Gaming Exit for $650MM to EA with Jason Kapalka

The Exit - Presented By Flippa

Technology

5.0 • 420 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Exit: When Jason co-founded gaming start-up PopCap, never in his wildest dreams did he imagine exiting to EA for $650MM. The business started out as three guys creating games to sell back to the big gaming companies, but they quickly had to rethink that business model. The collapse of web games, combined with the dawn of Ecommerce in 2000, forced PopCap into selling their games online and business boomed. After 11 years, they decided to exit and found themselves at the center of a bidding war. Listen to find out why he believes the bidding war led to a successful exit for them. Jason founded PopCap Games with John Vechey and Brian Fiete in 2000, where they designed and produced games such as Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma, and Plants vs Zombies. PopCap Games was sold to EA in 2011, and Jason is currently working on new games at Blue Wizard Digital, an indie game studio based in Comox, BC. LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkapalka/ Twitter @JasonKapalka - https://twitter.com/jasonkapalka Website - https://bluewizard.com/ -- The Exit—Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You’ll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to the Exit presented by Flip-Off, the world's largest marketplace
0:03.8	to buy and sell online businesses and startups.
0:06.9	The Exit is a 30-minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and
0:10.0	they have done it.
0:11.1	The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes.
0:15.1	You learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of Exit.
0:18.5	It's a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many.
0:23.1	Now in this episode, I sit down with Jason Kapalka.
0:27.4	He's an awesome entrepreneur in the gaming space, and we go through some of his current
0:31.3	ventures that are really fun, and his Exit with pop cap games.
0:36.8	This was sold to EA back in 2014, and there are some awesome, awesome stories along the
0:44.2	way.
0:45.2	He talks about some of the games that they've made, and just about how it was through
0:48.7	the whole transaction at Electronic Arts.
0:52.9	We talked about some of the things that he's working on now, including a mystery package
0:57.1	company, where he's sending out these scary packages to people that subscribe, and some
1:03.7	of the cool projects that he's working on now post acquisition.
1:07.5	I think that the gaming space is one that's pretty underrepresented in the Exit realm.
1:12.3	I was really excited to sit down with Jason and talk through the things that he was tracking
1:17.6	early on at PopCap and the types of things that they really did to prepare for this.
1:24.1	He went through a banker, and the idea that that banker was between him and the acquiring
1:30.1	company was really important to him, and the idea that things could get heated, and you
	...

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