#097 Mother Games | Creating a New Way of Seeing the World

Show Notes

The gaming industry is always open to creative and innovative ideas. Mother Games is one startup that is doing just that, both in terms of gameplay and in the way that it operates. The company’s first game Le Zoo will be out soon, promising a transformational experience for players. But outside of the gameplay, Mother Games is doing things a little differently. Co-founder and CEO Kelsey Falter is taking her experience from a previous startup and applying those lessons to Mother Games.

Kelsey recently joined Roland Siebleink on the Midstage Startup Momentum Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about the inspiration behind Mother Games, what makes Le Zoo different from other games, and the approach Mother Games is taking to building both games and a company.

• What it means to build in public and how Mother Games is allowing customers to participate in game design.

• Why Mother Games is rethinking boilerplate privacy policies. 

• The best ways to gain the trust of customers.

• What it’s like for Kelsey to navigate the uniqueness of a company as it grows.

• How Mother Games constantly reorganizes the company around the strengths of its people.

Transcript

Kelsey Falter:
"We’re not trying to create a myopic worldview. We’re trying to create an expansive worldview — where people can have the experiences with technology that they are in the driver’s seat for."

Intro:
Welcome to the Midstage Startup Momentum podcast. Each week, we interview up-and-coming founders of some of the fastest-growing mid-stage startups across the world. Your host is Roland Siebelink, who will share some of his own experience helping startups scale from 10 to 1000 people in a few years. Here is Roland.

Roland Siebelink:
Hello and welcome to the MidStage Startup Momentum podcast. My name is Roland Siebelink, and I'm a coach and ally to many of the fastest-growing startups in the whole world. Today, we have with us a very, very special guest. It is Kelsey, who is the founder and CEO of Mother Games or Maatru, as she says the official company is called in Sanskrit.

Kelsey, I've never ever had a company that named itself in Sanskrit. What is the story behind that?

Kelsey Falter:
That's a great question. We wanted to hearken back to the idea of originating something new, and Maatru is the root of matrix, materialize of matter, of mothering, of materializing, and that idea of the womb as the matrix space, where things come together and something new emerges and that there's this transformational experience through the act of cultivating with intention. 

That's what we wanted to do with the company. And we decided, let's name it Maatru, and our first public division is Mother Games. And that was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. There are a lot of companies out there like King Games, and we just were like, “Well, let's play with this a little bit and let's make it about mothering.” Not so much in the mommy sense of the word, but more so in the sense of, “What if you were to create something from nothing? What if you were to bring something into the world? What would that look like?”

Roland Siebelink:
I have some specific questions on that. But before I start with my interpretation, I'd love to hear, Kelsey, what does Mother Games, what does Maatru, bring into the world that's different? What impact are you hoping to have? How are you making the world a better place?

Kelsey Falter:
Yeah, that's a great question. Maatru, the company, holds the mission of creating transformational experiences that affect the inner and outer world of every being who comes into interaction with what we create. In our first division Mother games, we are doing that through gameplay. 

When we talk about transformational experiences or when we talk about this idea of materializing something new, I think that comes into the idea of how are we creating a new way of seeing the world? And in the course of our gaming division, we're talking about: how could a game transform the way that you perceive reality?

And when we think about games and the cultural impact that they have, games are one of the most neuroplastic tools that exist in our society. They are rapid learning tools. In fact, 20 times more effective at creating a new neural pathway than most other habit-forming mechanisms. If you really want to create a transformation of the human experience and the way that reality is perceived, games are one of those super-efficient loops to be able to do that. And our first game is called Le Zoo, and it will debut this year. And the tagline of the game is: “The only way out is within.”

Roland Siebelink:
Excellent. Okay. That transformation that you mentioned as the key impact that you want to reach in the world, it's really about a personal transformation, even a spiritual transformation, whatever words you want to put on it, that is very much about your personal experience in life. Is that right?

Kelsey Falter:
I would say yes, and I think also from a time and a place perspective, why now is also an important question. I think that in the age of agents, how are we rediscovering our own internal agency? How are we reconnecting with our humanity, and how are we rising to the occasion where so much as being abstracted away from the human experience, and how are we reconnecting with that in ourselves? 

Human agency is a big theme in our company. How are you creating the reality that you want to see in the world around you? And some of that starts with empowering yourself and seeing yourself from the very beginning and understanding your full level of expression.

Roland Siebelink:
What made you come to this idea? What is the origin story behind Maatru?

Kelsey Falter:
I had a company when I was in my early 20s and we analyzed text. LLMs were not a hot term at the time, but we did unstructured natural language processing very, very fast. We could parse text pretty quickly and understand what is the predominant concept from a summarization perspective, from a statistical breakdown. 

At the time, Twitter had not IPO'd, Facebook didn't own Instagram or WhatsApp, and it was a data free-for-all. You could get access to the entire Twitter firehose or the entire Facebook newsfeed, more or less, and there was no federation of that. We were analyzing that for large news companies, large media companies, and helping to shape what is the dominant narrative of the common person and how is that being represented in media? 

