The 4 biggest challenges — and 2 surprise benefits — to staffing up and building out a multimilion-dollar company during a pandemic

• After years of overseeing huge gaming franchises like "Halo" and "Destiny," Harold Ryan left Bungie in 2016 to build a new company: Probably Monsters.
  
• The new company received nearly $19 million in Series A funding last summer, and has been staffing up ever since — it just had its biggest month of hiring in April.
• From buying double equipment for employees to the difficulty of pitching multimillion-dollar games over video calls, Ryan spoke to the ups and downs of starting and running a huge new company during a global pandemic.
• "It's hard to build and maintain a creative team through all the things that happen," Ryan said in an interview with Business Insider. "And the pandemic — certainly it wasn't what I was planning for."

Building a company from scratch during relatively normal times in history is tough. Building one during an unexpected global pandemic is another beast entirely.

Probably Monsters CEO Harold Ryan is doing just that, and he's doing it — like millions of people right now — from home. "It's hard to build and maintain a creative team through all the things that happen," Ryan said in a recent interview with Business Insider. "And the pandemic — certainly it wasn't what I was planning for."

From increased spend on equipment necessary for people to work from home to the difficulty of pitching games over teleconference calls, Ryan highlighted the ups and downs of trying to start and operate a multimillion-dollar company during a global pandemic.

The challenges: Pitching games in development over teleconference is very different, and requires a very different strategy.

Video games take years to develop, and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and launch. The pitching process varies, but a critical step in that process tends to be face-to-face meetings at trade conferences throughout the year: the Game Developers Conference in March, E3 in June, Gamescom in August, and the Tokyo Game Show in September.

Not only are those trade conferences all canceled this year, but so are face-to-face meetings.

"It's so hard to pitch creative preproduction work remotely," Ryan said, and especially so in a world where people are "used to doing business deals and seeing game pitches in person."

Ryan has been on both sides of the pitch process throughout his career, and he successfully pitched Probably Monsters to investors who granted him just shy of $19 million in a Series A fundraising in mid-2019.

To that end, he said he's been "helping more" in the process because of his long experience in the gaming industry, sitting in on pitch meetings and assisting with prep. But the biggest change to the process, he said, has been to bring a more complete product to the meeting.

"You want to get your pitch, technologically, a little farther advanced than you would have otherwise," he said. "I want it to have more polish, too, because you're not in the room with the person."

The challenges: Buying two office sets per employee — including expensive workstations used for game development.

For many people working from home, a laptop and a smartphone are more than enough to handle the vast majority of in-office duties.

For game developers, the required equipment varies pretty dramatically. Some work can be done on a relatively lightweight laptop, while other work requires expensive workstations or custom studio space.

The first step for Probably Monsters was shipping basics, like desks and displays and computers, to employees' homes. The second step was focusing on the longer term, and literally duplicating setups for every employee.

"We've really doubled everybody's set up so they could get full access to office resources and have local resources that were performing," Ryan said. "We have both the ability for people to remote into the office and have full speed connectivity to resources still in the office building, and then also full workstations at home, so they have low latency for if you're doing animation work or building something for combat."

The challenges: Doing certain types of production work simply isn't possible yet.

How do you record a symphony orchestra soundtrack if you can't get the members all in the same room to perform? How do you capture realistic movement without a motion-capture studio?

Questions like this are currently being answered by video game, film, and TV production companies all over the world right now. How do you remotely produce performance capture, voice acting, and original music without being able to get together in physical spaces with other people, potentially for long periods of time?

"Luckily," Ryan said, "we're not at the point where we need to pull a large orchestra together, or large groups of actors or whatever in our current development." But that doesn't mean he isn't already thinking ahead to a time when those issues will arise and require solutions.

For some animation work, for instance, one animation lead is working with his wife and a "remote suit" to capture for preproduction on an unannounced game. "For voice actors, for performance capture, they're shipping complete rigs and then walking them through setting it up at their house," he said. "It's going to be a different world."

The challenges: Delays to announcements.

Probably Monsters has scaled up considerably in the last year, and April was the "largest growth month so far in the history of the company," Ryan said. All of that was done remotely — "digital video interviews, remote hiring, onboarding, all their paperwork, everything," he said.

The company is hiring because it's currently in production on two unannounced video games from the two game studios it oversees: Firewalk Studios and Cauldron Studios, with over 100 employees between both.

Those projects remain unannounced, it would seem, because any such announcements were delayed as a result of the pandemic. Ryan said his company is facing "a couple of months delay on stuff we were going to do this spring," but nothing too major.

"Big picture really hasn't changed much," he said. "Our real focus is on keeping [our studios] stable and on track with their games."

The surprising benefits: "Now we're really ready if we can't be in our office to work."

Ryan's company, Probably Monsters, is based in the suburbs of Seattle. And the Pacific Northwest in winter can be particularly snowy — a contingency that Ryan said his company is now positioned to handle more effectively than ever before.

"Occasionally here in Seattle, when it snows, they shut the city down and everyone stays home," he said.

More importantly, Probably Monsters is more prepared than ever to face another real-world emergency — something worse than a bad snowstorm. "We're now much better prepared to maintain business continuity in those scenarios," he said.

The benefits: Video meetings can offer an uninterrupted chance to share work in a way that might be disrupted in an office environment.

For some of Probably Monster's 100-plus employees, the distance has been an unexpected benefit.

"There are some workflows," Ryan said, "some aspects like screen-sharing that were harder to do with people interrupting people at their desk, are now easier for people to schedule and share their work."

At the same time, he stressed that those benefits were outweighed by the unsurprisingly common urge to return to some level of normalcy.

"For most of our teams at this point, they're all ready to see people again," he said. "This box on the screen is a different environment than in person."