This is the first article in a new series profiling alumni working in various fields. From entrepreneurs to artists and beyond, these alumni show the diversity of careers and opportunities that Wesleyan graduates pursue, create, or simply stumble upon.

 

Alex Rosen ’08 didn’t take a computer science class until his last semester at Wesleyan: he majored in the College of Social Studies. However, the summer before his senior year, while interning at The Onion in New York City, he heard a man talking in a coffee shop about a new startup company.

“I started to talk to him and offered to help him out, and I ended up working for him for the rest of the summer,” Rosen said.  “Tech/startup stuff, especially around 2008, was such a fast-moving, dynamic industry.”

The man in the coffee shop later founded Funzio, a mobile developer of online games such as Modern War and Kingdom Age. Rosen was given another opportunity when, years later, he was hired by Funzio as a product manager, all the way through the company’s purchase by GREE, a Japanese social mobile games company.

Before that, however, Rosen pursued an interest in the social networking aspect of technology through writing his thesis, “Distributed Consolidation: Identity, Reputation, and the Prospects for Online Social Interaction.” Then, right out of college, Rosen got what many students would think of as a dream job: Google.

Rosen said the company was receptive toward hiring college graduates from a number of different backgrounds, and even as a CSS major, he still found a way to contribute. After three years, Alex headed to Funzio, where he embraced the startup culture.

Now, Rosen works as Senior Director of Product at GREE, and his next project is right around the corner.

“For this new game, we’re putting together everything we’ve designed for the past few months, so we can pitch it to other people at the company,” Rosen said. “It’s a 3D war game, a mobile game that’s tablet focused, although it works on phones too.”

After graduating six years ago, Rosen has accumulated tech experience in myriad working environments, from large, corporate atmospheres to tighter-knit gaming startups.

“What’s attractive about startups is the ability to do more types of jobs,” Rosen said. “At Funzio, I started off working on data analysis, but then on the fifth day my boss asks me if I could take on marketing, since there wasn’t really anybody doing it. And then a few days later, I was working on designing features.”

The flexibility of the small working environment differed greatly from his time at Google.

“In a large company, you get more pigeonholed into one skill and one team,” Rosen said.

While at Funzio, Rosen had the opportunity to contribute to the production of Crime City, a mobile multiplayer game that allows players to build criminal empires online. When Alex first joined the team, the game had already called Facebook its home for six months, and the company was in the process of adapting it as a phone app.

In creating new apps, Rosen says his team works off information taken from the larger industry and culture.

“We do surveys, see what’s currently popular on the market, and how to improve current games, whether by making better graphics, new game mechanics, or social features,” Rosen said. “Then we seek to prototype and refine our concepts and ideas and hopefully put together a successful game.”

Crime City was one-of-a-kind when it was released for iOS. Where it succeeded, others soon followed.

“We were able to take proven gaming concepts from PC and console and distill them in a really fun, high-quality way that was fun to play on a smaller screen,” Rosen said.

What makes a good product, he added, is also the constant care and updating that goes into it even after its release.

“That’s one part of the mobile industry: when you launch a game, it doesn’t end,” he said. “You still have to release content and add things onto it for years and years.”

As product manager, Rosen’s job requires communicating and working with everyone involved in the creative process.

“You’re ultimately responsible for the game: the strategy, designing the features, and coordinating between all the teams from art to engineering to marketing,” he said. “You’re expected to know a little bit about everything, so you have to pick it up but keep humble, too, and know when to defer to others’ expertise.”

In particular, Rosen said that his initial lack of computer science skills slowed him down at first.

“That’s one thing I regret: not learning more coding and programming earlier on,” he said.

Yet startups don’t just involve programming, and Rosen said that the rest of his education proved useful in his career.

“There’s a very liberal arts sort of concept there, as there is a wide breadth of knowledge, and you also have to be able to figure things out fast enough,” Rosen said. “In that way, CSS prepared me well.”

Wesleyan’s emphasis on writing served Rosen especially well in the tech world’s collaborative, concept-heavy atmosphere.

“Generally, wherever you go, so much about the industry is communicating ideas and convincing other people,” Rosen said. “Wesleyan students tend to be very good writers, and that’s not necessarily a skill that everyone has, and it can be a real advantage.”

Rosen is now one of the leaders of Digital Wesleyan, which he founded along with Jake Levine ’08 (his former roommate) and Tim Devane ’09. This year, the group will be holding a workshop series to teach current students the skills they need to conceptualize and map their own startups. Some participants might then get the chance to work at paid summer internships, funded by some of Digital Wesleyan’s supporters.

Two and a half years after its release, Crime City is now one of the most popular games in the Apple App Store; it’s the number one free game in 20 countries and counting. Crime City became so popular, Rosen said, because of what it brought to the market.

“It was one of the first types of graphical RPG games for mobile, and tons have come out since then,” Rosen said. “I’m proud of how we were able to innovate in that genre.”

Correction: the original version of this article inaccurately described GREE as “a Japanese social networking company that produces mobile games.” The article has been revised to include the more accurate description, “a Japanese social mobile games company.”