You learn a lot and learn a little bit about what your personal perspective is on the entire data landscape when you're that close to it. You're interacting with petabytes of information. And it's like, wait a second, why is it that large institutions seem to know more about me than I know about myself? That opens up some questions. 

Fast forward, I got out of the technology business for a while and needed to have that come-to-Jesus moment of understanding this is how the world works. And I also had a time of reflection, being like, if you check off all the boxes that you were told are the peak of career, of existence on this planet, and you sit there and examine it and decide, wait a second, what did I really achieve at all? I had that reckoning, that internal reckoning of understanding, and started down that path of examining myself and saying, “What do I ethically align with, and what do I care about, and what do I think is important?” 

Then I started to think, “What if you really were to reconnect with your own autonomy? And what if you really were to reconnect with yourself and do it in a fun way?” And that's how Mother came. Maatru is a messenger. It's a messenger service to say, “You can be whoever you want to be. And by the way, you have a right to see yourself at the highest level, whether that is understanding yourself through data or whether it looks like understanding yourself through a game experience. That is really where we're going to be taking things with the company.

Roland Siebelink:
You mentioned in one of your other articles that you're inviting players to participate in the process of creation with Le Zoo. Is that still going on, and can you explain what that means?

Kelsey Falter:
Yes, we're in our third play test right now. Most games of our scale typically take years to open up to an alpha play test community. We've been building much more like a consumer application. Letting people in and experiencing it from the very early MVP proof of concept perspective, and incorporating their feedback.

We're now in that third phase of the process, optimizing how is the experience going? And then we will debut the game. We did our first play test within seven months of beginning our production build, which is a rare thing. And then in addition to that, we're enabling players to - they can basically connect in their own data, and we have built a way for folks to see themselves through that data. 

Roland Siebelink:
How far are you? I think you mentioned you’re pre-revenue. But have you done substantive testing? How many people are on the game? Is it still a lab project? Where are you at?

Kelsey Falter:
That's a good question. We have around six figures of users who have signed up for pre-signup. And we have a super active Discord community and play-tester base. We are still in private alpha, but certainly the numbers are looking good. Our prior play test, the average session time was over 36 minutes, which for a mobile game, most of it sits around that 11 to 15 minute mark. Just yesterday, we opened up our third play test, and it's already far exceeding that 36-minute session. 

Roland Siebelink:
Kelsey, you mentioned before that you've been pre-inviting people into that community, as you now also mentioned with your numbers. Is that close to that trend of building in public, or is it not quite going that far? And what do you think about building in public to the degree you've thought about it?

Kelsey Falter:
A lot of times, I think, building in public trends toward other builders. You are talking to your peer group, but not necessarily talking with the group that you're serving. And we are building in a way that is talking with the people who we are actually building for. Building in public, for me, is a trend on the cusp of “being a founder is cool” or I'm gonna reveal all my data to the world, how it's like to build a company. 

And I'm less concerned about appealing to other founders or investors, and I'm more interested in creating a super strong bond and trust, actual trust, with consumer users who honestly for the past 20 years have been using ad companies on a daily - Google is an ad company, Facebook is an ad company. And there are very high levels of mistrust. When we're building in public, we need to be building in public with the people who we're actually serving, not building in public for the optics of the industry.

Roland Siebelink:
What are some further ways in which you can engender trust with your user base? Maybe things that other companies haven't quite figured out to do yet.

Kelsey Falter:
Well, it's interesting you say that; we are actively working right now on drafting a new take on what is a privacy policy. Right now, if you go to our privacy policy page, it's an off-the-shelf privacy policy that any other company would have. And we were like, “This just doesn't hold; this is not the future. 

I think engendering trust is about being okay to question the status quo and then publicly talking about the fact that you are interrogating why is this the status quo? And saying publicly, “We started with this privacy policy just because that was the table stakes, the easiest thing off the ground. And then we realized, why is that the easiest thing?” It doesn't make any sense to me. That's one way. I also think admitting your faults is important as well. When something happens that you're not super proud of, you have to take responsibility for it. 

Roland Siebelink:
This is usually a question I ask at the very end - we'll probably keep going a little bit beyond - but it's just so connected right now. What are some of the learnings that Kelsey has learned that you would convey to founders coming behind you, younger founders, potentially people with less experience in life, if that's even possible?

Kelsey Falter:
Because the human life is a finite experience, I think we have a moral obligation to understand how are we putting human attention on something and why are we putting that attention on that thing. And I think about it like an agent-arena relationship. If the agent is the person and the arena is the company or the creation that you're making, are you creating a narrowing agent-arena relationship where it starts out as a fun thing that you can use and then eventually it becomes something that you're so addicted to that you cannot live without? That's a narrowing agent arena relationship.

And then you can think about an opening agent-arena relationship where each interaction is like, “If this is possible, then what if that's possible?” And by the way, both can be incredibly valuable businesses. Both can have a very serious impact in the world. And it's a choice as to are you creating a narrowing experience for people or are you creating a broadening and opening and expanding for people? And I think that that is a critical question to ask.

Roland Siebelink:
I did have a question about your team, Kelsey. You're somewhere between 11-25 people. Is that right at this stage? 

