The Stone Soup We Cook
A Thanksgiving Reflection
In 2017, the year Nex was founded, I attended a Thanksgiving event at Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, CA. It was called Stone Soup: The Season of Sharing, and its message has stayed with me ever since.
In the Stone Soup story, everyone contributes, and together they create a meal to remember.
That philosophy has shaped how we built Nex and Nex Playground. Nex exists because of long-term, win-win relationships across our entire ecosystem. It is a company built together with employees, partners, and the community we serve.
Last year, I shared how we got started. This year, I’d like to reflect on how we evolved.
We entered 2025 with both excitement and challenges.
The excitement came from selling through every single unit produced. Retailers including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy committed to expanding Nex’s footprint in their stores. Amazon deepened our partnership. Sam’s Club came on board. And we entered Canada with Walmart Canada. Today, Nex Playground is available in more than 5,400 stores.
The challenge was that we sold through the inventory originally reserved for Q1. Our partners were left with empty shelves. Nex Playground was out of stock for an extended period. Global supply chain disruptions and cost increases earlier this year added even more pressure. We were fortunate to have Skyworth Digital working tirelessly to strengthen our supply chain, secure material in advance, and diversify production to build resilience.
It has also been a year of major technology advancements. We rolled out more accurate and performant AI models. We added new sensing features that track hand pose and face pose, used in Mirrorama, Bluey, and more titles to come. We squeezed more features and performance from the hardware our customers already have. And we improved our manufacturing processes to make the product even more robust than last year.
With a growing subscriber base, we significantly increased our content production budget for 2025. We partnered with beloved franchises including BBC Studio’s Bluey, Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, NBC Universal’s Gabby’s Dollhouse and How to Train Your Dragon, the NHL, Paramount’s TMNT, Spin Master’s Unicorn Academy, and Zumba. Alongside them are our original titles Mirrorama, HomeRun Heroes, Copy Cat Deluxe, BoxFlow Fitness, Mingles, and Nex Pets. In total, we are on track to ship 20 new games and experiences this year, plus many updates. I’m also happy to share that we are increasing our production budget again next year to bring more frequent and exciting content to Nex Playground families.
The Nex team has grown to more than 120 people across the US, Canada, Hong Kong, and the UK. We are attracting world-class talent. It is the highest concentration of talent I have ever seen, and we are setting our sights on building a company that will last beyond our lifetime.
Yesterday, we crossed an important milestone together — the 500,000th Nex Playground sold.
And we could not do any of this without you, our user community. The bugs you report, the suggestions you make, the stories you share, the reviews you leave, and the words you spread continue to shape Nex. We share your feedback and experiences across the company as a constant reminder of why we do what we do. In moments of difficulty, your words lift us up.
Many families place Nex Playground in the center of their homes. With that privilege comes responsibility. Our mission is clearer than ever. We want to do good for families. Play that keeps you active and brings families together. A companion and a catalyst for growth. Safe, private, and secure. New content regularly. No ads. No nags. Play that moves you.
At the bottom of the stone soup is the stone itself. For us, that stone is Nex’s resolve to be a force for good — built on a model that gives more than it takes.
The stone soup we are cooking together is only getting better. And we are just getting started.
Thank you for your contribution.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Years ago when I was a teenager, around 2017, a basketball coach I knew hired me to design a brand book for his new app, a basketball training app based on cameras and motion sensors. I was very excited, it sounded very promising and I had made the most beautiful designs for him, truly innovative stuff for the time. He said basketball will only be the beginning, we can use this tech to create training apps for all kinds of stuff. But despite securing major partners, I quickly found out the coach prefers to waste money by buying two maxed-out Mac Pros, a huge training facility, and incredibly expensive equipment for the videos, without having a single line of code for the algorithm. He asked me to design a UI (with stocks, not money), without having anything but a basic shell and a lot of videos. This is where we parted ways, and of course it all went down the drain.
Soon after I discovered a very similar new app: HomeCourt. I realized this idea was indeed great and achievable, and if he didn't act like he had it all figured out before he had anything at all, maybe he could get there first and win the category. Years after, when I was looking for cardio apps, I tried an app called Active Arcade. It wasn't great in my opinion, but I liked their design very much and they got really successful. I forgot all about these two apps. Until now.
I wanted to understand who is this new kid that managed to overthrow Xbox. So I started reading about Nex Playground. And I was shocked. The company started as an app, called HomeCourt. A basketball training app, of all things. Later on they expanded into, you got that right, cardio, with Active Arcade. And a few years after, Nex Playground, based on the same tech. Connecting these dots was shocking. To me, this is a remarkable story of pivoting, starting out as something so niche but really good, and then in less than a decade overthrowing Microsoft after three decades of a trinity in the console field. And at the same time, it's also a lesson on how far you can go if you play it smart and don't throw money on being a wannabe. The thought of what could've been with this one, is just crazy. Well done, Nex. Fascinating tech story.