Maximo Cavazzani, CEO of Etermax: “Redefining yourself is essential for the success of an entrepreneur”

This year, etermaxthe company behind the successful platform trivia trivia questionsturns 15 years old. The national capital firm remains firm in its objective of consolidating itself as a reference in the interactive entertainment industry, while focusing on bringing solutions to companies and brands. Below is its founder and CEO, Maximo Cavazzanireviews the current state of the company, sets out medium- and long-term objectives, details the challenges and opportunities posed by the use of artificial intelligence and provides valuable advice to entrepreneurs.

Journalist: Today, etermax is a successful company with a presence in more than 180 countries and more than 150 million active users a year, but how did the company start?

Maximo Cavazzani: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, from a very young age. The project that started it all was the development of an application to buy and sell shares through the iPhone, which was launched in 2008. Shortly after, in 2009, based on that success and with the intention of continuing on the same path, I partnered with Simon Selva and we founded etermax. We are a company that from the beginning has entrepreneurship and research in its DNA, from there we tried a lot of things for the mobile world, until we developed the game Apalabrados that was launched in 2011 and immediately became a success in Spain where it is still the most played game among people over 60 years old. We focused on a very specific segment in games that are those that teach something, then we developed some more products that were not so successful until we launched Preguntados in 2013, and there the success we had in Spain we were able to take it to Latin America and then extend it to other countries that we never thought we would reach such as Russia, Turkey, among others. Preguntados became the most successful trivia app in history, the platform reached the top of the AppStore in the US for 66 days, with 20 million daily active users in that country. Today it is available in more than 30 languages, and leads the trivia category in 125 countries. We went from being a company with 50 employees to more than 300 today, our base of operations is still in Argentina and we also have offices in Uruguay. We have consolidated ourselves in the gaming industry, but we have also diversified our business to provide solutions to companies, brands and banks, among others.

Q: Is gaming still the main focus of the company’s business, or have you lost ground with these new services?

The most important business is still gaming, but this business also allows us to have synergy with the other business units because they are somehow intertwined. That is, the other business units are, on the one hand, Brand Gamification, where we provide gamification solutions, in-game advertising, and licensing and co-branding opportunities for organizations, and on the other hand, AI Labs, where we offer artificial intelligence business solutions with specialization in natural language processing. These two businesses are possible because of the experience we have acquired in the video game segment and the tools we are constantly developing.

Q: In these 15 years, what were the biggest challenges you had to face as a company?

I think redefining yourself is essential for the success of an entrepreneur, and that is the main challenge. In a cutting-edge industry like the one we are in, where everything changes every five years, the big challenge is to stay relevant over time and experiment a lot. For example, I’ll mention some of the things we did: we were the first game on the Apple Watch, we were the first and most successful game on Google Home and Alexa, we made a television series, we made a television show with Susana Giménez, we released Ask Me Anything, Ask Me Anything Two, and other games that didn’t work, actually many games that didn’t work or at least didn’t quite fit in with our rhetoric. So, precisely, creating a culture that allows this ability to keep changing, to keep being different, not just different, but better and more focused on the world, that is the biggest challenge we’ve had in these 15 years and that we’ll have ahead of us.

Q: Is there a premise, something fundamental when developing a game?

We always say that we make games that you would like your child to play all day long, and there aren’t many games that you can say that about. On the other hand, they are games that are aimed at socialization, they are also educational, but they are always anchored in fun, that is, we always try to create games that leave you with something. That is something difficult to achieve because games that are educational are seen as boring, as repetitive. Our challenge is to find how to gamify knowledge, how to gamify the experience that a person has with a lot of things. Among many of the things we are doing, one is to bring our experience to virtual reality. Today we have one of the most extensive virtual reality games there is, Trivia Crack World, it is an amusement park where you can interact with characters, developed with artificial intelligence, but at the same time you will interact with other people from all over the world who are there with their avatar and you can play trivia games at a table. We are also dedicated to relating our game with content creators. Trivia Crack for Creators is a program designed to help content creators and influencers optimize engagement with their audiences and monetize their efforts. Lastly, we are also launching Trivia Crack for Brands as a comprehensive solution that uses the appeal of Preguntados to boost engagement and visibility for brands and organizations through tournaments or trivia channels, among other tools.

Q: With the development of artificial intelligence, what do you think is the future of the sector? Do you think that, as they say, it will replace human work?

Artificial intelligence is a great tool, especially for our type of games, because it allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before. I think that artificial intelligence will surprise us over the years. There will come a time when it will surely be able to do all human jobs, which doesn’t mean that it will take over from humans. I think that new jobs will be created. I’m sure that the job of the entrepreneur will remain strong because the job of the entrepreneur is to make things happen beyond the tool and artificial intelligence, as powerful as it is, is still a tool that tries to fulfill the human will and precisely the human will is to try to make people live better, to have more things with less effort, to distribute resources better. Today we live in a world of scarcity, that is, there is a shortage of energy, food, water, and none of those things are missing. What we need is more intelligence. Ultimately, these new tools will give us more intelligence and we have to know how to apply it. Yes, it is true that we are going through a transitional stage and regarding jobs I think they are moving. There are a lot of repetitive jobs that are a waste of the human brain. I think this will allow us to move to places where the human spirit and creativity will be better utilized, and I think that is very positive.

Q: As an entrepreneur and businessman, how do you see Argentina for doing business?

I always say that I am in love with the country, so I am not very objective, but I think that we are a country with a lot of opportunities, we have a good educational base in the population and we have a very good entrepreneurial base. So we have a lot of opportunities that have to do with reinvestment within the Argentine economy, which is somewhat delayed, with everything that has to do with credit, so I think that we have a great opportunity. Like all entrepreneurship, we have to take advantage of it, I think that there is room to create new companies, to create new economies, so I have faith that the future will bring us, but again, it will depend a lot on what we do as entrepreneurs and as citizens, things will not happen on their own. Another key thing is that we have a young population, perhaps it is something that people do not see, but the world is aging and Argentina has a young population, that gives it a great opportunity for transformation and impetus that we are needing to return to where we were at some point.