What Jiu-Jitsu taught EA CEO Andrew Wilson about running a company

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has drawn up an ambitious blueprint to capture one billion users. Discover how the gaming giant’s leader is tapping into a new community-driven app, working to enhance virtual spaces, and leaning into strategies from Brazilian jiu-jitsu to outmaneuver the competition.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

You announced plans to double EA’s user base to more than a billion people in the next five years. That’s kind of an epic number. You must have to really expand the demo of your users beyond the sort of core demo of men 12 to 25. Or is it more about expanding globally? How do you get to those numbers?

So we’ve got the best part of 700 million people in our network today who have been interacting with our games over the last 12 months. There’s probably a lot more than that if we total the people that have interacted with our games over the past 10 years. But certainly as we look forward, it really comes down to a few things.

One, interactive is becoming the first form of entertainment. So as we look at younger generations, they’re choosing interactive entertainment as their first form of entertainment and their favorite form of entertainment, where they can play content, create content, watch content, but more specifically connect with their friends through that content.

And so as we fast forward, we put our crystal ball on the table. We think there’s probably 10 or a dozen massive online communities in the world five years from now, concentrated around the world’s biggest IP. 

We’re super lucky. We’ve got five or six of the world’s biggest IPs: our American football franchise, our global football franchise in FC, Apex, Battlefield, The Sims. We hope Skate will be one of these things. 

Maybe half of the world’s massive online communities around big IP and you think about the world having three to three and a half billion players, creators, watchers, in these new generations around that IP, it’s not unnatural for us to have well over a billion. Hell, I’d like to be able to say three billion. We can’t actually ratify that number. But we’re pretty confident in well over a billion. 

In our network right now, we have over 250 million sports fans engaging deeply in sports through our games. When we look at these newer generations many of them choose to connect with their friends through our games before they do it through the traditional purveyors of sport or the broader social networks. And so we look at that and say, “Okay, how do we fulfill their needs and motivations when they’re not playing?”

And that’s really the birth or the reason for the EA Sports app. How do we take your virtual sports fandom and align that with your sports fandom of the things that are going on in the real world of sports? How do we slam those together? How do we better fulfill the needs of these growing sports communities who are watching more content through highlights and they want to create their own sports fan content and share that with their friends?

Last time you were on the show, which was back in 2021, we talked a bunch about the Metaverse, which at that point was kind of the rage, right? And you had a particular perspective about sort of how it might be applied to the kind of worlds that EA is part of. Do you still think and talk about Metaverse, or is that a word a concept that sort of has moved off?

I think the word itself was always misunderstood by many.

And for us as game makers, we feel like we build worlds that people live in every day. I do think this notion of a blurring of the lines between the real world and the virtual world. The blurring of the lines of the characters and people that you interact with, with both, and the personal nature of those relationships that you have. I do believe we continue to move on that journey. It’s the same place we were in the last time we spoke. I just don’t think it has a cool buzzword name to it. 

And this blurring of the lines. I mean, there’s some people who get very anxious. Or they’re wary about what the blurring of these lines is going to do to humanity. You’re not particularly worried about that?

As a species now, I think we spend as much time on the internet as we do almost anything else in our lives.

The internet permeates every aspect of our daily life. So this notion of the blurring of the lines between real and virtual, that’s already happened. I mean, that toothpaste is out of the tube. I think what we’re talking about is making the virtual experience richer, more interesting, more immersive, where you can do more things that feel more like the things you do in the virtual world, not actually to take away from the virtual world, but to enhance the reality as a species.

Humanity loves being together. Contact is important for us. COVID taught us this. While COVID was a tremendous accelerator of our business, as soon as COVID ended, I was at a concert that had 50,000 people at it. And so that just told me that this fear that we have that humanity is going to only reside in virtual worlds is probably an unfounded fear.

What I do think is true is that we have the ability to fulfill needs and motivations in a virtual context as part of these rich worlds, interacting with these rich characters participating, telling, writing these rich stories that enhance our real lives in a way that if we get it right, we’ll be very profound.

You and I have known each other for a while, but we haven’t talked at all about your black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’m curious, like how and why you got into it, what it does for you and whether it sort of impacts the way you run the company, the way you lead.

I mean, again, I’m not that big as it turns out. And I come from the wrong side of town. So I started martial arts very young. I started in taekwondo, which is what a lot of kids start into.

As a kind of growth-minded human, I’d moved from taekwondo to karate cause I thought karate was going to make me tougher than taekwondo. I moved from Muay Thai from karate because I thought Muay Thai was going to be more practical than karate was.

So I’d been on this quest of always trying to find the best way to defend my small self. 

What jiu-jitsu tells you is as a small person, you don’t necessarily have to fear the big person. So in business, you know, relative to an Apple, or a Google, or an Amazon, we’re like tiny, we’re like 120 pounds relative to their 350. And so jiu-jitsu tells you that with the right technique and the right preparation, the right planning, you don’t have to fear the big person. But at the same time, if you are the bigger person, you should absolutely fear the smaller person if they are effectively trained.

And so as a company for EA, we sit in this space. We’re also bigger than a lot of other smaller companies. And we can’t be so arrogant to think that because we’re bigger than they are, that they can’t unseat us, or they can’t usurp us, or they can’t do things that we can’t do. 

You are always looking at both the bigger competitor and saying, “I don’t necessarily have to be scared, probably should be cautious, but I don’t have to be scared.” But you’re also looking at the smaller company and saying, “Hey, I shouldn’t ignore you. I shouldn’t be arrogant. I shouldn’t be overconfident.”

But yeah, I still train every week. Nothing keeps you real like people, choking you unconscious.

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