I Hate To Wait
Every day at 4pm I opened the D.A.V.E. portal, copied a number, and pasted it into a very good-looking Google Doc.
D.A.V.E. was our admin portal, named after the strongest monster in the game. Nothing fancy. Just the numbers that mattered, one day at a time: how much people paid and how many kept coming back. For the size of our team, it was bananas.
Most of it could be entered whenever. Daily users couldn’t. At 4pm, midnight in London, the count rolled over. If I didn’t grab it right then, that day was gone.
I was the fifth employee at Kixeye and head of product. We made Backyard Monsters, a Facebook game where you built a base, raised monsters, and attacked other people’s yards. You could grind. Or you could pay to skip the wait and fast-forward to awesome.
At midnight we were shooting huge Nerf guns from beanbags and throwing Frisbees across the whole floor. We cared about the gameplay and the design. And skipping the wait paid for all of it.
At first I was proud. We were crushing it. The rest of the country was in a recession, and I was looking at used ’80s Porsche 911s. Not seriously. Just curious. I spent over $1,000 on art for the first time. I bought a big fluffy zip-up mohair sweater by Marc Jacobs.
We’d just hired a head of recruiting. One day I walked by her office. “I love your sweater. Did someone make it?”
“Yeah. Marc Jacobs.”
Damn, I thought. We might have gotten too big.
For about a year, I didn’t understand why we didn’t just pay the investors back with a great return, stay small, print money, and split the rest eight ways. Not evenly. I’m not an idiot. The founders could have a lot more. Just eight ways.
Then we got busy. Our goal was a feature a week. I’d paste the number in, and two minutes later I couldn’t have told you what it was.
I did it in Bali. I did it at GDC. I did it at a friend’s bachelor party in South Lake Tahoe, where I had to excuse myself and go hunting for internet. Nobody there was bothered. But I had to do it. Our CEO would notice. So would the founders. So would Getty. If I missed it, I’d hear about it the next morning. Then again at some point. Then maybe at KIXMAS.
I never thought to put automating it on the roadmap. The roadmap was my job. I couldn’t think of a reason not to be working at 4pm.
Facebook used to limit how many notifications you could send from the game. So many games were spamming people that they had to. If people ignored them, hid them, or reported them, you got to send fewer. That was your allocation.
In the earliest versions of the game, we wanted you to tell your friends every time you did anything. We knew that had to change. There was no yellow light before your allocation dropped, but we had good data on what Facebook cared about. We had some quick fixes on the roadmap. They slipped. Fixes weren’t shiny. A new game with miniature pirates and lots of future explosions was shiny.
Facebook had warned us. I was in the room. Mark Zuckerberg gave a little presentation to a group of game makers at their Palo Alto campus. They played the scene from Step Brothers where they stack the bunk beds to make room for activities. The whole thing collapses. I think the games were the bunk beds.
A few months later, they cut our allocation. They slapped our wrist, hard.
I found out on BART. The train was packed. I felt like people were looking at me. I felt pale. I’d never had an anxiety attack, so I didn’t know that’s what it was. I needed to get off and walk, and I couldn’t, because it was a train.
We were in a tunnel, going fast, the lights flying by. Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.
At every station I thought it might ease up. A few people got off. More people got on.
Worst director of product management ever. How could I? How could I be so stupid.
St00pid, the engineers would say.
Get me off this train.
There was yelling in the conference room that morning. I barely remember it. I remember the train. After that, I knew I didn’t care how much money I’d make if it made me feel like those 30 minutes on BART.
• • •
Everyone else on Facebook was selling FarmVille stuff. Cute virtual shit to put on your farm. Our CEO liked to say our games didn’t have purple cows, just blood. What they really didn’t have was stuff. You couldn’t buy much. You could buy time.
The players knew. Their own guides told newcomers never to spend money on speed-ups. Plenty of people paid anyway.
The partner from Lightspeed came in once, stood right behind my screen, and said, “Why don’t you do this?” It was a good idea. That was the annoying part.
In my head: if I weren’t fixing all these bugs, I’d have time to pass your idea on to the founders. Actually, you’re on the board. Maybe throw it out at the board meeting you’re about to have, behind the glass, right in front of me. Hope you like the product slides I made.
But I put him on a pedestal. I once asked our founders, wouldn’t it be so cool to be a partner at a VC? They looked at me like I couldn’t have picked anything worse. Whatever happened to Kixeye, I knew he’d make more on it than I would.
• • •
By then I’d left Kixeye. The first time I saw Clash of Clans, I thought: holy shit. This is just like Backyard Monsters. I was jealous. Why wasn’t that us? I still owned equity. I was Kixeye’s number one cheerleader.
Build a base. Train an army. Attack other people’s villages. Pay to skip the wait. A Finnish company called Supercell put it out on the iPhone in August 2012.
It became one of the biggest mobile games ever made. Kixeye was still on Facebook, making games for big screens and gaming chairs. The partner from Lightspeed, good on him, was in early on Snapchat.
Phones turned into arcades faster than Kixeye was ready for. More like snailspeed.
• • •
When I was about five, we’d go to the Good Earth in Berkeley, and while we waited for our food I’d sing a song I made up.
Oh…
I hate to wait, I hate to wait, I hate to wait.
It drove my parents kind of nuts. After a while, the waiters started bringing me rolls before I even sat down. They knew.
I’ve spent over $10,000 on 10,000 Instagram followers. Ten thousand is when Instagram gives you the K.
Not bots. Real people, as much as that’s possible in 2026. Getty, who ran marketing at Kixeye, helps me. We target and let Meta’s AI sparkle. Come on. I worked at Kixeye.
I check my page multiple times a day, to see how the recent posts are doing. Nobody’s asking me to.
On good days I’m nerding out about what content works. On bad days I feel bad about myself, and I can always hit boost. I don’t have a sweet tooth, and I shave my own head. All that money I save, I tell myself, can go to boost.
“Isn’t that interesting,” I tell myself. Why? What do I need, right now?
I’m not looking for new advisory clients. The creative part of the work is the part that’s just mine. I’m paying to grow it like a startup anyway.
It’s not that I dream of 100K. I want the ones I have to keep coming back.
A few months ago a friend of my mom’s texted her. “Again, Lev has said something that I’m paying attention to! First it was pride and now it’s hope. Certainly not two words that I’ve ever connected to money!”
That text doesn’t show up in any number.
I haven’t forgotten the follower count yet. Maybe I will. In a weird way, I hope so.
You are a great storyteller Lev!