Andrew: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and home of over a thousand interviews with entrepreneurs who have talked about how they’ve built their businesses. In almost every one of them, I’ve done a rapid fire intro because I just love talking fast apparently.
Anyway, the other thing that you’ll notice in these interviews is that there is a good focal point, one that teaches you something that you can use in your business. In this interview, my hope is that you will learn about how to take an idea from a concept to reality and once you do it, how to apply rapid innovation and rapid prototyping so that it can continue to improve and be something that your customers want.
To do that, I’ve got with me Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman. They are the founders of Two Bit Circus, an experiential entertainment company. Their productions include Stunt Show, in which their team of nerds could set up events for your company and do things like launch a car off of a building. They’ve got STEAM, which is a modern take on the old carnival. It features high tech games, laser robots and fire. I’m going to ask them more about what that is.
This interview is sponsored by LeadPages.net. You guys know what they’re about. They’re the company that creates beautiful pages that encourage your audience to join your mailing list. If you want to see one of mine, go to AndrewsWelcomeGate.com and you’ll see a lead page that I created that LeadPages.net will power up for you, AndrewsWelcomeGate.com. I’ll tell you more about those later.
But first, welcome guys.
Bent: Howdy, Andrew.
Eric: Howdy.
Andrew: Brent, I never reveal a secret that my interviewees tell me before we start, but we did talk a few weeks ago and I asked you what your revenues were and you told me in private and I was just blown away. I see your eyes are widening. What do you feel comfortable saying about your revenues?
Bent: This is definitely one of the faster-growing companies I’ve ever been a part of. Eric and I have been building stuff together for almost a decade now. This is our third company. This is our third year for Two Bit. We have more work than we can possibly do, more projects that we can possibly sink our teeth into. It’s really been an absolute blast. I guess that was a very political way to respond to your question without actually responding to your question. But it’s in the millions.
Andrew: It’s in the millions. So, here’s the reason why it blew me away. I thought this was just an artistic, creative project that two people who are creative and enterprising put together. I didn’t realize it was such a big business.
Bent: Well, it’s a really fun time. Part of the reason that Eric and I originally started collaborating was the premise that out of home entertainment hasn’t changed in forever. You think about the last big innovation and it was practically laser tag. But compare that to the fact that we’ve got all this great new technology, easy to use computer vision, cheap sensors, what kind of new entertainment can you do as a result of having access to that stuff? That’s been fertile ground.
Eric: Invention is kind of a hot button thing and people are actually willing to pay for creative awesome things, whether at their events or at their companies. That’s something we provide.
Andrew: I don’t know. People are willing to pay $1.99 for an iPhone app. They complain when they pay anything over $4.99. You guys are now doing this kind of business trying to tell them, “Here’s something brand new.”
Bent: Well, Andrew, I think there’s sort of an interesting shift going on. Old world was like products and services. I think we’re really moving into an experiential economy. You think about the stuff that’s on your want list. It’s probably some new places you want to go, new restaurants you want to try, new novel life experience, not like stuff as much.
Eric: We already have apps. So, spending even a dollar more for an additional app doesn’t give you any marginal gain. But paying a lot of money for something amazing, a new invention, something like anything you’ve ever seen.
Andrew: Give me an example of something so amazing about your events, Eric, that people will come all the way out there to experience and never forget, one example, Eric.
Bent: I know where you’re going.
Eric: All right. Well, maybe you do. I’m going to tell you about one of my favorite games that we’ve made. It’s called Human Meteors. Do you remember the game of Asteroids?
Andrew: Yeah. A little rocket ship like thing shoots up at asteroids.
Eric: We don’t like little. We made it gigantic. Here’s what we did. We took a laser projector and we mounted it on the ceiling projecting down at the floor. We took that classic game of Asteroids and we made it 16 feet by 16 feet wide on the floor and you are the ship. You sit down in a chair and you roll around in the space. You don’t just sit there with your phone in your hand. You are in the game. Wherever you go, the ship goes. Wherever you aim, the ship aims. Whenever you press that button on your seat, it shoots a missile at one of the asteroids and you have to destroy the asteroids. And that kind of experience is unlike anything you can get anywhere.
Bent: And it gets social too because the people around you are saying, “Hey, look behind you. There’s an asteroid coming,” or what not. But I will say that where I thought you were going was another thing we just did at our carnival called the Dunk Tank Flambe. You remember the old dunk tank, right?
Andrew: Yes.
Bent: You throw a ball, you get hit, you fall in the water. We replaced the water with fire and you’re standing there in a full fire suit. Someone throws a pitch, hits the target and you’re enveloped in a ten-foot fireball.
Andrew: When you say “you” you mean me or one of your employees.
Bent: One of us.
Andrew: I see. Okay. Let me get a sense of what your background is. Eric, your background is in robotics?
Eric: It is.
Andrew: What did you do in robotics?
Eric: Robotics and rapid prototyping. So, for several years, after many jobs not in that field I finally found my home building robots essentially for the military, intelligent ground vehicles, some intelligent air vehicles, rapid prototyping of all sorts, sometimes for car companies, whatever.
Andrew: Can you give me an example?
Eric: An example of…
Andrew: Of something that you built using rapid prototyping.
Eric: Oh, an example of something that I’ve built using rapid prototyping.
Andrew: In the military, before we get into what you’re doing now.
Eric: No. No. I can’t, actually. I can certainly tell you about the things that I’ve rapid prototyped here because rapid prototyping is one of those skills that sort of supports all my efforts at any company. But I can’t actually talk about those old projects.
