"Five years ago, I joined a gaming company called NetDragon. Before the interview, I realized they owned Neopets, which they had acquired a few years earlier, and I thought, whoa, that’s amazing. When I checked it out, it was still alive and kicking, looking exactly the same as I had left it. That definitely rang a bell and intrigued my interest. When I joined, my main role was helping them restructure their overseas business. We spun off many of their education assets and did a separate listing. Neopets was a unique asset, hidden in plain sight, and we wondered what to do with it. We came up with the idea to spin it off as an independent indie studio focused on its revival, rather than keeping it under the newly listed education entity or leaving it with NetDragon, since most of the overseas assets had already been divested at that time." - Dominic Law, CEO of Neopets


"In the past ten years, we lost the trust of the community. Rebuilding that trust is now at the center of our strategy. We want to be more transparent about our roadmap and own up to our mistakes—why things went wrong, why there are bugs, and how we can launch better. If things get delayed, we’ll explain clearly what caused it. We’ve overpromised many times and underdelivered on almost all fronts, and we’re here to change that. Our goal is to build more realistic and practical roadmaps. If we can’t hit our targets, we’ll let the community know and explain the business decisions or reasons behind focusing on other initiatives instead. This approach has helped us reconnect and rebuild our relationship with the community." - Dominic Law, CEO of Neopets


"It was the strong community that kept Neopets alive. Even after the decline, there remains less than one percent of core super fans who have been playing nonstop for the past 15 to 25 years. This dedicated community is what sustained Neopets through the years. Although the lack of strategy and management led to a gradual downfall and people began to forget about it, there is still immense goodwill and brand awareness in the IP. That’s where we saw a huge opportunity for revival." - Dominic Law, CEO of Neopets

Dominic Law, CEO of Neopets and Jeremy Au dive into how a beloved millennial-era game evolved from early internet nostalgia into a modern revival story. They discuss the courage it took to spin Neopets out of its parent company, rebuild trust with long-time fans, and adapt a 25-year-old IP for new generations. Their conversation explores the challenges of updating old technology, the role of community-led development, and how emotional attachment can sustain a brand through decades of change. Dominic also reflects on leadership lessons from managing a turnaround, the balance between nostalgia and innovation, and why staying transparent keeps fans loyal for the long run.

00:45 Rediscovering Neopets sparked a new mission: Dominic found the brand’s hidden potential while restructuring NetDragon’s overseas business and proposed a management buyout to revive it.
03:30 Nostalgia and fandom kept the brand alive: A small but passionate community sustained Neopets through decades of inactivity, proving the power of emotional connection.
06:00 Missing the mobile era hurt growth: Neopets stayed static during key shifts to mobile and social gaming, losing younger audiences and momentum.
10:20 Collecting and trading define Neopets’ core: Digital ownership, customization, and item trading remain the game’s central appeal across generations.
13:45 Turning nostalgia into a family experience: Neopets now aims to become a shared parent–child game, offering safe, creative play and educational value.
26:00 Leadership shaped by transparency: Dominic learned that honesty, realistic timelines, and community dialogue rebuild trust better than overpromising.
38:20 Bravery defined the spinout: Taking the leap to lead Neopets independently was a high-risk, high-conviction move guided by belief in its legacy.

Jeremy Au: Hey Dominic, I'm so excited to have you on the show. Wow. Neopets. What a blast from the past.

Dominic Law: So glad to be here, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, I'm excited because you're building the future of Neopets, I have to say. I used to have a Neopet called Lenni, and my wife also had a Neopet called Chia. Time flies.

Dominic Law: Yeah, time flies. I played Neopets growing up as well. My first Neopet was a Shoyru, a blue Shoyru, and still my favorite now.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, these are exciting times. But could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Dominic Law: Yeah, sure. So I started playing Neopets when I was 12, and I played for a good few years. It's actually the game that I used to connect with my childhood friends in Canada , because I moved back from Canada to Hong Kong when I was nine. One summer I visited them, and they were all playing this game called Neopets. I was like, "Oh, what is this?" Neopets was a big part of my childhood during those days. Like MySpace, Facebook, it's the game that I used to learn about the internet. It made me a cool kid in town because I played Neo way before a lot of my peers and friends did. They eventually caught up with the phenomenon maybe a year or a year and a half later. So by then, I'd accumulated my wealth inside the game. I had more pets, I had more collections. So that made me pretty cool, because I was ahead of the industry curve and ahead of the curve adopting what's trendy. That was a big part of my childhood. But like most Asians, by the time middle school comes, I needed to focus on studies and exams, preparing for public exams. So I definitely did play less online gaming. And then eventually, I didn't even know that Neopets actually still existed.

