T wo years after starting Vostu.com, a game manufac- turer for social networks, the founders had gone through three different versions of their idea.
In 2007, they had envisioned a Latin American social networking site, then a platform to host other social networks, but by 2009 they had turned to social games. “It was really difficult to monetise down there [in Latin America],” says Joshua Kushner, the company’s 25-year-old chief strategy officer and one of three founders. “So we pivoted to gaming.”
But four years after its initial launch, Vostu is making the right moves. It has grown to almost 400 employees from the 12 it had less than two years ago, the majority of whom help to engineer and design the games in the Buenos Aires office (the company also has offices in New York and São Paulo). The company now makes social games such as farming, soccer and café management, which can be played on Orkut, Google’s answer to Facebook and a social networking site popular in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.