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

Quest Portal
Co-founder and CEO · Reykjavík · 2021–Present

- 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.

Teatime
Co-founder and COO · Reykjavík · 2017–2021

- 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.

QuizUp
COO & Executive Producer · Reykjavík · 2014–2017

- 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.

Jive Software
Director of Products & Analytics · Palo Alto · 2013–2014

- 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.

CLARA
Founder and CEO · San Francisco · 2008–2013

- 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.