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哈佛商学院校友谈拉美社交游戏公司Vostu创业经历

发布时间:2011-03-21 13:50:58 Tags:,,

在社交游戏开发商Vostu公司开业的两年时间中,其三名创始人曾设想过三个不同版本的发展前景。

在2007年,这三人组合曾打算将Vostu.com打造成一个拉美社交网站,成为接管其他社交网站的一个聚合平台。但到了2009年,他们就转向了社交游戏行业,其中的一名25岁的创始人、首席战略总监Joshua Kushner表示,“社交网站在拉美地区创收真是太困难了,所以我们只好转战游戏领域。”

vostu.com

vostu.com

事实证明,四年前的Vostu做出了正确的抉择。该公司已从两年前的12名员工,发展到了现在的近400名成员,其中多数人员在阿根廷布宜诺斯艾利斯工作室负责设计和开发游戏(游戏邦注:该公司在纽约、圣保罗也设有工作室),现在主要开发农场类、足球类和咖啡馆管理游戏,并将其投放到谷歌旗下的拉美热门社交网站Orkut进行运营。

与Zynga等社交游戏开发商无异,Vostu的游戏也支持用户用虚拟货币兑换虚拟商品,用户可通过当地的零售商店或手机短信服务,花钱购买Vostu虚拟货币。

游戏邦获悉,该公司两名联合创始人Daniel Kafie和Mario Schlosser是2007年毕业于哈佛商学院的同学,而另一名创始人Kushner目前仍是该学院在校生,今年将完成他的MBA课程,他们三人拥有共同的创业理念。Kafie和Kushner受到Facebook在哈佛发展经历的启发,在当时萌生了创建一个社交网站的想法。

今年32岁的Schlosser是Vostu的首席研究员,主要负责技术和开发层面的事务,当他在斯坦福大学完成了自主创建网站的相关理论调查时,就到哈佛商学院深造,并开始寻找初创企业的合伙人。他表示自己的目标非常明确,那就是做一些与创业有关的事情,如果有合适的时机,他甚至愿意从商学院缀学。

三名创始人的哈佛商学院背景深深影响了他们的企业运营理念,为他们的战略性思维奠定了基础,商学院的教授为他们提供了公司落户地点、目标市场等不少极具参考价值的建议。三人均认为巴西市场的情况让他们深受启发。

28岁的董事长Kafie认为,“如果你关注的是一个很大的市场,那就无所谓你做的是哪一行,因为这个市场很大,所以总有一些方法是行得通的。”游戏邦了解到,Vostu现在已有2200万的月活跃用户,25%以上的巴西网民都在玩Vostu的游戏。

在哈佛商学院,许多同学都在参加银行和咨询行业的招聘活动,这种情形让Schlosser徒生许多压力,他对获得MBA学位之后的前途感到迷茫。他曾在一个对冲基金会工作两年,在Vostu摸索营收模式正式成为全日制上班企业之前,他一直兼职处理该公司事务。

他表示,“在自己想做的项目充满许多不确定性之前,你真的很难说服自己辞掉一份稳定的工作。”在哈佛商学院,几乎人人都奉行“找到一份体面工作,或者追随其他成功人士的步伐”等就业原则。

哈佛商学院的多数基础设施是为那些追求体面职业生涯的人而存在的,在Kafie看来,许多人走进哈佛商学院时,都会认为这就是自己追求的价值所在,最后大家都进入了对冲基金、投资银行和咨询顾问等领域,“你很难走进这里四处询问:‘我是到这来找一些有趣的合伙人,同时也想看看这里有没有创业的机会。’”

尽管哈佛商学院有许多课程都在传授关于如何运营企业、应对经营困境的经典案例,但Schlosser却表示自己更希望了解关于企业家应对失败过程的案例。

他们三人都参加了一些创业课程,但都认为Vostu自身的难题是如何在新市场中找到可行的盈利模式。Kafie的观点是,课堂之外才能学到真正有价值的知识,“创业精神并非在某个领域特别聪明或者擅于分析就行了,更重要的是执著。”

他们的这种执著精神已经得到回报,Vostu现已获得了包括Accel Partners、Tiger Globa在内的硅谷最著名的风险投资公司的5000万美元融资,但暂时还没有支出这笔钱。虽然Vostu一直在盈利,但他们拒绝透露具体营收数据。

自从公司开业以来,这个三人组合就一直与哈佛商学院有志于创业的在校学生及毕业生保持联系,他们还雇用了其中一些校友。Kishner现在经常往返于Vostue纽约总部、波士顿的哈佛商学院校园,并定期与旧金山风险投资家会面,每周都在关注科技行业的最新动向,甚至在自己的班级面试欲加入Vostu团队的学生。

他们最近的计划是在拉美工作室开发新游戏,推动公司的持续发展,“我们在那里落脚有三年时间了,我想这对一家新兴公司来说,它的表现并不算太坏。”(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Entrepreneurs learn the rules of the game

Two years after starting Vostu.com, a game manufacturer for social networks, the founders had gone through three different versions of their idea.

