Gav Shepherd
Rev Rooms
Gav Shepherd has been an audio professional for over 30 years. His career started with point and click CD-ROM games in the ’90’s, then had a 15 year movie mixing career at Pinewood Studios before returning to games with Electric Square 6 years ago.
He is co-founder of Rev Rooms, a co-dev audio studio in Brighton providing audio and code services to AAA studios. On turning 50, he studied for an MA in entrepreneurship, which revealed a lot about how to lead a company.
Gav Shepherd is speaking at the following session/s
Growing Pains - How to Scale Without Breaking the Thing You Love
In this talk, I dig into the subject of culture, its relevance when you’re a 3 person startup, and how it evolves as the company grows. Keen to get it right and make our company a great place to work, I studied for an MA in entrepreneurship and culture. As part of my dissertation I asked games industry CEO’s and founders what good and bad culture meant to them, whether current leadership styles were worthy of the hype and is there even any place for vulnerability at the top, especially in the current climate. Turns out good old fashioned strategy, process and planning were more important than the beer fridge in creating a secure environment for people to do great work.
I will explore what worked well and what didn’t:
- Why acting like a bigger company than we were was one of the key ingredients.
- Running weekly skill-share workshops is the secret sauce for happy creative people.
- Why not accepting every job you get offered protects your culture.
- Why no one is reading the Vision/Mission/Values statement.
Session Takeaway
- The culture of the company comes from the founders.
- Culture isn’t perks.
- Acting big - why planning ahead created stability and security.
- Beware new people bringing bad culture with them.
- No one reads values and vision statements so why bother?
Session speakers
