Getting2Alpha

Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.

Brendan Greene, better known as PlayerUnknown is a video game developer best known for creating PUBG: Battlegrounds. In 2019 he left active development on the game to form PUBG Special Projects and PlayerUnknown Productions, where he is developing an ambitious virtual world far larger than the one in PUBG.

Entrepreneur and angel investor, Rei Wang is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at The Grand, a group coaching platform to help people navigate transitions at the intersection of work and life. Before The Grand she served as CEO of Dorm Room Fund  at First Round Capital where she nurtured a community of 250+ startups, and counseled entrepreneurs on topics ranging from fundraising to management. For her leadership growing Dorm Room Fund from an experiment into the world’s premiere university-focused venture fund, she received the Forbes 30 under 30 award in venture capital.

Philip Rosedale is the founder of Linden Lab, which launched the popular virtual world Second Life in 2003. His goal has always been to build a viable model for a virtual economy or virtual society, not just an entertainment platform. Before Second Life he served as CTO at RealNetworks, where he wrote some of the earliest algorithms to compress video for transmission across the internet. In 2013 he founded High Fidelity, which builds a spatial audio for group chat. He is currently involved with both Second Life and High Fidelity, and advises on Metaverse efforts.

Barry O'Reilly is a business strategist and author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. He’s worked with top executives at Wells Fargo, American Airlines and Walmart to cut through complexity and make smart decisions in a changing world. In doing this work, Barry has learned that most executives resist unlearning what they already know.Listen as Barry talks about the importance of questioning assumptions, and the power of incentive systems to shape human behavior.

Raph Koster is an entrepreneur, game designer, and author of a Theory of Fun for Game Design. He is currently CEO of playable worlds. He was Lead Designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He founded Metaplace in 2006, which was acquired by the social gaming company Playdom.

Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur and investor who founded the early social media company Tribe Networks, and the mobile social gaming company Zynga. More recently he co-founded investment firm Reinvent Capital in 2018.

Garry Tan is a software engineer turned entrepreneur turned investor. On his popular YouTube channel he offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He is intensely aware of the privileged position he is in as a tech-savvy investor in Silicon Valley, and is eager to share his knowledge with the next generation.

Gabby Dizon is cofounder of Yield Guild Games, an organization that helps its members make money playing blockchain-based play-to-earn games. As a long-time game developer and player, Gabby had long dreamed of a game guild owned by its members. 

Mitch Zamara is Lead Product Designer on Million on Mars: Land Rush! He has over a decade of experience as a game designer working in the free-to-play social/mobile game space at Zynga and other companies. He specializes in designing game economies.