Starting a company from scratch is hard; growing it all the way to a sale is even harder. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Andrés Tallos, an entrepreneur with a background in strategy consulting and co-founder of a video game studio he eventually sold, shares what he has learned about leadership, culture and incentives, and why running a company resembles keeping a video game alive.
How to scale a startup without getting stuck in no man's land
Tallos got into the industry almost by accident, while living in Japan. From his years as a founder he takes away two lessons. The first: starting from scratch is very hard in any industry. There is a long period of work and uncertainty with no guarantees, and everything (funding, product, customer traction) takes longer than expected.
The second one surprised him: besides outright failure and big success, there is an in-between scenario in which the business is profitable and growing, but not at the scale you hoped for. Tallos admits they were conservative and still regrets not being more aggressive. Selling the company was partly the way out: to keep running it with more financial and marketing firepower.
There's a third scenario, which is ending up in no man's land, where maybe the business isn't growing that fast or doesn't yet have the scale you expected, but at the same time it isn't a failure.
Leading through uncertainty: transparency and calm
How do you keep a team motivated when not even the founder knows whether things will take off? Tallos combines transparency, whether things are going well or not so well, with the calm of showing there is a plan. Often, he explains, the problem isn't the company's situation, but nervous leaders passing their nerves on to employees.
In his case, it helped to have a culture focused on making a product everyone could be proud of, rather than on financial returns or individual glory. The best proof it worked: players kept coming back.
Culture doesn't hang on the wall
If he had to give one piece of advice for scaling a company, Tallos would pick culture and values. It sounds abstract, but it shapes every decision: who you hire, who you promote, how you give feedback. Beyond 8 or 10 people, the founder spends less and less time with each newcomer and depends on early team members to pass on “how things are done here”. Hence the importance of consistency: new people quickly jump on the moving train.
What companies do underestimate, in his view, is how hard it is to change a culture: writing it down and hanging it on the wall isn't enough. He draws a lesson from live-service games: you design the world and the rules, but players do things you never imagined, so you have to observe and adjust on the fly. Culture works the same way: it's constant work, not a one-off exercise.
Be careful what you incentivize
Many gamification initiatives use game mechanics such as leaderboards, achievements or prizes. Tallos points out that in games, motivation often emerges on its own: put up a leaderboard and many people will compete to be at the top with no reward at all, just for status, even if only within their clan.
The risk: once you start measuring and incentivizing one behavior, you often sacrifice others that were happening naturally. Overdo the rewards for individual performance and people may stop helping their colleagues. It happens a lot in free-to-play games: if easy levels yield more resources per minute, players end up choosing between being bored and feeling they're wasting their time. The recipe, once again: design, observe and correct.
For something that doesn't require thinking, a good reward. If you want something that requires thinking and takes longer, a good story.
The future: AI and tailor-made experiences
The games industry changes very fast. Tallos gives an example: the mini-games used in ads, which at first had nothing to do with the game being promoted, have ended up built into the product itself.
He won't predict what games will look like in ten years, but he believes AI will bring more personalized experiences and that the essence will remain: feeling like the protagonist and living unique stories. And the game mechanic he would bring into a company tomorrow? Competition between teams.
