engaging experience or what a game designer would call a flow state without using a sense of rising challenge over time, which is what every game design textbook will tell you, you need to do to create a flow state. So we tried these different ways of creating a sense of deepening connection over time. And the best example in the app is a little ritual on the bedside table, which is a massager. And the massager, you've kind of go into it, and the mini game that you need to do is you need to fill a circle with your finger. And at first, it's like the amount of the screen that your finger fills is small and the circle is small, it feels awkward. And then as you fill the circle, you get another circle and the circle is bigger, and your finger becomes also kind of bigger and more smooth. And and each time you fill the circle, the experience gets easier and easier instead of harder and harder, and it gets smoother. And so it starts out kind of awkward and and becomes smoother. And the feeling it creates is completely different than the feeling that a video game creates. And we weren't expecting it to work right away. But because everyone was telling us we were wrong, and that we didn't understand basic game design. And like, my colleagues that I worked with, for many, many years, were kind of worried about me. And then what happened is when it launched and worked, and we reflected with emails and messages from people, we had 500,000 downloads in the first six weeks with no advertising. And people were saying things like, I don't understand how this app makes me feel like this. I don't like it's the most calming app I have. It's like it put me in a trance, I feel as if the little avatars looking out for me as much as I'm looking out for them. And so we knew we were onto something, and we've been building out the model ever since then.
Jordan Crook 7:23
Is there an equivalent out there? Like what what like, there are this is more a question for you like, what would you What would you equate it to? Like? there? Was there just a one of a kind like what you're describing?
Darrell Etherington 7:36
Yeah, I mean, the closest things and this isn't even really a fair approximation is like some of the early earlier apps that I remember really enjoying, like, there, they were just kind of like the koi pond type model where you were like, you know, it wasn't like there was not really a goal or an end say that you're trying to do and you were just kind of like interacting with like, that was more about like the novelties of the technology at the time, I think. Whereas I think briefly, what you've done is more about kind of like going beyond that right into
Jordan Crook 8:08
design specifically for like, the way it makes you feel. Yeah, I
Brie Code 8:11
think there are other experiences out there that are close, or that have, you know, many experiences that have elements of what we're doing. But they're not necessarily at the core of those experiences. But you know, again, like Animal Crossing, wouldn't be, you know, kind of close to what we're doing.
Darrell Etherington 8:28
Although I do think the criticism of Animal Crossing that you're like, just engaged in lockstep capitalist machine or like, like, accurate, like, I stopped playing it because of that. I was like, ah, like, I can't, this is what I'm doing every day. I don't want this on my 3ds. I did, I wanted to actually, like go back to you mentioned, you know, some friends were saying like they were they were not so sure about what was going on. But you have ample experience, like you're coming at this from like a lack of understanding of the traditional games market. So like, Can you give us a bit of background and kind of like how, how you got your start career wise, and then how you got into creating your own company?
Brie Code 9:10
Sure. So um, I was a teenage runaway and I went to I was a weird teenage runaway and I lived with a Pentecostal Christian family for a year and then I went to university when I was 16. And
Jordan Crook 9:22
coming right out the gate with this story.
Whoa, okay, let's do it.
Brie Code 9:31
And so while I was in university, I had a scholarship and I needed to keep my scholarship because I didn't have savings because I had ran away instead of working summer job. And and to keep this scholarship, you had to have a 85% average. And I felt like I could do that in computer science because you can just stay in the lab until you know it works. So there's there's no subjectivity in the marking and there's no chance it's gonna go wrong. Like you just really have to if you stay in the lab until you're program works, you know, you're going to do well. And so I knew I wanted to get a degree. So I did computer science and then, and I, but I really loved psychology. And I used to rush through the art building in between my math and computer science classes and wish that I had time to meet all of those people who seemed like very creative and interesting. And then when I graduated with my degree, I kind of realized I liked programming, but I didn't want to do it 812 15 hours a day. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I went traveling in Europe on a credit card instead of doing anything. But also the you know, the.com thing happened around the same time I graduate, there weren't any more interesting, creative, like web programming jobs that I thought I would graduate into. So I thought I could last in Europe for a year and I lasted two months before I was completely out of money and came home with like $8 left on my credit card. and
Jordan Crook 11:01
Europe does that every time.
