Curriculum vitae

Gunnar Holmsteinn

Reykjavík, Iceland

Built 4 companies across analytics, AI, and gaming. Experienced entrepreneur, operator, product design and growing teams with clear purpose and autonomy.

Experience

2021–Present

Quest Portal

Co-founder and CEO Reykjavík

Co-founded a platform that makes tabletop role-playing games more accessible and social, combining a virtual tabletop with AI tools for game masters.
Led the company through its public launch and the introduction of Quest Portal Pro, bringing AI assistance for rules, worldbuilding, characters, and encounters into a subscription product.
Raised $7.6M in funding, backed by Lakestar, Moonfire, and gaming industry investors.
Reached 180,000 users
Developed a product spanning web and mobile, with collaborative notes, character sheets, voice chat, maps, and an AI assistant.

2017–2021

Teatime

Co-founder and COO Reykjavík

Launched Trivia Royale to the #1 spot in the US App Store
Raised $14M from Makers Fund, Atomico, and Index.
Hired and coached 18 on-site employees and 10 remote team members.
Led development of chat, friending, sharing, clans, video, and voice systems; created wireframes and prototypes for rapid user testing.
Built data pipelines, A/B tests, and dashboards to support product decisions.
Authored a patent for using player emotions to generate shareable highlight videos.

2014–2017

QuizUp

COO & Executive Producer Reykjavík

Helped build the world’s largest trivia game, with more than 100 million players;
Raised $47M from Sequoia and Tencent and presented product strategy at board meetings.
Drove initiatives that increased day-one retention from 40% to 60%, download-to-signup conversion to 80%, and the app store rating from 2.5 to 4.5 stars.
Hired and mentored 70+ engineers, product managers, data analysts, and team leads. Introduced iterative development, mentoring, retrospectives, and open meeting notes.
Launched WeQuiz with Tencent in China, generating 30M new users
Developed a Trivia game show pilot with NBC Universal as Executive Producer.
Led the sale of QuizUp to Glu Mobile.

2013–2014

Jive Software

Director of Products & Analytics Palo Alto

Led analytics product development and launched three products. Used internal analytics to inform company product strategy.
Grew CLARA revenue from $250K to $2M through sales enablement, training, and marketing automation; presented at the 1,500-person JiveWorld conference.

2008–2013

CLARA

Founder and CEO San Francisco

Built and led a team of 12, owning product development, sales, recruitment, customer support, and investor relations.
Authored a patent for machine learning in sentiment analysis and theme extraction.
Raised $600K from Icelandic investors, returned 15× their investment, and led CLARA’s $10M acquisition by Jive Software.