Kelsey Falter:
Yeah. We're a little bit over 20 folks and are distributed around the world. We have our headquarters in New York, some engineers in Brazil, and one of my co-founders is Brazilian, and then the other is Portuguese-American. Our entire game engineering team is in Ukraine. We had a close connection to them in the very beginning.

Roland Siebelink:
How big did your previous team grow in your first startup? Do you remember how far you guys got?

Kelsey Falter:
We were 13. But the company was acquired within 18 months. It was quick.

Roland Siebelink:
That was good. You're now reaching to a scale that you haven't managed before, perhaps, at least not as a startup. Is that starting to make a difference in your life?

Kelsey Falter:
The answer is yes. I realized that everybody has different ways of processing information, of receiving information, of different motivations, and that's never gonna change. You're gonna continue to have increasing levels of uniqueness throughout the company. And learning how to interact with various management styles or various learning styles is something that I feel continuously humbled by. And so, the answer is yes. Yes, I am learning.

Roland Siebelink:
Very good. Are you and your co-founders working on some conscious way of helping the company scale? Whether you bring in OKRs or try to put some methodology in place or some rules of procedures, an operating system? What is on the agenda, if anything?

Kelsey Falter:
Haisa, who is one of the co-founders, she's head of operations. Her approach is much more human-centric and feeling-centric. Even having an outlet of someone who you can talk to and process through whatever you're experiencing is something that I think is important. But I think from a performance-driven perspective, we have key - let's call them key outcomes that are qualifying criteria. Whether you want to say that they're in the canonical OKR format or not, this is the objective, and here's how we know we are getting there or not. 

We have that as it relates to the game. Gaming is certainly a metrics game. We have that. And then I think how we measure whether we're achieving what we want to achieve from that foundation, that data foundation, that idea that humans deserve to own their own data. From that perspective, we have to create that proof of concept and prove that this is possible. It's a little more binary at the moment and a little bit less OKR driven. It's more, let's see if we can get this thing stood up. But we do that. 

We also reorganize a lot. It's really around what stage is the company at? What does it need? And then what are this person's strengths or zone of genius? And how are we actively moving people into place and talking with them about, “Hey, so we're gonna change course because you are super strong at this and we wanna make sure that you're in your zone of genius for this thing.”

Certainly, founders are bobbing and weaving all the time, making sure that the person who is focusing on that thing is invigorated and in love with what they're doing. It's the same thing we were just talking about. The machine is going to operate at a much better rate than if you're running up against friction, and it's no longer the right fit for that person in that time.

Roland Siebelink:
If Maatru grows really big and it has all the impact that you could possibly desire for it in the world, where are you going to be 10 years time from now, Kelsey?

Kelsey Falter:
I want to redefine the consumer technology landscape. And I believe that there's a future reality where people can have the experiences with technology that they are in the driver's seat for. That means no more data silos. That means experiences like games and social networks and fun play or purchase experiences that are not extractive or reductive. And instead, are empowering, enlivening, are able to be tweaked and changed according to who is using them. We're not trying to create a myopic worldview. We're trying to create an expansive worldview. 

In 10 years, I think a new consumer landscape will exist. It's already happening with the advent of vibe coding and generative coding techniques. We're putting the building tools in the hands of the person. Not to quote Rick Rubin, but Rick Rubin's over here being like, vibe coding is the punk rock of the future. If you have something to say, you can say it now.

And we're at a turning point. We're going to see an explosion of consumer experiences. And so, 10 years from now, this will be where we are; the entire landscape of how consumers interact with technology today will be dramatically different.

Roland Siebelink:
How about any numbers you have in mind?

Kelsey Falter:
Well, I'm going to be very honest with you, and I don't know if I'm pulling one of those things where I'm like, what does that really mean? But 4.5 billion people around the world have data access rights. Obviously, there are more users of Facebook than that number. 

We would like to, when you look at a global tipping point around ideology or around transformation, you need that 3% of the global population to create this like escape velocity of change. And in order to bring about a new consumer landscape, we need 3% of consumers to be interested and using and enjoying and loving and building with us what we're talking about here.

Roland Siebelink:
Yeah, very cool. Okay, that's a number, I love it. That's very good. Kelsey, if people have made it to the end of the podcast, what can they help Maatru, Mother Games, Le Zoo with? What are you looking for from the audience?

Kelsey Falter:
If you wanna learn more about yourself, I encourage you to go to lezoo.mothergames.com and take the house quiz. It will tell you a little bit about your personality style and who you are, and then stay tuned for a pre-signup for the game. If you are interested in this future reality where consumers are in the driver's seat and there are no zookeepers, if you will, then drop your email on mothergames.com. We're excited to continue to make connections with people who are interested in a reality where we can transform the current landscape.

Roland Siebelink:
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining the MidStage Startup Momentum podcast, Kelsey Falter, the co-founder and CEO of Maatru, Mother Games. This has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you coming onto the show.

Kelsey Falter:
Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate your time and telling these stories.

Roland Siebelink:
Exactly. And for everyone else listening to the podcast, there will be tons more stories and more founders as of next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Outro:
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