Brie Code 11:05
And I needed a job. And the first place I interviewed was a games company. And it hadn't occurred to me that I could work in games, it seemed like I'm like made up job that wasn't real and would be really hard to get into, if it if it did exist. But it also turns out, I was the first programmer to ever Ace their programming test. And they had it was their first time hiring juniors. And they had two spots open and I got one of them. So that was at relic entertainment in Vancouver. And that was an amazing job. And that's where I first started to work on like the interaction between characters inside of a game. So the game that I worked on their Company of Heroes, it was the first RTS game that had NPCs that coordinate with each other, like you move a group of them and they coordinate as they move. So I did that for a while. And then I moved to Australia for a while. And then I worked at Ubisoft for eight years. And still I had to focus on like the way that NPCs or non player characters coordinate with each other. And I was focusing on AI, I was a lead AI programmer there for a while and then a lead programmer on. So that was Assassin's Creed. And then on Child of Light, which was a departure from, you know, what I've been making before. And I preferred working on something more poetic and beautiful like that. And at that time, I was also of course working very long hours as the video game industry tends to do. And I would call my friends who were all outside the industry, like stressed sometimes at night and say like, Oh my gosh, it's like so stressful. And they'd say, Yeah, why are you doing that you like none of them were interested at all in video games. And even when I moved on to something like Child of Light, which I thought maybe they might be more interested in they weren't. And to me that was fascinating. Like, why did I see something in this medium that held me there because I was interested in working those long hours. And I was interested in something and what we were making, but it wasn't what we were making Actually, it was like I wanted to add some different direction. So I started to test on my friends like various games that I felt had some feeling in them that was pulling me and what was that feeling. And I realized it was very different than what my colleagues liked. So first, I recommended journey to my friends because my friends were interested in art and journey is like, you know, it's it uses a mechanic to tell a story in a way that you can't without interactivity. And so it's it's an incredible piece. And I was surprised to find like there's a point where there's a dragon inside journey that can kill you and all of my friends were like, not interested in that. And so something jumped out at me about that. And then for some reason I had this leap, I was like, Okay, I'm going to recommend them all to play Skyrim and my cousin who was like, probably the most informative for me during this time, she looked it up and she's like, I don't like swords. I don't like violence. I don't watch Game of Thrones. I'm not gonna like this and but there was something in it that I just had an intuition that from her feedback about journey that there might be something more to learn here. And then I never heard back from her and I didn't think she played it.
Jordan Crook 14:16
And if your cousin stopped talking to you over that recommendation,
Brie Code 14:21
that's what I thought. And that wouldn't be out of character. But then, two weeks later, she found me and we usually text I used to have a phobia until fundraising I used to have a phobia about the phone. I got over it to fundraise but then. So she phoned me and I thought there must be some family emergency because she knows I don't talk on the phone. And I answered it and she was upset and she said Lydia died. And I couldn't figure out who she was talking about. And then I realized she was talking about a character in Skyrim. And she'd been playing it for two weeks solid which is why I hadn't heard from her. Wow and The way she talked about it, I realized, for one thing, she didn't know what video games were, she thought they were just shooting. And she didn't know about what the richness that some of these game worlds, like she just didn't know, when she was telling me I shouldn't be doing this with my career. Like she didn't actually know what it was. And I had always known because I like because I did computer science, I'd been exposed to those games, like from a young age, so I just assumed kind of everyone knew. And she had, you know, an emotional attachment to Lydia. And she didn't realize that you could have an emotional attachment to a character in a game and she'd accidentally killed Lydia and she didn't have a safe game going back on. She wanted to know what to do.
Jordan Crook 15:40
The worst feeling of every dead horse and red, red dead. And anything that's ever happened in last It was too I feel her pain.
Too much.
Brie Code 15:52
I realized that for her like, just like for me, I turned the difficulty all the way down when I play Skyrim I'm not interested at all in any of the core elements of the game. Actually, I do the exact same thing with all like, open world adventure or anything like that. Yeah, what parts of it do you like?
Darrell Etherington 16:08
I just like, I mean, I suppose it's story driven. I just like wandering around exploring and on, you know, I really love I love all the the Bioware games because I just enjoy the ability to go talk to everyone and have like a multi threaded conversation, explore all the conversation options that come up in the dialogue tree and see what goes on. Like, that's what I enjoy about those games.
