YC Tech Talks: Designing from Day One: Artists as Founders with Multiverse (S20)

Um, so we're multiverse. We did YC W20, so that was from like January to March of this year, just before corona hit.

You know, multiverse, we're making next generation tabletop RPGs. You can think of us like a mix between, you know, DnD and Roblox. We want to take games like Dungeons and Dragons that you play in your head and on paper, and we want to turn that into a visual experience you play online. You can stream, you play with your friends, right? It's like a video game. And we're building a marketplace because DnD and like tabletop RPGs are ultimately about telling your own story.

We want anyone to be able to make content on multiverse, but we're also the first creators on it. So in a way, we're making a platform, but we're also making a game and content on top of it. You know, we're a bit of an unusual founding team. We've got two MIT engineers, me and Hisham, and Sarah, who's a world-class artist. I'll let her get into stuff she's done, but really it was kind of an unusual team. We wanted to share our experiences about how it was having someone like Sarah collaborate with us, be a founder, and whether maybe that's something that more people should do.

You know, Emma touched on this; in tech, it's hard to understand how to make a game sometimes, right? Because coming from a tech background, we're used to solving problems. We're used to talking to customers, and like worst case, you're building like a social product and the advice is always like, you can't talk to the customers, but you launch right away, and you test. The testing's out.

Games, I think sometimes make people a little bit uncomfortable in tech because they're different, right? Like they're entertainment products, and they take some time to launch. They're not necessarily solving a problem. In entertainment, you really need to have a point of view that you're sharing, and you need it to be compelling. You have to trust that like millions of other people want to know about your point of view, right?

You need to make these really important foundational decisions without necessarily knowing how people will react. You're not able to test it right away, right? You really want someone on your team when you're making a game who is truly good at that. No, it's worth saying that not every gaming startup is an entertainment company, right? Like Twitch is a platform, right? They're not necessarily making their own content.

Even mobile games, to some extent, you could say you don't necessarily need the high entertainment value. But like, you know, if you're trying to make a company like, you know, let's say Riot, when fundamentally, you're also making a media company, entertainment is really important. You need someone who is good at that; you need someone with great intuition and instincts.

When we were making multiverse, we knew we needed to make content, and we wanted to be compelling, and just immediately the person who popped into our mind was our friend. We've been friends for a long time, and it felt very natural. Luckily, she had a lot of the entrepreneurial skills that we already needed.

Yeah, sorry, do you want to talk a little bit more about that and your journey going through YC as an artist?

Yeah, sure! You can hear me right? Yep, okay cool. Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm the creative director and co-founder at multiverse, and primarily the illustrator. Sorry for the cat interruptions before; she seems to want to give part of this talk as well.

Before I was with multiverse, I was doing work for Marvel, for Star Wars, and on comic books. It was just a really natural transition, actually, to transfer some of those skills into games. If you think about how players interact with your games, art is at every single step. You know, the first way they interact with your game is through illustration and the promotional images you create.

Then, you know, their art is dominating the screen and ultimately defining what the player experience is going to be. The art of the game is what people are going to ultimately recognize. You know, when they're on Twitch, they're on YouTube, they're on Instagram, you know, seeing your game around. So we genuinely believe that artists actually have the same skill sets that you expect of good tech founders.

First and foremost, illustrators right now, especially the ones utilizing social media, they're entrepreneurs. They're good at business; they're very interdisciplinary. You know, they're raking in 10 to 40k at comic cons. Kickstarters are getting genuinely like millions of dollars with teams of just like two or three artists. When companies talk about recurring revenue for the same thing that these, the same things that artists are considering, it's like a Patreon in Twitch subs.

You know, they're running their own businesses, and often they already have audiences. They have access to other artists in an established community of talent. When you open the door to like one illustrator, you very quickly have access to many more.

One kind of hot take and kind of a controversial opinion is that you shouldn't get fixated and dazzled by people who are coming from AAA studios. You know, the artists who are coming from Riot and from Blizzard; they're coming from like a very much studio background. What really makes illustrators excel as entrepreneurs is when they're coming from the scrappier side of things.

When you know they're on Twitch or YouTube or Instagram or Twitter, and if you're looking to recruit from a small to mid-sized team, I highly recommend looking at those folks who are building their own audiences and doing it from scratch the same way a startup does.

With my own experience coming into tech and coming into startups as an illustrator, I should say that there are growing pains. It comes from both the illustrator themselves and from the team that's accommodating them and bringing them in. I didn't have the same vocabulary as a lot of the people in startup spaces. You know, when I was going around do I combinator, every two minutes I'd have to lean over to that and be like, "Wait, what does this mean? What is B2B SaaS?"

I would just smile and sit there. I was the only person at YC who didn't know who Paul Graham was, and I still a little bit don't. So, you know, I didn't have some of these established truths or general knowledge, and that took some growing with my team.

I should also say that for me, as an illustrator transitioning into like working with a company after so long doing freelance and, you know, successfully working independently, I had to understand timelines were fast. Decision making is really important; you're accommodating a larger team and a product that's being developed very quickly.

Those early stages at a startup are very crucial; you don't want to end up developing the wrong thing. But what's interesting is at the same time, that's where illustrators really come in handy because you're able to produce illustrations and trailers and those first instances that really grab audiences quickly and relatively cheaply compared to developing other products.

So you can kind of test what's clicking with your audiences and what isn't, thanks to having that talent ready to go in the team. And I would also say, especially for the artists that are in the chat and, you know, watching these talks, the budgets are a lot higher, and the pay is just simply better in tech.

Like, that's a big appeal to go from working independently to like working at a startup. I'm similarly likely there, and similarly as a tech company, you can get a lot of really talented people affordably. You know, like you can really spend a lot of money and like make some really talented people amazing art, like really high production value.

And that's been a huge advantage for us in like all of our content. It's really kind of like why we’ve gone to YC and why we raised our seed round. Even like most of the investors were like, "Alright, shut up, we don’t care about your pitch. Your trailer looks awesome." You know what I mean? Like, let's just invest on that. So, yeah, it's a really huge advantage.

Yeah, and a lot of things that we hear from other people who they're not necessarily opposed to working with artists, but primarily they don't even know where to start. I can say that they're not on LinkedIn and they probably don't know how to use LinkedIn.

You have to go to where they're already building their audiences, so that is going to be Twitter, it's going to be ArtStation, it's going to be on Twitch or on YouTube.

And they're surprisingly accommodating and easy to reach out to, and very often, again, when you find one, you very often have access to others. I also really encourage people to comb through some of like the popular Twitter hashtags that are on there to look at #PortfolioDay, #WomenArtists, and most recently, there's been a really popular push in game dev spaces for POC in play.

So that is highlighting like people of color within the video game industries, and it's been a real treasure of talent and access to people who can really do something special with your video game company. So, yeah, our whole concept is that, you know, illustrators have the same skills as a tech founder, and they're already doing a lot of the same work.

They know what they're good at, knowing what people want, and doing it. We really hope that more folks bring artists to the table and also the cap table. That was something nice! I begged her not to make that pun, you know, the cat table pun.

Yeah, I mean, no, it's been really great having someone like Sarah on board, and, yeah, a huge part of our company.