What does FlowPlay do?

We’re a game development company – changing people’s lives by providing them a platform that allows them to live in a virtual world. We bring people technology that expands their horizons and gives them access to friends and lovers they’ve never had before.

What’s your traction been like thus far?

We’ve had tremendous traction so far. Our first product, ourWorld, has more than 52 million registered users to date, while our latest product, Vegas World, now sees more than a million players a month. Profitable since 2011, we had our first $1 million revenue month in March and have seen % 240 growths in the last year. We’ve also had a lot of success scaling our business with partners, including Yahoo! Games, Miniclip, and most recently Atari – signing as a white-label partnership deal to launch a social casino product with the Atari branding.

Are you hiring? If so, for what?

We’re always hiring engineers, specifically game developers – but mostly anyone that has engineering chops and is passionate and knowledgeable about gaming. In fact, we’ve hired about 1 employee a month for the last year and we’re always looking for great, self-managing people.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started your company?

As the old startup adage goes, you’ll need twice as much money and twice as much time as you expected. Other than that – while I’ve always worked at startups, this is the first time I’ve started my own company and served in the CEO role so there was a huge learning curve in how to communicate with so many people (which now includes shareholders, partner, and a board in addition to staff, partners, etc).

What’s a hypothesis that you’ve had that has failed? And how did you respond?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned had to do with the hypothesis that we had around if we can build games for girls, then we can build them for boys too. Let’s just say that didn’t work out, but we didn’t beat our heads against the wall about it and we now stick to a demographic that we know really well. In game development, if you’re failing early on, the chances of you fixing the game and turning it around are slim to none.

What’s your favorite startup in your city? (Besides your own!):

Glympse. It’s a really useful, cool app created by a super talented team. I’m looking forward to what they have in store in the next few years.

What’s your favorite thing about being an entrepreneur?

Being able to make all my own mistakes. When working for someone else, the worst feeling was knowing when a strategy was wrong, but still having to execute on it. Now, mistakes are still inevitable but at least they’re my decision.

What’s your favorite local sports team?

Seahawks, they’re the only ones that I watch on TV and only ones that actually win.

If your company were an animal, what would it be and why?

Probably a Dolphin – we’re very smart, friendly and social yet also small and nimble. We’re not the type of company where you have to work 12 hours a day, constantly working to meet a deadline – we work at a steady pace to get things done.

If you were to take your company on a date, where would it want to go?

We’d go to Macau, China – mostly because, as a company, we’d like to enter the Asian market. Macau is also the gambling capital of Asia, so we’d probably visit a casino and play some slots and poker like our Vegas World users.