Five years ago, I joined a gaming company called NetDragon. [00:03:00] Before the interview process, I realized they own Neopets, which they acquired a few years ago. And I was like, "Whoa, that's amazing." I checked it out, and it's still alive and kicking, of course. Things still actually looked exactly the same way I left off. That definitely rang a bell and intrigued my interest. When I joined, it was mainly about helping them to restructure the overseas business. We spun off a lot of the education assets that they had. We did a separate listing, and Neo is a unique asset. It's like that's hidden in plain sight. What should we do with it? And then we came up with the idea that we should definitely spin it off as an independent indie studio, focused on its revival. This was instead of being part of the newly spun-off education entity, or staying behind with NetDragon, as most of the overseas assets had been divested at that time. So we proposed a management buyout, a spin-off of this IP. Luckily, we got the blessing of NetDragon , letting us take this leap of faith. That's how the whole revival journey of Neopets started two years ago. And it's been a great journey.

Jeremy Au: Wow. Incredible. There's so much to cover, but I had the exact same emotional journey using my Lenny. I think I was obviously going for some competitions and also playing the Neopets stock market. Yeah. Buy low, sell high. So just learning some stuff there. And of course, there were so many other things that were happening at the same time. There was MSN Messenger, ICQ, MIRC for serious chatting. So there's a lot of stuff that was millennial. And if you mentioned those names, a lot are gone, right? MSN Messenger is gone. Hotmail is gone. Early internet days are gone. So could you share a little bit more about when you came into contact with it? It's obviously gone through that boom, then bust, and now you, but what was it that you saw as the opportunity there?

Dominic Law: It's the strong community that kept it together. Although it busted, we still have less than 1% of the core super-fans who've been playing Neopets non-stop for the past 15, 20, 25 years. And the core community that continues to play it is actually what kept Neopets alive. And although the lack of strategy, the lack of management in the past many years, led to a gradual downfall , and eventually people started to forget about it, there's so much goodwill and brand awareness in this IP, and we see a huge opportunity to revive it. There have been successful revival of IPs in many places. There have been nostalgic games having a really strong comeback. So those are the playbooks that we're learning from. For example, Old School RuneScape is still one of the most popular titles for their studio. Disney reshaped the Marvel universe, or how Star Wars is transgenerational, from the original episodes to now young fans are collecting collectibles. IP is a very fun space when there's good storytelling, when there are cute characters, when there's a worldview allure, and that type of emotional immersiveness that leads to the potential of having, I would say, an evergreen transmedia, transgenerational IP.

Jeremy Au: And what's fascinating to me is that there was such a strong community aspect of Neopets, which was different from other games. RuneScape also had its own strong community, but it was very much all the jokes about, I know, abusing some newbie player and dropping them and things like that. But what I remember about Neopets was that community piece—people always talking on message boards and making fan fiction about the stories of their characters. And if I look back on it, I feel like it was such a missed opportunity , because it was like Pokémon but online. Everybody had one. I had my Lenny, my wife had three favorite Neopets of hers. All of us were doing that. I'm scratching my head, how did the ball get dropped as far as lessons about IP and community management?

Dominic Law: Neopets was at the forefront of technology. If you look at the gaming world today, you can actually see parts of the technology today in the original Neopets game. If you look at Roblox today, playing Neopets when we were kids was like how kids are playing Roblox now. There's an online community, a lot of show elements, and fans are the UGC content creators. And then if you look at the Metaverse, like what Facebook announced recently in Meta Connect , the very early version actually happened in Neopets as well , where you're immersing yourself in the vast worldview. We have more than 18 lands in Neopets, and that actually mimics different parts of the world. Although it's a click-based game, it has been very expansive. And there's so much to do, and everyone can enjoy Neopets in a different way. So that's where I think we can learn from the lessons that at one point, I think there was a lot of push to turn Neopets into more of a cartoonish IP or a child's IP. The original players felt like it's not really the IP that I loved and liked anymore. And they felt like when they go to middle school or college, they wouldn't want to be seen playing a child's game, a kid's game, right? So that's where a lot of our users graduated from the experience. And I feel like there's also the lack of innovation within Neopets as an IP. Can Neo continue at the forefront of technology? That's what excited people and attracted the first generation of players in the first place. But we missed the whole mobile gaming era. We missed the later exciting growth of the gaming industry. All that we didn't really participate in. And I think that's where we missed the most opportunity.

Jeremy Au: I think it's interesting because we're talking about two dimensions, right? One is the IP or the mechanics, but now the part you're talking about is really what I call the technology waves or channels, right? Because you're right, I used to be playing that on a web browser using Flash. Yeah. And then you always had to update Adobe Flash. People don't even know what Flash is anymore. So yeah, exactly. I was like, "Gen Z folks, what is Flash?" And then you'd go to a place like Newgrounds as well, which had all these flash games that all these designers would be launching. So that was that wave. But you're right. After that, it went into mobile phones, console gaming also became hot. Now there's VR as well. So there are lots of different, and obviously there are the handheld gaming devices like Nintendo Switch and all these other consoles, right? So I think it's interesting to see that orthogonal component to it as well.