Andrew: Really? Because it’s classified.
Eric: You know, NDAs that give you cold sweats in the middle of the night.
Andrew: Literally.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. And Brent, what was your background?
Eric: But I can tell you that I’ve built intelligent ground vehicles, a car much like the Google car that can drive around, not run into obstacles, know where it is except this thing was designed not for city streets but for the middle of an inhospitable desert.
Andrew: And you would build that and you’d use rapid prototyping to see if the idea that you had in your head and on paper actually made sense in the real world and know how to change it?
Eric: Yeah. I think rapid prototyping as a philosophy is that you’re willing to fail very fast with any idea. You’re not going to overthink it. You’re going to test it quickly, make sure it works and, if it doesn’t, discard it instantly and if it does, see where you can take it next. That says nothing about the materials you’re using or the processes you’re using to take that idea and turn it into a reality. It says evermore about your philosophy of how you built things.
Andrew: Okay. And Brent, what were you up to?
Bent: So, my background is computer science. But I’ve been building novel entertainment for a long time. Before Eric and I met, I was building a high tech restaurant. So, touch screens on all the tables, displays on the walls, you would order your food from the screens and then could play games against everybody in the restaurant.
Andrew: You’re talking about uWink?
Bent: I’m talking about uWink, yeah, which was such a fun, wild ride. Sadly, we were like five years too early. We closed the last restaurant and six months later the iPad came out. I had scoured the globe for even a $2,000 device that had similar characteristics and it just didn’t exist at the time.
Andrew: I remember one of the cool things, I was in the LA tech community and the geeks loved going to uWink. I remember going there. One of the cool things was I don’t have to wait for a waitress to come over or look like a jerk trying to get the waiter’s attention with my arm. I could just use a device there that kind of looked like an iPad.
Bent: Well, the wild thing was people weren’t even that familiar with touch screens at the time. So, we had to do a lot of training around just interacting with the touch screen. Nowadays, it would just be a no-brainer.
Eric: Nowadays everyone assumes that every screen around them is a touch screen, whether or not it is.
Bent: But it was a really neat experience because all the things we set out to prove ended up being true. You had lower labor costs because you had fewer servers, higher check average because the system would always upsell bacon and whatever else and then increased revenue from games because people were willing to pay for some of the games. So, it gave you lots of flexibility to do special things on Tuesday nights and special events, parties, corporate stuff. I’ve got to say, I’ve sort of got the itch again.
Andrew: I get it. I can almost see it now as an app that restaurants can use to bring this experience, the uWink experience into their restaurants without adding a new infrastructure at all.
Bent: Yeah. There’s some success already doing the ordering side. Nobody’s really doing the entertainment side. So, there really is an immediate opportunity there.
Andrew: Did you feel at all burned by that and say, “You know what? I can’t believe this didn’t work out. I thought we were right. I’m just done.”
Bent: It did hurt. It took a while to sort of get over it because on the one side, we had these passionate fans, people who loved it and came all the time. It was working. But the challenge was it was three companies in one. We were doing all the software development. We were making all the enclosures. So, even though the restaurants in isolation were successful-
Eric: And they were cooking the food. You didn’t mention cooking the food.
Bent: The restaurants in isolation were successful and it was impossible to sort of carry this 15-20 person engineering team with the revenues of one location.
Andrew: So, what about you on a personal level? I always like to get into the mind of the entrepreneur. On a personal level, did you feel burned? Did you feel depressed? Did you feel like, “I’m never doing this again?”
Bent: I don’t know about never doing this again, but I definitely felt exhausted. My dad used to always say it’s a lot more fun starting them than it is closing them down. By the time we were closing it down, we hadn’t been paid for a year. It really sucks everything out of you. It was crushing. It was really crushing.
Eric: I’ve got to say, my experience working with Brent, we started working together about the time the uWink was coming apart. I think maybe one restaurant was still open. I helped them move their warehouse. But as we were pawing through all the hardware that was never going to now make it into a restaurant, we were already looking at that stuff going, “Huh. I wonder what we can do with that now.”
Bent: Yeah.
Eric: So, I say he probably took about five days off from being an entrepreneur before he dived right back in.
Andrew: I see. And then the ideas were starting to bubble. Where does an idea for this kind of experiential circus event come from? What was the originating point?
Bent: We had kind of a fun time of that because when Eric and I first met, I mean, literally, before we’d actually met face-to-face, we had already prototyped a project that we were going to build together just over email and ended up building it. But it was a passion project, nights and weekends, just sort of an interactive whiteboard. We took it to a party. People really liked it. They started playing with it in ways we hadn’t predicted. Our confidence was so bolstered we decided to make more of that stuff.
Andrew: So, this was the first product, the interactive whiteboard. I saw it online, I think, on Eric’s personal blog. I forget how I landed on it. Can you describe it to people who can’t see it?
Eric: Sure.
Bent: Sure.
Eric: So, what we did was we took an ordinary whiteboard, just like the kind you have in any startup and we aimed a camera at it and we aimed a projector at it. And the way you would interact with this whiteboard is you’d walk up to it, you’d take a whiteboard marker and you’d draw on the whiteboard. And then the projector would project objects falling from the top of the screen. But those objects, balls, squares, whatever, it would interact with whatever you had drawn. So, it would fall down the screen. It would hit what you had drawn and it would start rolling down the screen.
So, we sort of synthesized the physical and the digital world in that way. The way it worked was a camera was pointing at that screen and distinguishing the things that you had drawn in that whiteboard and just creating a physics simulation. It was so much fun.
