Founder and CEO at Clementine
Ramon Iglesias
A Stanford PhD who traded optimizing ride-share fleets for revolutionizing gaming, Ramón combines deep technical expertise with an unbridled love for storytelling. When not reading every book in Morrowind or imagining newspaper headlines in Civilization VI, he's building Clementine's AI tools to help developers create the next generation of games.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
Generative AI opens the game design space in a similar way that broadband or the internet did. I wanted to build these experiences and the tools to make them.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
We have been working on this core real-time voice-to-code system. We think its a brand new UX paradigm. Once you try it it feels magical!
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We are a small but powerful team: a veteran game designer, a roboticist and a data scientist. All with solid engineering background.
What inspired you to start your business?
After Dalle came out, I could not stop thinking about the role that AI would play in games. I would think about it when I shower, before sleep and with my coffee. After seeing the industry not moving fast enough, I had to do something.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
While my background is very technical, I have no discipline-based boundaries. I've worked in construction, in ML, in robotics, and now in games. AI makes my profile even stronger as the barriers for tackling new challenges is even lower than before.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
A fun one, I built an operations app for a carsharing system in Japan as part of my PhD. Probably one of the most robustly difficult tasks as the algorithmic challenges were just a tiny part of a large puzzle!
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
In the physical world, we get to enrich our communication by pointing at things. When building our current game (a voice controlled monster trainer), we added "pointing" as a "cheating" feature... but it made the interface of using voice command go from "awkward" to "incredibly natural". It makes sense! Pointing is fundamental to our otherwise vague deictic references!
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
The opportunity of creating worlds with emergent stories. Where you actions directly alter the world you live in. I wrote about at the beginning of the company: http://ramondario.com/say-hi-to-clementine.html The vision remains, but we need to focus on the highest impact experiences. In our humble opinion, those are experiences where you have both freeform input but also minimal friction, and where the game celebrates your input immediately and reasonably. Thus, we built our real-time voice-to-code system and built a highly dynamic world around it.
