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CTO PLAYBOOK 2011 Tony Parisi CTO at Large

CTO Playbook

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Tony Parisi's Playbook for Social Gaming Startups

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Page 1: CTO Playbook

CTO PLAYBOOK 2011Tony Parisi

CTO at Large

Page 2: CTO Playbook

Who I Am

Entrepreneur

Consulting Architect and CTO

Technologist

Web 3D Inventor and Evangelist

Page 3: CTO Playbook

What I Do

Consult

Advise

Plan

Develop

Manage

Challenge

Cajole

Comfort

<StealthMobileGamingStartup>

Page 4: CTO Playbook

What This Is

Startup Stuff

Product, Process, People

Tony’s Tech Toolbox

What This Is Not

Gaming Goodies

Success Secrets

Page 5: CTO Playbook

STARTUP STUFF

Page 6: CTO Playbook

Goals

What are your goals?

What is the company mission?

Where do you see yourself and/or the company in X months? Y years?

Change the World

$ Cash In $

Make Great

Games

…prove to my friends I’m not a

total loser

Build My Empire

Page 7: CTO Playbook

Strategy

Pick one and stick to it.

Your go-to-market plan may be very different from your long term goal.

Choice of platform may– or may not– be a core strategy decision.

Focus. You can always expand that focus or PIVOT later.

Get clarity on this early and often; challenge yourself.

Launch a killer FB game; expand to mobile

later.

Develop a platform, and find a partner to make a

game.

Raise the bar in game play, and become

famous for it.

Create a money machine:

Beg/borrow/steal revenue.

Some examples

Page 8: CTO Playbook

Funding

1. Self

2. Partners/Customers

3. Publishers

4. Investors

Investors invest in team and market opportunity first; technology and game play second.

Partners, Customers and Publishers have additional requirements (genre, platform etc.) and introduce additional risk.

If you are self-funding, you only have one job (initially): make a great game that generates $.

Investors invest in platforms, not titles.

Consumers buy titles, not platforms.

Page 9: CTO Playbook

Team

Your team should be a PACK™

PassionateAlignedCommittedKick-Ass

If your team is not 100% committed, investors and partners will smell it. No part-timers!Your livelihood depends on your team creating something new, different and awesome. Your team needs to kick ass.

Startups require long hours, huge sacrifice and absolute dedication-- against the odds, during bad times as well as good.Lack of alignment will kill a team. It is not a matter of if, but when.

Page 10: CTO Playbook

PRODUCT, PROCESS, PEOPLE

Page 11: CTO Playbook

Product

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Get User/Player Feedback Early and Often Be Thou Data-Driven, CeaselesslyCollect Data From Day One

Awesome MVP rant on Jon Radoff’s bloghttp://radoff.com/blog/2010/05/04/minimum-viable-product-rant/

Page 12: CTO Playbook

ProcessAgile (Scrum, Kanban, XP…)

Everything in broad daylight Short release cycles

(“sprints”)

Iterative Features can roll out over time

Inner vs. Outer Methodology Design and requirements

distinct from project management process

Continuous Integration Integrate daily, automate

build/test

Test-Driven Development Ideally, all features are unit-

tested before submitted to QA

Interdisciplinary Teams aka “Pods”

Nearly all features require multiple disciplines and have many stakeholders

People

Page 13: CTO Playbook

TONY’S TECH TOOLBOX

Page 14: CTO Playbook

Platforms: An Omnivore’s DilemmaA Tyranny of Choice for Client and Server

HTML5/Flash/WebGL/Molehill War

Android/iOS/Windows Phone/Playbook War

LAMP is Rapidly Fragmenting/Dissolving

Server Frameworks, Client SDKs are a Double-Edged Sword

Page 15: CTO Playbook

Design for Scalability

Shared-Nothing Architectures

Asynchronous/Event-Based Where Possible

Horizontal Scaling with Cheap, Disposable, Replicable Parts

Cloud Hosting/Virtualization

Edge Networks for Assets

Build Cheap at First, But Design for Big From the Start

Separate Your Log Server from Prod

Build Analytics in At The Start!

Load Balancer

Application Server

User DBUser DB

memcache

Application servers scale horizontally to user

connections

Players

User DB scales

horizontally to user growth

Application Servermemcac

he

Inventory DB

Inventory DB

Inventory replicated across application instances Object

DB

Object DB

Object DB scales

horizontally to repository

growth

Log DBMetrics and

reporting offline from production

Page 16: CTO Playbook

Tony’s Toolbox

Cheap Cloud Hosting Linode

Cheap/Free Project Management

Rally Community, Pivotal Tracker

Cheap Corporate Docs/Mail Google

Cheap/Free Sharing Dropbox, Evernote

Content Management Tactic (not hosted, costs

$)

Client Code All depends Use as much HTML, GL,

SVG etc. as possible

Server Code PHP, Node.js

Database CouchBase

Revision Control SVN or GIT

Frameworks Home grown

“I love frameworks… as long as they’re mine.”

Page 17: CTO Playbook

CTO PLAYBOOK 2011Tony Parisi

CTO at Large