- Hello and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer and today we're interviewing
Jonathon Troughton, the CEO of framePlay.
Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Can you start by sharing
how you came up with the idea for framePlay?
- Hey Aley, thanks for having me here.
It's always strange when I jump into a conversation now
with anybody in Australia.
I get so used to being in SF and hearing the accent here.
So frankly, where did that come from?
Well, I'm a huge gamer.
I play an inordinate amount of games, still every day,
but I guess it really lends to the industry that I'm in.
So, PUBG, going back quite a few years now.
I don't know if you've played PUBG,
but I have played thousands of hours of PUBG.
It goes back to that and originally, Brendan Greene,
when he was originally designing the game, and his team,
if somebody in that team would have said,
"You know what, the character needs some sort of stimulant,"
they call it in the game,
and someone might have had a Red Bull can on the desk
and they took the modeling from that Red Bull can
and put it into the game.
And, you know, run around to the games,
spending thousands of hours looking at a Red Bull can,
I think that's a pretty good marketing opportunity.
So, you know, as they progressed
and the game really took off
and they had millions and millions of people
who were playing this game,
Red Bull reached out and they said,
had some license use of IP, et cetera, you know,
and they removed them, they put a generic can in there.
Now, as someone who's playing that
and I'm having such an amazing experience
with that brand immersed inside of that actual, you know,
the game I'm playing,
I've sort of looked at it and said, "Well, you know,
how do we take that experience that I had with that brand
and how do we get all the technology that you expect
in the media world, advertising world,
measurements, attribution, everything,
and like how do you apply that capability
to the experience I had that really benefits
advertising so forth and reaching a gamer
in a very authentic way that doesn't break the experience.
And if you look at the size, you know,
three billion plus people who are actually playing games
every day and like this is not a 15-year-old boy
in a basement.
Now the average age of a gamer is 34 and female.
Like, I mean, people don't really think of this.
And I wanted to make sure that we create,
as we went down this path,
I wanted to make sure we create a way to reach
and market to these people in a way
that doesn't break their experience
and that's kind of where this came from.
- Well, I mean, firstly even were having a giggle
together before because I personally did not realize
that three billion people play video games.
You know, I also had that stigma in my head
of the teenage boy in the room, but you know,
here I've got the CEO of framePlay, so you play video games,
so definitely broken down that stigma for me
and how cool that, you know, the company idea began
from simply playing a battle game yourself.
And Jonathan, I wanna ask you,
why did you choose to build your business on AWS?
- When you're trying to reach that many people
and you're trying to build things quickly,
and also keep in mind, like as a startup,
you need to be able to maneuver within the requirements
from technology requirements and capabilities
and having the engineering resources available, you know,
we wanted to build on something that was reliable,
it was known, like we could go to investors
and actually say,
"Hey, this is how we're building our stack."
It is why we're choosing to build with AWS
and knowing that you can do that without having someone
on the other side of the table when you're going out
for rounds of investment going, "Well, you know,
that's crazy, why would you do that?"
Going back to like 15 years ago, maybe not,
but now it's like default gold standard.
Like you are expected to be doing these kinds of things.
So, you know, when we look at that, I mean,
we're using 22 services at the moment from AWS
and, you know, as we do look at building a more capable
and robust platform, I mean, we have no intention
of changing, you know, having a presence in AWS, you know,
going down the path, we may have other areas
that are not in AWS, but the core functionality
and support system that we have in place really, you know,
is built on that.
So again, if you look at how many people we serve,
when you're talking about serving,
let's say at the moment we're serving hundreds of million,
we are like actually hundreds of millions of individuals
we see at our work,
if you look at the time that people spend
in the space as well, the average time
in the US is what, eight hours, nine hours a week, you know,
for people, when you're spending nine hours a week
in games and you've got several billion people doing it
and we're looking at building a capable system
that's everywhere around the world
and we're a startup and we're not talking
about deploying a billion dollars in development.
We're talking, you know, millions, but still,
you need a system that's robust enough and capable enough
to be able to record and interact with billions and billions
of impressions per week or per month.
- I agree, I mean, there's nothing worse
than being interrupted by technology
while you're playing a game or doing something
and I'm so glad we can help out with not just, you know,
your cloud storage and hosting,
but you said you're running, I think 33 different-
- 32.
- 32, sorry.
- Just like if you think of like a couple of fuel owners,
there's CloudWatch, there's Lambda, there's AppSync,
CloudFronts, S3, I mean, there's a bunch of different things
that we actually use on that perspective,
but the whole, I guess, concept of us is being able to scale
quick enough and in an efficient manner
until the business really matures years and years
down the path is by using a lot of these services
that are available from, you know,
especially from a perspective
of engineering talent understands this
and can deploy these capabilities, but then, you know,
it's kind of not off the shelf, if you will,
but it's there ready for us to go and scale
so we can really focus on what we're focusing about
is providing the best experience that we can provide
for a play, for a game, whoever's playing game,
we wanna make sure that we provide them the best experience
while providing that value to an advertiser
and AWS has definitely allowed us to do that quicker
than, you know, going through and trying to build
a lot of these core services ourselves
when we can just plug that module in.
- Absolutely, I mean, I was gonna say as well,
like not only are you using cloud storage and hosting,
but what you're doing, which is so cool is, you know,
looking at the analytics and management services as well
which is crucial for your business, so really cool.
