David Kramaley has always had an interest in games. When he was 14, he started an initiative called SoccerOD/VGCity, a soccer and video game online community that he managed for a few years. Kramaley attended college in New York City and completed an undergraduate degree in computer science. At roughly the same time, around 2007, Facebook was taking off and invited developers onto its platform. Kramaley saw this as a perfect opportunity to launch an online game company. He started Sharkius, a social games company inspired by games he enjoyed as a kid. Sharkius was an instant success. The firm had three big hits—Metropolis, Simmbook, and Mifia Cities. At the end of the first year, Sharkius’ revenues were \($60,000\) to \($80,000\) per month. Sharkius was riding the wave of Facebook’s growing popularity. Kramaley later commented, in an interview on Failory, a website that tracks failed startups, that Sharkius’ early success caused him to believe that “if you build it, they will come.” Kramaley indicated that his later experiences taught him that that was not the case. Sharkius’ problems began a few years down the road. Broadly, Kramaley said in the Failory interview, his most obvious mistake was failing to realize that his experience in making games did not translate well into running a company that made good games. Kramaley, elaborating on this topic, said: I made mistakes in people management, hiring too fast, firing too slow. I made mistakes in project management, and on and on. The inexperience showed at many levels. I was young and overconfident to the extent I was no longer on planet Earth. Success had launched me far into space when I needed to keep my feet firmly on the ground. On a more granular level, three issues contributed to failure. While a bit different from each other, the reasons focused on the lack of experience in marketing, the lack of a culture of learning, and the fact that Kramaley fell into the trap of working in the startup rather than on the startup. Regarding the lack of experience in marketing, when Sharkius launched, there was room for every online game company to do well on Facebook’s platform. As time went on, Facebook received so much attention and grew so quickly that a larger game company jumped on board that had more capital and better execution than Sharkius. Given the competitor’s success, Sharkius had to start doing some marketing, and it did not even have an email list. Having an email list, which is a fairly basic business practice, allows a company to reach out to current and past customers. Reflecting on the importance of having an email list while at the same time providing a word of advice to future entrepreneurs, Kramaley said, “An email list could have saved us. If you do not need one now, you might need one later and regret not having it.....

Discussion Questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest), how important do you think it is for a technical founder to have a cofounder with strengths in other areas, such as marketing or management? Do you think the outcome for Sharkius might differ from what it was if Kramaley had had a cofounder with marketing experience?
2. How does a founder or cofounder avoid the trap of spending too much time working in a business at the expense of working on the business? What evidence is there that Kramaley is doing a better job on that aspect of building a company with Chessable than he did with Sharkius?
3. If Chessable formed a five-member advisory board, what type of expertise would you recommend that the firm seek to assemble a strong board?
4. Are you dedicating time to reading books (or listening to e-books or podcasts) on personal development and/
or business? If not, do you think it would be a good use of your time to do so? Why or why not?