Brie Code 16:32
Yeah, Yeah, me too. And, you know, and my cousin put it really crystal clear. Like I always knew I enjoyed that stuff. But I had never really like realized, like how much I really don't like the other stuff, and I tolerate it to do the side stuff that I like, what are those feelings in that side stuff? And can we make that the main thing. So as I started to look into that, I realized, like how serious of a paradigm shift that can be and how unexplored that can be. Because I figured out that the the typical, like rising challenge definition of how a game designer puts a player in a flow state is probably linked to the fight or flight response to stress by creating a sense of pressure or challenge or danger. Or on social media, it might be a sense of FOMO, but anything that might, you know, create some anxiety, then might trigger your fight or flight response, which makes you instinctively want to win. And then the game designer gives you opportunities to win. And that's rewarding for you if you have a fight or flight response to stress, but not everyone does. And that explains why none of my friends are interested in video games, because about half of people have a different response to stress, which is very little Nolan and little studied because of systemic sexism in many aspects of our existence across industry and academia. So the other stress response is rather than adrenalin being released in your body, it would be oxytocin, which is the love hormone in our sometimes called that it's a little more complicated. But instead of making you instinctively want to win, it makes you instinctively want to take care of people who are more vulnerable than you seek out your friends or seek out new allies and find solutions that work for everyone. So you know, that's like exploring those dialog trees, or getting new party members, which I also really love building your party. And so this implies, you know, a paradigm shift for many aspects of the gamification model implies, like nonzero sum outcomes that implies like rather than linear experiences more like cyclical experiences, because of the nature of some of the subtleties between the two stress responses. What I find particularly interesting is that you can choose your stress response over time based on mindset and practice.
Jordan Crook 19:03
Um, so that what you just said scares the shit out of me, honestly, because as you're talking, I'm just wondering who I am as a person.
Darrell Etherington 19:10
Yeah, you should add some context here. Some personal cars, because you're you love. You love competitive.
Jordan Crook 19:17
I love different video games. Yeah, I love anything competitive, like anything competitive, like I have to have a competitive outlet in my life, like pretty much weekly at the very least, if not daily. But then I also feel like and Darrell, maybe I'm misreading myself, but I feel like in personal situations, or like work situations, things where I'm actually interacting with other humans. My response to stress is exactly what you're talking about, which is like, let's see if we could solve the problem together, as opposed to like, I need to beat you in this conversation, or I need to beat you over this problem. But I gravitate to video games, because I love winning and I play like I love Last of Us and I love story games. And like I love all of the side stuff, although I don't go through every option in the dialogue tree. I I do like the the adrenaline's going, so I definitely keep going to the next challenge. But I also love like I could play Apex for four hours and be like really content, I mean not content up probably be like angry and a little bit toxic, but I would enjoy my time playing it. So I just don't know who I am as a person anymore. So thank you very much. I appreciate that
Brie Code 20:25
humans are very complex. And like, it's hard to talk about the you know, like there are these two stress responses and one tends to happen maybe in more dominant people and one tends to happen in people are a little bit more collaborative, maybe. But it's it's very contextual. And it's also changing over time. So like, yeah, ironically, I'm an extremely competitive person, I figured this thing out about the gamification model, but like, I am like, I can't play board games, because I get like to Me, too.
Jordan Crook 20:56
Yeah, my family won't play with me.
Darrell Etherington 20:58
But also, you can shift yourself consciously from one to the other, to practice.
Jordan Crook 21:03
So you can be both, essentially, and there's a range and there's a context involved. And there's an evolution involved. But yeah, you said you could also choose so I'm wondering if I've chosen to be a part of a patriarchal society in a way that is unflattering to myself.
Brie Code 21:18
This is what like, I think when we look at things at scale, and what the impacts of things are at scale, when we take the gamification model and use it to influence the design of apps engagement for apps for social media, at scale, does that potentially lead to more reactivity? Or more dominance behaviors in our society than it otherwise? Would? There's no way to know that.
Jordan Crook 21:43
But I think it's a fair premise to throw out though, I could see it being true 100%,
Darrell Etherington 21:49
you can try to prove the opposite by adding more of like competing ideas, right? So that would that would sort of lead you to believe that the opposite was true, right?