Dominic Law: Yeah, I think if we think about it from an IP standpoint, which I can talk a little bit more, at that time we forgot the identity of Neopets and what the core users love. And then we stopped innovating , and tried to push the IP in a way that was different from what they care most about. That's when we saw the drops in MAUs. Most recently, lack of innovation is also making it much harder to play the site. The death of Flash. Adobe announced it years ago, and then overnight, in December 2021 or 2022 , our MAU probably dropped significantly because half of the site was not playable overnight. Things like that—we never really planned for the transition. The team was also stretched very thin, as it was put on maintenance mode for the longest time. So we didn't really have the resources and long-term strategy to maintain or revive the site. So we've been taking a completely different approach since we took over. It's to focus on the core user experience and making sure we can make the classic site fun again. I know there are still a lot of bugs. There are still a lot of things that we need to fix. Fixing a 25-year-old tech stack that has been handed over by multiple tech teams over multiple acquisitions—we can only imagine how messy it could be. There was never a smooth handover, and a lot of things are still lost. When we're reviving a codebase, we'll still see things like, "Oh, this is a temporary fix for this marketing campaign," but that piece of code remained there forever and is actually causing bugs. We finally found out what's causing that. It's been an interesting journey.

Jeremy Au: Sorry, I'm just laughing at having a 25-year-old tech stack across multiple generations of the internet, like you said, from whatever HTML to Adobe Flash. But what's interesting is you started defining that core experience. I'm curious what you think that core experience is. To me, Pokémon would be childhood nostalgia, I guess. And what's interesting is, as a millennial, I used to play Pokémon Red, and I think my sister played Pokémon Yellow. I haven't played recently. My younger kid has a Pikachu plushie. It's interesting to see that reintroduced. How do you think about the core user experience versus how you think about it from a generational perspective?

Dominic Law: For what's left of Neopets, the core experience is a trading game. There are a lot of items, gadgets you can collect for your pet. Collecting them is the ultimate prize. To collect them, you need to trade items, you need to stock items. You can play mini-games. You can do all those things to earn the in-game currency. Ultimately, you trade for the ultimate item you want. There's a lot of luck and chance, or you just have to grind to collect certain items. And then there are random events and all those stuff. So it's always an adventure in Neo, but ultimately it's about collecting items used to customize your pets. So for some people, customizing their pets to express their digital identity—that's the angle. For some people, it's collecting items so that they have a really nice showcase of their collection. That could be their ultimate goal. So a lot of it's really about this in-game trading community. It is a really big part of it. And then expressing their digital identity and making their pet look nice is the other part of it.

Jeremy Au: How do you think about it from a generational perspective? That makes a lot of sense. The trading component's such a key component for so many games. The joke about World of Warcraft is that the game is a big chunk of it, right? And in RuneScape, there are actually a lot of folks who make a giant economy by making their own smithing process and being level whatever crazy that can make a special breastplate armor. I remember all those things, and yeah, it's still going. Trading is such a sophisticated mechanic, right? For you to trade, you need to plan for the future. You need to think about that. When I was playing, I didn't really understand a lot of it. I was using those paintbrushes and NEGGs, I think, to also do some of that. But I was not very sophisticated, so I was very much, "Oh, I found a paintbrush". Okay. I didn't trade. I just applied it straight away. Do you see differences in core user behavior with new generations of users or returning users?

Dominic Law: Yeah, I think a lot of the game loops are not that different across games. Returning users understand that. They're coming back for nostalgic reasons to visit their childhood account, go down memory lane, and enjoy these fond experiences that they had. We have been able to grow our MAU significantly in the past two years , but most of those are reactivation of recently lapsed users. For long-term returning users, we're seeing that they're coming back and they enjoy that experience, but it's hard for them to stay. At the end of the day, most users might not want to play a 25-year-old game. That positive experience is exciting. From the Neopets brand and IP perspective, we want to create more experiences that users can come back and enjoy with a more modernized gaming experience. We've launched smaller mobile games as an extension of the storytelling. We also have board games with our licensing partners. We're also going to work with our licensees to launch new experiences on other gaming platforms. So that's how we're planning to expand the storytelling of Neopets and the experiences that returning users could enjoy apart from the classic site. So they can come back for nostalgia, but they can also play Neopets in new, different ways that they've never thought about. And now that they know that Neopets is alive and kicking, they can also buy merchandise, just a physical merch to enjoy, to collect. So that's what we're trying to do. As I mentioned, collecting is a core loop inside the game. Can we bring that core loop into the real world with merchandise, with the success seen with blind box toys and things like that? I think collectible toys are disrupting the whole toy market and toy industry , and it's been growing significantly. So that could be an area that we also play in.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, I can imagine there being a lot of synergy between collectible toys and collectible Neopets, right? They have a lot of similarity in that trading dynamic. I think it's interesting because many millennials from that returning generation are becoming parents. If you ask me right now, I think, like I said, Neopets has a lot of goodwill. To me, I'd be like, "Neopets is probably a healthier game". I could imagine introducing this to my kids, like Pokémon.

