Startup Cafe: The Quality Time Games Company
☕️Startup Cafe: The Quality Time Games Company
Adam Rowings and Leo Bursztyn will be sitting down for a fireside chat style talk on how technology can simultaneously both bring us closer together and isolate us.
The talk will focus on lessons learned through experience developing tech platforms and through research. We will focus on how these lessons shape our philosophies toward future tech development and can be used to benefit our empathy, building tech toward more deliberate societal benefits.
Agenda
8:45 - 9:30 am • Coffee and Socialize
9:30- 11:00 am • Talk and Presentation
February 11th, 2026
Adam Rowings is a Technology and Media executive who has led teams tackling some of the biggest consumer technology challenges over the last 15 years. He is currently co-founder and CEO of The Quality Time Games Company and early stage AI company building analog gaming consoles.
In previous roles he has been a leader at Meta, first leading Growth and Integrity data science at Instagram (2016-19) and later leading Monetization Data Science for Meta (2021-24).
He built the data team for Disney's launch of its flagship Disney+ streaming service (2019-21). And in 2024 he led data, product, and marketing at CharacterAI culminating in a multi-billion dollar Google deal.
Leonardo Bursztyn (PhD, Harvard) is the founder and CEO of NOMO Technologies and the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.
He is a leading scholar on the economics of social interactions, with extensive academic publications and regular coverage in major media outlets. He recently launched NOMO, a behavioral-science-driven app that uses incentives and technology to help people scroll less and reconnect in the real world.
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