About Jon Radoff

Interested in collaborating, speaking, or advisory? Reach out here.

I'm Jon Radoff—entrepreneur, builder, and writer. I've spent three decades at the intersection of games, technology, and the internet. Today, my work centers on agentic AI: the shift from software we use to software that acts on our behalf.

What I Do

Metavert is my venture studio and research practice. Through it, I advise companies building at the frontier of AI, games, and interactive technology. I write the Metavert Meditations newsletter, where I explore how agentic systems, creator economies, and composable architectures are reshaping every industry. I also build things—open-source tools, platforms, and experiments that put these ideas into practice.

My current focus is on what I call the direct-from-imagination era: the convergence of large language models, agentic engineering, and composable infrastructure that is collapsing the distance between having an idea and shipping it. I believe we are entering the Creator Era of software—where natural language becomes a compiler, where AI agents handle implementation, and where the bottleneck shifts from engineering capacity to imagination.

Background

I co-founded Beamable, a live game infrastructure platform used by studios building multiplayer experiences. In February 2026, Skillz (NYSE: SKLZ) acquired Beamable's technology and team to accelerate their platform capabilities for mobile game developers.

Before Beamable, I founded Disruptor Beam, where I was game director for Star Trek Timelines—a mobile game that reached millions of players and recently passed its tenth year of continuous operation, placing it in a rare 1% of games with that longevity.

I've been building online games and internet software since the early days of the medium. My first game, Legends of Future Past, was one of the pioneering online multiplayer RPGs. I went on to found Eprise Corporation, an enterprise content management company that went public on NASDAQ. Through these ventures and others, I've shipped games, developer tools, and content platforms across every major era of the internet.

Agentic AI and Building in Public

I practice what I call agentic engineering—using AI agents as collaborators across the full development lifecycle. I build in public, and most of my recent projects were created this way: Chessmata (an open-source chess platform built in a weekend), LightCMS (an AI-native CMS with MCP), LastSaaS (a SaaS boilerplate built entirely through conversation), Agent Almanac (an AI agent directory discovered by an autonomous agent), Flipbook (a presentation viewer with MCP), and HiddenBench (a benchmark for multi-agent collective reasoning).

Explore all of my open-source work on GitHub, or visit Projects for the full directory of current ventures, tools, and advisory work.

In June 2023, my team won the a16z AI Tech Week Virtual Worlds Hackathon by building Tales of Mythos—a complete D&D-style RPG in a single day. We used Claude's 100K context window with what I called semantic programming: LLM prompts as functional subroutines within traditional software architecture. That experiment prefigured the agentic engineering workflows that are now becoming mainstream.

Writing and Ideas

My intellectual work focuses on a few connected threads:

The Creator Economy framework — Every creative industry moves through three eras: Pioneer, Engineering, and Creator. Software itself has now entered its Creator Era.
Composability — The most powerful creative force in the universe. What we can accomplish together through composition always exceeds what any one of us can build alone.
The Agentic Web — AI agents are restructuring discovery, commerce, and creation around the open web. The answer is no longer a page—it's an experience.
Games as Platforms — The metaverse arrived—it looks like Roblox, Minecraft, and the platforms where 300 million people build interactive experiences every month.

I published the State of AI Agents & Agentic Engineering 2026—a 205-slide analysis covering $211B in AI venture capital, the SaaSpocalypse, and the forces reshaping every industry.

Speaking

I've spoken at MIT Media Lab (MAS.S61), MIT Sloan, GDC, GamesBeat Summit, Gamescom Congress, and numerous industry events on topics including agentic AI, the metaverse, game design, digital identity, and the creator economy. I also host livestreams on YouTube covering AI, game development, decentralized technology, and virtual worlds.

Education

A.B., Harvard University (Extension Studies), Psychology.

Connect