Who we are
We are a team of veteran game makers, specializing in building on emerging technology platforms.
Many of us first met in the early days of Zynga, when Mafia Wars on MySpace was still a big deal. We were running live ops for multi-million DAU games on the Facebook desktop web platform when the Apple App Store was still just a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. We brought Zynga Poker from web to mobile as one of the first successful mobile-optimized gaming experiences. And we have continued our partnership post-Zynga by co-founding, bootstrapping and then selling a successful mobile Free-to-Play gaming company to a publicly-traded gaming giant for $170 million. We've built commercially successful and award-winning games for PC, Social Networks, Mobile and Voice interfaces, so we're no strangers to new, diverse and immature technology platforms, on the verge of breaking out into the mainstream.
We've seen a lot, and built a lot - but we've never been as excited about a new platform or a new set of technologies as we are about blockchain.
Leadership Team
Niko Vuori, Founder & CEO
Niko is a serial entrepreneur who has been playing games (especially management sims - his favorite is Football Manager) for a lifetime, and has been making games for more than a decade, since the early days of Zynga (where he was a product leader and the General Manager of FrontierVille and Zynga Poker). After leaving Zynga he co-founded social casino pioneer Rocket Games in 2013 (sold to Penn National Gaming in 2016) and co-founded voice gaming innovator Drive.fm in 2018 (raised $15 million from top-tier investors). He has been a crypto investor & advisor since 2015.
Cory Johnson, Founder & CTO
Cory has been a gamer since before he could read (he learned that while watching his parents play Super Mario World!). He started making games in middle school, when he learned BASIC and got his first exposure to C++ / DirectX at age 9. He led engineering on Zynga's first push into MOBAs (Solstice Arena), and then joined Rocket Games as its first engineering hire in 2013. He co-founded voice gaming innovator Drive.fm with Niko in 2018 and has been an early adopter in the crypto space since reading the first Bitcoin whitepaper and receiving Ripple (XRP) in early 2013.
Sherrie Chen, Chief Product Officer
From poker player to McDonald's mayor, Sherrie has been playing games since she first learned how to say "40 points" in Chinese (She was 3). She later graduated from earning Neopoints and Monopoly money and took her passion for gaming to social at RockYou and Zynga, where she worked with Niko on FrontierVille and Zynga Poker. She then joined dating app Coffee Meets Bagel as its first Chief Product Officer - because what's more high stakes than the game of love? Sherrie is also an art lover and has been following and championing the NFT art space since its inception, and has even created her own experimental Riendrops NFT piece.
Joining the team are a battle-hardened group of gaming professionals who have worked together across multiple companies.
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