David Chase’s Post

HERE WE GO!!! 🌸 Kicking off the spring by sharing that Possible is breaking into new terrain and partnering with Claremont McKenna College's Randall Lewis Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to launch a 2nd year rotational program for their incredible students! It’s truly an honor as an entrepreneur to help students at one of the top liberal arts schools in the country to think entrepreneurially and better understand the various career paths that exist across a tech organization. Too often internships are both too narrowly focused and overly centered around what the company needs from the student. I’m confident this rotational program will be the opposite - designed to prioritize what Claremont students needs to know about tech companies as they begin their career. The new program will kick off in the fall semester and I’m hopeful it will be a core part of the RLCIE for years to come! A special thank you to Ron LaPierre for helping bring this partnership to RLCIE and to Quinn Chasan and Aaron Herst for their introductions to Ron & Nereida Moussa. I’m continually grateful for the opportunity to work with incredible students and indebted to those that help Possible to reach them. 

New video out for Possible! 🎬 Pretty cool to see it all come together and am always grateful to the hundreds of mentors, students, and faculty members who have made this journey...well possible.

Back from thanksgiving with some GREAT news. 🤝🏽 Possible has signed partnerships with six colleges from the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA). These six amazing liberal arts institutions include Kenyon College, Wabash College, Denison University, Allegheny College, Earlham College, and Oberlin College! These are 6 of the premiere liberal arts colleges in the midwest! So it is very humbling and exciting that we can support them in helping prepare their students for long-term success in the job market and their careers. After two years of building this is a no doubt another one of those pivotal moments. Thank you to Lucia Knell for making the intro that started it all. And a big thank you to Lee Schott and Charla White for driving this forward. I would also like to thank Mickey McDonald, Cassie Hagan, Brian Collingwood, Ph.D., Anthony M. Pernell-McGee, Don Graves, Lynn Hampton, Ph.D., Ryan Brechbill, Mila Cooper for their belief and investment in Possible and their students.

Last month, the product that shaped my early career and (IMO) changed the future of Xbox was quietly shut down after 10 years 🌅.   This is the story of the humble program that paved the way for Xbox Game Pass ($4B rev/year).   When I was just 25, I took over a program for Xbox Live from Jason Lesi Wang called Games with Gold - the program gave Xbox Live Gold subscribers free games every month with their subscription. It grew fast 📈📈. By 2015 over 100M games had already been downloaded! But the program faced two big product challenges:  👉 1. Publishers worried free games could decrease their overall revenue and future sales of the game.   👉👉 2. Internally at Xbox, there were worries that by giving away great games for free that overall game sales might drop.   And so with the help of Eli Cortez and the encouragement of my old boss Eric Hermelee, we dove deep into the data. The analysis was shocking.   The exact opposite of the hypotheses were happening: 👉 1. Publishers actually made more money! Turns out when millions of new people are playing your game, it leads to increased sales of in-game content (DLC) and franchise uplift. 👉👉 2. Xbox actually made more money! Users spent more time on Xbox overall when using the program. And platform lock-in led to more games played overall and increased sales.   This data helped transform publisher sentiment and we were able to build a long roadmap of games.   But, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the amazing team pitching Xbox Game Pass, the Netflix for gaming, now had data that proved it was a sound business decision. It showed that many of the initial reasons for not pursuing the program were actually justifications for doing it. 🔑   Games with Gold was the first step to a much bigger leap. And Game Pass is the product everyone will show off and remember. Rightfully so.   But I’m extremely proud to have worked on the product that came before it. Because a great product doesn’t need to last forever to have lasting impact.   Peace out Games with Gold✌🏽

Yesterday, I went on a run and this rainbow appeared through the dark clouds. In the midst of such a heavy week, it gave me hope. Because only through the rain can the sun refract the spectrum of light so beautifully. And hope feels worth sharing at a time like this. --- I'd also like to share a book recommendation: Apeirogon by Colum McCann It is the story of two fathers - one Israeli and one Palestinian - each of whom lose a daughter to violence and build a deep friendship through their shared pain. It is based around the hope that "this desolation can bring us solace." It is one of my favorite books and this plea for peace feels more important than ever.

Throughout my career, my mind has always drifted to all of my unfinished work. 📝 The daily to-do list. ✉️ The unread emails. 🖥️ The upcoming meetings. ⚒️ What I needed to build today. It is so interesting how little mind space I was giving to the work that I had accomplished. ✅ The to-dos that had been crossed out. 📤 The emails that had been sent. 🤝🏽 The meetings that went great. 🪴 The work I had built. It struck me...what would it mean to reframe my thinking to better celebrate myself and the finished work I was doing so that I had the internal motivation, energy, and excitement to continue to do the unfinished work. Because if future work can feel overwhelming, maybe our past work is our best reinforcement.

I've been eagerly waiting to share this news for awhile! 🎉 I'm thrilled to announce TWO new university partnerships 🎉 →→ Possible has partnered with both Santa Clara University and Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University! Feel immense gratitude to partner with both of these incredible institutions and help their diverse students explore and land a career in tech that aligns with their goals. Let's get it started! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gqjFj-jX

If you are feeling burnt out and looking to build a regular creative practice, please check this out! Robin is an incredible teacher, a gifted writer, and I'm so excited to see the impact this will make for people.

April marks my 2 year anniversary of founding Possible. And I got to celebrate by meeting Possible grads IN PERSON for the first time 🙌🏽 It was so special to get to have the first reunion with these Rutgers Business School students. Because I know it was never guaranteed I would get this far. I remember Jarrid Tingle writing that entrepreneurship is privilege and not everyone gets the chance to pursue it. This resonates even more now. I still get to to do this. I still get to build the career education I believe we should have had in college. And I'm feeling hopeful that this first reunion with the Possible community was just the first of many!

We shouldn't look at layoffs at the big tech companies as the same as those at startups. 👉🏽 Big tech companies have massive cash reserves and executives making tens of millions. 👉🏽 Most startups are fighting for survival and have *maybe* a couple years of run rate. For example, here are the cash reserves of some big tech companies: • Google: $116.26 billion • Microsoft: $99.50 billion (after the acquisition of Activision for $68.7 billion) • Amazon: $58.662 billion • Meta: $41.78 billion 🚩 Just as a point of comparison, the United States has $143 billion in cash reserves... The ugly truth is that big tech leaders cut jobs while keeping their exorbitant executive salaries. And they all have the financial cushion of large cash reserves to weather economic downturns that startups don't have. We must hold big tech companies and their leaders to a higher standard and not lump their layoffs in with those of startups. Cutting 10,000 jobs while sitting on $100 billion in cash is a totally different type of decision.