Dominic Law: I think that would be the ultimate goal for us, whether we can create a transgenerational experience that's shared between the parents and the new generation. Historically, parents played with kids 20 or 30 years ago because it was the new experience. They wanted to play games together, which is like how nowadays a lot of parents are playing Roblox just to check on their kids. We foresee that it could be a shared experience for Neopets as well. So we do have parents who played when they were 30 years old; now they're 60 years old, and they're still playing with their kids. It's a safe environment. Neopets is definitely a very friendly, very safe space. And we do want to see if we can create new experiences that can be enjoyed by the household. For example, we've launched a trading card game with Upper Deck , and we've designed it to be six plus. It is very easy to pick up and play, but there's also enough complexity for adults to play. We have seen at the conventions when we have these tutorials, there's a lot of family playing. It becomes a family board game, but you can also have the complexity of actually building your deck and trading the cards and collecting. So those are the experiences that we're continuing to launch more so that Neopets can be a shared experience for the family. And on the other hand, it's whether a Neopet can become a classic account. I think there are things that we can help parents to introduce. Maybe Neopets is like a living relic of what the early internet looked like. That could be educational and interesting in some ways. Nostalgia is a big thing. Sometimes it could be pretty trendy. So maybe that could be some of the hooks for getting parents to introduce Neopets to their kids. But on the other hand, on the merchandise side, cute characters are naturally attractive to kids. What IPs they like is actually very heavily determined by either their parents introducing them, the entertainment content they consume, and what their peers like. If you get the parents to introduce them, it could be the first IP they ever interact with. We have licensees helping launch baby products. If you introduce Neopets early enough in preschool years, Neopets could become the IP that they like. We don't have too much entertainment content to sustain that.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Looking back, I used to be—still am, I think—pretty much a Star Wars fan. Okay. I say this with some humility because when I say I'm a Star Wars fan, a lot of fans are like, "Okay, Jeremy, your level of knowledge is not there". But I'm definitely higher than 99% of the general population. I remember as a kid, my dad brought me to a movie theater to watch Episode One of Star Wars. I think he had watched Episodes 4, 5, 6. He brought me, and I still remember the theater. It was the premiere night, and everybody was celebrating and throwing popcorn when The Menace came up—the opening title crawl. Everybody was screaming, yelling. It was a magical moment for me. As a kid, I watched Episodes 1, 2, 3. And what's interesting is that when I watched it as a kid, I had a total blast for 1, 2, and 3. Only when I grew older did I realize that people really hate Episodes 1, 2, and 3. And I think this is part of the transgenerational piece, right? Which is that, as a kid growing up, I enjoyed 1, 2, 3, and I also enjoyed 4, 5, 6, but I didn't see a very big quality difference. But then I watched, obviously, 7, 8, 9, and now I'm an older person. And I felt, "Oh my gosh, there are some issues with Episodes 8, but also especially Episode 9" of the Star Wars component. Seven was a nostalgia trip. So again, it was a big celebration. Eight was, "We're going to try something new". "It's fresh, but let's see where it goes". And then nine was unfortunately, for me, bad. But what was interesting is that I started realizing that I'm kind of aging out of Star Wars because the movies are designed for younger kids. It's a family movie. And then in the Star Wars IP, I like Andor, these older, more noir, mature versions of that same story. It's interesting to see the IP stretch between family, kid-centric, and for parents watching alone, like me, because my wife is not into it. How do you think about that dynamic of trying to flex IP to be generational?

Dominic Law: Yeah. Star Wars is a more mature IP, fantasy-based. And at the very beginning, they had a much more male-dominated audience. I think for Neopets, our audience always started as a friendly and safe space. Although our core users now are 25 to 40 years old, because they all started playing when they were kids. But what shows what's interesting is cute character-based IPs can actually have a very long lifespan. If you look at the success of Disney, Pokémon, and characters, they're all cute characters, and they can become transgenerational. I think it's a human, innate attraction to adorable characters. I think that wouldn't change. The emotional attachment or the companionship that you get from collecting these adorable character products is part of the culture, the emotional bonding that you have. I think that can be across, even when you're older. Maybe you don't enjoy the content, but you probably still buy some of the merchandise. You might not play as many games, but you can still enjoy some of the more casual experiences. So I think as a gaming IP, that's interesting because we're always in the casual segment. Although the original game has been at the forefront of technology, at its core, it is a very casual game. You can play mini-games, multiple ways to enjoy. You don't have to be pressured to grind. You can just enjoy it at your own pace. And that's actually a great genre to extend that lifespan of what age you can still enjoy, because you can pick it up, play as much as you want. There are skill-based games, but it's not like when you get older you feel like you can't really beat the level anymore. Yeah. So I think it's interesting to see whether we can extend Neopets for 25 years to come. And actually, expansion will come from our core users now. Can we attract younger generations through parents? And age with the core audience?

