Each week in the New Tech Newsletter we feature a Spotlight Q&A with founders, angels, New Tech alumni presenters, and other people or companies in our community we believe you’d like to learn about. Reach out if you’d like to recommend a startup, founder, angel, accelerator, or New Tech alumni presenter for us to spotlight for the PNW tech community!
This week we caught up with Josh Ayala, CEO of Perfect Day Games.
Why do you do what you do for a living?
I am the CEO of Perfect Day games, and am a consultant on Minecraft. We make video games with our own IP, and consult and develop with some of the biggest names in the industry.
Why did you start your company?
We’ve worked together as a team for 10 years, having tremendous success with our products, building immersive worlds with compelling characters and great gameplay. We decided to spin out of King (Candy Crush) in 2019 to continue to build great games together.
What is one of the greatest lessons you’ve learned from being a founder/CEO?
Be creative and responsive to the challenges that present themselves. We pivoted to do service work with great partners when we couldn’t fly out to our planned meetings for our Seed Round in 2020. It turned out to be a fantastic way to keep the team together and become self-sufficient faster than we expected.
What is the one piece of advice you would share today with your younger self before you started your company?
Study up on business operations solutions and equity management and get advisors that have been through that process. I did it real time to get some critical business functions in place and it would have been great to have more knowledge prior versus learning on the fly.
What is something interesting and unexpected that people would be surprised to learn about you?
I founded the Vera Project as Board President in 2001, a Seattle based Music and Arts venue that sits on the Seattle Center property. I continue to be involved and am helping them grow their programming in the areas of music education and teaching coding for the creative class.