#203
When Pokémon Go launched, Niantic CEO John Hanke was enjoying a tranquil walk through a bamboo forest near Kyoto with his son. When he got back, it was all hands on deck: Building on a platform Niantic had developed for its previous game, Ingress, Pokémon Go was a runaway success story, earning $100 million dollars in revenue in its first week, and $1 billion in its first seven months. “I had a huge amount of anxiety that this is just too good to be true,” John recalls. “When are the wheels going to come off? What’s going to go wrong?”
In this episode, John and Joubin discuss San Francisco’s history, Noam Bardin, Google Street View, David Lawee, AR glasses, Field Trip and Ingress, Tsunekazu Ishihara, gaming outside, Gilman Louie, Frank Slootman, mellowing out, Thomas Kurian, Jay Chaudhry, commute burnout, daily yoga, Xerox PARC, Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Vision Pro, the history of gaming, and talking to computers.
00:00:00 The story behind Niantic’s name
00:02:40 How Google Maps stays spot-on
00:08:01 Pokémon Go's $2B rise
00:12:00 Building the foundations for a hit game
00:16:26 Pokémon Go wasn’t supposed to be a game?
00:24:37 The toil of building a startup
00:32:57 An entrepreneur’s mindset
00:36:59 The startup grind
00:42:50 The chaos of Pokémon Go's launch
00:45:39 Post-launch struggles of Pokémon Go
00:53:04 Can founders ever really switch off?
01:02:41 AR’s impact on tech
01:09:02 Will games lead wearables?
01:11:50 AI and LLMs will reshape how we build games
Watch video #203 online without registration, duration hours minute second in high quality. This video was added by user Kleiner Perkins 12 August 2024, don't forget to share it with your friends and acquaintances, it has been viewed on our site 1,050 once and liked it 39 people.