Lisa Wong of PopBase

March 15, 2020 thetechtribune

An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with Lisa Wong, the co-founder and CEO of PopBase, which was honored in our:

Tell us the origin story of PopBase – what problem were you trying to solve and why?

Our goal was to solve a communication problem – democratize game development and allow it to be more responsive (like social media) so that non-tech people can create interactive messaging quickly without having to always be “on”. We knew that most people who had a message they wanted to share, from “Hey, I have an opinion about the last Avengers movie!” to “This is what you should know about the coronavirus” were not game designers, but could benefit from the immersion and interactivity that only game development provides.

What was the biggest hurdle you encountered in your journey?

Ha! Well, our founding team are game developers and TV animators – these are fields that make experiences that are universally loved, but the tech and skills to make them are niche and obscure. But if you’ve been doing the work as long as we have, all the jargon is “normal”, and it’s been challenging for me to find the best way of explaining what we’re building to people who aren’t in the field. I assume a lot of concepts are obvious, and they’re just not.

What does the future hold for PopBase?

We want to use our tech to solve real problems – effective communication leads to better education about important topics, such as health and wellness. When we began showing our tech, we had a lot of people from the medical field asking about it. So we’ve recently focused on utilizing PopBase tech to help with patient empowerment and medical literacy for young type 1 diabetics and their caregivers.

T1D has impacted us personally (my co-founder has T1D). We’ll be partnering up with a patient advocacy group that specializes in this area to lighten the informational and emotional overload by using PopBase to educate and engage. We want to extend what we learn to cover other chronic conditions in the future.

We were able to put together this quick demo in about 10 minutes, educating about coronavirus, We’ll be releasing this update soon to the PopBase community and encouraging our pilot creators to share WHO information as well: https://vimeo.com/397274322.

What are your thoughts on the local tech startup scene in Burbank?

It’s different! Tech here is very focused on entertainment use cases because of all the studios’ long histories in the area. People here really emphasize and value the powerful skills of storytelling for communication, and this is exactly what we want to leverage when designing our tech.

Game design and storytelling are two different, but equally powerful skill sets. We want our tech to allow anyone to learn and access these skill sets, in the same way that Instagram made it possible for anyone to use image filters without needing Photoshop skills.

What’s your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Be prepared to adapt quickly, lean on your network. Try not to eat garbage. Wash your heads with soap and water. Take your own good advice :).