Glitch

“We still had like nine million dollars left and everyone still liked the game and we were all happy working on it. But I think by that point I had exhausted every non-ridiculous long shot idea to make it commercially successful. And so Decided to abandon it.”

“Four years of development, 45 employees, tens of thousands of players, 17 and a half million dollars raised.”

“It was incredibly powerful for the small minority of people for whom it worked. So they spent 20 hours a week playing, and they were very committed. It was a super tight community. But most people, like, you know, 97% who signed up would be out of there within…”

“And that was a tough conversation with our board and our investors, because they actually wanted us to keep going. It was a tough conversation with the other co-founders who also wanted to keep going.”

“And we ended up getting every single person a job.”

“We still had five and a half million dollars or something like that left in the bank. So we didn't have to shut down”

“In fact, we had money left over when we decided to shut it down, but it was apparent that it wouldn't work”

“And we had made a bet On Flash as a technology for delivering the game, which wasn't going to work on mobiles, and I think in the end that, that really was the nail in the coffin. If it hadn't been for that, I think it would have been worth trying a little bit…”

“Any of you who have participated in online communities, especially in the early days, where, like, the online community was the nexus of all of these friendships and all these relationships, when they disappeared, that's it. Like, people can say, we're gonna m…”

“So there's 45 people at the company, and eight of them were going to stay on to work on Slack. So for the other 37 people, we did kind of career coaching. We wrote reference letters. We set up interviews for them. We ended up getting everyone a job”

“It was never going to become the kind of business that would justify 17 and a half million dollars of venture capital investment.”

“We still had, like, over five million dollars in the bank.”

“By the end of that process, we had gotten, you know, every single person who worked there who was getting laid off, and there was like, 37 of them, I believe. Every single one of them got another job, and in most cases, they got a better job than the one that …”

“My memory is, is it took us months to decide this, and there's a lot of debate. In fact, it took us, like, less than a week. The core was there, like, almost instantly.”

“The leaky bucket problem that I talked about in the context of the game was completely eliminated. Like, we found that once people started using it, as hard as it was to get people to start, once they started, they almost never stop.”