Tapulous founder, "Risk is rewarded"

Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous shares some entrepreneurial advice at PACT 2009

Today, Tap Tap Revenge is the most downloaded and installed iPhone application with 32% iPhone penetration, 10 million installs, and all users combined, the game has been played 100 million times.

Bart Decrem, CEO and founder Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge spoke at PACT 2009 in Silicon Valley.  The conference, held at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, is an international entrepreneurship event where start-ups from different countries meet to pitch and showcase themselves to each other and investors. 

Decrem was a featured keynote speaker at the event and shared some interesting observations about competing on the App Store.  One of the main ones that no matter how hard you try, it's like if, “Steven Spielberg took his movie to Hollywood and found that he was competing with hamsters and dogs on skateboards.”  This concept very similar to what we see on YouTube and the rise of user generated content.  Also on this note, Decrem stated one of the most exciting things about today is, “it isn’t like the TV of 50 years ago, where there was only a few major channels controlled by a handful of networks.   With the Internet, today there are a thousand channels, and the people control those channels, and people can be that channel.”

"Risk is rewarded," explained Decrem on the difference between angel funding vs VC funding.  Decrem explained, that when starting Tapulous he didn’t want any big VC investments, so he looked for Angel funding.  The Angel funding allowed him to experiment and take risks he couldn’t have with VC funding.  He was looking for something lightweight in order to build a business – his advice, once you have built your business and it is working how you want it to, consider VC funding.  

I caught a detailed interview with Bart on Tapulous and where he sees it's headed.  I'll be posting shortly, so check back soon.