I spoke to Mitch Lasky, the former CEO of Jamdat and till recently the head of EA Mobile...we broke the news about his leaving last week and it was formally announced today (official release here). He is joining Benchmark Capital as a general partner, and will invest in mobile content and other digital media sectors.
Some notes from the interview I did earlier today:
-- Why he left EA: He likes the make-something-out-of-nothing part, not the big company part.
-- Wanted to get back to working with entrepreneurs.
-- Preferred to have seen more retention of the top executives at ES Mobile, but it is a challenging thing to do, as the people were already there (at Jamdat) for 5-6 years.
-- 2006 was a year of integration for EA Mobile..this year it had six of EA products in top 10 on the mobile side, and most of the time was spent integrating EA library with Jamdat.
-- On the mobile gaming industry: Lot more work to be done...some amount of complacency took over the industry in 2005, especially from the carriers. That slowed the growth of the industry.
-- Glu Mobile IPO will be relatively successful and that will hopefully re-energize the industry.
-- On his plans: will continue to look at mobile content in all its forms...look at the successful mobile content exits compared to the money that has been invested in it, and there are very few. Lasky hopes to change that.
-- He remains very excited about location as a proxy for search...he doesn’t think text based search is necessarily going to be the big in the way others think, but location will be.
-- There are categories of content that are yet to be invested in, or even launched.
-- Outside of mobile, he will look at interactive entertainment in gaming, online or in other ways.
-- LA startup market has been under-served...Jamdat had to go to NYC to get its funding done back in the days. He will move to Silicon Valley, but will keep looking at LA startups.