Daniel Fiske, co-founder and chief technical officer at social gaming and casino game company RightShift, has unveiled his tips for startups, including only ever hiring people that are “smarter than you”.
Fiske was speaking at the Scale Conference, in Cape Town, today when he used the story of his own startup to illustrate how to make them a success.
RightShift began as a multiplayer frames per second (FPS) tournament company. By 2008, RightShift began developing social gaming applications and can now support millions of users at a time
Fiske told the story of the development of RightShift and Clickfun Casino in a presentation he titled “Tales from the Trenches.”
Speaking about the success of startup businesses, he said it is important to start small, work closely with people you trust, work hard and achieve success by obtaining funding.
An important aspect for when a startup grows, according to Fiske, is “hire smart people… Our rule is always hire someone smarter than you.”
Fiske added: “Me and my co-founder are by definition the dumbest people in the office,” which is a result of hiring people “smarter” than themselves.
Fiske said it is better to hire smart people otherwise the entrepreneur in question will have to spend time providing training.
He believes there is a place for skills development and internship, but when time is limited and when investors are seeking results, training people consumes valuable time and the mistakes they make will have to be corrected.
Another point of importance is the structure of the business. Fiske said teams should be small, dedicated and must be responsible for the products they produce.
He said responsibility leads to the team being more aware of “what’s going on”.
Fiske said it is also important to consider the process the business runs by to scale it appropriately when taking on new developers and adding to the business.
Fiske then presented the technical details of how the system was written in terms of code and software. He said Clickfun Casino is almost entirely built with PHP, a server-side scripting language in web development.
Fisk has more than 15 years experience in building and designing very large scalable systems for both the gambling and gaming sectors. His career began in 1997 where he started as a software developer for one of the first online casino groups.
Fiske described RightShift’s Clickfun Casino as an arcade game, “people come in, they put in their 20 cents… or tokens”. This forms the basis of Clickfun Casino.
He said the model includes taking the arcade game, giving people slots to play and distributing it on the Android platform.
The Android based arcade game together with working with Facebook resulted in Clickfun Casino, an application that was launched in 2011 after several previous applications.
“Its an interesting tech business to be in,” said Fiske who added the demographics of the game are 60 percent women and a large portion of the 60 percent are over 35 years of age.
Fiske added the demographics for those 50 years and older is in “double digits”.
“So even though we think mobile [technology is used] by the younger generation, a lot of people out there playing these games all day are kind of old,” said Fiske.
