Exploding Kittens CEO Elan Lee still keeps in mind the specific minute when he recognized that he needed to stop his job at Microsoft.
Back in 2014, when he was primary style officer for the business’s Xbox Entertainment Studios department, Lee was visiting his younger bro for a little family reunion, just to discover his niece and nephew zoned out in front of the television. “They were both staring at the screen, playing on the Xbox, and did not even acknowledge that I was there,” Lee remembered throughout a Zoom call from his home in Toronto. “They weren’t interacting with each other. They weren’t appreciating the family that was in the room with them.” And to add fuel to the fire, they were playing Halo, a video game Lee himself had actually dealt with.
Lee chose then and there that he remained in the incorrect business. “I was part of the problem instead of part of the solution,” he said. “I kept putting screens in front of kids. That just felt like the wrong direction.” Within 2 weeks, he had actually resigned from his really well-paying job at Microsoft and chose to rather “put a silly card game on Kickstarter.”