Jordan Crook 22:01
I just believe anecdotally, based on the difference between finishing a game of Last of Us, which is still like, you know, the rising challenge model and all those things, but it's complete, it's definitely a change of direction from apex, right? The way I feel at the end of two, those separate Sessions is very different, right. So like, that encourages a different side of me out playing apex,
Brie Code 22:24
then we could also talk about, like, if you build up aggression through the day, and maybe playing Apex is going to help you release it, and your stress response and bring you back down to baseline. So there's, there's a couple things that I believe one is, like, clearly, there's just like an entire industry waiting to be discovered and built for at least half of people. The implications of that at scale could be that we could be a little less reactive and more compassionate with each other. And since studying this and learning about this, and learning about the two stress responses, and and then meeting one of my investors who recognized from what I was talking about, from these two stress responses, his experience with meditation, I've learned a lot about states of consciousness. And I can now choose my stress response, not only, like you can learn to choose it through over time through mindset and practice. So like, if you play a video game a lot, maybe you are kind of practicing one of the stress responses, maybe. But you can also like if you're if you're someone who meditates quite a bit, you can learn to choose it in the moment. And I taught myself to do that, in order to do better at public speaking and not go into like a panic on stage. You seem great right now for what it's worth. It's obviously paying off. Thank you. But so that's, that's a really long answer to the first question. The startup because I saw that, like I, there seems to be this entire industry that hasn't been invented, the implications of it at scale could be something very interesting for all of us, each person individually as well, based on what we practice can have impacts on like the way that we can, like choose how we want to be.
Darrell Etherington 24:15
So you saw that this was you know, unaddressed or sort of like out there and and had all kinds of potential and you just decided, well, the best way to pursue that is for me to go create my own business to try to bring that into being or how did the actual decision moment going
Jordan Crook 24:33
to talk to us about like the leap of faith? Yeah, that big that first step.
Brie Code 24:37
I tried to do this inside the existing games industry at first. So first, I tried inside of an organization that I worked at, I probably am not allowed to talk about any of that innovation doesn't happen inside large organizations. They know how to do the thing that they know how to do that their audience likes and when you try to do something different and looks like it's worse before it's better. So in kind of need to do innovation in a startup. I went on speaking tour for three years, because I thought everyone should know this. This is huge. And like, it's important that it matters and like, play fills an important role psychologically. So if we're only creating these like technologically mediated play spaces for half of people, what we're leaving the other half of people behind, it doesn't seem right. So I thought that like maybe just telling everyone about it would work to create the change. But actually, it's I need to prove it, like most people just didn't believe that that could be true. So that's when I got serious about it and put the app out to see like, Is it true? And it is?
Jordan Crook 25:37
And so you can I mean, like, because of your background, and the fact that you've developed games and have the computer science degree, you could kind of just like, do it, right, like, Did you just get to work? And and like, what was the spark for the first idea, like,
Brie Code 25:53
I just wanted to know whether this was right. So I, some friends of mine gave me a big push, actually, like, I wasn't going to take the leap, and a very good friend like, summoned me to her house in the woods and said, like, I noticed that you don't seem to have a plan, you're just kind of like figuring this out randomly. And she was like, you need to take it seriously. So she gave me a bit of a structure. And I started six different projects with six different people who knew nothing about video games, just to see if they would kind of create something of the same pattern. And then they did. So I thought, okay, there's definitely something here, it does seem to be universal. I took one of those and continued to develop it to the point of being able to launch it along the way I At first I thought it wasn't, I thought that it had to do with the aesthetics of the experience. And I was still using game design. And then I as I was playing around, I started to play around with just intuitive ideas for doing things differently. And then at one point, I showed one of my mentors, and he said, Well, you've reversed the curve. This is genius. And I didn't understand what he meant. I just was making something that felt good to me. So then I read a game design textbook, and realized what he was talking about. And I thought, oh, but this just seems so obvious to me. And then so. So then I understood that the implications were much bigger than I realized, and that the model kind of needed to be turned inside out completely. So that's when I started because I'd been on speaking tours, so long, I knew a lot of studio heads. So I called I had like a two month period where I called every single studio head I'd ever met and ask them like, how did you get a studio? And everyone told me like, well, don't make a startup, like don't get VC funding. It's it's evil. It's terrible. Don't do that, because of the fact that like, what I wanted to make is the basis of a new industry and is scalable, like making a startup seem like Actually, it's just the actual right fit.
Jordan Crook 28:01
It's just also sounds like it was very like gut gut instinct to kind of go against the advice that you had spent so much time seeking out. You also said that the rising challenge is the way to build a game. And you also said, you know, like that the big gunfights are the ones that people come to play games for. So maybe I'll just do my own thing.
