After a year of growth, Lil Snack has hired Scopely and Supercell veteran Bill Kang as its chief operating officer to help the company continue scaling.
Founded in 2023 to make daily casual games, Lil Snack raised an $8 million seed round last year, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the fundraising effort. The company’s mission has gradually evolved into a push to distribute games in destinations where they don’t typically show up, including platforms like Netflix and Amazon. Today, July 21, the company announced that it had hired Bill Kang as its first-ever chief operating officer to help lead this strategy.
Kang comes to Lil Snack after a 12-year stint at Supercell, where he most recently served as the company’s head of entertainment and partnerships after holding roles across marketing, user acquisition, and franchise development. Kang told GamesBeat that he had resigned from Supercell in January to get back to his “startup roots” and apply his experience scaling a large gaming business to something new. His connection with Lil Snack came through a four-year stint at Scopely, where Kang previously worked alongside Lil Snack co-founder and chief product officer Travis Chen.
“One of the things that blew me away when I first started talking to [Lil Snack] is that they shipped at least one new game every day for the first 650 days, or something like that,” Kang said in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, to me, it felt like Supercell’s culture of iteration and fearlessness, but turbo-charged 100x.”
Lil Snack co-founder Eric Berman framed the company’s decision to hire an experienced operator like Kang as its first-ever COO as a signal of Lil Snack’s ambitions to the broader market. He said Kang was a natural addition to Lil Snack’s C-suite, describing Kang as “that perfect middle of the Venn diagram” between Berman and Chen.
“The biggest part of Bill being here, for me, is it means we are open for business for anybody who is considering adding games or play to their platform that haven’t done that before,” Berman said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Lil Snack has expanded significantly since its $8 million seed round last year, with the company’s overall headcount doubling year-over-year, per Berman. Lil Snack appointed its first-ever COO in order to help preserve the company’s culture and central mission while growing from a small team to a team in the double-digits.
“The thing that I’m thinking about the most is, how do we protect and nurture the special sauce that Lil Snack has? For example, this incredible content team out of New York, 10 folks that have impeccable taste and creativity,” Kang said. “How do we protect and nurture that, yet start to scale and build a little more rigor and structure in the operation, so that we can go after increasingly big games?”
This week marks Kang’s second week on the job at Lil Snack. He told GamesBeat that his experience at the company thus far had validated his belief that the company’s style of bite-sized games are well-positioned to grow amid the broader convergence of gaming and entertainment.
“I think that’s the real dream of what we’re trying to build here — and with the traction that they’ve already had, it really felt like a great place to come in and try to contribute,” Kang said.