David Bluhm, president and CEO of Z2Live.

In the past year, Z2Live president and CEO David Bluhm has seen the Seattle startup triple in size, launch a hit social game, reach profitability and raise $2.5 million in a new funding round. Through it all, Bluhm has remained committed to a team-oriented mentality and the desire to create multiplayer, social games for mobile devices. The company launched its hit iPhone/iPad game Trade Nations in November of last year and is finalizing a second, more competitive, jet fighting game called Dogfight, slated for a May 12th worldwide release.

Bluhm, who has a strong background in the mobile industry, as well as a few startups under his belt, founded the company in 2009 with gaming vet Damon Danieli (of Microsoft's Game Studios and Xbox Live). Also on board is Lou Fasulo, previously of Sonic Boom Games and Vivendi Games (now Activision).

I recently chatted with Bluhm about the mobile game industry, hiring talent in a competitive market, and his dirty little (gaming) secret.

How did you come up with the idea for Z2Live? We didn’t know what we wanted to become – this was essentially incubated with Madrona (Venture Group). This is one of the those scenarios where you start a company, but you don’t know what you want to be... So we did research on, 'What’s the best company to build given the new iPhone and new hardware devices, faster networks and better ecosystems?' We started out with that and ultimately wound up as a game publisher.

You recently raised $2.5 million, what do you plan to do with it? That was purely strategic. We became profitable last fall with the launch of Trade Nations, so we didn’t need the money to fund any of our operations or, frankly, to continue to grow... The macro economy aside, games is going nuts and this is a very hot market for good reason. We still have massive ecosystems that are just barely penetrated in India, China, even the U.S. with respect to smartphones and hand-held devices that support gaming… So we wanted to raise money to allow us, first, to grow at the speed we need to, at the timing we need and, second, to put another really strong investor round on the table that could help us with whatever growth needs we have down the road.

What are your plans for expanding to platforms outside iOS? Apple creates an attractive environment relative to anything else out there, but change will happen over time. The Android landscape is going to fragment, not just your development of the game to all these different devices, but...will also fragment our support of the product across different devices, different ecosystems... So that’s our latest challenge right now, to figure out a smart way to support a disparate Android opportunity. We’re working on it now -- we have distribution deals, we have plans to take our product to other ecosystems and to Android, and we’re putting a lot of our smartest people to that problem right now.

On adding Ed Fries and Bill Bryant (of Draper Fisher Jurvetson) to Z2Live's board of directors: Parallel to (the funding), we were really putting the right board behind this company, and that’s why we put Ed Fries on the board, who’s got one of the longer histories in gaming that you could name in the business... Somebody like Draper Fisher, who has presence in every country in the world, they certainly have major investment activities everywhere, and deep and strong ties -- you certainly want to leverage those. So you go from a Madrona, who has one of the greatest track records and integrities in setting up great, responsibly managed companies and you add a Draper who has kind of a world view and is aggressive in pushing companies around the globe, I think you get the best of both worlds.

On the Seattle gaming space: Seattle has really become the nerve center for what I think is the next generation of gaming, which is 1) mobile and 2) social, so with respect to what we’re trying to for a bigger agenda here, not just Z2Live, is really make Seattle the nerve center for the next generation of games. And why do I think we can do that? Well, we have this rich fertile ground of gaming -- what Ed did (co-founding the Xbox Project and Microsoft's Game Studios), what RealNetworks, PopCap and Big Fish have done. But when you go look at the other centers of gaming (outside Seattle), there’s no mobile expertise there. Because of McCaw (Cellular), because of T-Mobile-VoiceStream, Alltell, Western Wireless, we have such a rich fertile ground of wireless executives who understand mobile. So, when you put mobile, social and gaming together, Seattle really should be the leader of the world.

On maintaining an edge in a competitive market: I think that’s the easy part. We’re small, we’re nimble, we can move faster than anybody, we have no bureaucracy... Our real competition is other well-funded little startups. Of course, it’s harder to get those startups funded, and many of them don’t have a team that benefits from guys that have been around doing this for as long as we have… With respect to us competing against those next innovative guys, they don’t have a way to get in this industry this easy, they don’t have the network, the connections, the past, the history.

On sourcing top talent: The bar is really high and the competition is really high, so I’d be misleading you if I didn’t say a larger part of our challenge around here has been finding great talent... If you look at other companies in town in the gaming space, they’re all very healthy, planning for IPOs or they’re talking about billions of downloads or they’ve got some other really great metric of success, and then you’ve got new guys moving up here -- Google extending their operations, Zynga coming up. There’s a lot of competition and that’s a good reflection on Seattle as a talent pool, but it makes it very tough... It’s a very healthy job market in gaming.

The Z2Live team.

On being the benefits of being a non-gamer in the gaming industry: Here’s your great little secret, I’m not a gamer... I’m a big sports guy, played every kind of physical game you could imagine, but I was never ever the guy who sat inside at a game console...But what’s been interesting to me in finding this gaming opportunity is there are very few business people in the gaming business. Most of them are gamers, they built a game and, because they’re the top dog building and architecting the game, they become the leader of their organizations. I’ve heard multiple game architects, game designers, game celebrities, get up in front of crowds and say, 'I’m a terrible business guy, I do cool games for cool reasons.' And so we are taking a business approach to this and I think it reflects in that we want to monetize these games and we’re building a responsible business that’s already turned to profitability. My job is to go find those gamers. Everybody in our company is a passionate gamer, but my job is to build a business, to make it so that everybody is just focused on doing their job and all their outside distractions are gone.

Other games planned? We do have another game, besides Dogfight and Trade Nations and I’ll just say it’s another mass social game and its got more a competitive element to it. And that’s about all we can say right now.