Brie Code 28:24
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. And that doesn't always serve me well. But that and that, that phase of reaching out to everyone and asking how they got a studio it like it was it was extremely helpful. Like, what I found is that almost every studio head I knew had also like really messed up their lives, like worse than I had at that point. Because I was like running out of money. I was like, experimenting, and like, and then I was like, Oh, I'm like, I'm kind of old to be in this position. Like I probably shouldn't have just spent my retirement savings. And then and then I like I would call these dads and they be like, Oh, no, like, I've messed up way worse than that. Like, I was deeply in debt. And sometimes I was like, Okay, I'm gonna stick with this, like, I haven't ruined my life. And like everyone else did it. I can do it. But I do know, like other friends who when they started their startups, like they studied, like, what is a startup? What's the landscape? How does it all work? And they, you know, I didn't do that. I was just like, well, other people can do it, I must be able to do it. And that I did that all along the way. And I think that is pretty normal for founders to do too, I think but I wish that I had kind of maybe done it the more methodical way
Jordan Crook 29:34
interesting. So you wish that you had gone back and like been like, Okay, I'm gonna read a few books on running a business and all of that stuff, as opposed to just kind of like, oh, here, I'm in this room, and I better figure out what all this means, you know? Yeah, yeah. And you also seem like the kind of founder who is like, there are certain there are different kinds of founders right. And like you feel very much like the kind who is just like in love with your product. And so like I think that super product oriented founders tend to do the business stuff second, and they tend to get investors who are attracted to product oriented founders and help a lot with things like that and help with recruiting for someone who is more like back office mentality. So I think that there's like absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think many, many, I think more investors than not are attracted to that kind of founder. But yeah, we and like, as for the counter example is, you know, we
Darrell Etherington 30:29
talk all the time to founders who are on there, whatever, fifth SAS Enterprise company, and like, they set out to begin with, they're like, I don't really care what box x is, but I'm going to build box x to be to have a quick exit, because I know Oracle is going to acquire is
Jordan Crook 30:49
I want to be an entrepreneur, the drive is to be an entrepreneur, as opposed to build something.
Darrell Etherington 30:54
Yes. And I think I, to your point, though, like, I can see how you would also say like, Well, you know, if I had done this one, if I had known this one thing ahead of time, it would have maybe saved me six months, or a bunch of headaches or a bunch of pain or something like that. So is that kind of what you're talking about? Or just,
Brie Code 31:13
I think, I think it's easy to look back and yeah, to be like, Oh, if I'd known that then, but I didn't know it, then, you know, like,
Jordan Crook 31:21
and look how things turned out. It's almost like a scary thing to say, What What if you had changed piece x, right? Like, would it all come together the same way, you know, could the outcome and it's possible the outcomes better than it is today. But there's like a lot of possibility that the outcome isn't because you weren't focused on the same thing?
Brie Code 31:40
That's a really good point. And I think by being so like, what you're making me remember is that by being so focused on product, like where I ended up, was, you know, with exactly the right investors, for example,
Darrell Etherington 31:51
yeah, because you could have ended up in a place where we were talking about whatever fortnight to or whatever, like, you know, and because you had the one wrong investor, because you were focused more on the name of the firm or the size of the check or something. And they take you in the completely wrong direction, right.
Jordan Crook 32:09
I am insanely curious about your fundraising, because, like, from the first two minutes, three minutes of this conversation, so like, more context, like Darrell is booked you guys, and has had conversations with you guys before I'm coming in a little blind. So I'm learning all this, you know, for the first time and I was like, what in the world does this woman do? Like I, it seems like a difficult thing to explain and to pitch, particularly considering that the context of gaming in general, right, and this medium is already so dominated by a specific idea. So it's exactly what you're talking about a group of people who don't know what gaming is, and they think it's, I have a gun, and I'm trying to shoot someone else who has a gun. And then you have people who understand what gaming is. And it's all the same thing, even though there's a lot of different genres is built all under the same premise. And then you're talking about something totally different. So you're so many steps removed, when you're trying to explain what what's going on. And there's so much context and background that someone needs to understand. Like, what was fundraising like for you? I just I'm so insanely curious.
