Lisette Titre-Mongomery: "We will keep knocking on doors and pitching until we find the right person"

gamesindustry.biz:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Finding VC support for your studio is complex, and it gets thornier when trying to find a partner that aligns with your views and culture. The difficulty gets further compounded when your studio's founders don't belong to demographic groups that investment firms have commonly supported.

That's what Cornerstone Interactive Studios co-founder and CEO Lisette Titre-Mongomery says as she and her team search for funding.

Titre-Mongomery explains that since launching her studio, she's been learning the ropes of being in a new executive role.

"I've always had my foot in the production side for most of my career. This is my first foray into being a CEO and learning what that means. Dipping my toe into what it means to lead a company as a CEO, and it's been overwhelmingly positive," she says.

The CEO explains that support among her peers and colleagues has been encouraging since taking her company public.

However when it comes to finding venture capital partners, Titre-Mongomery says, "The problem is that those people are money people. There's this insular group that I have to figure out how to connect with and pierce."

Along with her co-founders, Raymond Graham and Marcus Montgomery, she explains they have something valuable: decades of experience in interactive entertainment and the games industry.

And even though they receive the same questions from VC firms as other studios, Titre-Mongomery says, "What we get are the actual hurdles of validation.

"No one thinks when we walk in the room that we have 60 years of experience [collectively] because they don't see that every day."

The executive notes that her co-founders are facing these hurdles as an all-Black professional-founded studio. Her experiences also mirror a recent Polygon report revealing how few little women-led firms receive investments.

The CEO says, "They always have to dig into who we are to move past their low expectations. That's just, quite