Elan Lee
Co-founder & CEO, Exploding Kittens. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Elan Lee is the co-creator and CEO of game studio Exploding Kittens, which launched in 2015 through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Earlier in his career, he served as Chief Design Officer at Xbox Entertainment Studios and co-founded 42 Entertainment to pioneer alternate reality games.
2shows
4appearances
53statements
15resolved
9supported
2contradicted
60%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Elan Lee said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lee: Kickstarter's real purpose is community building, not fundraising
“Go to Kickstarter to build a community. It's not there to raise funds. It has the side effect of raising funds, but you're really raising a community, and that's the place to do it.”
Brick-and-mortar stores represent 60% of Exploding Kittens' total sales
“Brick and mortar is still about 60% of our business.”
Elan Lee: Games should make players entertaining, not be inherently entertaining
“My fundamental premise behind all game design is that games should not be entertaining. Games should make the people you're playing with entertaining.”
Elan Lee: AI fails at designing games that spotlight player interaction
“Games should make the people you're playing with entertaining. And AI sucks at that.”
Lee: Most crowdfunding projects focus entirely on funding and ignore the crowd
“All the projects you've ever seen in your life focus on that funding part and they ignore the crowd part.”
Lee: Traditional mirror-room focus group game testing produces useless feedback
“Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group. They do these blind tests. Everyone sits in a room. There's the one-way mirror. You watch people play the games. It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out like, why are these te…”
Lee resigned from Microsoft because Xbox games isolated children
“And I just thought, like, oh, I am so clearly part of the problem here. Like, something about it feels broken. And within about two weeks, I resigned and knew I had to go do something else.”
Lee: Card games should pit players against each other, not the game
“My whole principle behind the thing was, every card in this game should invite an interaction between you and another player. So, I really wanted this thing to feel like you are playing against players. You're not playing against the game. Everybody is playing…”
Lee: Exploding Kittens consistently generated $20M annually for ten years
“Every year, like, For the first few years, honestly, for the first, like, 10 years, Exploding Kittens is very consistent at hitting that.”
Exploding Kittens costs $1 to $2 to manufacture and retails for $20
“It's to make cards, put them in a box. This comes out to like between one and two dollars based on the product. Right. And we're selling it for 20.”
Exploding Kittens exceeds $100M in annual revenue across over 100 published games
“We're over a hundred at this point. I, you're right, I can't say the exact number, but we have, we've now published more than a hundred games.”
Exploding Kittens' marketing team has ultimate veto power over any new game
“And the reason that we're doing that is because they have ultimate veto power over anything. So we could think it's the best game in the world, but if the marketing team cannot figure out how they're going to sell that thing, that game dies that moment.”
Elan Lee: AI compresses game ideation from months to hours
“And it used to take, you know, months or years. And with AI, I've actually been able to shorten that to sometimes just a few hours.”
Elan Lee: AI accelerates brainstorming by filtering bad ideas faster
“It often won't yield the right idea, but I can usually shortcut weeks Off the process, because it helps me get through all the bad stuff faster, and it helps me find the little tiny sparks that might be interesting, and then I can grab those and dive right in.”
Elan Lee: AI enables lightning-fast combinatorial ideation for human creators
“For those who don't have a Jordan, AI serves that purpose perfectly because it will do that combinatorial mathematics at lightning speed. All you have to do is be really astute and really open-minded as you look at the results and find the two ingredients that…”
Exploding Kittens hit Kickstarter goal in seven minutes, $3M in three days
“We hit that goal in seven minutes. By the first day, we had raised a million dollars. By the end of the second day, we had two million, and by the end of the third day, we had three million, and this thing was completely out of control.”
Lee: Exploding Kittens designs games that make the players entertaining
“We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining.”
Lee: Exploding Kittens only ships games that get 100% 'play again' ratings
“When you finished playing our games, there's one question on the whole survey, which is, do you want to play again? That's it. That's all I care about. When a game hits a hundred percent yes, we're gonna ship that game.”
Lee: AI focuses your thinking rather than giving the right answer
“It's a research buddy for me where it's not ever going to give me the right answer. It's going to help me focus my thinking to hit that formula exactly as I need to hit it.”
Spielberg ARG 'The Beast' was named after its 666 project assets
“The first time we did an inventory count on how many assets we had built, the number came out to 666, and so the project got its name.”
Lee: Service agency models are exhausting because revenue stops when you sleep
“It's, it was a service business, right? So. You're constantly hustling. Yeah. So we would make money as long as we were working. And every night I would go to sleep and think, I'm about to go to sleep for eight hours. And during those eight hours, I'm not maki…”
Lee expected $10,000 on Kickstarter while his co-founder predicted $5 million
“And I said, 10,000 dollars. That seems about right. That's how much we'll earn off of it. And Matt immediately said, five million dollars.”
Exploding Kittens founders split equity equally on a handshake without lawyers
“Instead, we'd said, let's all own a third of this thing, and shake hands, and move forward, and that was it.”
Exploding Kittens set its $10,000 Kickstarter goal based on minimum print costs
“If I contact a local card manufacturer, I was like, what's the minimum order? And he said you have to produce a thousand decks of cards. Like, that's the minimum here. I was like, cool, ok, fine. And I was like, well, how much does that cost? And he said, oh, …”
The other half of the tape: Elan Lee's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Elan Lee, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Elan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Exploding Kittens | 1 | 32 | 70% 7/10 | full record on How I Built This → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Exploding Kittens | 3 | 21 | 40% 2/5 | full record on Masters of Scale → |