EA's Biz Side
Thought I would start the week by giving Joel Lizner of EA a call. I was introduced to him through my friend Jon Bass. I never would have guessed he knew people in the industry, but hes introduced me to Joel and to RJ Berg, a producer over at LucasArts. It just goes to show that when you are looking to meet people in the industry, tell everyone you can. You never know who all your friends of friends know.
Joel works the business side like Rob who I met last week. Except that Joel is in charge of a lot of the deal making for the licenses that make many of EA’s hottest titles possible. Every time a game uses a trademarked name, leverages an existing franchise, uses some popular music, or enlists an actor (think Harry Potter and Bond) to lend their likeness to a project someones got to negotiate and land the contracts for those licenses. Thats Joels department.
It sounds like a lot of fun to me…I’m starting to think I should turn more of my attention on the biz side of things, especially since thats where my background is. I dont have as much background in IP as Joel does, but I can make a more compelling pitch to biz side than to the production side with my current background.
Joels promised to forward my resume on to the two studio GMs at Redwood Shores and they will likely glance at it and then pass it on to their HR team. Its going to become a familiar sight to them, I think. :)
Updated on September 29th, 2013
Some of the links were broken. I replaced them with working links to pages with the same or similar content as before.