Between the ages of 12 and 17, Adam Guild estimates he had “zero friends.” Two months into 10th grade, he had no classmates either after dropping out of high school.
But he had Minecraft. The sandbox-style, world-building computer game (arguably the best selling of all time) became his path to a community, an income and a purpose, including his formation of multiple companies by the time of his latest birthday at 21.
One of them, a local marketing and delivery platform, Owner.com, this week announced a $10.7 million seed round from venture capital groups, electronic music duo The Chainsmokers, the host of MSNBC’s “The Profit,” Marcus Lemonis, and small restaurant owners who can’t stop raving about the product. Since receiving venture backing Guild has moved to Palo Alto to work on the company with his co-founder, but plans to secure office space in San Francisco “once people feel safe going back to work.”
Guild told me that he'd been building projects online since he was 9 years old, and at 12 fell head over heels into the world of Minecraft. He never fit in socially at school, he said, and his grades sank from staying up all night maintaining his pet project, a server where different players could congregate and build their own empires and rivalries. Then one day a player looking for an edge offered to pay $5 for Guild, the 12-year-old moderator, to give his player a souped-up sword to take out his enemies. Suddenly in-game currencies, paid for by players with real-world money, became a lucrative side gig.
“I was completely shocked, but it might have been one of the happiest moments of my life,” Guild said. “I started to really obsess over growth marketing because I realized, oh my gosh, if I could make what we did in that first month, $70 in sales with a community of 100 people, what happens if I grow this to a million?”
By the time he decided to drop out, he was already pulling in “serious figures for a teenage boy" — six figures in profit, and more than seven million players.
“While it was extremely risky in retrospect, it didn’t feel that way at the time,” he said, noting his parents were “super f—ing pissed about it, to be fair.”
“It just felt like the right thing to do by the server that I built and the community of players.”
Guild was scaling like crazy. Then in 2014 Microsoft took over from the hands-off Scandinavian developers, Mojang Studios, and started cracking down on the cottage industry that had sprung up around users like Adam, instituting stricter monetization terms. Guild started getting cease-and-desist letters.
“For a while I thought it was really fun to just fight them on it. I found several ways to circumvent their blocks and to basically say, 'f— you guys.' I mean, I built this for four years. I dropped out of high school for this. I’m not going to shut it down because there’s a change in ownership of the parent company.”
“Then I realized at some point I was putting my mom, who I was living with at the time, in legal jeopardy,” he said. “There was a precedent with some lawsuits in a similar situation in World of Warcraft.”
So Adam found a new project where he could put to use the growth marketing skills he’d developed hawking his Minecraft server: helping his mom with her new dog grooming business in West Hollywood. After a couple months, he set aside the advice he was getting — build awareness through platforms like Yelp, Facebook and direct mail receipt ads — in favor of his own combination of "split testing" variations of webpage design, and focusing on means of generating customer conversions rather than spray-and-pray website visits.
Conversions sprouted up and slowly — then quickly — gathered speed. Over the next three months the website's conversion rate went from 2% to more than 30%, his mother hit her three-year revenue rate projections and the foundations for a new business, which would eventually become Owner.com, were born.
Rather than using a revenue share with restaurant partners like traditional services such as UberEats, DoorDash and GrubHub, Owner.com’s suite of tools for marketing and delivery orders operate on a freemium model. Customers pay a 5% surcharge on each order on the free tier for restaurants, and restaurants looking to build out customer relationships can pay between $99 and $1,000 per month to unlock various marketing features and capabilities. Some of those restaurants, Guild said, are used to paying tens of thousands per month in delivery fees. And in this arrangement, restaurants get to keep their customer data too.
Guild teamed up with a friend and his eventual co-founder Dean Bloembergen, now the chief technology officer, whose experience included building restaurant ordering systems for chains like Sharky’s and Nekter. Seven months after its official launch in May 2020, Owner.com had grown to a run-rate over seven figures in January 2021, having served more than 700 restaurant clients, facilitating 105% revenue retention and an annualized pace of $18 million in transactions.
“Using this platform is the best decision we’ve ever made. It is the difference between life and death,” said Rahul Bhatia, owner of Saffron Indian Kitchen near Philadelphia, who to date has processed more than $800,000 of orders using the platform. “I asked Adam if I could invest just days after starting to use it because it’s obvious this is the future of restaurant technology,” he said in a statement.
Guild credits Minecraft for igniting his interest in growth marketing and motivating his self-taught fluency in Java, the language the game is written in. And years later in 2020, his Minecraft community had a hand in the first $100,000 of the seed round — when Guild discovered his interviewer for the Thiel Fellowship (a two-year, $100,000 grant from the eponymous entrepreneur to forgo college in favor of building their own company) was in fact an old rival on another Minecraft server.
“We knew each other by our server and in-game names. We hated each other because we were always having to compete for players,” Guild said. “At the end of our conversation, he said, 'I want to give you $100,000 of my own money to help you figure this out, and help you raise the rest.'”
Within 72 hours of his next interview, they had $3.6 million in commitments led by Redpoint Ventures. The eventual $10.7 million seed round, announced Tuesday, was led by SaaStr Fund and included contributions from Redpoint, Day One Ventures, and others including Naval Ravikant, Kimbal Musk of The Kitchen Restaurant Group, and Thiel Fellowship alumni Joshua Browder (founder of DoNotPay) and Dylan Field (founder of Figma).
“This is one of the many reasons I believe in God. There was, like, divine intervention,” Guild said. “Now we’ve raised almost $11 million, and have over 1,000 restaurants. Things are going pretty well.”
