Fred Benenson

Bio

Fred Benenson was Kickstarter’s second employee and worked there until 2016 as their VP of Data. He met Alex Hague at XOXO in 2014 when Alex was demoing his game Monikers, and the two quickly became friends while bonding over their shared love of “smart dumb” party games, a misanthropic sense of humor, and a general distrust of technological utopianism.

In late 2015, when Fred had the idea for Pitch Deck, he presented it to Alex, and they evolved the idea into a game that would actually be fun to play. Over the next two years, they worked together to bring the game to life, starting with ugly prototypes and Google spreadsheets, continuing through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and finishing with a large print run.

The game’s design is largely a product of Alex and Fred’s collaborative process for refining the rules and editing thousands of cards over the course of dozens of play tests. They worked with several designers over the course of developing game, including Jakob Scott (logos and card illustrators), Simon Abranowicz (web and box illustrations), and Jill Lewis (design). Here they break down the story of how Pitch Deck came to be.