A pretty excellent piece came out this weekend on me from Inc. Magazine. The reporter, David Whitford, followed me around for weeks learning my story. I was torn about telling some of the more salacious details of my story - like my trip through rehab, or being disowned by my parents. But there’s so much false information out there - I thought people should know the real one.

Being a business magazine, there’s a heavy emphasis on my business beliefs. Every word in the piece is accurate, I do believe in activism through capitalism. But, reading it I worry I come across as some money hungry monster who cares more about the bottom line than her employees.

I want to tell you in my own words what I believe, and the responsibility I feel a business has to its employees.

The simple truth is, money doesn’t particularly motivate me. Growing up, my family was very well off - yet my dad was a deeply unhappy man. I’ve had a taste of the 1 percent - renting entire houses for trips to Disney World, dinners at ridiculously expensive restaurants. It never felt fun to me, it felt like an uncomfortable, narcissistic indulgence.

I think it’s pretty telling about me that despite my love of cars, my sister owns a Jaguar and I own a decade old Honda Accord - because I prefer to put my money into computers, which I can build things with.

This brings us to GSX. I see money as the gas that fuels the car, that lets you go places. Money is not important, only the lack of it. The truth is, I do want money - but only so I can turn around and give talented people jobs.

I think the current studio system is terrible for the rest of us. Crunch, networking in bars, sexism getting handled by petty, self-interested HR departments. It’s just not working. And you see it in the outcome, women simply leave. I was speaking at UC Irvine this week, and I spoke to two women with computer science doctorates. They told me that despite being ridiculously qualified to work in games, they wouldn’t - the culture doesn’t make them feel safe.

Put simply, my goal is to give people like that the best place in the world to work.

If I had to sum up the culture of Giant Spacekat, it comes down to a single word - respect. At meetings, I make sure everyone gets a chance to have their views heard. People that dominate conversation and don’t listen to others are given the boot. One GSX employee described it as “hyper-collaborative,” as opposed to other studios she’d worked at.

At GSX, people are in charge of their own tasks. There’s no micromanagement. I give you priorities, and trust you to get them done - on whatever hours you wish. If you aren’t self-directed enough to get it done on your own, you get fired. This gives the rest of us the freedom to enjoy what we do without managers breathing down our neck all day.

GSX has what we call the, “Rule of threes.” I run our organization as flat as possible. We are all equals. Any employee of GSX can challenge another GSX employee on anything, even if it’s me. We talk about it. If we don’t agree, we bring in a third person to play tie-breaker. There is no ego. I have lost hundreds of these votes over the years, and it’s ended up making our work stronger.

As the leader, I have what I call the “boss card,” where I can veto feedback and end discussion. But, I recognize this has a terrible effect on morale - so I use it as sparingly as possible. And when I do, I tell my team, “We need to go my way on this one. Next time we’ll go your way.”

I think my team is extraordinarily awesome to women. One GSX employee had cramps one day, and needed to go lie down. There was no talking around the issue, no euphemisms or white lies. She just said what was up, we all nodded knowingly and gave her the afternoon. She got her deadlines done.

That same openness and empathy applies to parents. I regularly have women at my studio miss work for doctors appointments and sick kids. It’s not a big deal. Because we hire self-motivated people, they get their missed work done in the evenings and weekends.

Being a feminist studio, we unapologetically value diversity. If you have attitudes that make other people at the company feel uncomfortable, expect to get fired. We ruthlessly enforce our, “No assholes” policy.

I’m not sure what our structure will look like going forward - but I can tell you shipping R60, the people that made it had equity. This wasn’t my game, it was OUR game - and we all slaved over it for years. It felt fair to me to give them the rewards, even though my husband and I had assumed all of the risk.

The truth is, I see so many people that are clearly talented but just don’t fit into the studio system. Our philosophy is to find people, invest in them - let them learn, and make them happy so they stay at GSX. Our lead programmer for Revolution 60 had no game experience, and didn’t know UnrealScript - but we paid her for months to learn it on her own. It’s a philosophy that lets us build the talent we need.

If you’re reading this, I think you can sense the themes of mutual respect and cooperation here. I might add, all of this is in service of the almighty dollar. My mission is make a lot of money for our studio - so all of us can continue to make work we love.

I think our current hierarchical corporate culture isn’t a more efficient - I think it’s about small egos that need to be stroked. As I lead my company, I think about this cartoon every single day - I never want to be a boss, I always want to be a leader.