And Jonathan, I wanted to ask you, 'cause framePlay recently
raised 8 million dollars in a Series A cap raise,
so first of all, congrats on that,
and second of all, can you please explain to me,
'cause my husband's in the startup world as well,
what was it like raising capital in the middle of COVID?
- Put it this way.
Raising capital is usually difficult.
It's not what you see in Silicon Valley where basically,
you know, I don't know if you watch TV show,
but TV show is fantastic and there's a lot of things
you pick from that, but it's not usually the way
it's depicted where it's like,
hey like people are constantly throwing cash at you.
Yes, people throw a lot of money at you,
but the reality is when you are kicking off a fund raise
in the middle of a global pandemic, I mean, I'm pretty sure
the global economy shrunk significantly.
People sort of recoiled and said,
"Hold on a second, like pause."
But we were very fortunate, like I guess our approach
and philosophy, where we've been gamer first
and the way that we actually approach building
the technology, we were very fortunate to be able to speak
and communicate and demonstrate what we were doing
and why we were doing it.
Now, you know, gaming was massive before COVID
and COVID really sort of just put more attention
and a spotlight on that, but how we built the technology,
how it was being responded to by people who are playing
the games with our technology in it,
how game developers are responding to our technology,
really, you know, gave us the benefit that we raised money
easier, you know, than most did in COVID
and I can tell you now, like I, you know,
I can feel for other people out there
that that entire capital sector disappeared
completely for many and there's a lot of businesses
that definitely didn't raise capital during COVID.
So for us, you know, we're very fortunate.
We stuck our core values
and it was really around providing a good service
for gaming and developers and game developers
and because of sticking to that philosophy
and also like just approaching it from the perspective
of using AWS to scale these things,
it made a lot of sense to invest, even in times like that.
- Absolutely, I mean, one thing I have to say is
that you guys definitely have done a really good job
at gaining the trust of the developers.
You've said it right the way through this interview
that, you know, having that confidence with the gamers
that you're not gonna disrupt the game experience
is so important as a gamer yourself
and congrats on the raise.
But Jonathan, to round up this interview,
I wanted to ask you about data 'cause data is so important
in so many businesses, but particularly important
for you guys at framePlay, so why is that?
- Well, I guess it's a couple things.
So if you really look at even what I've just said there
like the way we sort of approach this,
the scale of what we're talking about existed
prior to COVID.
It grew during COVID, but it's not shrinking.
It's only those people have gone into it
and now are going again.
We're, again, talking about over three billion people
spending hours and hours and hours a week
in these environments, you start to think of what type
of data is required to be monitored, modeled.
How do we even ingest, you know, what's happening here?
Like what are people seeing
and what's working, what isn't working?
And when you start doing that in like the scale
of billions and billions of impressions
and also the fact that, you know,
I know you've probably had this a bunch of times
in other talks as well,
metaverse, like we build core technology.
Like we are the picks and shovels of monetizing
the metaverse when this comes up.
So, you know, as you are taking in billions of data points,
data is fundamental to our business
of understanding how it's operating
and understanding what working, what's not.
Now, AWS has been very beneficial for us,
especially having things like QuickSight
where we can actually model some of these
data ingestion points really quickly to have
a clear understanding of what things look like
and knowing that we could build platform relative to that
and support that data more later, but just like putting
out a prototype, like what the does this data look like?
But you know, maybe I'll go on a bit of a rant here,
data's essential and for us,
especially in the advertising industry,
it's probably the most crucial thing.
Like how do you actually, how do we substantiate
how we're billing, how do we prove that it is accurate?
How do we know what somebody's, you know, what somebody saw
and what they did, it was the attribution to that.
What's the ROI relative to that brand
and why we keep all philosophies in place
that's actually making sure that, you know,
privacy and experience and everything is upmost
for the game developer.
The sheer amount of data that we collect
and we have to analyze and ensure is accurate,
to be able to build what we build,
AWS has been fundamental for us
actually understanding what we have
and that's a big problem with a lot of people
is like understanding your data that you have
and being able to interpret it.
- Absolutely.
As you say, it's one thing to have the data,
but, you know, interpreting it is so important
and a couple of jobs ago when I was fresh out of UNI,
I worked in the space of serving ads and attribution models
and there's several ways of skin a cat,
but the data is so important where you're proving
why your ads are, you know,
worthwhile having and serving, so absolutely.
- And we do, like the other part, like we differ massively
from the industry from standard web technology.
Being able to understand what's happening
in a three-dimensional space, you know,
where you have things like lighting
and things that may obstruct a player's visibility,
like viewability of whatever's happening in front of them,
we are trying to convey that value.
You know, a single player can yield
thousands of data points per game session.
I mean, how do you really model all of that at mass
to understand true value of media that for, of media,
so, yeah, like for us, it's always gonna be fundamental
is having a reliable system that can actually be called upon
to validate value when it comes to advertising.
- Jonathan, I could talk about this stuff all day
'cause I find it completely fascinating.
This space is so interesting to me.
Thank you so much for sharing your success
and we really love partnering with you
and I look forward to kind of following your journey
and seeing what happens with framePlay
in the next couple of years, so thank you so much.
If anyone has any questions, please pop them
in the comment section below and we'll get back to you.
Thanks, Jonathan.
- Thanks.