Jeremy Au: That's super interesting, right? My sister and I played so much Halo. We played co-op all the way from Halo 1, and then I think we stopped at Halo Infinite because we were just so busy with work. But the cooperative version of it is still doable, because cooperative can always play at your own pace and everything. But all those sweaty multiplayer games that I used to play... Yeah. I was just amazed recently because I found out that one of my secondary school best friends, she's still playing Dota , which is another IP that's aged with millennials. He's still one of the top 1000 players. And I was like, amazed, and I'm like, "I'm getting carpal tunnel syndrome from work, so now I switch..."

Dominic Law: From a normal mouse to a vertical mouse. Maybe we should play more console. Public safety advisory.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. It's interesting to see so many IPs adding dynamism by bringing in new folks. One thing you're doing, you mentioned, is going to board games, collectible toys. What's that strategy like? Is it brand extensions? Attract new customers? Or reactivate lapsed players?

Dominic Law: We think about it as a way to reactivate our lapsed user base primarily. And through that reactivation, we're also trying to see whether these products can attract new users. For example, with the trading card game, a lot of our initial adopters would be our core fans or lapsed players. In the trading card segment, it's actually a unique product , because we're the first trading card game that actually attracts a lot of female players, which used to be more male-oriented. Yeah. So it's interesting that we're able to bring in new players for the trading card industry. People who originally enjoyed the trading card genre were willing to try the new Neopets. Even if they might not have heard of Neopets or played Neopets. I remember the first tournament we had, the Champion was actually not a Neopets player. But he got pulled into playing the Neo trading card game that we developed with Upper Deck because of his wife or his partner. He has been a trading card player for many other games. He quickly hopped on, loved it, started collecting, and won the first tournament.

Jeremy Au: That's amazing. I think it's interesting because I think about Magic: The Gathering. I also soft-played, so you do have a lot of hobbies in secondary school. I was not a very good student, I was watching him. But I never got into it. I was watching my friends get into it and playing in class. I think obviously there were the Pokémon trading card games, which I definitely played as well with friends. I think more interesting, the thing you actually said is very true: there's a gender component. Games are more coded. And I think Magic became a very sweaty game , where it's like really maximizing for the Black Lotus or this special card that's super expensive that with the right mechanics ... A lot of these games end up coming in a little bit more casual, and then they become very sweaty, and then they become very, I would say, male-coded. Even Pokémon feels like a very male-coded game. I'm not sure in terms of the competitive...

Dominic Law: It's hard to be playable because it's all collecting and scratch cards. So hard to buy cards.

Jeremy Au: You've got to buy the right cards for the right game, for the right meta, for the unbreakable mechanic loop. So it breaks the fun for casual players where you're like, "Oh, I'm playing, I don't know, Big Two or Poker with my friends, where we all have a decent chance of the game". I'm curious, how do you think about that, because you said your community has a good representation of both men and women?

Dominic Law: Our core users now skew towards female. We don't have great data over the years. But for the past two years that we've started to gather more data, the skewing towards female could be a few things. The more of what the boys used to enjoy in the game, a lot of it is broken. And maybe that's why more females stayed with the platform over the years. But I guess it's also because of the cute characters and the customization of your pets. The site itself is quite friendly. In the gaming space, there aren't that many other games that are very welcoming for female players to join, because most are male-dominated, apart from the casual games. And casual mobile games actually skew very heavily towards female as well. That's what we're seeing in Neopets, too. I guess that's why we feel like young parents will be more conscious about what content their kids consume, what games they play. What's their screen time? Is it positive screen time? Is there potential danger? How can I have more parental guidance? So all those things are things we're thinking about. If we were to create a shared experience, and whether this can be the transgenerational IP that the parents introduce to their kids, knowing that Neopets is a safe environment, knowing Neopets is a family brand ... That's something that's always in our mind. And young parents are the decision-makers on what the kids can consume and enjoy, at least in their early days of their online ages.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I know it reminds me of as a kid, again, playing Math Blaster , because my parents were like, "Oh, yeah , he's calculating math quickly to shoot aliens. So they were like, 'It's good, it's educational'". We have two young kids, a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old. My wife bought them Amazon tablets to play some educational games from time to time , but only educational games. So we try to have lower screen time for YouTube, unless it's for Mandarin. So there's bilingual time, at least they're learning a language, exposed to the culture. How do you think about that? It must be interesting to bring back this IP for the core users, but also slowly extend it for new Gen Z or Gen Alpha users as well. I'm just curious what that internal set of conversations you need to have is like.

