It’s time…stepping back from SuperAwesome

I recently wrote about ten years of SuperAwesome. As a serial company builder, it reads like an impossibly long period of time. It really didn’t feel like it. But it does feel like the right moment to step away and reboot my brain for the next challenge (the supremely talented Kate O’Loughlin is taking over).

The team (past and present) has been amazing, it’s really worth reading this post about what we accomplished over the last ten years. It’s been a lesson in the compounding power of working with great people (which continued when we were acquired by Epic Games in 2020). 

One of the greatest gifts has been to work with a genuinely mission-driven company: SuperAwesome is building a safer internet for the next generation. You can hustle for anything, but hustling for something? That’s quite rare in my experience. 

Working inside Epic has been a court-side seat to one of the most exciting platforms for gaming, media, builders, brands and content owners on the planet. The potential remains enormous and I can’t wait to watch UEFN’s roadmap unfold.

What’s next? I’m quite excited to say I don’t know. I’ve always loved the thrill of learning new sectors (although I was an investor in a couple of kids companies at the time, I knew nothing about digital privacy or brands when we started SuperAwesome). I’ve a few broad vectors of exploration:

• The youth space remains an incredibly exciting ecosystem. I truly believe that Gen Alpha and Gen Z are going to have a far greater impact on the digital landscape than anyone grasps.

• As a slightly weird mix of operator and investor, I’m quite interested in the evolution of capital models for building companies, especially in spaces which don’t fit a VC returns model

• The climate crisis remains an obvious (and perhaps, obligatory) purpose for any capable operator. I’m doing a lot of reading.

• The engineering techniques used by ancient cultures may not prove to be commercially viable. But they are intensely interesting.

It may very well be none of these things but I shall enjoy the journey to figure it out. Esoteric reading recommendations and ideas welcome.

“Go find some purpose” Potter Payper

(btw the header image is not AI-generated, it’s my collection of SuperAwesome challenge coins-we mint one each year for the team to commemorate some of our achievements)