The original concept for Pixels, one of the most popular Web3 games on the planet, came to its founder after he ditched his comfy tech job in his early 20s to travel and work in New Zealand.
“I wanted to mess my life up a little bit, so I moved to New Zealand,” Luke Barwikowski tells Hall of Flame.
Barwikowski, who holds a double degree in computer science and Economics, worked as a software engineer in San Francisco and felt like he “had too much figured out for a 23-year-old.”
Now 28 and based in Miami, Barwikowski says his time in New Zealand was a blur of odd jobs — working on a dairy farm, a surf hostel and eventually crewing on a sailboat — all while juggling the early days of building Pixels.
A week before he was supposed to sail from New Zealand to Fiji, he was accepted into a startup accelerator for Pixels
“I talked to the guy I was working with on the startup accelerator side and said I have this cool opportunity to sail from New Zealand; is it cool if I start like a week later?”
He went on his sailing adventure, not knowing that just a few years later, Pixels — a laid-back game with over 2 million daily users — would hit a fully diluted value of nearly $2.65 billion. It did so in February of this year.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, pun intended.
(X/Luke Barwikowski)
He says he wasn’t great at the whole fundraising side of things, so for the first year, he bootstrapped the game with his own savings. Later on, he convinced a couple of investors to back him, but still, building a game isn’t cheap, and that funding ran out pretty quickly.
At one point, he was down to just $25,000 — barely enough to keep the company afloat for two more months.
He was skimming it close to the line, but Pixels then managed to score $2.4 million in a funding round led by Animoca Brands in 2022, and that turned out to be a game-changer for Barwikowski.
“I had $200…
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