Meet PLAY ON!’s Co-Producer: David Esposito of Harvest Time Partners

David Esposito of Harvest Time Partners signed on as a co-producer of PLAY ON! partly because the story of our intrepid first-time inventors betting all they had at Toy Fair 2008 resonated with his own experience. Like many of them, he developed his first games – Abundant Harvest for Kids and Abundant Harvest for Teens and Adults – because he’d identified a social need he wanted to address.

His journey into the toy industry didn’t begin with a flash of inspiration. It began with a slow realization – based on his failures and frustrations as a parent and partner – that families struggle to communicate.

A Daughter’s Lesson

He remembers the busy day when he came home from work and had to get ready for his MBA class. As he frantically packed up his books, his 2-year-old daughter happily told him about all the wonderful things that had happened to her that day.

Then he noticed she’d stopped talking.

“I turned and saw that she was crying because I wasn’t paying attention,” he recalled. That moment was part of what he describes as “a series of experiences where I realized parents and kids just don’t fully sync up in terms of effective communication.”

While another dad might just chalk up that experience to the challenges of parenthood, thanks to his family background, David saw an opportunity.

“My mother came over from Glasgow, Scotland, and my father’s family were Italian immigrants who started a fruit and vegetable market – Esposito’s on State Street in Hackensack, New Jersey,” David said. “I grew up understanding the impact that a local family business has on a community.”

Although he was working for a pharmaceutical company as a sales rep, the challenges of raising four kids and a foster child with his wife Tracy stirred up his entrepreneurial blood. He also realized that he could teach families the values he’d learned from serving in the military.

“Several relatives had served in the military during World War II, which had inspired me to go to West Point,” he said. “I then spent years on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division, which gave me a sense of the importance of serving a cause bigger than yourself, the responsibility of leaders, and the value of principle-based decision making.”

Once he realized that both his and other families never learned to “put real issues on the table,” he and Tracy began to develop Abundant Harvest.

Learning to Listen

“The goal was to create a game that allowed parents and kids to have intentional conversations instead of reacting to problems in the heat of the moment,” he explained. “They’re designed to help people be a little bit more reflective. They’re guided by principles like compassion, honesty, and teamwork.”

Development took roughly five years, from early concept to prototype to final production. Like some of the inventors in PLAY ON!, David and his wife made a bold — and risky — decision: they took out a second mortgage on their home to fund the game.

“At the time, it seemed not as financially risky,” he said, referring to the pre-2008 housing market. “Looking back, it was probably a very foolish financial move.”

Still, he doesn’t regret it.

“I felt like, man, there’s something there. There’s a real need.”

That belief carried the couple through a difficult launch. The game debuted in 2007—just as the financial crisis began to unfold. By 2009, markets had collapsed. In addition to taking that second mortgage, David had also left a stable corporate job to pursue early-stage biotech ventures.

It was a precarious moment.

The business grew slowly, without major retail deals or breakout success. However, David found validation in smaller, more personal ways.

“Even now, I get notes from parents reaching out to say something like, ‘our son opened up on things we didn’t know he was going through.’ That’s really gratifying."

For David and Tracy, those moments matter more than scale. The goal was never just to sell a game. It was to create a tool that could change how families talk to each other — one conversation at a time.

NEXT: How Harvest Time Partners Plays the Long Game