Dominic Law: Yeah, for the classic Neopets.com game, I don't think we're going to use that to attract the new generation of players. They might be curious to see what it is, but most of them probably won't stay. It's all about the new gaming experience. Whether we build Neopets on Roblox, a Switch Neopets console game, or are there other experiences that we can bring to the new generation of users? Those experiences might help us attract the right new players. Merchandise can probably go all the way—younger merchandise is like cute plushies. It's a wide range of people who can collect it. But certain games like Roblox—all young kids play Roblox. And for console games, it's great for family pickups. People can play. For example, the Switch has, I think, close to a 70% install rate in the US. So a lot of households have it. So those are the ways that we're envisioning that we can leverage new experiences to attract new generations of players.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. And new players, they're not going to have a web browser and a laptop accessible.

Dominic Law: Web browsing experiences and games are making a comeback. Yeah. Not just Neopets, but across the board, because it's easy to launch. One-click launch. Getting users to download an app or game on mobile is getting expensive. But getting people to click on a game, try something casual—we see a resurgence industry-wide. Fantastic. And not just for gaming.

Jeremy Au: I was cool, I became uncool, and now maybe I'm cool again.

Dominic Law: It's not the cool kids doing it.

Jeremy Au: "Hey guys, check out my Lenny". I can't remember what color I painted him. But look at him. And what's interesting is if I look at your personal journey, I'm curious, how did you get into gaming as an industry? It's one thing to be a gamer when we were young, versus how did you say, "Hey, gaming is an industry vertical that I like"? Because you studied, you went to Harvard for your MBA as well. But I'm just curious how gaming became that path for you.

Dominic Law: Yeah. So, looking back, reconnecting the dots, it was quite a unique journey. When I joined NetDragon, I was actually helping them with restructuring their overseas business. Most of it was educational-related. It just happens to be educational hardware, and then they have educational games. And Neopets falls under the educational game department of a company called JumpStart, which made the Math Blaster Game. JumpStart acquired Neopets from Viacom a few years ago. And when NetDragon acquired JumpStart, they were mainly looking at how to integrate all these educational games with their educational hardware and have a one-stop solution. During the restructuring, when I was joining NetDragon, I was actually more on the M&A strategy, putting on more of my previous finance background and general management hat to help with that. But it was during the process when I decided to join NetDragon—a big part of it was, "Oh, it's very interesting that they own Neopets". Not knowing that I'd eventually get to work on it, but knowing that it was part of the overseas portfolio and eventually there might be something that could happen. So that definitely helped spike my interest and helped my decision in joining NetDragon. So I would say fate might have brought me back to Neopets. I love it.

Jeremy Au: You also had this decision to spin it out, right? Was it like a brainwave? How did this idea come to you? It's quite rare, from my perspective, these spin-outs that happen. There's a lot of consolidation of these key brands, but for you to make a decision that you want to spin it out, how did that brainwave come about?

Dominic Law: I took a class called the Search Fund , one of the classes I enjoyed a lot. And in short, a Search Fund is really like you're trying to raise a search fund and get investors to write you a blank check. And then search for a company to acquire. Normally you want to acquire a company that's relatively mature. It's very cash-flow generative, and you feel like operationally there are things that you can improve, or there are other types of strategies where you can increase and grow the company multiple times. And the reason why Search Fund makes sense is because normally you're buying a more mature company that's not at the size that traditional strategic investors would be interested in. So you grow it. It could be because you're really interested in that industry , or because you want to find a company that's specifically located in the area that you want to live in. So it has been around for a while, but Search Fund, the concept, is still pretty new. And during that class, I really enjoyed it. But I know that doing a Search Fund in Asia—up until more recently, where SPACs became so popular for a few years, and now everyone understands this concept of writing a blank check for listing in the future ... Going back to your question, the Search Fund model is actually what I applied that helped me think through the framework of whether I should take this leap of faith and basically betting my whole career on reviving the Neopets IP through a turnaround strategy. So it's not completely like a Search Fund. In a Search Fund, you normally try to find a company that's already very profitable. But you can improve the efficiency, you can improve the profitability, and can grow the top line and also improve the bottom line, and then make it a much more attractive business. Neopets has some of those elements. There's still a strong community. There's still decent cash flow. But it's in a very fragile position where the foundation is crumbling, half the site is broken. There's not that much trust between the community and the team that's running it. So there are a lot more issues than the typical target of a Search Fund. But at least during that process, a lot of things checked out. It has a really strong brand. The brand awareness is very high. People that played Neopets, like us, growing up, still have that goodwill. And it brings back great memories. It's not just another game you play when you're a kid, but it's a game that probably shaped some of your views and how you enjoyed the world of internet in some ways. So I think that is something that's very hard to replicate. And it was basically a big hypothesis when I decided to take this leap of faith.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, amazing. I think there's so much goodwill. I was playing games like StarCraft or Red Alert, and I don't think they have the same goodwill, the community, and that sense of pay-forward dynamic. A more tender, nurturing, wholesome childhood aura. What's the word? Lasting. I would say enduring. Yeah. So I think what's interesting is that obviously, you went to do that. And how was that set of negotiations? Was it tough? Well received? "Get out of here?" Or "Maybe you have a point"? by the company or community to propose a spin-out?

