The luxury problems I planned for

Raw Fury was supposed to be a lifestyle company.

That’s the part I usually leave out when people ask about the founding, because “lifestyle company” sounds like a hammock with a Steam key. But it was the actual plan in 2015. A small boutique indie publisher. Five to ten people, hand-picked. A company that pays dividends instead of chasing rounds — pick the games carefully, keep the team close, go home happy. You don’t build a proper publisher without money, though, so I took angels. First one, then a few more, all heavyweights in the industry. Even then the plan held: small, careful, dividends.

Then Kingdom landed.

And some time after that I was in a meeting with a co-founder and one of our angels, and the conversation was about building on the success. Accelerate the growth. Take in more money. And I remember being the one who said the quiet part out loud: this isn’t more of the same. This is a different company. We’d be going from lifestyle to venture, and it would change everything — the team, the economics, what we owed and to whom, the kind of problems we’d be having in five years.

I gave. We went down the venture path, and the rest is history.

I want to be careful with that word — “gave” — because it sounds like surrender and it wasn’t. It was a decision, made with open eyes, by someone who had already done the math on what it would cost. And that’s really what this essay is about. Nothing about the first ten years of Raw Fury was accidental. It was thought out. Planned. Engineered. Reality distorted. Including the problems. Especially the problems.

Because here’s what that meeting actually was, even though I wouldn’t have used the words at the time: a luxury problem. Kingdom was a success. Every option in that room looked good. Stay small and comfortable? Good option. Accelerate? Good option. Nobody was going to write a postmortem about us either way. That’s exactly what makes these decisions dangerous. There’s no cliff edge to focus the mind. Just an open intersection where every road looks reasonable, and one of them quietly decides your next decade.

A short detour through some math

There’s a formula I had rattling in my head even when we were six people. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1975: the number of communication channels in a team of n people is n(n−1)/2. Five people is ten lines. Ten is 45. Twenty-five is 300. Fifty is 1,225.

Anybody who has sat through their first thirty-person all-hands knows this in their body. You used to make decisions in kitchen conversations. Now it’s three Slack threads, a half-attended meeting, and a follow-up nobody watches to the end. Nothing changed about the company except the number of nodes. The edges exploded.

So when we said yes to venture, I knew what was coming for the org chart. I just thought I could design around it.

What I built, on purpose

You can find the philosophy in books — the post-industrial argument that companies hire adults and then manage them like machinery has been made well by people like Seth Godin and Frederic Laloux. But the conviction was mine before I had the citations, and it was simple. In our private lives we trust people to make enormous decisions. Buy a house. Marry someone. Raise a child. Then we hire them, and the first thing we do is strip it all away. Do your job. Stay in your lane. That’s above your pay grade. The exact same person you’d trust to drive your kids to the hospital is, on Monday morning, not authorized to approve a line item. It’s absurd if you look at it for thirty seconds.

I built Raw Fury around the idea that we could just… not do that. Hire people who were already adults and treat them like adults.

By the time we were 25 or 30 people, the structure looked like this: four fully autonomous cells. Each cell worked on its games and owned them completely — strategy, beats, calls, all of it. Signing happened outside the cells, but with a mechanism I haven’t seen anywhere else: every single person in the company held a veto. If anyone felt strongly that we shouldn’t sign a game, we didn’t sign it.

And budgets — this is the detail that matters later — didn’t really exist as boundaries. Marketing would come to me and ask: how much can I spend? And I would answer: how much do you need?

I thought I was handing people freedom. Hold that thought.

Where it broke

It broke in three ways, in escalating order of how much each one taught me.

First, partner chaos. Four autonomous cells meant external partners were having four different conversations with Raw Fury, none of them coordinated. Platforms, vendors, partners — they weren’t talking to a company, they were talking to four small companies wearing one name.

Second, the cells didn’t perform equally. Of course they didn’t — different people, different games, different luck. But word gets around, and it got to the point where developers would ask, before signing, to be assigned to a specific cell. The market was grading my org chart and handing me the results.

Third — and this is the one that actually rearranged me — humanity kicked in. I’m idealistic. I thought people wanted autonomy, wanted decisions over their own actions and fates. Turns out most people want to be told. Not because they’re weak — because we’re raised like this, schooled like this, shaped by every job they had before this one. “How much do you need?” sounds like freedom, but what it actually hands someone is subjective, emotional work: constructing an ask, owning it, defending it. A boundary would have been kindness. The pressure of having to be subjective all the time, instead of objective inside known limits — that’s a personal responsibility the classic hierarchy quietly takes off your shoulders. That’s what hierarchy is for. I had to run a flat company to learn it.

