Max Albert

Max Albert is CEO of adrenaline interactive, a company that leverages AI to help advertisers reskin video games to their brand. The work is virtual product placement done right: instead of an interruptive ad slapped over gameplay, a brand becomes endemic to the world a player is already in. If you played Fortnite during the company's Dr. Squatch campaign, you might have seen Sydney Sweeney's new soap line laying around the battlefield — a placement Albert jokes puts adrenaline in the social impact space, helping gamers find soap for the first time. He likes to point at FIFA: the billboards along a virtual stadium would feel weird if they weren't there. That is the level of immersion adrenaline chases across every game it touches.

He started the company about 18 months ago, but his path into it runs much deeper. In March 2022 he quit a nine-to-five at Ford Motor Company to start a game studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a popular NFL title and a racing game drew brands wanting to insert themselves authentically. Albert kept building software to make that easier until he realized the software was the business. He is a gamer first — his co-founder Walt, former director of programmatic advertising at Nike, is the advertising brain. Albert's own origin story is a Mario Kart tournament at his local library at age 14, where a hundred-dollar GameStop gift card made him feel like Elon Musk. He programmed his first game at 16.

Albert sees AI as inseparable from the product itself: he does not think virtual product placement is even possible without it, from generating the inserted product to matchmaking advertisers with the right game for their objectives. He is also out to debunk what gaming has become. Contrary to the lonely-gamer stereotype, he argues, gaming is now everybody — there are more women playing games in the US than men, and properties like Candy Crush, Wordle and LinkedIn games have made it a genuine phenomenon. For the past 30 years advertisers and gamers were stuck in an adversarial relationship; Albert's whole pitch is that their goals can be aligned, with ads that are impressive content in their own right.

What drives him now is partly a lesson in letting go. This is his first venture-backed business, with a bigger team and a more complex product than he has ever managed — and a self-described control freak is learning to trust people to execute a vision he can no longer live inside of every part of. He believes culture is the only real competitive advantage a very young startup has, and he hires for it relentlessly, looking for proven operators but also for asymmetric people, diamonds in the rough. His white whale is getting beauty brands into Candy Crush. His advice to new founders is blunt: do not settle, because B players cost you cultural momentum you can never get back.