Andrew: So, when you talk about rapid prototyping, was there a prototype here? I know it seems very basic, but it also seems complex to create.
Bent: So, this was the prototype. So, this for us was sort of the big difference. Having an idea is one thing, but actually creating it is completely different. We wouldn’t have known the ways people were going to interact with it without having taken that first step to build the thing. We built it in two nights. It was only by putting it in front of people that it sort of got us thinking about other novel interactions and for an event that was one month later, we had a whole new set of things to try and showcase.
Eric: When we started doing this, the event was called Mindshare in LA.
Andrew: Mindshare. Right. So, that’s an event in LA where a guy named Dougie Fresh invites people who are creative with technology, science and other areas and you just mix them together. So, this was your contribution to the event. But when you started building this, did you say to yourselves, “We have this big idea. It can be this big event. Let’s start small.” No. You just said let’s try something cool.
Bent: Let’s experiment.
Eric: Here’s what happened. At the time, we both had perfectly ordinary jobs. We were looking for some kind of outlet. I think uWink was in a state of decline and I was working at a rapid prototyping company unable to tell anybody what I was working on, as I am still unable to tell what I was working on.
Andrew: To this day.
Eric: But we were both playing with amazing technologies. We were thinking, “If only there was a way to share what we’re doing sort of outside the domain that we’re actually employed and outside the domain we’re working in.” We weren’t the only ones thinking this way. We really came together with a bunch of other people who felt the same and we just started prototyping stuff on the weekends.
We started meeting in a bar. That bar is about a half block from where we are right now. Probably a dozen people and sometimes two dozen people would get together and show off, challenge one another to make cooler things. You had to get it done either before the next event or before the next time we met at the bar, otherwise you would show up empty handed and that’s not cool.
So, it was a really special time in art and technology coming together because I don’t know that technologists like us, big geeks, ever, before that moment, had the opportunity to stand up and show off before the general public and have the general public react in this way that they reacted. We’re like, “This is art.” We didn’t realize we were making art.
Andrew: It kind of reminds me of the old Homebrew Computer Club where Apple was born, which basically launched the computer world as something that individuals can have access to. You’re right. I don’t see a lot of events like that. Even today with meetups making it easier to organize events like that, I don’t know of very many.
Eric: It was really a powerful time keeper for us because having the event happen every month sort of meant like, “We’ve got to have something new for the next time.” A lot of discussions meeting at that bar was like, “Okay, how can we screw with the attendees this month?”
Bent: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: What was the best way that you screwed with the attendees back when you were just getting started?
Bent: Cloud Mirror?
Eric: Yeah. That was fun.
Bent: Cloud Mirror was a project we did. We do a lot with computer vision, a lot with cameras. The idea here is that you would walk up to what appeared to be a mirror. It was really just a screen and a camera. You would see yourself reflected in the mirror. And above your head, there would be a thought bubble. In that thought bubble would be something terrible that you had written on Facebook or it would be your relationship status or it would be if you shared a name with anybody from the internet sex offender registry.
Basically I wrote software that would go online and it would research who you were. It would come up with snarky things to put in that thought bubble. So, you’d walk up to this screen and all of a sudden you’d be confronted with your dark internet self. The way it knew who you were is you were wearing a badge and the camera could identify-
Andrew: And you did facial recognition and used that.
Bent: No. There was no facial recognition. You had to be wearing a specially marked badge. But we had all the attendees information. We’re giving them the badge. So, we could give them a badge that told us who they were.
Eric: We did do face tracking to put the bubbles on.
Bent: Oh, we did face tracking. But it didn’t identify based on the face.
Andrew: So, when we talk about, again, rapid prototyping, this seems really complicated.
Bent: You know what? It’s a mindset. I actually think this is something every entrepreneur needs to have in their bones. The difference between sitting on a couch and being like, “Oh, this might be interesting,” and actually going out and testing that hypothesis is the make or break moment. You need to be out there and trying it in order to figure out what’s going on. One of my favorite quotes is from Madeline L’Engle. It says, “Inspiration comes during work, not before it.”
What happens is you take your premise, you go out and you talk to a potential customer and they say, “That’s a terrible idea. I don’t have that problem at all. But you know what I do have is this other problem.” At which point you’re like, “Oh man, I can build that too.” You sort of need that active engagement in order to be able to figure out how it’s going to work.
Eric: If you look at the evolution of the tools that entrepreneurs use to make web products, they’re getting so much easier, right? It used to be you had to hire a team of developers and probably a DBA to run your back end system. You don’t need to bother with that anymore. That same evolution has happened in hardware prototyping as well. It is so easy to turn an idea into a working piece of hardware now. The tools are cheap. They’re readily available. There are infinite tutorials online. There are gigantic communities ready to help you. So, as easy as it is to make web software, it is that easy to make hardware.
Andrew: What’s a good community for anyone who’s interested in physical products to be a part of?
Eric: The Arduino community. I’m not going to say a single website because people who are using Arduinos are, I’d say, universal across this way of thinking. You go online. If you have a problem that can be solved with an Arduino, someone has used an Arduino to solve it and you’ll find someone who’s done it and the code is usually up online. It’s amazing.
Bent: Every city at this point has a local maker space, a local hacker space. Those people all sort of orbit around those environments.
Andrew: So, what about this, guys, this other issue is one is it seems too complicated. But now that you’re explaining how much easier it is than I imagine, the other issue is maybe its too simple. When you’re starting out with an idea too simple, do you ever feel like, “You know what? There is no huge business of people. What’s the market share of people who want whiteboard games? It’s not that big. Why bother? Why not look for a bigger idea?”
