Paul Thelen

Paul Thelen was the Founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Big Fish Games, the largest portal for downloadable games in the world, distributing in excess of 1.5 million games per day. He held an MBA from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington. Thelen had more than 20 years of experience working in technology.

After graduating from the University of Washington in 1985, he started his career as a Systems Engineer with the Seattle Marketing and Sales office of IBM. Four years later, he left to join a small wholesale food distribution mainframe software developer to start a systems integration division for the 12-person company. While at Stanford University, Thelen focused his studies on technology and marketing and then entered the field of strategic business consulting for Mercer Management Consulting. At Mercer, he worked on developing targeted customer marketing solutions and customer database mining programs for several companies including First Interstate Bank (acquired by Wells Fargo) and Sprint Telecommunications.

Acting on his desire to get back into the trenches with a technology company, he accepted an offer from RealNetworks. While there, he successfully launched RealAudio (stereo streaming audio over the Internet) and RealVideo; wrote the business plan and deployed the RealProducer and RealPublisher media editing, compression and deployment tools; and led strategy for the Media Systems division as Group Product Manager. Thelen then moved on to co-found the games business at RealNetworks, where he wrote the business plan for the RealArcade Service, the RealArcade Client, and the Game Pass Subscription service.

In 2002, he bootstrapped startup Big Fish Games with a mere $10,000 during a period in his life when he was very sick with an undiagnosed, life-threatening illness. Big Fish Games grew rapidly and secured $8.7 million in angel funding in 2005 and an additional $83.6 million from Balderton Capital, General Catalyst and Salmon River Capital in August 2008. Thelen grew the company to 400 employees, with corporate offices in Seattle, Washington, United States and additional offices in Vancouver, Canada and Cork, Ireland.