Dominic Law: No, I think it's... I have a great rapport within NetDragon, so the conversation was actually not... There were multiple rounds, but it's like a scary proposal. Yeah. They were figuring out what to do with Neopets. I came up with a business plan with a proposal. They liked the idea, and we continued to dive deeper into it. Some negotiations definitely happened. But that's how it went. So it wasn't a scary board meeting that I needed to get into and try to win over anything. But it was actually a very relatively smooth process, looking back. I think it's because of the rapport I built during my three years of experience working with my colleagues, with my boss at NetDragon. And it definitely helped that transition.

Jeremy Au: How have you changed as a leader? Because it's one thing to negotiate and spin this out and finally let the community stand on its own feet and start serving them a hundred percent. Versus obviously, fast forward a couple of years. You understand the product, your Shoyru, your Lenny, fixing bugs. How have you changed as a leader over this period of time, over the number of years?

Dominic Law: What I've learned most is how we need to be more transparent, listening, and building alongside the community. At the end of the day, the center of Neopets is the community. Although the gameplay is collecting, trading, and dressing up your pet, the community makes it unique. And the trading community itself is very vibrant, and they've been sticking with Neopets, even when the site is broken. So that passion, that love for the brand, it's unbeatable. I think previously we haven't really listened to them and understood what they want the most. Even during the early days of this turnaround strategy, we were focused a lot more on, "Okay, how can we expand the IP to new experiences?" But we should have focused more on reviving the core first. We've been focusing more resources on reviving the core. But there are two things: at the very beginning, we didn't know reviving the core would be so much more work. The 25-year-old tech stack is no joke. The low-hanging fruits in my business plan were none of them low-hanging fruits, like easy fixes on other products or other games that we've seen across the industry. And I thought it's industry standard. Nope, it's not going to work. We have to revamp the whole thing to make that small piece work. Oh my God, there are all these challenges. The whole reviving of the core took longer than we envisioned, and it's taking a lot more resources than originally planned. For the past 10 years, we've lost trust with the community. Rebooting that trust is at the center of this community strategy that we have. We want to be more transparent about our roadmap. We want to own up to our mistakes of why things went wrong, why there are bugs, how we can have better launches. If things get pushed back, we'll explain clearly what led to it. We have over-promised a lot of things and underdelivered on almost all fronts for the past 10 years. There were many announcements of Neopets doing things, but it just never happened. So it gets hyped up and never happens. So we are here to change that , trying to get our team to have more realistic, practical roadmaps that we release. If we can't hit our target, we'll let the community know. And we'll let them know the business decisions or a reason why we focus on other initiatives instead of X, Y, Z. So that has helped us bridge with the community. We've also established a community ambassador program, which is now its second term, with a lot more structure in place. We try to gather feedback from these evangelists, and they also give us a lot of feedback on what bugs there are. So we actually have a to-do list of more than 2-300 items. Half of them are probably contributed by our community ambassadors. Half of them are our internal team. A lot of us are core players, so we know what to fix. Our focus now is on burning down the list. Sprint by sprint, what we can churn through while also maintaining and upgrading the site and delivering better in-game events as much as we can with a lean team. We've changed our perspective. We want to revive from the core. And then we need to fix the foundation before we start entering all these adjacent industries. So now the adjacent industries make sense for us that we focus more on partnership. We focus more on licensing. It's about finding the right partners to help us expand the storytelling , instead of us trying to do too much.

Jeremy Au: That makes so much sense. Kind of strategy from the core there. I'm just curious, because community management is actually one of the unique skill sets that's required in gaming. During the pandemic, I used to play Overwatch. There was always a community manager who'd explain every update and every new hero and explain the logic. And I remember his... I don't remember his name now. He'd be a very earnest guy talking to the camera about what he heard would be happening. Obviously, YouTube would have all his comments be like, "Oh, I love this guy". He'd laugh eventually. So everyone's... And then obviously Overwatch is competing against new games that are coming out that have borrowed aspects of hero shooters. It's an interesting dynamic when it comes to Software as a Service. There's no community of finance accountants talking to each other and evangelizing or talking about the new feature. They all complain about bugs. They all feature requests. But I think there's a very unique aspect about games, and I feel like people can also get it really wrong, and some people can get it right. How do you go about community management or interaction?

