Friday, October 31, 2008

The Mover

Hays brings massive media skills to GenArts

By Jay Rizoli, Special to Mass High Tech

It probably sounds fitting that an art major would end up at a company called GenArts Inc. But in Katherine Hays’s case, it’s a little more complicated.

Even if you’ve never heard of Hays or her company, you’ve almost certainly seen their work. GenArts, founded in 1996, is a developer of visual special effects software for the film, television and video industries. Hays, a video game advertising pioneer, is the new CEO at the Cambridge-based company, whose technology has been used in the “Spider-Man” and “Matrix” trilogies, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “The Lord of the Rings” and TV’s “Lost.”

Hays acknowledges that the career path that led her here isn’t the usual one for a student of art.

“By the end of college, I wanted to go into business. I had studied art history and visual art at Princeton University, but by my senior year I decided to go into business and went to Wall Street — which is the natural transition for an art history major,” she says jokingly.

The Fort Worth, Texas, native landed at Salomon Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs before going to Harvard Business School, where she earned her MBA and found her future husband. But with six months to go before her next job started, Hays began seeking entrepreneurial opportunities and connected with Mitchell Davis, with whom she would found New York-based Massive Inc.

“One idea (we had) was putting advertising into video games,” she said. “There were a substantial number of people playing video games, but the advertising dollars were not following. We thought, ‘If we can find out why, we can build a company.’”

She wasn’t a gamer herself — “My dirty little secret,” she says — but the premise was simple: place advertising into the landscape of video games. While advertisers showed interest, game publishers were leery of using technology from a startup and were fearful of its effect on the games and the response of the players. “So it took a lot of work to convince them,” said Hays, adding that a projected $2 per game sold in additional profit helped to do so.

Massive brought on about 100 game-company clients before it was sold to Microsoft Corp. in 2006. That same year, Harvard Business School published a case study on her path as a technology industry leader and co-founder of Massive.

Hays remained as senior director and chief operating officer for two years before GenArts came calling. Now, she says, she’s looking forward to what she enjoyed at Massive: “Working with a team to have a vision and executing that and making it happen.”

 

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.