Bent: So, this is great. This is why you can’t just sit on the couch and think of the ideas and then arrive at the billion dollar idea, right? We only arrived at the idea for Two Bit after spending a year of building crazy games. That whiteboard hasn’t been a part of this ever since, but it was a stepping stone to land us here. In fact, we didn’t think there was a business model at all until Microsoft called and said, “Hey, guys, all that crazy stuff, would you do our E3 party?” We scratched our heads and we’re like, “Wait, you’re going to pay us to do this thing that we’ve been loving for the last eight months?”
Eric: This is one of those overnight successes ten years in the making. It really is. The things we’re building now are things that we’ve been testing, in part, on ordinary human beings out in the world in the places they go; movie theaters and bars and restaurants. We’ve been testing this stuff for eight years now. We’ve been at it for a long time. So, we know what people like. We know what causes them to have fun. We know what brings them back.
Bent: There’s that old phrase, “No battle plan survives engagement with the enemy.” I think that there’s somewhere in between what you’re asking and what we’re saying that it’s good to have a plan to begin with, but then you need to sort of constantly feed back data into that plan as we move forward in order to be able to adjust your trajectory.
Eric: And that’s rapid prototyping right there.
Andrew: This is really helpful to see, especially considering how far you’ve gotten in such a short period of time. Continuing with the story, you mentioned Microsoft. My hunch is that Microsoft’s employees are out at one of the events. They saw you and they said, “You know what? How do we partner up? How do we get them?” Right?
Bent: Exactly. And so, the fact that we were showcasing at events and conferences and that kind of stuff sort of put us in the churn of people out doing interesting things at various corporations and sort of started to get on that radar screen.
Andrew: I remember actually organizing events in Los Angeles and actually a couple of different people who were Microsoft evangelists happened to come to one of my events and said, “Hey, we should partner up,” or, “You should know that we have a bit of a budget. We can help you guys out.” It starts out with those beer and pizza budgets, but if they see that there’s an opportunity to do something bigger, they bring you in. Was it as simple as that or am I just oversimplifying how you guys got the first paying gig?
Eric: I think it was a slightly longer step over pizza and beer money.
Andrew: Oh yeah, the revenue I’m sure is bigger. I think they walk around saying, “We can help you with pizza and beer if you have a small homegrown event.” But when they invited you to E3 that’s pretty big.
Eric: Yeah. This was their party for E3. So, definitely it was an awesome opportunity.
Andrew: I’m looking at your Kickstarter page. Is that the next step?
Bent: So when we started Two Bit, we had a couple of contract gigs that sort of got us cash flowing as we figured out the direction and invested into fun stuff.
Andrew: And the cash flow gigs, how did this next one come up, actually, before we go to Kickstarter. Since we know the Microsoft gig came from getting to know someone who came out to the events where you guys were showcasing or just playing around, where did you get the next event?
Bent: Folks were always reaching out. I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. One was from a longtime friend. The other literally randomly reached out over LinkedIn and was like, “Hey, would you be the CTO of this next thing?” I was like, “Well, you can’t hire me but you can hire our company.”
Eric: A company that sprang into being the very next day.
Andrew: So, he wanted you to be the CTO because you had the technical chops. But you said, “Will you hire us to organize an event for you?”
Eric: No. It was not an event. This was a contract gig. This was one of the early projects that sort of cash flowed for Two Bit.
Andrew: What was that early project?
Eric: We were basically doing some educational materials, video game educational materials.
Andrew: And this was all digital products for them?
Eric: Digital products.
Andrew: I see. So, not the kind of interactive tangible events that you guys do now, but it allowed you to have some revenue that kept you guys going.
Bent: I just want to mention that events is only one part of our business. So, we also do contract stuff that doesn’t result in an actual event; physical objects and products of our own.
Andrew: For example? What’s an example of that?
Eric: Well, the software product that we did early on in this company was one of those. Sometimes we do products, content capture, 360 video capture. So, you imagine capturing in 360 an experience that you can then stitch together into a sphere of video that you can put inside an oculus rift, have an experience on Rails that could be delivered over the web, it could be delivered in a physical space. Some games, not the human meteors precisely, but games like that are available in family entertainment centers, places you might go out. You might run into our games there.
Andrew: I see. Oh wow. Boy, this is really just a fun, creative business that you guys are a part of. I’m looking here at my notes. In the pre-interview, you guys said that Brent had to persuade Eric to quit his job and do this full-time. Am I right?
Eric: That is true.
Bent: It was a lot of fun.
Andrew: Why? What was your hesitation?
Eric: At the time, I was at my dream job, frankly, as a rapid prototype and roboticist. Seriously, I had found the right place for someone of my skills.
Andrew: What made it the right place?
Eric: I’m sorry?
Andrew: What made it the right place?
Eric: It was just full of smart people and lots of big tools and cool projects coming in all the time and the opportunity to work with awesome people making awesome stuff. Honestly, I’ve striven to recreate that environment here. I feel like we’ve really done it.
Andrew: What did he say that finally persuaded you?
Eric: We need some more big tools. We’ve got smart people and big projects. We just need some bigger tools.
Andrew: Bigger tools. What was it that he said that he persuaded you to come in considering that you didn’t have the same-size tools and as big a team?
Eric: Well, it was the beginning of the huge recession. So, what better time to quit your job and try to start a company?
