He moved across the country to attend the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Steve Sellers and his video game design startup Archetype Interactive, which was developing Meridian 59, one of the first commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). They sold the firm to The 3DO Company on the day he graduated from Berkeley in 1996 with an MBA. Hanke and Sellers created another entertainment startup, The Big Network, which was quickly sold in 2000 to eUniverse for $17.1 million. He was quoted to have been recently worried about the dangers of virtual realities.