Brie Code 33:15
I had, you know, people appear along the way who were there at the right moment with the right perspective. So I had admired a games startup called story bricks several years ago that were making procedural narrative content that's very similar in some ways to the kind of open world stuff that helped me realize that I want to do this. And there's a lot of similarities between the kind of way I'm architecting it and what they did. And at one point, the founder of that, that startup was closed by the time I met the founder, but he contacted me because he was recruiting for some other company. And I was like, Oh, my God, the founder of that company, I love. And then so I was supposed to give a talk in London, and I got cancelled, and I had the flight anyway. And I had booked it myself, and they weren't going to reimburse it. And I decided to go to London and try to talk to anyone about game startups that I could meet in London, and I could meet with him. And he was like, so I met with him for coffee. And he was like, oh, that Job's not available anymore. I was like, Oh, no, that's not why I wanted to talk. Like, I think I want to build a startup and I started to describe it to him. And he was the first person in you know, it was maybe a three month period of, of trying to tell people what I wanted to do that he got it and I remember I just saw his eyes get really wide and he started asking me questions. And he understood the implications of what I was saying. So that was Rodolfo russini. And he was at an accelerator in Hong Kong at the time. So I they made a spot for me in the accelerator. Like they said, applications just closed but we're doing it again in the fall. I was like by the fall, I'm going to be on the street. And so I just kept phoning him, I just kept like bothering him because I looked at other accelerators and none of them looked like they would get what I was doing, but I knew that he personally got it. So like two days before the cycle started, they made a spot for me the accelerator and I went to Hong Kong. And then actually, while I was there, a major company offered me a studio. And I wasn't expecting that. So it was a huge, weird thing that happened all in a couple of days. And I made the decision to stick it out with my own startup, I launched the app to prove that the model was accurate, because I noticed that games VCs, like did not believe me, and I'm not great at pitching. So I'm sure that was part of it as well. But a woman who I really admired who I'd met at a conference in Sweden, several years before, recognized patterns from her own studios, like they had kind of innovated on the form of what a game is. And everyone had told them, this won't work, whatever. And when she saw my app launch, and she saw the traction it had, she contacted me and said, like I want in what are you doing? And so I had a big talk with her and she invested and then and then I kind of thought I would rather actually go slowly and figure out what is this model. So I kept conversations open with VCs, but I really wanted to focus more on the model and not fitting myself into someone else's agenda. And then I met Jay s at real ventures. And he was, you know, he was very interested in meditation and states of consciousness and what this means for the next wave of innovation and technology, if the current, like current technology that we have, like a lot of the interface kind of hooks into our brainstem, so like, what happens when we, like, grow beyond that, and make things that are like, better for humanity?
Darrell Etherington 36:54
is he thinking that, because he's, he anticipates a sort of crisis point or like, is that the thought that like, at some point, we just grow too exhausted from this thing? Or we just need some alternative for the sake of survival? What was the thinking there? Maybe this is a question for you, too.
Brie Code 37:13
I'm not sure exactly what jazz is thinking is I know, he said to me once, like he believes that companies that put, you know the benefit of like, you know, he would call them love companies will grow to dominate the stock maybe dominates one word here, when we're talking about love, but to dominate the stock market as much as like Internet companies did around 2000.
Jordan Crook 37:35
Love domination.
Darrell Etherington 37:38
sounds better than the opposite side. Yeah, I
Jordan Crook 37:41
know, right? sounds better than the current setup we've got.
Brie Code 37:45
I think we're just, you know, talking about a paradigm shift, like, no one wants to be using something that's causing compulsive use or causing you to have more aggression, or, you know, it's, it's what we're kind of offering right now. But
Jordan Crook 37:59
yeah, but I also feel like game developers, like don't like a lot of the big, big titles that come out, particularly like the kind that I like, like the Call of Duty's and the apex and stuff. Like I feel like they really don't care about like community wellness, at the end of the day, if they did, like they have the resources to invest in tools to make it better to make it a better experience, like the game doesn't have to fundamentally shift like the game is going to be what the game is, right? Like, if it makes you competitive, if it makes you stress, like if it does that whole cycle. That's one thing. But there are ways to like, you can build matchmaking filters for people who are more likely to play as a team, be like a team player than people who are more likely to like abandon you or get you killed. Right. Like, there are ways to do those things. And they just don't. And it's not like they haven't thought of them. Right. Like I i'm not saying they're like intrinsically evil, evil people who like enjoy, you know, like people's pain. I'm just saying, like, you could and you choose not.
