Bing Gordon '68, Distinguished Alumnus 2023
Use the reunion registration to rsvp for the Alumni Assembly and Distinguished Alum Presentation at 11 am on Saturday, June 10.
Share your congratulations with Bing here.
Bing Gordon has a knack for seeing the future – it’s what made him one of the pioneers of the video game industry in the early 1980s with Electronic Arts and what has kept him at the forefront of the digital age today as a tech-focused venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins.
Share your congratulations with Bing here.
Bing Gordon has a knack for seeing the future – it’s what made him one of the pioneers of the video game industry in the early 1980s with Electronic Arts and what has kept him at the forefront of the digital age today as a tech-focused venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins.
Gordon came to Cranbrook as a ninth grader, after the stress of his parents’ divorce began causing him small discipline problems at his middle school. Ed Lerchen, a 1938 Cranbrook Schools graduate, suggested Cranbrook for Gordon. “He suggested to my mom that maybe I’d do better in a school where academics weren’t socially unacceptable. I interviewed nervously (at Cranbrook) with three grown-ups in tweedy blazers and they let me in.”
At Cranbrook, Gordon did well under the guidance of his teachers. He recalls legendary English teacher Carl Wonnberger and his theme-a-week writing class. “It was the most impactful class for me,” says Gordon, who also remembers Latin teacher Howard Wert and “arma virumque cano,” the first phrase in The Aeneid that Wert made his students memorize. Former Spanish teacher and Upper School Head Sam Salas also was a favorite.
Gordon earned good grades at Cranbrook and became a prefect for the day students as well as editor of The Crane newspaper. “I owe the most debt to the anonymous faculty grown-ups who decided to (give me those roles),” Gordon says. “It never would have occurred to me to ask for the positions.”
Following graduation, Gordon went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from Yale University but found himself still in search of a direction. “I was broke in my early 20s,” he says. Hearing from friends who were having fun and finding work on the West Coast, he decided to move to Washington where he got a job in commercial fishing alongside fellow Cranbrook graduates Howard Gutow and Ned Heavenrich.
“I discovered that I really liked getting a paycheck,” he says, and decided to pursue a career in business. Inspired by Ned and other friends who also had enrolled, he earned his MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. It was there that he was first exposed to the tech industry.
In 1982, Gordon became one of 11 employees to launch a new business venture called Electronic Arts, founded by a former Apple employee who recognized what the impending boom in home computer sales would mean for those who could provide software – and ultimately, games – for millions of new home computer users.
Within a decade, Electronic Arts, now better known as EA, would become one of the dominant forces in gaming, launching classic franchises such as Madden NFL, The Sims, Need for Speed, Battlefield, FIFA Soccer and more.
EA was one of the first video game companies that celebrated their software designers and programmers for their artistic rather than just their coding skills. “We shared a vision that games were a new art form that would surpass movies, books and recorded music,” Gordon says. “We believed it, but didn’t know what that kind of success would feel like. Then, one day, I got into a New York cab, carrying my EA Sports swag, a briefcase. The cabbie didn’t ask ‘where to,’ instead he called out ‘EASpohts, it’s in da game!’ I thought, that’s what a million fans feels like.”
As the tech industry continues to evolve at an unyielding pace, Gordon sees artificial general intelligence as the big game changer on the horizon. “Jeff Bezos is among the leaders who thinks it’s the most important innovation in tech since the internet in the ‘90s and the microprocessor in the ‘70s. A friend at Google believes that AlphaFold – AI that predicts 3D protein structure – is even more important than large language models like ChatGPT.”
Gordon headed up EA’s marketing and product development efforts and served as its chief creative officer from 1998 to 2008. He was behind the seeming ubiquity of the EA Sports brand, helping ensure that every kid, teenager and adult gamer in the country was addicted to at least one EA Sports franchise label.
“The first decade of EA was a whirlwind,” Gordon says. “(My life’s) history was punctuated by game releases rather than life events. I remember more of Madden design tweaks than of birthdays or vacations.”
EA was one of the first video game companies that celebrated their software designers and programmers for their artistic rather than just their coding skills. “We shared a vision that games were a new art form that would surpass movies, books and recorded music,” Gordon says. “We believed it, but didn’t know what that kind of success would feel like. Then, one day, I got into a New York cab, carrying my EA Sports swag, a briefcase. The cabbie didn’t ask ‘where to,’ instead he called out ‘EASpohts, it’s in da game!’ I thought, that’s what a million fans feels like.”
Gordon was honored for his work at EA with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award. He also held an endowed chair in game design at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, the first such chair in the game industry.
Gordon retired from EA in 2008 but did not stay idle for long. That same year, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, known for their more than 50-year history of investing in firms that soon became household names such as Google, Twitter, Amazon, Nest, Beyond Meat, Intuit, EA and more.
Today, Gordon serves as chief product officer for Kleiner Perkins and leads their sFund, an investment initiative to “fund and build applications and services that deliver on the promise of the social web.” Currently, Gordon is also on the board of directors of Duolingo, Truecaller, Take 2 and Dreamscape Learn, and previously spent 20 years on Amazon's board. He was a founding member of Audible's board of directors and has advised CEOs of such household names as Spotify, Niantic (Pokemon Go), Coursera and Cameo.
“There is a lot of luck in finding an initial product/market fit,” Gordon says, adding that it is difficult to pick the winners “before they have actual customers.” And once a firm is launched, it’s about constantly moving forward. “What separates sustained success from one-hit wonders is speed of team learning and speed of execution.”
As the tech industry continues to evolve at an unyielding pace, Gordon sees artificial general intelligence as the big game changer on the horizon. “Jeff Bezos is among the leaders who thinks it’s the most important innovation in tech since the internet in the ‘90s and the microprocessor in the ‘70s. A friend at Google believes that AlphaFold – AI that predicts 3D protein structure – is even more important than large language models like ChatGPT.”
For those young people who want to chart the same kind of trajectory into the future that Gordon has, he advises “do cool stuff, find a mentor, build a network, learn with discipline.” And ultimately? “Turn your avocation into a vocation.”
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Distinguished Alumnus 2023, Bing Gordon '68
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(248) 645-3000