Andrew: Yeah.
Eric: I think the first time I paid my rent by showing an art piece that I had made, I’m like, “You know what? I can do this. We can start a company.”
Andrew: I see. “I can get by with my art. Somebody values it enough to at least give me rent for it. So, if they did that, then I can make…” What did you pay your rent with?
Eric: It wasn’t Bitcoin.
Andrew: What was the art piece?
Eric: Oh, what was the project? I think it was actually the Cloud Mirror I told you about before.
Andrew: And your landlord said, “All right, we’ll take this instead.”
Eric: No, no. I was paid actual cash for installing it some place.
Andrew: Oh, gotcha. Okay. I see. That’s what made it a real business.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: I thought, “Boy, that’s a really fun thing to do.” Before I continue with the story and get to Kickstarter, there was something I noticed before we started when we were just setting up. The mic was really tough to deal with, the mic in your computer, there was so much external noise in the warehouse where you’re working that I couldn’t hear your voices. You guys said “You know what? Let’s try earphones.” And you each put a different ear bud from the same earphones in your ear. Most people don’t like each other enough to use it even afterwards. You guys, what’s the relationship between the two of you that allows you to be so close to feel like, “If we’re doing this Mixergy interview, let’s both do it together.”
Bent: We tolerate each other. Yeah. Also do you hear this audio in the background right now?
Eric: The Michael Jackson, “Thriller?”
Bent: Do you hear “Thriller?”
Andrew: Not as much as I did before. I don’t hear it at all, actually.
Eric: Perfect.
Bent: That’s great.
Eric: That’s pretty funny. This microphone solution is really working.
Andrew: Yeah. For anyone who’s listening, they plugged in an iPhone headset. We’re using the mic from the headphones and then they’re listening to me on speakers that are just built into the computer. We didn’t realize you could bifurcate that way, but you could.
Eric: Brent and I have really complimentary skillsets and we get along really well and we’ve always gotten along really well starting companies. I can’t remember a single time where we were ready to kill each other.
Andrew: Were you guys close as kids?
Eric: No.
Bent: We only met nine years ago.
Andrew: How did you meet?
Bent: It was around Mindshare.
Andrew: Oh wow. Okay.
Bent: It was for that drinking club with an art problem. We would get together and start collaborating on projects for Mindshare.
Andrew: All right. So now I get a sense of how this started to become real. It’s going from ideas that you keep putting out in the world and seeing if anyone gravitates to. You see that they’re gravitating to it. They’re getting excited about. They’re starting to pay you for it. And then Kickstarter comes in. Why did you decide to go to Kickstarter?
Bent: So, our previous company, we went out and raised money. We kind of knew this time we didn’t want to raise money.
Andrew: With uWink, you mean?
Bent: Sorry, after uWink.
Eric: We’ve skipped over like four companies.
Andrew: What are the companies after uWink? We’ll get back into Kickstarter in a moment. I don’t have them here in my notes.
Bent: So, we raised money for a company called Doppelgames that was building GPS-enabled games. We were sort of doing a mash up between Zynga and GPS. The challenge was GPS games are really hard. People are lazy. They don’t want to necessarily have their GPS affect gameplay. We sort of experimented in that space for a little while. I don’t want to get too far off in the weeds.
Andrew: I do see that now here in my notes, 2009-2012. That’s three years of trying that.
Bent: I don’t know that it was that long.
Andrew: We copied it off of your LinkedIn profile, I think.
Bent: Oh yeah, LinkedIn.
Andrew: It might not be exact.
Bent: Okay. Well, the challenge was we had raised money for that. I think arriving at Two Bit, we really wanted to autonomy that we would get from not having backers. I think it has continued. Fear versus greed, we’ve continued to sort of have a weird relationship with whether or not we’d raise money or not.
Andrew: When Eric left his job, it wasn’t to work at Two Bit Circus. It was to work at, was it Syyn Labs, Doppelgames?
Eric: No. We skipped over one. There’s yet one more company. We do it in forward chronological order. So, when I quit my job, I quit so that Brent and I could create a company called Versix. We were doing sort of immersive gaming, a little bit like we’re doing now. When we say that we’ve been thinking through these problems for a very long time it’s because the very first company we started together was all about experiential entertainment, out of home entertainment, immersive theater.
That lasted for a while until we were called by the siren song of online mobile games. So, we jumped ship and we created Doppelgames. Are you familiar with Runescape games? Have you sort of seen this-
Bent: We’ve got to go in chronological order.
Eric: Well, the immersive theater and sort of immersive gaming that Versix was working on, we were trying to raise money for it and it was a very hard sell. We wanted to physical installations that are going to sell tickets. Investors were like, “What? Is it on an iPad and an iPhone?” And we’re like, “Well, no.”
Bent: It’s got to be an iPad or an iPhone. We will get back to those immersive theater ventures in a moment. But moving forward, we started Doppelgames doing those iPad and iPhone mobile games. But we also started a company with others called Syyn Labs, which did sort of stunts and events.
Eric: Did you ever see the OK Go “Goldberg Machine” music video?
Andrew: Yes.
Eric: That was us.
Andrew: That was you guys doing it?
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: I see. This whole time it was you guys working together. Eric had already left his job. You had already created the whiteboard that we’re talking about.
Bent: Yeah.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Even though you had this whiteboard, even though you had this in-person philosophy and ideas, it wasn’t until 2012 with Two Bit Circus that you finally said, “This is the thing.” Got it.
Bent: I think we managed to pretty successfully combine all of our preceding ideas on what’s fun in the formation of Two Bit Circus.
