Professor Game Podcast – Episode 420

Title: Building Beats Playing: Matt Dalio's Path
Guest: Matt Dalio (Founder, Endless Studios)
Host: Rob Alvarez
Date: November 24, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into Matt Dalio’s mission to empower youth as game creators rather than mere game players or technology consumers. Matt shares the journey of building Endless Studios—a youth game-making studio focused on teaching coding, design, and 21st-century skills. The conversation explores learning from failure, the essential role of creativity, best practices for engaging learners in technology, and frameworks for sustainable impact. Matt also reflects on personal philosophies and the practicalities of building meaningful, scalable educational technology.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Matt’s Mission & Daily Life

• Matt’s core belief: If you can engage them, you can teach them (02:12).
• Dual Mission:
  • Equip every child to shape technology, not be shaped by it.
  • Bridge access gaps via the Endless Foundation.
• Daily Experience:
  • "My life is a little bit of chaos...like those chess masters that go around the circle playing 20 games of chess at once." (03:18)
  • Balancing roles in the for-profit company, nonprofit programs, grantmaking, and early-stage investing, all orbiting the central thesis: building games can teach.

2. Transformative Failure & Pivoting the Approach

• The Big Fail:
  • Initial vision: A playable, hackable game to teach coding—The Endless Mission.
  • Ran into budget limitations: "We needed a thousand times more than we were able to inadequately do on the budget that we had." (06:45)
  • Key realization: The act of building games teaches more deeply than playing or hacking them.
• Pivotal Insight:
  • "If we taught them how to build a game...they could become the creators of the game that we wanted to build." (08:45)
  • Shifted focus to creating tools that scaffold novice learners toward using professional-grade tools (e.g., Unity) via approachable, Minecraft-like interfaces.
  • "We realized there was this giant gap between Minecraft and Unity." (09:47)
• Lessons from Failure:
  • The best insights came from watching students struggle with unintuitive design and tools.
  • Led to building nStar—a beginner-friendly tool to transition youth into professional software.

3. Philosophies of Testing, Profitability, and Sustainable Impact

• Learning From Mistakes:
  • "Test your assumptions cheaply. I wish we had not spent so much darn money on something that didn’t work." (12:10)
  • Embraces a philosophy influenced by stories like IKEA’s founder: start profitable, grow steadily.
  • "If you could be profitable, even if it's just barely profitable, then it allows you to live forever and then it allows you to grow and crescendo upon something very real." (13:00)
• Cultural Approach:
  • Matt considers the mission nearly "religious," learning from every mistake.

4. Frameworks and Principles for Problem-Solving

• Guiding Principles:
  • Never lose sight of the mission/North Star.
  • Balance idealism with pragmatic, incremental progress.
  • "Too often people either focus on the short term...or the inverse. I was guilty of the inverse—chase the vision and kind of run off a cliff in the meantime." (15:43)
• Practical Example:
  • Crafting contracts and partnerships to align with the organization’s core mission—a strategy that makes every win additive to the central goal.

5. Best Practices for Game-Mediated Learning

• Do the Job to Learn the Job:
  • "The best way to learn to do a job is to do the job." (19:11)
  • Simulate real-world team-based environments first, then integrate learners into authentic professional projects as soon as possible.
  • Open source communities (e.g., GitHub) cited as an ideal learning environment: "In many ways, I consider GitHub to be the best school in the world." (20:03)
• Mentorship and Community:
  • "Go join a community of other makers…be with people who are more advanced and more sophisticated than you are, because you will learn by being side by side with people who really know what they’re doing." (21:22)
  • Encourages students to offer their labor to small, scrappy studios for firsthand experience.

6. Open Source, Games, and Industry Gaps

• Dream Guest Suggestion:
  • A leader bridging open source and games, to discuss why open source is pervasive in tech but not in games—a topic Matt finds personally fascinating. (23:22)

7. Creativity, Productivity, and Recommended Reads

• Book Recommendations: (24:37)
  • Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert—"It’s this ode to creativity. If anyone has had their creativity stifled or needs a little bit of blowing on the embers—it’s just a wonderful piece."
  • The Artist’s Way—“At the end of the day, it’s really just about the power of journaling…such a creative and quite frankly, productive release..."
• Creativity as a Core to Engagement:
  • Passion and creativity are seen as fundamental to student engagement.

8. Matt’s “Superpowers”

• Vision and Pragmatism:
  • "I have big crazy visions, crazy dreams that matter for how you make people’s lives better… and then being pragmatic about how you get there." (26:18)
  • Ability to attract talented, mission-aligned people: "A good vision with good people will get you a long way." (28:07)
  • Quote: "The Bible says, where there is no vision, the people shall perish. You need a vision, and then you need the people who will go and actually make it." (28:23)

9. Favorite Games and the Power of Learning-by-Playing

• Games That Shaped Matt:
  • Civilization and SimCity ("foundational" for understanding systems and history/politics).
  • Plague: "People don't understand the power of exponentiality… I felt like I was one of the few people who could see what was coming because I played a video game." (30:25)
• Memoir Moment: Though Matt rarely plays games now ("I don't get to play as many games as I want"), the influence of gaming on his world view is unmistakable.

10. Closing Invitations and Call to Action

• For Studios:
  • Seeking partnerships with studios open to community-driven development—integrating students as contributors, from art to code.
  • "If you're a studio that has an old IP and you want to revitalize it...the ability to build games this way, that's a great example..." (31:30)
• Contact:
  • Email: matt@endlessstudios.com for collaborations, investment, or educational partnerships.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On shifting strategy:

  • “We realized this huge kind of, like, whoa, insight that the people we were trying to teach these skills would learn more if they were able to build a game than by any game they could ever play.” (08:45)

• On the value of testing assumptions:

  • “Test your assumptions cheaply. I wish we had not spent so much darn money on something that didn’t work.” (12:10)

• On vision and people:

  • “A good vision with good people will get you a long way.” (28:07)

• On experiential learning:

  • “The best way to learn to do a job is to do the job.” (19:11)

• On exponential growth and games:

  • “People don’t understand the power of exponentiality… I felt like I was one of the few people who could see what was coming because I played a video game.” (30:25)

Important Timestamps

• [03:18] Matt on the chaos and balancing act of his mission
• [04:37] The story of Endless Mission and the insight from failure
• [09:47] Recognizing the gap between Minecraft and Unity
• [12:10] Reflections on failing fast and the value of profitable, steady growth
• [15:43] Frameworks and the essential balance between vision and pragmatism
• [19:04] Best practices: learning by building, mimicking the real world
• [21:22] The power of joining communities for learning
• [24:37] Book recommendations for creativity and productivity
• [28:23] Importance of vision and aligned people—the “Bible” quote
• [30:25] Games that formed Matt’s perspective—and why
• [31:30] Call to studios for community-driven, open game development

Additional Resources

• Endless Studios & nStar Tool: endlessstudios.com
• Book Recommendations:
  • Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert
  • The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron

Tone and Takeaways

Throughout, the conversation is candid, engaging, and laced with Matt’s blend of big-picture vision and practical, learn-from-experience wisdom. He is passionate about democratizing not just technology usage, but creation—“shaping technology, not being shaped by it.” Audiences are left with practical steps—build, participate, find mentors, and embrace failure as a path to progress—and are invited to join a collaborative future for educational game development.