Game Night — Quality Time With Our Founders and Their Team

I make it out to Los Angeles more and more these days as our portfolio seems to be growing the most there. This is due to a couple of factors including our focus on esports.

On just about every trip, I spend at least one night at “Game Night” with the founders and some team members of our portfolio company, Mobalytics. Mobalytics is a gamer performance analytics business that helps people get better at video games by analyzing your game play via their gamer performance index and providing feedback to help you improve.

Left to Right: Stephen Hays, Amine Issa, Bogdan Suchyk

It is somewhat ironic that we spend so much time focused on the technology of helping gamers improve at video games, and then once a month we gather at their office for game night, which usually consists of old school card and board games.

Typically, game night begins with a card game such as Avalon or Werewolf (which you play as a group, and lasts 5–10 minutes per game) and then progresses to a game like Power Grid (which lasts about 3–4 hours for 6 people).

Normally game night goes from about 7 or 8 PM at least 2 AM and sometimes as late as 4 or 5 AM. I can’t tell you how much it does for me to see how smart, competitive, and cohesive the team is. It’s fun to see how competitive the teammates are with each other and even with their investors. I’m very grateful to get to have such a good relationship not only with the founders, but with a number of their team members.

I also enjoy taking a break from the digital games (PC, console, etc.) and doing something that requires in person, old school, face to face interaction.

I need to start having game night with other teams in the portfolio. It’s such a great time to talk about anything, and everything and nothing all at once. We catch up on the business, on life, on nothing, and we just get to bond and come together doing something we all love, which is playing games together. You learn a lot about people when you play games and compete with one another.

Stephen Hays is Managing Partner at Deep Space Ventures, VC firm based in Dallas, TX that focuses on both esports and B2B enterprise startups.

Follow Stephen on Twitter Here

Read More About Deep Space Ventures Here