Brie Code 39:01
I think when you're I think when, like, I mean from, I haven't been everywhere in the games industry. So I can't draw inferences across the industry. But from what I saw, like people come to the industry, because they love what they grew up playing. And they want to make more things like what they love. And the people who would want to make something different, just aren't there. And it's natural for people to make the thing that they love. And so I think it's just like, you know, systems, you know, like, once a huge ship is moving in one direction, it doesn't change direction takes a lot of energy to make a change direction. And so that requires like different people that have different like that, that want to orient themselves in a different direction.
Darrell Etherington 39:44
Yeah, I think I think like, it struck me that like, what you're describing is that they, the alternative didn't exist properly for people to consider like, yes, you can consider intellectually like, oh, maybe these are ways but no one's ever done it and done it with intent and like an on a sustained basis to prove that it actually works and as effective, so like, the legacy systems with the legacy. Players just don't even consider an option. Like it's an invisible option to them, right?
Brie Code 40:17
You also like since like doing hiring in my own company and seeing like, because I've been in the games industry since the early 2000s. Before, like, Game Design solidified as a field, and I played games, like, since I was four, I played snake on the zenith terminal, like dialing into my dad's mainframe, I, I don't have these ideas around what interactivity is, like, to me, it's, it could be like, so many things. But two people who come up through like playing games as they are now now that they've kind of solidified around one model. And then even maybe studying game design in school, which didn't exist when I was in school. Like, it's, it's harder to think outside of that.
Darrell Etherington 41:03
Yeah, right now that it's become a formal field of study, it has bounds and strictures and things, right?
Jordan Crook 41:09
Do you feel like just like kind of circle back to the business a little bit? Like, you know, we talked about how product oriented you are. And there are obviously a lot of different parts to your job, that don't have anything to do really with the product, right? Like things like hiring and fundraising and checking on the bottom line, and all of the goodies, you know, that come with running a business? Like what advice do you have for founders who are listening? Or like, how did you kind of manage wearing so many different hats, because I think a lot of founders do it differently. Sometimes they bring someone on for that specifically so that they can stay, you know, making eye contact with their product. And some slowly learn and kind of realize, Hey, I have to trust these other people with my product now. And I have to go do all these other kind of CEO things like what what is your strategy and approach.
Brie Code 41:58
So I'm a systems designer, and I've taken that approach to how we've designed the organization as well. So in order to create a new kind of product, we're also creating a new kind of organization. And us having these different kind of investors really helps with that, like evolve our other investors and bridge builders, their impact investors. So we've like they asked us to focus on like, we report to them, impact metrics, more so than any other type of metric that includes impact within our own organization. So we unified like, and we haven't talked at all about our new stuff, which is like extending what we learned about like creating a different kind of flow state, we're also looking at, like what would like AI characters, AI agents, or NPCs be in this type of world. And if they're not about like, being the most challenging opponent, what is it to be a friend, and we thought about what is friendship and we looked across psychology, sociology, social neuroscience, spirituality, and like any aspect of like, what connection between people can be and we've kind of come up with a model for like, what different types of energy feel like so we, we have what we call five energies. The first one is celebration, which we don't have a really a word for. So we use the word celebration, it's kind of the, the joy of being part of something greater than yourself a sense of oneness with people. And then curiosity or openness and love, more collaboration and intention, which would be when we're starting to move into more action oriented types of ways of being together and care as our five energies. And we organize everything around those. So that's the AI architecture. It's also the way we organize our work inside the studio. And it's also how I organize my own calendar. So I can wear all these different hats, and I can organize the types of work I do. And I can do a lot of context switching. But all within like, I have like, one day, that's for those kind of celebration kind of tasks. And one day, that's very curiosity kind of tasks. And some of them get more than one day, and some of them get one day. And then we loop in a cycle. And so I can orient and handle all the different types of context switching I have to do as a founder, and it all flows, and we can stay in flow together as an organization. And because we're working with our own model all the time, we capture our own reflections about our own work. And that becomes content for the AI so that we have a data set feeding into the AI that isn't biased or based on, like past data that is old paradigm and doesn't fit into the new paradigm or taking the product, but it's like data based on the insights and experiences of our like, very diverse team members.
Darrell Etherington 44:47
That's fantastic. That's like a new level of dogfooding. Like, you know, it's Yeah, that's great. And
Jordan Crook 44:54
you could start another company that does that. Well.