Andrew: Okay. And so that’s why you didn’t have to think about what’s the next big business or, “How do we turn this whiteboard into a business?” You had other businesses but this was fun and the fun was what became a business in the end.
Brent: Yeah. There was a very sort of organic path that lead there.
Andrew: And this whole thing that now we know as Two Bit Circus and everything that lead to it seems to have just gone on in the background for a long time as you were trying to figure out what the thing is, kind of like the John Lennon lyric, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” This is the business that happened while you were busy making other business plans.
Bent: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. So, that’s why you went to Kickstarter. You said, “No more funding. No more shifting our idea to the iPhone, iPad or the iWatch or whatever comes out. We’re going to raise money from a community of people who want to buy.” The idea there was you were going to do an event.
Bent: Well, you know, the thing that’s fascinating about Kickstarter is that it’s another sort of step on that rapid prototype. In fact, this is a prototype that doesn’t even exist other than in the marketing and the description of it. So, it gave us the opportunity to sort of validate and test like, “Hey, is there a market for this? Is there excitement for this?”
It was a nice threshold for us because we were like, “Hey, if we put this ostensibly ridiculous idea out there and nobody wants it, well, great, we didn’t build it.” But to be able to put it out there and see that there was much excitement around it was sort of feedback we needed to really keep moving.
Andrew: I scroll through and I’ll get to the money you raised from it. But one of the people I see here is Nolan Bushnell. He’s your dad?
Bent: Yeah.
Andrew: The founder of Atari. I had that at the top of my notes. The team said, “Look, I don’t know that we should be emphasizing it. But you’ve got to acknowledge it.” Do you ever feel overshadowed by him? Not only has he done so much, he’s in the history books, Eric is now leaning back with a big smile as we’re talking about it. Do you ever feel that at all?
Bent: You know, as a kid I did. Maybe not as a kid, as sort of a 20-something did for sure. Having a really famous dad, you actively want to go out and make your own mark as fast as possible. So, for a decade, everything that I worked on had nothing to do with games. I worked in fiber optics and DNA synthesis and web hosting and email hosting. I did a whole bunch of different stuff. That was what it took to really sort of feel great and sort of be at peace with that.
Andrew: Because you did make your way out in the world on your own?
Bent: You have your own successes. My dad, at 12 or 13, I’ll never forget it. I said, “Hey, Dad, I want to do this thing.” And he was like, “You don’t have enough money for that.” So, he was very clear from the beginning about the difference between his money and my money. I’m so thankful for how he treated us in that regard. He was very much about work ethic and getting stuff done.
Eric: And besides, what has he done lately?
Andrew: I hear he’s an advisor to this company that does events. But now that you have proven that you can make your way in the world and you have an independent attitude, he will give you money at some point, right?
Bent: No.
Andrew: No. What about you, Eric? So, when I type Brent Bushnell into Google, I see the guy who’s on television. Do you ever feel overshadowed by him and say, “Wait a minute. I’m the guy who creates all these robots. Why is everyone paying attention to the guy who’s on television.”
Bent: He was on television.
Eric: I’ve been on television just as much as that guy has.
Bent: In fact, the both of us were on “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.” Remember that show?
Andrew: Oh, how do I not have that? Now I feel like a fool. Now I feel overshadowed by the two of you.
Eric: I will tell you that I do feel overshadowed by him in as much that he is probably about five inches taller than me. You know why my mohawk is this tall? I’ve got to make up the difference. That’s it.
Andrew: I do like the mohawk. I love your whole design. Even as I look at this Kickstarter campaign that you ran, it was over two years ago about, a year and a half ago. There wasn’t as much there. But boy the design looks good, everything from the backdrop of the video to the little details like where the food trucks are going to be.
Bent: You know, Andrew, the team we have here, it’s the smartest group of people I’ve ever worked with in my whole life, real cross-discipline set of talents from art to education to filmmaking. It’s a really special, special group.
Andrew: I was listening to the Y Combinator team talk about how to recruit teams. This was in their Stanford class. They kept saying over and over again, “If you really want good people, you have to work on interesting projects. They care about that.” So, how do you communicate that this is going to be an interesting project that will actually get done and it’s worth them coming on board.
Bent: I think by continually working on interesting projects. Most of our best folks found us. They were like, “Hey, we saw what you did on the Kickstarter. That was awesome. Hey, we were listening to a talk that you gave.” They end up coming through the door.
Eric: I’m looking out over our balcony here at the workshop and the shop area. Anybody who walks in the door knows that there is cool shit happening here. There is no question in their mind. We have projects that are done that are working. We have projects that are dismantled in pieces. We’ve got so much stuff happening here. You walk through the door and you’re inspired.
Brent: We’re in a big old power plant in Downtown, Los Angeles. It’s one of the oldest buildings in Downtown. It’s got 50-foot ceilings. So, basically three stories straight up. It’s a cavernous space. So, it’s pretty fun.
Andrew: What’s the biggest thing that you have in there that requires that much space?
Eric: Nothing requires that much space.
Andrew: I see. I thought maybe you’ve got a new jet in there and you’re going to give people a real jet experience, take them to outer space.
Eric: The problem with that is the space is only like 20 feet wide. So, maybe a giraffe. We could get a giraffe in here, but not an elephant.
Andrew: All right. So, the Kickstarter went off well. You ended up raising $100,000 from it. You put on an event. What did you learn from the first big thing that you guys put on?
