Sean Pinnick, founder of Avalon, joins Sunny Ray to trace his path from modding StarCraft as a five year old in Orlando to building AI powered game creation technology. Sean recounts growing up around computers thanks to his tech salesman father, creating custom maps and mods in StarCraft and Warcraft 3, and later funding college partly through Diablo II marketplace bots and an SEO business. He describes co-founding a charity gaming organization at UCF that raised fifteen million dollars for St. Jude, then building Cyberdream, a VR company that shipped the bestselling VR battle royale Virtual Battlegrounds and produced simulation technology for NASA, Lockheed Martin and Universal Studios. After an early rejected pitch to Y Combinator for a metaverse concept, Sean eventually sold Cyberdream and started Avalon, a platform combining user generated content tools with generative AI to let players build persistent, multiplayer 3D worlds and games from simple text prompts. The conversation covers his lifelong obsession with Ready Player One style shared universes, his wariness of any single company controlling the future of digital life, and what makes Avalon's approach different from tools like Genie.
A lifelong StarCraft modder explains how childhood game hacking led to NASA VR work and now an AI powered metaverse platform called Avalon.
Can you explain what Avalon is in one or two sentences?
If I had to simplify it, Avalon is a more modern Roblox that uses AI to let players create their own games and worlds.
You mentioned StarCraft earlier, what were you going to say about Serral?
I grew up modding StarCraft, and Serral is a westerner who somehow broke into the Korean dominated esports scene and has been the best StarCraft 2 player in the world for about ten years. Watching players like him is like watching modern day chess, real geniuses executing hundreds of actions per minute at a masterful level.
How old were you when you got your first computer and started making games?
My dad was a computer salesman, so I had a computer in my living room at five years old watching my parents play Diablo and EverQuest. I discovered StarCraft at six and started making custom games instead of playing sports with friends, eventually creating some pretty notable mods as I got older.
Were these your own designed maps within StarCraft?
Yes, StarCraft made modding pretty accessible. At six I was doing basic data manipulation, giving characters names and stats. By nine, inspired by Starship Troopers, I was building wave based game logic for custom maps, which ended up being a big inspiration for what I am doing at Avalon today.
How did growing up in Orlando shape the way you think about immersive worlds?
A lot. I grew up going to Disney World and Universal Studios constantly, and I sort of see them like what we are building at Avalon, a multiverse of small connected worlds. Building a tech startup in Orlando was tough though since there are not many like minded thinkers here, so we made the company fully remote.
How did you pay your way through college?
I built bots in Diablo II that bought, traded and sold goods on the game's real money auction house, which made me a lot of money. I also ran an SEO and website building business for clients. That, along with some help from my mom, got me through college.
What's the story behind raising fifteen million dollars for St. Jude?
At UCF I co-founded Gaming Nights, which grew into one of the largest student run organizations in the country with about a thousand members. Alex Sherikasa was the main founder and deserves most of the credit, I was his right hand man. We ran charity gaming events, broke a few world records, and raised fifteen million dollars for St. Jude over a couple of years.
What made you walk away from Cyberdream to start Avalon?
I solo founded and ran Cyberdream for six years, building VR tech for Lockheed, NASA and Universal Studios, plus bestselling VR games like Virtual Battlegrounds. It was profitable, but I never set out to build technology for other people, I wanted to build Avalon, so I sold the company as an acqui-hire and went all in on this.
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