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Playdom

Playdom

Social network companyWikipedia

Search complete. 5 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Playdom".

Sep 28, 2026

Vanessa LarcoGUEST
7:22
And Disney, well, we got acquired into Disney.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
7:23
I worked at Playdom, which is building social games, right? It was like the Zynga competitor back in the day.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
7:28
And there was a lot of weird social norms that developed when people played games over Facebook and asked you to like water my crops, right? So all these experiences, I learned so much.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
7:39
So At Xbox, we really didn't have a lot of data to go off of.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
8:21
And that was the talk, like magical, magical,
Andy WalshHOST
8:23
magical.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
8:23
Then I get to Playdom and it was during the time, it was right after like Wall Street collapsed, right? 2009, I joined late 2010.
Vanessa LarcoGUEST
8:30
And all these like Wall Street bankers came to Silicon Valley and they're like, we're going to apply math to everything and predictive models.
Jay PowellGUEST
17:01
I ended up actually just quitting that job after about 10 years.
Jay PowellGUEST
17:04
And then shortly after I did that, they got bought by Playdom and Playdom got bought by Disney.
Jay PowellGUEST
17:09
And so, yeah, but it was time for me to leave that company.
Alex SulmanHOST
17:16
Right, so that's fascinating.
Sam SteffaninaHOST
78:40
Chris, if there's anything from your experience, you know, Club Penguin, Disney, NBC, Universal all through or parts of it, I guess, through the social gaming era that Tony is talking about, any heuristics or ideas that relate to what we have that we're experiencing right now that you'd want to share?
Chris HeatherlyPANELIST
78:58
Yeah, I actually took over Playdom, which we had acquired for like a billion dollars at Disney.
Chris HeatherlyPANELIST
79:10
And it was a social gaming studio.
Chris HeatherlyPANELIST
79:12
And the two general managers before me that had both been fired slash encouraged to leave, kept defending that social games business on Facebook until the bitter end.

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