Anshul Dhawan — Product Leader, 0→1 Product Builder & Game Developer
Anshul Dhawan is a product leader, 0→1 Product Builder, and game developer with 12+ years leading growth and monetization for consumer products. He is founder of Social Pixels, an AI-native game studio. He has led product at Supernatural VR (acquired by Meta), VRChat, Glu Mobile / EA, and Zynga.
About
Product Leader and founder of Social Pixels. Social Pixels is an AI native gaming studio leveraging AI workflows across the game development process. My career spans software engineering, product leadership, and entrepreneurship, with 12+ years leading growth and monetization for consumer products. I work across acquisition, engagement, retention, and revenue, partnering with engineering, data, design, and marketing to build products and teams that scale.
I've led product and growth across VR, subscriptions, and gaming. At VRChat, I owned growth and the expansion to mobile, launching an alpha with creators and players and improving app stability. At Supernatural, acquired by Meta, I led product teams responsible for engagement, subscriber growth, and revenue, and established its analytics and machine learning function.
At VersusGame, I led product, analytics, and design, including an evaluation platform for a fine-tuned LLM product that improved engagement on partner products. I helped scale the product engineering organization by restructuring it into squads. At Glu Mobile / EA, I led a centralized product group focused on ad optimization and organic growth, and introduced a career progression framework for product managers.
I started at Zynga as a software engineer building backend systems for Zynga Poker and grew into Head of Product, Growth. I led messaging-platform launches for Words With Friends and the development of Zynga's learning machine, including an experimentation platform and segmentation tooling for game studios. For this work, I received Zynga's Spirit Award, which recognizes individuals who go above and beyond their responsibilities to set new standards for the company.
I also founded Equally and raised venture capital to build Da Vinci Club AR, an AI-powered AR learning platform that turned real-world objects into interactive play. We were semifinalists in the Global Learning XPRIZE. I hold a master's in computer science from USC and have patented work in experimentation and player recommendations.
Patents: Experimentation & Optimization Service and Player Recommendation for Playing Online Game.
On nights and weekends, I build projects and hack on new ideas, especially at the intersection of AI and games. I also regularly participate in hackathons.
Expertise
- AI-native product development
- AI-native game development
- Generative AI and generative games
- Large language model (LLM) evaluation
- Product leadership and product strategy
- Growth and product analytics
- Experimentation and A/B testing platforms
- Live-service and free-to-play games
- Social VR and VR fitness
- Augmented reality and EdTech
- Matchmaking and recommendation systems
- AI-native organization design
Projects
- Can You Make an Open World Adventure Game Like GTA Without a Game Engine? (Builder, 2026): A playable experiment combining a deterministic simulation with real-time generative video.
- Can You Build a Time Machine with AI? (Builder, 2026): On turning a city and a year into a world you can explore, and what happens when you look around the corner.
- Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Grok — Poker Tournament (Builder, 2026): A Texas Hold'em evaluation harness that pits frontier LLMs against each other across hands and tournaments.
- Network Cities (Founder · Social Pixels, 2025): An AI-native city builder that went from a rough Three.js prototype to 200,000 players and $20,000 in revenue.
- Da Vinci Club AR (Builder): A computer-vision-based AR app for kids that turned the world around them into a learning surface.
- Experimentation & Optimization Service (Product · Zynga, 2014 — 2017): Server-side experimentation and optimization service for Zynga that let PMs and analysts ship experiments without engineering bottlenecks.
- Words with Degens (Builder, 2025): A scramble game you play with friends, built around crypto lingo. Launched on play.fun with on-chain rewards for winners.
- Global Learning XPrize (Builder, 2017): Semi-finalist in the $15M Global Learning XPrize, a competition for teams building software to teach literacy and numeracy to kids without access to schools or teachers.
- Player Recommendation System (Product · Zynga, 2013): A skill-based matchmaking system that pairs players for more balanced and engaging sessions.
Writings
- The Age of the Artist-Entrepreneur (2026-09): On AI, the rise of micro businesses, and a world where everyone can turn an idea into something real.
- The Tussle Between the Brain and the Soul (2026-09): Let the soul lead the creation. Let the brain lead the distribution.
- AI Native Organization (2026-05): On the stack, org design, and operating habits required to become AI Native.
- What is Spirituality? (2025-11): On spirit, identity, meditation, gratitude, affirmations, and living consciously.
- Emotion and Rationality in Decision-Making (2025-09): On using emotion as signal and rationality as refinement.
- The issue of neat categorization (2025-07): On why categories help us think, and what they quietly leave out.
- Three Perspectives on Reality (2025-04): On moving between broad, close, and metaphysical views of reality.
- Generative Games on building systems that generate games (2025-01): On building systems that generate games, and what that changes about the medium.
- A generalist's case for staying a generalist (2024-09): Notes on optimizing for breadth in a world that keeps asking you to specialize.
Talks
- Evaluating Game Experiments: A More Robust Approach for Freemium Games (GDC 2016, Zynga): A more reliable approach to evaluating free-to-play game experiments that accounts for the behavior of the most engaged players.