Back to Blogging

Wow -- I’m 5 months into my journey as CTO at Electronic Arts.  I get a ton of questions from friends, colleagues and family about the experience, so I thought it was a perfect moment to pick up my electronic pen and start blogging again.  Treat this as my introduction to you, and if you find it interesting, please tell me and I’ll keep blogging on more topics over time. 

Let me start by saying that it is an incredible honor to be part of such an amazing institution as EA.  The creativity and passion of the people I work with is truly an inspiration to me.  It’s a company with an incredible history that spans into an incredibly strong present and is helping to blaze the trail into the future of entertainment and gaming.  I love my job. 

I also love being at home playing games with my family and friends and thinking – “This is my work!” From a gaming portfolio, the company is creating some of my favorite games in the industry.  Some recent ones I’ve been hooked on include:  FIFA 15, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, The Simpsons Tapped Out and one that just launched for mobile this week – SimCity BuildIt.  I’m energized to be working with teams who are designing these end-to-end player experiences and creating a ton of smiles for millions of people around the world.

My main focus, not surprisingly, is on the technology that powers this all.  I’ve been lucky in my career to work on cutting edge technology in various high-touch endeavors like search, productivity tools and commerce.  The gaming industry is going through a technology-led transformation right now and I think we have a huge opportunity in front of us and a number of exciting challenges to solve.  A few of the areas I’m keeping my eyes on include:  Games as services, Mobile gaming, Big Data, Security, Streaming, Social Connectivity and Unified Game Engines.  Each of these is transformational – and EA is right in the mix.  Depending on what you want to hear, I’ll discuss some of these in more detail in future posts, as well as other hot topics.

As you can imagine, a lot of my time is of course spent plotting out the technical strategy for the company.  What you may not have guessed is that I also spend a lot of my time guiding and building the teams and talent that thrive in such a fast-paced environment and who are as excited as I am for exploring these new frontiers. 

If you are interested in learning more, don’t be shy -- we are hiring awesome people at every level – from interns to recent college graduates to those more experienced or even super senior.

Thanks for reading.  Let me know what you’d like to hear from me, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you here in 2015!