gamehouse.com

GameHouse was founded by Ben Exworthy and Garr Godfrey, to develop games to be played and sold over the internet. They built up the company which was recently acquired by Real Networks for a reported $35.6 million.

We caught up with Garr Godfrey to find out more.

Your Name: Garr Godfrey

Position / title:

Co-founder and CEO of GameHouse, Inc. (former...prior to merger with Real Networks)

Company name: GameHouse, Inc.

Website: www.gamehouse.com

Your company / website vision statement / goal:

Our philosophy was to remain highly adaptable and react quickly to opportunities, even if it required a complete change in our business plan.

This philosophy isn't really consistent with a vision statement that attempts to predict and influence the future.

We did follow a mission statement, which established the boundaries of what we would do. With apologies to Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, whose idea of a mission statement was quite similar: "Make great games, make customers happy, make money."

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

GameHouse makes games that are played or sold over the internet.

We make games that can be played in a web page and license them to websites who use them to attract visitors. We make downloadable games which customers can download and purchase. The web based games often are mini-versions of the downloadable games and therefore serve to promote the sales of the downloadable versions. We also make games for PDA's, cell phones, GameBoy and other platforms.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

I was sixteen and working at an independent bakery when I realized that I wanted to run my own business someday. It was the first time I'd ever really seen a business from the inside. It seemed to offer the owner an awful lot of freedom, both on the job and off.

At the time, my idea of running a business was owning a record store but 3 years later I wrote a piece of software for my mother to use in her law practice. I ended up promoting and selling the software to other law offices around the state. I charged too little for the software and being in college with other things going on, I let the business fade away, but I always intended to do something similar later in life.

GameHouse was my next business, which I started about 10 years later at 29 after working at Microsoft and other software companies.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

Our company didn't spawn from a single idea. Ben Exworthy was the other co-founder and as the internet boom was going a lot of companies were asking for our services: my programming ability and Ben's graphic design. We teamed up on a couple freelance projects to make some extra money and soon realized we could make more money doing these types of job than we could in regular full time jobs.

Our favorite thing to work on together was games. Our business evolved to building original games that we would license to business running big websites. From there, we made more complete games we could sell to individuals.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice what would it be?

To anybody who is currently working for somebody else and has thought about going for it on their own, I say "go for it." Most people think the risks are much higher than they really are. Most people who may be capable of running a business could quickly go back to a full time job if things go badly, so what have you lost? The experience of running a business, even a failed one, will increase value to employers and so even in failure you can come out ahead.

Who are your role models / mentors and why?

I met Bill Gates on a couple occasions and there are a number of things I admire about him. He is a very detail oriented person and has an amazing breadth of knowledge about business and technology. I admire his competitiveness, especially early on in Microsoft's history and I admire the way employees are treated, which is very well if you are capable and good at your job and if you aren't so good you hear about it.

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