So we moved to a classic hierarchy, with everything that comes with it. Titles — which people wanted. Paths to seniority — which people wanted. Reporting lines. The whole apparatus I had designed the company against, requested by the people I had designed it for.

Flat didn’t die at Raw Fury because of politics or scale alone. It died because the humans asked for the hierarchy back.

The principle survived the structure

Here’s the part that took me longer to see: the structure failed and the principle didn’t.

The veto is the proof, because the veto went wrong. Someone once used it as a political point — vetoed a game not on its merits but because they personally felt we couldn’t handle that particular game. It was a great game. We respected the veto anyway and lost it. That one stung, and I’d honor it again, because a principle you only keep when it’s free isn’t a principle. It’s decoration.

Release management never got restructured. They were comfortable operating autonomously inside the new hierarchy, so they kept doing their thing, and their thing worked. Where the people could carry the weight, flat quietly survived.

And the hierarchy we built never became the compliance machine I’d been avoiding. I kept trusting people. Lead, don’t manage. People in the company made the decisions and ran them by me when they wanted my read — not because a process demanded it.

So: flat versus hierarchy is the wrong question. The right question is whether the structure — whatever shape it takes — is built on the assumption that the people inside it are smart, trusted, and whole, or on the assumption that they need to be managed into compliance. You can run a hierarchy that respects people. You can run a flat company that doesn’t. The shape is downstream of the principle.

The boring contract that did everything

While all of that was playing out, a quieter principle was compounding underneath it. This one never broke, never needed rescuing, and made Raw Fury what it is. Naturally, it’s the boring one.

When we started, publishing was largely fire-and-forget. Ship the game, ride the launch, stick with the winners, move on. I wanted the opposite: build and nourish a foundation. Never leave a game. Keep it going. Work on it. Build a catalog — because the catalog is the backbone of a publisher. Hits are weather. Catalog is climate.

And the thing is, you don’t get a catalog by feeling strongly about it. You get it by writing it into the deal. Our template agreement was the principle in contract form — 50/50 terms, perpetual license, structured so that staying with a game for years was how the economics were supposed to work, not an act of charity after launch week. The contrarian thesis wasn’t a slide in a vision deck. It was the paperwork.

The result is the statistic I’m proudest of, and it’s not the hits: a ridiculous share of Raw Fury’s games are in the black. Not all huge successes. Profitable. Across 50+ titles. Publishers die because their model demands the next release be a hit — running, every quarter, on the bet that the team picks the next winner. That bet has bad odds for even the best operators, and the law of large numbers always collects. We were never making that bet. The catalog meant nobody — not the next hire, not the next game, not the next round — was being asked to do something heroic just to keep the lights on. Heroism at scale is a luxury problem dressed up as a virtue.

The contrarian part that isn’t a brand

There’s a variety of “contrarian” that’s pretty cheap — the brand-positioning kind. We do things differently here. Mostly that’s a marketing position, taken because the position was empty and somebody had to fill it.

Real contrarian thinking isn’t being against the standard play. It’s refusing to take the standard play on faith. Doing the boring math on communication channels, the boring philosophy on what people actually want from work — including the humbling parts where your idealism is wrong — and the boring finance of catalog economics, instead of accepting the shape of the industry as given.

The reason luxury problems are “luxury problems” is that from the outside they look like the problems of the lucky. You had a hit and now you don’t know what to do? Must be nice. From the inside they’re path-dependence: which of the open roads decides your next ten years. There’s no script. The script everyone learns is for the cliff, and you’re not on the cliff. You’re at the intersection where every direction looks reasonable, and one of them is wrong.

The way you make that call isn’t by reading more strategy books at month thirty-six. It’s by having decided what kind of company you want to run before scale forces your hand — opinions about communication math, about hierarchy and trust, about what the contract should encode, formed when nothing was on the line and you had time to think clearly. I knew my luxury problems were coming. I planned for them. Some of the plans held. Some got rearranged by reality — and the rearranging was the education.

Engineered, all of it. Reality distorted.

Where this goes next

I’m writing more about this at Final Boss, the small advisory practice I started this year. The first essay up is about the operator window — what happens to founders in the first twenty-four months after a launch lands, when the conferences run out and the actual hard calls start. That one I wrote from the founder seat. This one I wrote from the chairman seat. They’re both true.

If you’ve been thinking about these questions — building a company without lying to yourself about what scale will cost, or sitting on a fund board wondering why the studio in your portfolio is acting strangely after a good year — there’s a conversation worth having. You know where to find me.