Riz Virk | US-China App Wars, Life is a Video Game, Game Start-up Lessons

Riz Virk is Executive Director of Play Labs @MIT.

Prior to that Riz has had a very successful entrepreneurial career as part of the founding team of TapJoy and CEO and co-founder of GameView Studios (makers of TapFish) that was sold to DeNA.

More recently in addition to his work at MIT Riz has written three books:

#1. Treasure Hunt: Follow Your Inner Clues to Find True Success

#2. Startup Myths and Models: What you Won’t Learn in Business school

#3. An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics all agree we are in a video game

In addition to his books, Riz writes articles including most recently a piece for NBC News titled “Trump uses TikTok and WeChat to challenge China. Welcome to a new conflict: The app wars.”

In this far ranging discussion we talk about App Wars, why Riz believes we live in a simulation/video game, and critical start-up lessons and how they can apply to game start-ups today.