Family Guy Rights Secured

A story about how a startup founder managed to secure the Family Guy mobile game rights despite competing against EA.

"The company was making normal mobile games but distribution costs kept going up because Facebook advertising was getting more expensive. We needed a way to stand out and acquire users more efficiently.

We had seen that The Simpsons did a mobile game with EA, and I thought that's what we needed to do. So we targeted Family Guy, also owned by Fox. When we first approached them, they basically said 'We don't know your startup, we'll probably go with EA since we just did The Simpsons with them successfully.'

But we didn't give up. The company was screwed if we didn't pull a rabbit out of a hat, so I put all our chips into this one strategy. Every morning we'd come into the office with a whiteboard that said 'How do we get the Family Guy rights?' Only me and two other people knew about this plan in a company of 50-60 people.

We tried everything until finally we got Marc Andreessen, who was on our board, to make a phone call. We got the meeting, but they were still hesitant. So we made them a ridiculous deal - a huge upfront guarantee of millions of dollars plus a fat royalty on the backend. Even though we didn't have the money at the time, I promised it and planned to raise it if they said yes.

The final piece was discovering that the main decision maker's mentor was a family friend of Marc Andreessen. We talked to the mentor, offered him board seats and shares, but he declined and simply put in a good word for us. He told them 'These guys will go all out for you - it's life or death for them.' That's what finally got us the rights and saved the company."