Sometimes, all you need is a little help from your friends. For the co-founders of Parsec, Benjy Boxer and Chris Dickson, it was exactly what the duo needed to start a company that is on a mission to change the gaming world.
Originally believing he wanted to be a scientist, Boxer applied to the University of Pennsylvania intent on studying the field. He quickly realized science was not for him, and he switched to majoring in economics at Wharton. While in school, Boxer met his future co-founder Christopher Dickson through a mutual friend. Although Boxer did not know it at the time, Dickson would play a major role in his development in the startup world.
Following graduation at Wharton, Boxer joined the M&A team at AOL, where he was partially responsible for AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post, as well as the acquisition of Pictela. The experience left him increasingly interested in media and technology, and spurned his next move as Co-founder of Arkad, a crowdfunding site which powers investor relations, in 2012. “[Arkad] was a good lesson for how to set up a company. The business had good [things] about it, but it was incorrectly timed,” said Boxer. Arkad shut its doors in early 2013.
Boxer would then join Newscred, a content marketing software company, as the Director of Product Strategy. He used his M&A skills to help build out the business development team. While he continued to improve his business acumen at Newscred, he remained friends with his now longtime friend Dickson. Dickson, now an engineer, already had multiple years of experience as a startup founder, and his skills complemented Boxer’s business-oriented mind well. Dickson proposed the idea of starting a new company, and when Boxer agreed, they just needed to settle on an idea.
Dickson, who enjoyed gaming in his spare time, noticed how expensive high-power gaming PCs were. Additionally, both Dickson and Boxer noticed that the gaming market was only growing. With over 60 million people spending money on gaming computers, the two knew that there had to be a more cost-effective way to share in gaming experiences.
From this need grew their cloud gaming company: Parsec.
With Parsec, “[You] can rent and download video games without having to purchase a gaming PC. Or, if you have a gaming PC but aren’t home and want to use it, you can connect to your gaming PC from anywhere.”
Parsec offers cloud software that enables users to login from anywhere, and moreover, Parsec users can buy additional computing power from their PCs to stream games from anywhere in the world. Users can opt to allow their friends and other users to play games with them, or even allow access to games on the user’s computer. Additionally, it works with a wide range of computers and cloud machines.
With the addition of Jamie Dickson (Chris' sister) on the engineering team, Parsec got off to the races in building a technology-focused team to build the future of gaming and serve a significant number of users since its inception in 2016.
For Boxer, this is only the beginning. "We are 100% focused on building the best technology platform for game streaming. Most of our R&D goes into that technology from networking code to video rendering. But in the future, we'll offer more options for cloud machines and features to help people find other gamers to play games with through matchmaking."
Citing a University of Chicago stat, Boxer noted that for every non-work hour, 45 minutes of that time is now shifting towards gaming. With such a growing market, it is clear that Parsec will be ready to serve their avid community.
Caitlin Burke is a Contributor at VentureFizz. Follow her on Twitter:@ccaryburke.