Adam Lieb sold his first gaming website to IGN at age 11. Before he could drive, he was earning $10,000 a week selling virtual goods in MMORPGs. Before he graduated college, he was running a 25-site gaming network doing multimillion-dollar revenue. He's never had a real job. He's never needed one.

Today, Adam is the founder and CEO of Gamesight: a marketing intelligence platform that helps game studios run influencer campaigns, track player acquisition, and actually understand what's driving (or killing) their game's performance in market.

He's seen the industry from every angle: as a kid writing cheat guides on AOL boards in the 90s, as a VC-backed founder who built the "LinkedIn for gamers" before pivoting hard into B2B software, and now as CEO of a 55-person globally distributed company working with some of the biggest publishers in the world.

In this conversation on ‘Founders & Empanadas,’ he breaks down what most studios get wrong about building and marketing games and the leadership lessons that come from doing this for over two decades.

Here are some of our biggest takeaways:

• The two-variable formula: why studios are great at creative vision OR market opportunity, but rarely both and what Path of Exile got right that most don't
• Why best-practice marketing kills good games: horror dominates TikTok for a specific psychological reason most studios never think about
• How Twitch and YouTube replaced the Nintendo Hotline as the modern "try before you buy"
• What COVID actually did to the industry: release windows, E3, brick-and-mortar and what still hasn't recovered
• Going from 9 people in a Seattle office to 55 across the globe and the specific rituals (Lunch Roulette, annual all-hands) keeping culture alive
• The counterintuitive take: most startup advice is a coin flip, and the smarter move is to ignore it entirely

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