TED Fellows Friday - Meet Kellee Santiago

Fellows Friday is a weekly series on the TED Blog that profiles one TED Fellow each week. We have asked the Fellows to answer our question below to share their knowledge and advice with other social entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers who are coming up with big ideas that can change the world.

For Kellee Santiago, founder of thatgamecompany, video games are an interactive art form. Inspired by hiking, gazing at clouds, and even stories of religious conversion, her games invoke emotional responses, pushing the boundaries of video games as a communicative media.

Sokunthea: There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Kellee: I think defining your personal goals, for whatever space you’re working in, is an extremely important starting point. This will help you be able to answer some of the much more difficult and complex questions you’ll have to answer as an entrepreneur. Questions like how you want to structure your company, how you want it to grow, or how you want to grow within your field. All of those things are really determined by what your initial goal or impetus is. So it’s very important to define it.

With thatgamecompany, our goal was to make commercially successful games that pushed boundaries of games as a communicative medium. So we needed to find a partner - either an investor or publisher - that would allow us to make those games. It definitely helped us find Sony Santa Monica as our first publishing partner, because they really supported that same creative goal that we had. We knew that we wanted to be commercially successful. Defining that also helped lead us to Sony as a publishing partner - as opposed to trying to raise investments on our own, or going with a different partner. We knew the exposure we were going to get from partnering with Sony was going to be really beneficial in establishing our brand in that space.

And referring back to those initial goals just consistently helps us decide what kind of games we’re going to make.

Read the rest of Kellee's Fellows Friday interview here.