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<aside> 👋 Hi! I'm Hilary, Co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. I'm a technologist with a business hobby, who has founded a few other organizations, including Fast Forward Labs and HackNY.org as well as past roles like being the General Manager of Cloudera's Data Science and Machine Learning business, as well as Chief Scientist at places like Bitly and Accel Partners. I also deeply support diversity and equity in tech and volunteer on the board of the Anita Borg Institute. I currently lead the engineering team at Hidden Door, where we're thinking about large language models, procedural generation, dynamic visual story rendering, and building scalable platform services.
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<aside> 👋 Hi all - I'm Chris, Game Director at Hidden Door. I'm a designer, creative lead, and programmer (of last resort) who's worked in games for nearly thirty years, including stints at Harmonix (The Beatles: Rock Band) and Turbine (The Lord of the Rings Online). I've also been a teacher of game design, and in my limited spare time, I work on an indie game titled Loose Nozzles with my son. At Hidden Door, I oversee the overall creative vision for our first game, helping to plan game mechanics, user experience, and story content together with the entire team. Nice to meet you!
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<aside> 🤔 I am really impressed and interested by your diverse technical background. Looking back at your experience across a variety of different fields and cultures, how has that prepared you to successfully build and grow a team and business at Hidden Door?
Or, putting it another way, what are some of your unique skills and perspectives that will provide you and your new team with a competitive advantage in this new space? - Nate
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/39f774cf-32f2-4c55-8d16-22ba9fc9073a/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/39f774cf-32f2-4c55-8d16-22ba9fc9073a/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" width="40px" /> Hilary: Ha, thanks! To get right at the heart of it, the product we're building is using an emergent technology, in this case, machine learning, right as it's becoming possible to do so, to invent a new kind of entertainment experience. To do this requires both deep technical expertise, as well as empathy, and sensitivity for the delight that we're trying to create.
That's why I'm personally in love with this project (I was an English/Computer Science double major at a hippy liberal arts school, so have been toying around here for YEARS), but also why we're building a team that's half folks from tech and half folks from gaming, all with different experiences and perspectives on what makes amazing social story experiences.
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<aside> 😍 Love this! Confession: I am selfishly asking these questions because I see a lot of benefit in diversifying our games teams by complimenting them with people and perspectives from outside of games, something that I'd like to see more risk-averse teams lean into. - Nate
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e63a7f8a-152b-4229-a768-aedc88a11fd9/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e63a7f8a-152b-4229-a768-aedc88a11fd9/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" width="40px" /> Hilary: I agree with you! It's been surprising to me as someone coming from 'tech' broadly how different even fairly straightforward things like engineering or management approaches can be between the gaming industry and startup tech (which is also different from enterprise tech, and so on).
I'm also a big fan of diverse teams in many dimensions having broader experience and perspectives to build better things.
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<aside> 🤔 Can you tell me about the dynamic on your team, marrying your game experience with Hilary's varied technical background? And specifically, what excites you about bringing those worlds together? - Nate
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a2d2981a-a8d0-4830-98d4-fbcbffd74988/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a2d2981a-a8d0-4830-98d4-fbcbffd74988/fyrBGWD6_400x400.jpg" width="40px" /> Chris: I came to Hidden Door as a kind of "games whisperer," helping marry the team's objectives for a cool AI-driven storytelling experience with the sorts of dynamics that make games work. It's been a thrill to collaborate with people who are this smart and creative, and to be able to apply what I've learned at various game studios in this new domain. Maybe what's most exciting is that what we're building is so new and unprecedented, and leverages the story in a way I haven't done since I was an aspiring screenwriter.
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<aside> 🤔 That is a good lead into what you are doing now. What can you tell us about your current project at Hidden Door? And for our job seekers, what excited you so much about the project that you decided to start/join this team? - Nate
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