Starting A Gaming Company While Getting A PhD In Neuroscience At NYU, With Wayne Mackey of Statespace - Part I
When Wayne got fired from Applebees for a new hand tattoo, he didn’t know that less than a decade later he’d be naming a new part of the brain. In Part I of our two part series with the founder of Statespace we hear about why being obsessed with video games and training as an MMA fighter prepared him to start a video game analytics company as a young Neuroscience postdoc at NYU. Wayne’s story starts in high school where he taught himself how to code for fun, but the rest of his path to being a tech founder is anything but usual. Growing up in a small town in Ohio he originally didn’t set his eyes on college, instead working various jobs in sales, customer service, and management. By the time he went back to school towards his 30s, starting with ITT Tech and a community college, he realized he could capitalize on his computer science knowledge. This episode details how he went from that small community college to getting a PhD in neuroscience at NYU, and how he came up with the idea for his startup, a product that uses neuroscience to help people get better at video games. In Part II, we’ll discuss how he raised capital and grew his business to hundreds of thousands of users in his first year. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