Bent: Yeah. Well, you know what’s neat is this is one of the first interviews we’ve given now that it’s past. It’s the middle of December. We did it at the end of October.
Andrew: I talked to you, Brent, a couple of times while you were prepping for it.
Bent: We rescheduled this a bunch of times, right?
Andrew: You sounded like you were in such, not chaos, it was just so much going on.
Bent: Andrew, we were in the trenches. The weeks leading up to the event, we were getting two and three hours of sleep.
Eric: You got two or three hours a night of sleep?
Andrew: Slacker.
Bent: It was really an insane amount of work. We bit off a lot. It was basically five events. We threw a gala. We had a hack-a-thon. We had a student preview day where we bussed in almost 3,000 kids from all over LA. And then we had the main event. So, there was sort of all the logistics that went around.
Eric: Didn’t we launch a nonprofit at the same time?
Bent: We launched a nonprofit.
Eric: There were like 30 brand new games.
Bent: New games that were untested. We had done other people’s events for a long time, but in those cases, we were the entertainment. They had secured the venues. They had gotten all the permits. They had done all the food. They had done all the alcohol, all the other stuff. Now we were doing not only way more entertainment than we’d ever done before, but all of the other stuff across five events. We maybe needed to have our heads examined.
Eric: And by the way, we killed it.
Andrew: How do you measure success for something like that?
Brent: You probably feel the same way, but there’s a moment in an event when you can look around and it’s like you’ve sort of crossed the threshold where really terrible things could have happened and the sort of coordinated missile strike necessary to make everything happen has gone off okay. You look around and people are smiling and having a ball and there’s just the right density of people. It’s not where no one came to your birthday party and it’s not just sardines.
That feeling, I don’t know however else you say that. But we saw afterwards in surveys that people were saying four, five, and six hours on average. The amount of happiness from a broad spectrum of people, little kids, their parents, our peers, really a broad mix.
Eric: Also, profitable.
Andrew: And profitable. So, the company now is profitable too.
Bent: Yes.
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: Wow.
Bent: Yeah. We’ve actually always been profitable.
Andrew: So, one of the things that I’ve never understood and one of the reasons why I couldn’t be an event organizer, my goal was to do something else and use events to get there. But I can tell that where I wasn’t ready to do the events were the little touches. You can tell when an event is really creative and people care about it when little things like the tickets that you have to come in aren’t just tickets that you can buy at Staples, where the atmosphere has little touches that nobody should pay attention to, but somehow in the back of your mind you notice them. Those are tough decisions to make, tough areas to notice that they need some creativity and tough to come up with the creative touch for them. How do you go about doing that? I’d like to be able to do that.
Bent: We’ve got a team. We’ve got an amazing team. We have a creative director, Hector Alvarez, who is just incredible. He’s meticulous about those things. He’s creative about those things. The two of us, we’re engineers. For me, engineering art is like I’ve got that down. He takes that stuff very, very seriously and he knocks it out of the park every single time.
Andrew: So, do you have an example of a little touch that he pays attention to that someone else wouldn’t even know existed, let alone pay attention.
Brent: This is the… Oh yeah. Those are our business cards.
Eric: These are our business cards. They are individual tickets. You can tear them off and pass them out.
Brent: The invitations to our gala, I don’t know if you can see that-they were basically origami. It says, “Welcome to the gala of the future.” It literally sort of spiraled open to reveal all of the details in these little cards. This was not the kind of thing you could buy off the shelf.
Andrew: That’s what I’m talking about. Not just custom made that it’s a pain in the butt to go put together so most people would have given up on it, but they wouldn’t have even noticed. What’s that?
Eric: You tell me how many companies have their own tokens? That’s right. We have tokens and tarot cards.
Andrew: Again, that is a whole creative product that would take someone so long to put together. Is it just a matter of hiring someone who has this creativity oozing from them and they just can’t wait to design an invitation in a way that’s not an ordinary invitation, create a token.
Bent: And giving them an environment where it’s very much appreciated.
Andrew: I see, where someone else would say, “Why are you screwing around with the invitation. We have this big event to put together,” you appreciate it so much that you bring it up in an interview.
Eric: Yeah.
Bent: I will say that Hector has been with us since the very beginning of all this.
Andrew: How did you guys hook up with Hector?
Bent: Same way we connected with one another.
Eric: Mindshare.
Andrew: I see.
Eric: He was just one of the people that was building awesome stuff at the same time.
Andrew: Hey, I just realized Doug was one of the early Mixergy interviewees.
Eric: Wow. Cool.
Andrew: I saw him when I was in, I think, Argentina. He was riding his bike through South America. I don’t know. Is he still doing the event, do you know?
Bent: He is. In fact here’s one this coming Tuesday I think.
Andrew: Yeah. He did a great interview. People should go and check it out. Just do a search for Doug. Dougie Fresh is what he goes by. So, what’s next now? I feel like you guys have your groove. What do you do with it?
Eric: So, we describe ourselves as experiential entertainment or the future of fun or maybe off your ass entertainment depending on who you’re talking to. We’re always looking for how are people going to be having fun in the next year, two years, ten years, five years. One thing that we’re really, really excited about right now are immersive storytelling adventures or story rooms. And the idea is that you create a theatrical environment, not a theater, per se, but maybe a room or maybe a bar.
You invite groups of people, small groups, large groups, they enter into that environment and it’s a bit of theater show, it’s a bit of puzzle solving adventure. It’s a little bit like a movie. It’s a little bit like a show. Maybe you and your friends will be collaborating. Maybe you’ll be competing. But for a certain span of time, you’re going to be transported into a completely different world. We’ve been prototyping tons of these experiences these story rooms.