In 2007, they had envisioned a Latin American social networking site, then a platform to host other social networks, but by 2009 they had turned to social games. “It was really difficult to monetise down there [in Latin America],” says Joshua Kushner, the company’s 25-year-old chief strategy officer and one of three founders. “So we pivoted to gaming.”

But four years after its initial launch, Vostu is making the right moves. It has grown to almost 400 employees from the 12 it had less than two years ago, the majority of whom help to engineer and design the games in the Buenos Aires office (the company also has offices in New York and São Paulo). The company now makes social games such as farming, soccer and café management, which can be played on Orkut, Google’s answer to Facebook and a social networking site popular in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.

Vostu’s social games allow people to use real money for virtual goods associated with the games, with users paying cash for Vostu coins at local stores or via SMS messages on their mobile phones.

The company is compared with Zynga, a company that offers game applications such as FarmVille on Facebook.

Two of the co-founders, Daniel Kafie and Mario Schlosser, met as classmates at Harvard Business School and graduated in 2007. Mr Kushner, who met Mr Kafie as an undergraduate, will complete his MBA at HBS this year. The three MBAs were first drawn to each other because they share the same entrepreneurial dream. Facebook, which started as an Ivy League social network at Harvard, was the inspiration for both Mr Kafie and Mr Kushner, who were students at the university at the time.

Mr Schlosser, Vostu’s chief scientist, who focuses on technology and development, says he was looking to meet start-up partners and enrolled at HBS after researching theoretical concepts in self-organising networks at Stanford University.

“I came with a very specific goal of doing something entrepreneurial,” says the 32-year-old, who had been willing to drop out of business school if the right opportunity came along.

The founders say their HBS experience influenced many of the ideas for the company and supplied them with a basis for strategic thinking. Their HBS professors weighed in with advice on anything from where the company should be domiciled to which market to target.

All three founders state that cases on Brazil were an inspiration.

“If you have focus on a big market, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing because you’re going to find something that works because the market is big,” says Mr Kafie, the company’s 28-year-old chief executive. Vostu has 22m active monthly players, with more than 25 per cent of Brazil’s internet users playing Vostu’s games, according to the founders.

At HBS, as many students were ushered between banking and consulting recruiting events, Mr Schlosser remembers feeling overwhelmed when considering a less secure post-MBA path. He spent two years at a hedge fund, working at Vostu part-time while the gaming company searched for ways to make money, before returning to the start-up full time.

“It’s hard to tell yourself you have to interrupt this [steady job] with the uncertainty of doing something by yourself,” he says. At HBS, he points out there was considerable “emphasis on taking the big job or following what other people have done”.

As entrepreneurs, the trio say they have had to find their own way in the technology world and learn how to apply lessons from business school to their own start-up.

Much of the HBS infrastructure is set up to help those who are pursuing established career paths.

“A lot of people walk into a programme like HBS thinking you’ve got it made for you and those are the people that end up in hedge funds and investment banking and consulting firms,” Mr Kafie says. “It’s very different to walk in there and say: ‘Hey, I’m here to meet really interesting people and to see if there’s an opportunity for me to work on some sort of entrepreneurship idea.’”

While many of the business cases presented in class discussed what it was like to run top companies or work through serious business dilemmas, Mr Schlosser points out that he wanted cases that showed what it was like to fail, as entrepreneurs often do.

“HBS very rarely highlights or removes the fear from the failure aspect of entrepreneurial endeavours,” he says.

The founders took several HBS entrepreneurship courses but say that it was Vostu’s own difficulties in finding a viable profit model in a new market that helped the company to find its way.

For Mr Kafie, the most valuable lessons were learnt outside the classroom. “Entrepreneurship is not about being smart, analytical [or] being the best in one field. It’s about being persistent.”

Persistence has paid off. The Vostu founders have raised almost $50m from Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, such as Accel Partners and Tiger Global, but are not spending the cash they have raised. Vostu is making a profit, say the founders, although they are reluctant to disclose figures.

Since launching the company, the trio are also getting in touch with other HBS students or graduates who wish to follow an entrepreneurial path. Some have contacted the founders and they have hired several HBS alumni. Mr Kushner, who commutes between Vostu’s New York headquarters, the HBS campus in Boston and San Francisco to meet venture capitalists and keep abreast of the latest technology on an almost weekly basis, says he sometimes interviews students on Harvard’s campus between his own classes.

Nowadays the trio is working to keep up with future growth and focusing on developing new games in their Latin America-based game creation studios.

“We got there in three years’ time, which I don’t think is too bad for a start-up,” says Mr Kafie. (source:ft.com)


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