Magical Sheet

New York University, Stern School of Business

Industry: Education / Gaming / No Code

MBA Founding Student Name(s):

Julian Ozen, CEO (NYU Stern Andre Koo Technology and Entrepreneurship MBA Program ’25)

Aneesh Soni, CTO (NYU Stern Andre Koo Technology and Entrepreneurship MBA Program ’25)

Nick Kolin, Chief Scientist (PHD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning from Toyota Technical Institute at UChicago) (Not an MBA student)

Brief Description of Solution: Magical Sheet is an app that makes creating and sharing a game as easy as sketching on a napkin. A kid’s sketch on their phone becomes a playable game in under two minutes. It is the simplest, most expressive no-code tool available.

Roblox and Minecraft unlocked creativity for a generation. We want Magical Sheet to be the next platform for creating and sharing interactive experiences, especially for those who never thought they could build a game. Teens have unlimited creativity and potential. We are creating a new medium that’s intuitive enough for everyone to see their vision come to life, and powerful enough for a person or small team to build and launch polished and unique interactive media.

Funding Dollars: $0

What led you to launch this venture? All three of us grew up wanting to make worlds. We sketched characters, built scenes out of lego, and wrote stories. In our heads they were all part of grand tales of adventure. When we played a lot of video games, we dreamed of seeing our own dreams come to life in the same way.

Today, we see many companies using AI coding to build marketing pages and SaaS tools, but we thought: isn’t it a waste not to leverage this amazing technology as the ultimate toy box?

We built the first version at OpenAI’s inaugural hackathon – a working prototype in just four hours. Since then, we’ve grown Magical Sheet by talking directly to kids and adding features that let them design more complex and engaging games, while keeping the interface as simple as day one.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with your venture? Building something that kids instantly engage with. From the hackathon version to today, we’ve seen many people get excited about the games they’ve been able to create, a powerful validation of our core vision.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Narrowing in on product–market fit. There are many competitors in the AI coding space, but we believe our approach is fundamentally different. Since the space evolves quickly, we constantly evaluate how others are tackling similar challenges while forging our own path.

We also spend a lot of time talking to users. One major challenge is that teens have countless entertainment options today. But the upside? They also give brutally honest feedback. If they’re bored, they’ll tell you. That makes traditional feedback methods less effective, but far more direct and actionable.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? We both came into our MBAs with big-tech software engineering experience, aiming to round out our skills in finance, leadership, and communication.

Julian served as Cohort President for the NYU Stern Andre Koo Tech MBA Program, representing classmates, working closely with faculty, and organizing community-building initiatives. Leading a diverse group of peers gave him hands-on experience in motivating teams, resolving conflicts, and managing priorities, all skills directly transferable to scaling a startup.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? One of our favorite classes was Managing a High-Tech Company, taught by Professor Rim Ji-hoon, former CEO of Kakao Corp, one of South Korea’s largest tech companies. Each week, he introduced a new emerging technology (ride sharing, media streaming, AI, social platforms) and unpacked the dynamics shaping each industry, explaining which companies he believed were best positioned for success.

He also shared firsthand leadership lessons from managing a 3,000-person company: how to approach hiring, reward top performers, start or shut down initiatives, and navigate complex negotiations.

From this course, we learned how to balance rapid technological shifts with the human and structural realities of growing a business.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why?
One of the biggest benefits of NYU is access to world-class professionals who teach as adjunct professors. Many work full-time in finance, real estate, tech, or fashion, and then come downtown to teach in the evenings.

Venture Building for Entrepreneurship was taught by Professor Geoffrey Schwartz, Chief Strategy Officer at Frog, one of the world’s leading design consulting firms. The course guided us through the full entrepreneurial cycle: developing ideas, validating them with structured experiments, and assessing their long-term quality. Professor Schwartz emphasized rigorous assumption testing and fast iteration, which aligned closely with our approach to building Magical Sheet.

After graduation, he continued mentoring us, offering candid feedback on product direction and challenging us to sharpen our understanding of our users and market. His guidance has been critical in shaping how we test, validate, and grow the venture.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success?
NYC is the place to be. It has the world’s best talent – entrepreneurs, funders, artists, engineers, and founders. We’ve met exceptional mentors, and we’ve been directly connected to Stern alumni in startups and VC firms. Startup meetups and hackathons introduced us to many people who have supported our journey.

While at Stern, we also used our time to advise and learn from early-stage startups. Endless Frontier Labs connected Aneesh with an AI startup focused on reducing hallucinations, where he helped refine product–market fit. Julian spent his final semester advising Play, a startup building design and development tools, based in SoHo just a few blocks from campus.

What is your long-term goal with your startup?
We have two big visions for how this technology gets used. The first is to create the next creative gaming social network: a massive, scalable social network where anyone can build and share games as easily as posting a video. We want this to be a space where teens and hobbyist creatives can build unique, weird, and fun things you can’t find elsewhere.

We also believe we are building a sophisticated tool that can be used to help indie game development. Using our AI system, a team can drastically cut down development time to distribute their games on platforms like Steam or the App Store.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wish you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? Find ways to network early, not just to validate your idea, but to connect with others who are building and struggling too. Celebrate even the small wins because building a company can be lonely and hard.

Talk to your customers! They will always teach you something you didn’t know. Keep talking to them, and you’ll keep uncovering new challenges and opportunities.

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