Trip Hawkins

A fan of the Strat-O-Matic Football pen and paper games, Hawkins started his first business as a teenager trying to create a knockoff version. He borrowed $5,000 from his father to start up the venture and advertised his game in NFL Game Programs, but the business failed. Eventually, he received his first computer and became interested in creating a digital football game, because it would allow players to avoid the challenging math of the game, which was all handled internally.

He designed his own undergraduate major at Harvard University in Strategy and Applied Game Theory.

Around this time, in 1975, Hawkins estimated that it would take home computer saturation seven years to make a viable career out of game design.

In April 1977, Hawkins attended the first West Coast Computer Faire, where he saw the debut of the Apple II. The experience influenced his decision to join Apple Computer in 1978.

In late 2003, Hawkins launched a new video game development company called Digital Chocolate. The company focused on developing games for handheld devices. They received high success with the mobile puzzle game Tower Bloxx. He stepped down from the CEO position at Digital Chocolate in May 2012.

In 2012, Hawkins joined the board of directors of Israeli technology company Extreme Reality, which is working on developing motion control software that can read a person's movement in 3D, but which only requires a 2D camera.

On March 20, 2013, Nativex, a mobile ad technology platform for games, announced Trip Hawkins as a senior advisor to their board of directors. Hawkins also joined the advisory board at Skillz, a mobile eSports platform, as a strategic advisor in December 2014.

His newest startup, If You Can Company, aims to foster social and emotional development in children, teaching compassion and anti-bullying lessons. Their first game, "IF...", uses a free-to-play model and is meant for teachers and students in an educational environment.

Hawkins lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he served from 2016 to 2019 as a professor of entrepreneurship and leadership at the University of California, Santa Barbara.