Dominic Law: Yeah. For Neopets, because the community has been around for so long, they have their own way of communicating. A lot are fan-driven sites. And for example, the Discord channel, the Reddit channel—all of them are fan-run, and there are fan moderators. And it's actually very... They've been running it very professionally. What we've done instead is inviting these evangelists to our ambassador program. We don't directly manage these channels, but we release the right information so they can disseminate it out. Or if there are a lot of questions about some recent feature, they don't understand, we can help explain. And our biggest fan site that has a really great archive of everything Neopets is called Jelly Neo. They actually have a better archive system than we have internally. It's like the fan wiki and all this stuff. But I've talked to a lot of gaming companies, and they actually all have the same funny scenario: fan sites normally have better archives than internal archives, or easier access, or are more user-friendly. But going back to community management, I think the community ambassador program is a key, integral part of that. And then we've revamped our CS system multiple times to really streamline the process for users to report bugs, for users to get back into their account, for users to have a better Neopets gaming experience. The CS department is where I've personally focused a lot of time to make sure it goes right , because we're seeing an influx of returning users wanting to play Neopets because of nostalgia, because of all the things we do. But it's like a top of funnel. For them to come back. Recovering an account is always the tough part. Most people don't have access to the email , or they only remember part of their email or part of their username or pet names. But on top of that, we have to balance that out with security issues. There are always bad actors who want to claim high-value accounts because of well-named pets, because of some of the items that exist in their account. So we want to make sure that while we want all returning users to come back, we also want to make sure we're not returning the high-value accounts to a non-rightful owner. So there are things that we need to do to make that better. And we've done a long way. We've been churning through a lot more tickets. We expanded the CS team. It's actually the team that got expanded the most—it's the CS team.

Jeremy Au: Incredible. The customer support team is the biggest.

Dominic Law: Yeah, because customer support is a big part of the community management , especially for a game that's been around for so long. If it's a new game, then maybe customer support might be less important. But for Neopets, customer support actually plays a big role in the community.

Jeremy Au: Fantastic.

Dominic Law: Our community is very active. When we launch a new feature and there's a bug, we get tickets about the bug. It's part of bug reporting. That's how we gather intel on what we need to fix.

Jeremy Au: Fantastic.

Dominic Law: Good to hear.

Jeremy Au: Could you share a time you personally had been brave?

Dominic Law: This whole journey has been brave. It's a turnaround strategy. It's a lot of fun. It's a very exciting journey, but at times, to be honest, it could be very lonely. What we're going through is unique. It's hard to share these stories and get feedback where we need help. Who should we reach out to to get the right advice? So a lot of things, we just have to make an informed decision as good as we could, without perfect data, without any reference that we can find. So we have to be brave all the time in making these choices. But I think the whole journey is a brave move. I took a big risk to be here, and I'm glad I did it. So, yeah. Excited to be sharing more about Neopets.

Jeremy Au: When going through that process, who do you get help from? Who do you ask advice from? Is it from turnaround folks?

Dominic Law: I talked to a few mentors. Some former bosses at private equity—they understand these deal structures. It's very unique because we're not buying a big corporate and doing that. Some of their experience has been turned around as well, or in more new technology spaces. But I think all these problems, there's a certain framework to help us think through. The best advice is you have to follow your gut. "Is this something that you want?" "Your mid-forties will be the prime time of your career". "Is this the legacy you want to build ?" "Are you willing to bet 10 years to make this revival of Neopets your main career move ?" If I can do this, I will be proud. And if I don't do it now, I'll regret it. I'll never get this opportunity again. So that's how I decided to be brave and take the opportunity.

Jeremy Au: Wow. Incredible. I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways. Thanks for sharing about your pets, experiencing your pets as one of the games, and being cool with Neopets. It's a blast from the past, but also a great way to explain how you eventually came back onto the IP and saw the opportunity to revitalize and bring it back. So I think it's a fantastic story of both the personal side, but also the professional opportunity that you saw to bring this to life. Secondly, thanks so much for sharing about the strategy, about community management, and the team decisions that you need to make in order to bring this property back. I love what you said about, at a high level, focusing on the core versus extension. And then how you go through a more heavy lift versus a more lightweight approach like partnerships or licensing. And then also talking very much about how to think about extending the IP from a transgenerational perspective as well, to make it a family component. I think there's so much of a masterclass in terms of thinking about the turnaround of an IP brand and game community. Thanks for sharing your love for the game community. Something that strikes me so much is how much you keep mentioning how this community has kept the game alive over the past 10 years : bugs, broken promises, multiple owners. It's fantastic to hear about how you think about it from an industry perspective, which is community management , but also from your perspective, about how you steward and work with them as ambassadors, as partners, as collaborators to fix things. It's a fascinating, unique skill, rare in any business.

Dominic Law: In this AI world, we need to be human.

Jeremy Au: Neopets, in this AI world, we need to be human.

Dominic Law: Thanks, Jeremy.