Meteor was a video game publisher of the award winning, direct-to-consumer, free-to-play PC game HAWKEN. Recruited by tier-1 VC’s Benchmark (Snapchat) and Firstmark Capital (Uber) to acquire HAWKEN’s developer, Adhesive Games, and take on the role of CEO, I was challenged with recapitulating their success with Riot Games.

Riot had built League of Legends into the biggest game franchise in history and was acquired by Tencent for nearly half a billion dollars. With Meteor they wanted to repeat their formula of building out a top tier roster of talent to successfully publish free-to-play games globally, with an emphasis on compelling content and a high standard of customer service and community engagement.

I grew Meteor to a global team of over 100 professional in one year with offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Budapest that developed two games and Storm - an AWS-based gaming-as-a-service (GaaS) platform that included identity, analytics, hyperscale multiplayer, load balancing, security, eCommerce, content management, server-side game logic, and CRM.

Hawken launched in 2012 and quickly scaled to 1.5M monthly active users with a novel inbound transmedia customer acquisition strategy that included movies, web series, comics, books, and graphic novels.