Darrell Etherington 44:57
I was gonna say
Jordan Crook 44:59
thank you. Just proud. titles to running a business.
Darrell Etherington 45:01
I think I think there's no, I think that's the beauty of it. And when he described the initial thing, like the actual application when you talk about verticals or whatever else, like it doesn't seem limited, right? Because the what content constantly has been coming to mind for me for some reason, maybe just because it's very popular right now is like clubhouse. And to me it's clubhouse is like a perfect instantiation of the legacy, like old way of doing things for from video games that you're talking about, right? Like, it's just a competition forum, but in audio format, like from its signup process through to like the mechanics of how it works and everything about it. And so, to me, as I'm thinking through it, I'm like, Well, you could apply it to that, right? Like, you could apply it to these to these ways of making apps go viral, or or, you know, a user growth, right, like if you start thinking of the ways that it can affect and change those like that has tremendous effect, because it would be so refreshing to go to an organization and not have the the growth hacking section of that be what it is today, which is, I think, a psychological slog. Yeah. And it's exhausting. It is exhausting for people who participate. It's exhausting for everyone, right. So yeah, if you can come up with something that is alternative to that it has no end value,
Jordan Crook 46:25
and you found your first two employees. So good to go.
Darrell Etherington 46:28
We're and this is our notice TechCrunch. Sorry.
Jordan Crook 46:34
Honestly, like feel so entranced and enlightened by this conversation that I am feeling like a little bit of like Black Mirror paranoia as well like,
Darrell Etherington 46:42
like, what's gonna go wrong?
Brie Code 46:43
That's why we're moving slowly. Because we also, like, if we scale too quickly, we could make people fall in love with each other that shouldn't or something, you know, like, Oh, my God. So we're just being really intentional and really careful at every step of the process and moving slowly. And we're lucky that we have investors that understand that. And then we want to build on and learn from like, the existing model, rather than kind of just throwing it out. So we examine like, you mentioned, growth hacking, like right now, we're in the middle of like taking growth hacking, and like transmuting it to our model, which basically is about optimizing for impact. Instead of optimizing for compulsive use? Well, I
Jordan Crook 47:22
have to say, I don't know when exactly Daryl is going to wrap up. Before he does. I just wanted to say that, you know, you've seen I downloaded the app, while we were talking, I can't wait to start playing with it. But you just from every everything that I've heard of it on this conversation, you just seem like you've built something that really embodies you as well. Or maybe you embody the product, I don't know, where you end and the product begins or whatever, which is just a delight, as someone who talks to founders so often, and so many of them are so entrepreneurial, Li driven, right. And so like we see driven and so capitalistic, aliy driven. It's just like, it's a really refreshing thing. So kudos to you. And thanks for talking to us. I feel like I learned a lot.
Darrell Etherington 48:06
Yeah, yeah. Thanks very much. Yeah, we are just at the end of our time, but I want to echo those sentiments and I think it is, because you hear a lot about product first founders. And I think that it's a term that yes, gets overused, frankly. But like,
Jordan Crook 48:21
it gets tacked on. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 48:22
yeah. And and it can mean a lot of different things. But I think it's a very for me, you represent that to the best extent of that. And yeah, it's great. So thank you for for joining us here.
Jordan Crook 48:34
Yeah, your version of that is like, like, tapping it into my veins right now.
Brie Code 48:42
Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
Darrell Etherington 48:51
Okay, so I'm gonna admit that we're recording this outro later, but I just I'm trying to reoccupy the headspace so that I can be appropriately filled with gravity tasks about about where I am right now.
Jordan Crook 49:07
And you should feel different.
Darrell Etherington 49:09
Yes, you should feel this. I assume you feel different. for the better and you know, I'm glad that honestly I'm just glad that found was able to provide you that our podcasts
Jordan Crook 49:21
and I actually encourage everyone to go get a bunch of different podcast apps and download it and subscribe separately across all of them.
Darrell Etherington 49:27
Yes, that's right. The computer doesn't know that you're gaming the numbers so please help us. Found is hosted by myself. TechCrunch news editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch managing editor during cook we are produced and mixed by you shad Kulkarni and TechCrunch is audio products are managed by Henry pic of it. Our guest this week was Bree code who is a co founder and CEO of true love. You can find us on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you know you listen to podcasts and you can find us on Twitter also@twitter.com slash found Yes, we really did get that username. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.