James Gwertzman

CEO

2024 - Current

We are building the next generation asset management and collaboration platform for artists, developers, and producers. We shorten development times by improving communication and collaboration across all members of the team, encourage risk-taking and creativity by ensuring no work is ever lost, and foster the creation of community by opening up the development process to a global audience.

Chairman of the Board

2023

I'm a board member and advisor at modl.ai, a leader in applying AI to the process of game development. As game studios move toward more modern development processes, they are automating big parts of the development process, and using AI to automate QA is a huge area of growth.

Advisor

2023

Advising Snapser, the newest game Backend-as-a-Service, that has an elegant solution to a problem we never solved at PlayFab: customization of services.

Scout

2023

Investing in computer games and adjacent industries

General Partner

2021 - 2023

Helped launch Games Fund One, a $660M fund focused on investing in games. General themes include web3, community, games as platforms, infrastructure.

Board Member

2022

Founder.& Lead Artist

2021

Co-Founded the Moonlight Collective to create interactive, immersive art installations that use technology from the game industry to inspire and move audiences.

General Manager, Gaming Vertical

2020 - 2021

My goal is to provide the best cloud platform for game developers, building on assets like Azure, PlayFab, Xbox, GitHub, etc. We certainly have our work cut out for us -- most developers wouldn't consider Azure for their games, despite some world class capabilities, and experience hosting big games and small games alike. I want to change that! This new role is a natural extension of how I've spent the last 6 years of my career, co-founding and growing PlayFab, then selling it to Microsoft 2 years ago. I've long been fascinated by the intersection of art & technology - it's what drew me to gaming -- and I'm especially fascinated by what's now possible in the cloud.

General Manager, PlayFab

2019 - 2020

Leading the expanded PlayFab team within Microsoft on its mission to empower game teams of all sizes to more deeply engage their players with PlayFab's complete backend platform for games. PlayFab was acquired by Microsoft in February 2018.

Chief Strategy Officer, PlayFab

2018 - 2019

Leverage my experience as CEO and Co-Founder of PlayFab to ensure PlayFab continues to grow and be successful following its acquisition by Microsoft. Drive the long-range strategic planning, and help ensure short-term execution of the strategy, across the entire PlayFab business including product, sales, and marketing.

CEO & Co-Founder

2014 - 2018

PlayFab provides a cloud-based "backend-as-a-service" for PC and mobile games. Game developers are notoriously bad at building robust, scalable backends -- we do the hard work so game developers can focus instead on making their games fun. We are currently powering several high-profile games, and will be rolling out more broadly in coming months.

Chief Evangelist

2013 - 2014

Spread the word about Code.org and its mission to bring computer science education to every K-12 school in America. Created the campaign around the Hour of Code, the most effective educational initiative in history, bringing an hour-long introduction to computer programming to more than 18M students in less than 2 weeks. Set up more than 200 partnerships with companies, non-profits, and educational organizations to recruit educators, parents, and students. Oversaw our social media campaign, generating 60K tweets with our hashtag #HourOfCode and millions of views across all channels. Produced the Hour of Code promotional video, which has received nearly 3M views.

Head of Strategic Development

2013 - 2013

Started up a new project within PopCap to explore opportunities in the toy-meets-game space.