Paul Thelen
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Paul Thelen, Big Fish Games Founder and CEO, has an MBA from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington. Paul has over 17 years experience working in technology.
Prior to founding Big Fish Games in 2002, Paul worked at RealNetworks as Director of Consumer Marketing, where he helped launch RealArcade, an online game distribution platform. After graduating from the University of Washington Paul started his career as a Systems Engineer with the Seattle Marketing and Sales office of IBM.
After four years at IBM, Paul left to join a small wholesale food distribution mainframe software developer to start a systems integration division for this small, 12 person company. Paul grew this business to over $1 million in sales and employed 5 engineers within one year. At Stanford University, Paul focused his studies on technology and marketing and then entered the challenging world of strategic business consulting for Mercer Management Consulting.
At Mercer, Paul worked on extended engagements developing targeted customer marketing solutions and customer database mining programs for companies like First Interstate Bank (acquired by Wells Fargo) and Sprint Telecommunications. Acting on his desire to get back into the trenches with a technology company, Paul accepted an offer from RealNetworks.
While at RealNetworks, Paul successfully launched RealAudio 3.0 (stereo streaming audio over the Internet) and RealVideo 1.0; wrote the business plan and deployed the successful RealProducer and RealPublisher media editing, compression and deployment tools; and lead strategy for the Media Systems division as Group Product Manager. Paul then moved on to co-found the games business at RealNetworks. Paul wrote the business plan for the RealArcade Service, the RealArcade Client, and the Game Pass Subscription service. All three of these initiatives were huge successes and built the games division to one of the fastest growing, most profitable businesses at RealNetworks.
Paul's latest venture, Big Fish Games, has passed up thousands of small and medium sized game portals on the Internet to become a top ten game site worldwide. This astonishing growth was achieved while pulling down 12 straight quarters of profitability with net margins as high as 40%. With two large infusions of investment capital in 2005—the first outside investments—Big Fish Games is now positioned to become a worldwide consumer brand in casual games.