One we did recently was called Cosmic Contagion. We created a 256 square foot space in our shop and we themed it to look like an abandoned laboratory. The scientists who have abandoned it were researching an asteroid strike nearby. So, it looks like a lab and you walk in and you have to figure out how to turn on the power. A friendly artificial intelligence wakes up and starts giving you some background.
Then you split up into groups and you investigate the computer and you learn to drive a rover and you find these alien tiles and you arrange them and there are puzzles. There are papers hidden throughout the space. We’re trying to engage people in a way that a movie can’t, that theater can’t, that video games can’t.
Bent: You think about the trend in entertainment that’s about increasing your immersion, right? So, from a video game where you’re controlling a little bit on the screen to using your hands and feet in front of a Kinect and what not, what’s the next layers that’s sort of closer to Michael Douglas in “The Game” where you’re the character in the video game. So, this is creating a game around you on all sides.
Andrew: So, when you have this vision, what’s the first little bit that you can create that allows people to experience it and for you to see, “Do they dig it? Do they get it? Are we on the wrong path?”
Bent: So, the one that Eric mentioned that we built in the front of our shop, we sold tickets all summer and people came with their friends, groups of six and went through a 45-minute adventure. We took a bunch of notes and now we’re making tweaks to it in order to reboot it with the changes that we learned over the summer.
Andrew: What did that first version have in it?
Bent: There was a whole synced together set of software and technology. We did some filming for it so that when you and your five friends were in the room, a display is playing a video to get you up to speed.
Eric: There was a rover you had to learn to drive. There was this alien box and you had to arrange these tiles in a very specific way.
Bent: There were little puzzles. We hijacked some industrial manufacturing equipment, ripped out the guts and then put our own screen and compromised the controllers to make it custom and interactive but using sort of an old school unit as the-
Andrew: I see. This is a small version of this bigger thing that you are building towards.
Bent: So, this was for six people. What would the version for 150 people look like?
Eric: Or what does the travelling version look like? Put this in a truck and travel it around. It’s really funny. You’ve asked us a couple of times what we’ve learned over the span of years building these things. We’ve learned a lot about how people interact with individual units. We have to go through that learning all over again, to some degree, when you start stitching it together into a story. Story functions very differently.
Now, we have theatrical backgrounds. We have a lot of people here who have a theatrical background. I have a theatrical background. So, we kind of have a leg up when it comes to constructing a story that captures people. But capturing people with a story is very different from capturing people with capturing people with a short-form wow experience. So, you have to approach that problem very differently. We are learning so much.
Andrew: How do you do it? How do you give someone a wow experience so soon?
Bent: Well, you think about the Dunk Tank Flambe. That is a quick spectacle. You can walk in front of that for 30 seconds and sort of get it. But the kind of experience we’re talking about with a story room, this is an arc. It’s a narrative. It’s going to take 45 minutes for it to feel like a complete experience. No movie that you watch 30 seconds of is going to feel like a complete experience.
Eric: That’s the core of it. How many times do you watch a movie and know in the first 30 seconds that you’re going to love it or you’re going to hate it? Creating that reaction-and then there are some movies where you have no reaction at all and you’re like, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll love it. Maybe I’ll hate it.” But sometimes, producers do a great job in creating that reaction in someone very early on. Learning how to do that is something that we’re getting good at.
Andrew: And do you have any things that you use, any techniques that you use that you can pass to us? I wonder about that too. When it comes to doing an interview like this I think, “I have this big story. How do I get someone at least a wow first answer that makes them say, ‘All right, I should invest more time in this conversation?'”
Bent: You know, I think about it the same way as video game development. You need the first five seconds to be awesome and then the next five seconds to be awesome.
Andrew: Then they trust you to give you a little more time.
Bent: You need to have your leg into it from the very beginning. Don’t think about what’s going to happen at minute three and five. If you didn’t get them in the first 30, you’ve lost it. I think of old pitchmen. I think of magicians. I think of anybody who goes up on a stage and has to capture the attention of an audience for 45 minutes, 50 minutes, two hours. There are some techniques, man. You’ve got to watch those people and just learn. It’s amazing.
Andrew: Well, this is amazing too. Before I say goodbye, I should say to anyone who’s listening, the site that I mentioned earlier, it’s called LeadPages.net. Check them out if you need to create landing pages. Guys, I’m looking at your website. To close it out, I thought we could talk about the next event. But when I go to TwoBitCircus.com/Events, no events planned yet.
Bent: No events. Yeah. We’re in the throes of building that stuff out right now. After the carnival we said, “Hey, we’re going to take the rest of the year to strategize, get 2015 right.” Folks should get on our mailing list. Its low-volume but it will definitely keep you up to speed.
Andrew: And that’s how they can find out about coming into your office and checking out an event in person before.
Eric: You won’t be waiting long.
Andrew: You have something in mind.
Bent: Yes.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Well, I even like your website because I get to see people experiencing things that I had never seen before, whether it’s what looks like a video game and probably isn’t that six people are playing all at once or this seat that puts a monitor in front of some guy who also has a mohawk or any of the other things you guy are up to. It’s so creative. You said this is what people are looking for. I don’t know a lot of companies that do this, that do real person events that are so different. It’s cool to have you guys on here. Thanks for doing this. Congratulations on all the success.
Bent: Andrew, thanks so much for the time.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for watching. The site is TwoBitCircus.com. Bye everyone.
