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How to turn a developer into a founder: Advice from those who’ve done it

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

For six years, Peter Relan specialized in turning developers into founders. At his YouWeb incubator, the investor/tech veteran found talented developers such as Jason Citron and turned them into the creators of companies.

Peter Relan
Peter Relan

It isn’t easy to make that switch. Citron did, founding OpenFeint, a social platform for mobile games. He got thousands of developers to sign on board for OpenFeint — and then he sold it to Gree for $104 million.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.