Episode summary

Jen MacLean started as a teenage playtester at Microsoft, rose through AOL, Comcast, Amazon, and Microsoft's Xbox, and is now co-founder and CEO of Dragon Snack Games. Ron has known her for more than 25 years, since they met at Columbia Business School. He is also a friends and family investor and angel advisor to Dragon Snack. Jen walks through the state of the games industry: North American layoffs after the COVID investment boom, why players in the West recoil from AI while players in Asia embrace it, and what Grand Theft Auto VI, which Jen estimates could earn $7 to $15 billion in its first week, says about the business.

The second half is about building. Jen describes the 2024 conversations that pushed her to leave Xbox, including Ron's question about a line on a resume versus a line in a eulogy. She explains why she and her co-founders chose to hire only when it hurt and to assume no more money was coming. When a $10 million budget shrank to two to three million, they cut scope and told the team the truth. She also covers keeping a remote-first team of eight connected, why humans must stay in the loop with AI, and Farhaven, the cooperative steampunk fantasy game where nobody competes and everything you do benefits the people you play with. Dragon Snack's Kickstarter launched October 1, and the game is slated for release in Q2 2027.

Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Jen MacLean and Dragon Snacks Games
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmaclean1/
Dragon Snacks Games: https://www.dragonsnacksgames.com/
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsnacksgames/farhaven-not-an-mmo-a-friendmo
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4922250/Farhaven/

Guest bio

Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI. He spent years in education technology, including building a business in China teaching soft skills to teenagers, and now speaks and advises on how leaders and organizations navigate the shift AI is driving. His framework covers seven skills, among them curiosity, global adaptability, principled innovation, and the augmented mindset.

Episode description

Rahim Hirji's book opens with his great-grandfather getting on a boat in Gujarat, bound for East Africa, at a time when one in three boats made it across and pirates worked the route. It was a calculated risk against a hand-to-mouth life, and it started four generations of skill changes: survival skills, then street skills, then vocational skills, then soft skills. Rahim's argument is that we are in the next one, and it took him ten years to see it clearly.

Ron and Rahim get into what that means for leaders right now. Why AI strategies almost always start with process, cost, and revenue, and get to augmenting humans last, often without the chief people officer in the room. Why the tool question is the wrong question. Why the leadership principles that mattered ten years ago still matter, and why the most forward-thinking companies are the ones that do not put AI at the center.

Episode description

JoAnn Garbin is the first returning guest on Lead with Purpose. She led innovation work on the data center of the future at Microsoft, co-authored the bestselling The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, and now runs Regenerous Labs, where her team designs data centers meant to be positive for the company, the community, and nature.

Ron and JoAnn work through the fight happening in towns across the country. A Gallup survey found Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant than an AI data center, a result JoAnn calls a contradiction, since a gigawatt campus is asking for roughly what a nuclear plant provides. They dig into what water neutral actually means once you count power generation upstream and paved ground downstream, why eighty percent of a data center's water footprint sits in the grid rather than the building, and why software companies pretending to be power and construction companies keep learning expensive lessons.

Full Podcast Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

JoAnn Garbin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanngarbin/

Link to Book: https://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Guide-Innovation-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B0DLX2PF5J