Our first investor, former IGN president Roy Bahat, has agreed to be chairman of our board.
Roy believed in OUYA from day zero. He loved OUYA from the start for a bunch of reasons – one is that he cares about teaching coding skills (he’s on the board of a nonprofit called CodeNow that teaches underprivileged kids to code). So many people learned to code by making games but, until OUYA, it was hard to do that on a console.
I worked with Roy at IGN which he ran for five years. He loves startups, and has been involved with a bunch (Revision3, Flixster, etc.). He’s also on GameStop’s digital advisory council. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s a lecturer at UC Berkeley, where he teaches media.
And we’ve filled our technology leadership roles…
We hired the guy who ran development for RIFT at Trion, and Tiger Woods at EA, Steve Chamberlin, to run our engineering. Steve loves games, DIY electronics, and homebrew computing projects (his are internet famous!). We are thrilled to have him. Steve started his career in the defense simulation industry, we don’t think that’s relevant (yet?) but we do think it’s cool!
Raffi Bagdasarian joined us to lead software product, including user experience and our services for game developers. Raffi led product for Crackle at Sony Pictures Television’s Digital Networks Group, working with Xbox Live, PlayStation, Roku, iOS, and Android. He’s a gamer. He’s a tech junkie. OUYA combines the two. It’s pretty much his dream gig
Meanwhile, in the last couple of weeks we’ve continued talking to lots of game developers about putting games on OUYA – over a thousand have been in touch with us since our Kickstarter ended. We’ve kept building our product (we’re making choices about things like what materials and finish to use). And we’ve been fielding requests from distributors who want to carry OUYA (more than 50 have applied from all around the world!). Lots to do…
Ciao for now, and join me in welcoming Roy, Steve, and Raffi!
Julie
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks