Author Archives: kevin

About kevin

I write the posts

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Tuesday

Posted on
Electronic Arts
  • Electronic Arts had by far the best presentation of any of the companies we've been to so far. This is partly because they have excellent facilities, including a gym and fitness room (and gave us a product we wanted, a free EA game from the company store) and because as a large company that hires lots of college grads, they're clearly used to showing college kids around.
  • What's the most interesting conversation that we can have? That's what I want to know and what I'm trying to talk to people about, especially because we don't have that much time to talk to any one person. I would rather not waste time talking about what my favorite EA titles are. Today I tried to jump in by asking people what they are thinking about or working on right now, with good results. However,
  • I need to be careful because people expect me not to know anything. Silicon Valley execs were once young college students, and then they graduated and learned everything they needed to about how to run things, be effective, make good decisions and create value for a company. Currently I am a young college student; my role is to be a sponge. Tomorrow I will ask for advice instead.
  • An executive at EA repeated the line we heard yesterday about Wii bowling tournaments at retirement homes.
  • The number of different skills required to successfully produce a game is astounding. EA needs a great story, great engineers, great artists, and managers that can make eighty people work together and get a complex product out the door, when everyone's going to want to stuff more features into it.
  • EA is currently producing a game called Dante's Inferno, with nine levels based on the nine circles of hell. One member of our group wanted more stories based on classic stories. The developer pointed out the problem, which is that in good stories, not very much actually happens. Most storytelling involves setting the scene, describing the relations of the characters to each other and the changes in status that arise from events in the story. But in a videogame, especially an action game like the type the developer makes, you need lots of action and bad guys, all of the time. Video sequences in between the action can only tell so much of the story and give the player so much accomplishment. For a further dramatization of this point compare the fight sequences in Star Wars Episode 5 between Darth Vader and Luke (lots of conversation and emotion; little sword play), which are excellent, with the fight sequences in Star Wars Episode 1 after Qui-Gon is killed (lots of choreographed sword play, which is easy for video games to reproduce, but little passion and little story).
  • In Dante's Inferno the main character is a pretty evil guy, with a dark history who does evil things throughout the game. We can root for this character in a video game but not in a movie; why? Off the top of my head, the audience is different, we are playing up the differences between protagonists in movies and video games, when we are the one controlling the character we think differently, or we think video games are "less real" than movies.
  • An EA executive mentioned his current project was to get his engineers to be more accepting of change. This point is echoed in FP2P by one of the interviewers, who points out how hard it is for any country to stay at the forefront of technological progress. To reach the bleeding edge a country must be willing to accept rapid and uncomfortable change, but once it experiences success the vested interests and the technology that got the country to the top begin to try to protect their interests against future upstarts, through legislation or by discouraging the competition. If I have five engineers that are using Maya, they're going to compare themselves based on how good they are at using Maya. The best Maya programmer doesn't want to switch to a new, better technology because he's already the best.
  • In my opinion, EA still has a significant problem allowing users to share stories between game players and non-game players. Obviously they are excellent at developing a story within a game and allowing collaboration, competition and networking between players of that game. But if I spend three hours playing Madden and then my girlfriend asks me what I've been up to, what kind of story can I tell her? "I was down 14 points in the fourth quarter and then came back and won the game" is not compelling to a person who's never played the game. In that sense while games offer utility to the people who play them, they don't give players a story they can tell to non-players. When everyone in your network plays the same game, this isn't a problem.
Atlassian
  • Just like every five year old wants to be Spiderman or a pro sports player, every high school and college kid looking to work in the Valley wants to work for Apple, Google, or start the next Twitter. Atlassian isn't the sort of place college kids dream about working it's where Silicon Valley bread is buttered; creating a good product that businesses and developers need, even if it has no flash to it.
  • Atlassian was profitable from day one and took no VC funding. Outstanding.
  • Because the developers were Australian, they had to do all of their sales over the web, which isn't common for enterprise software. This led them to keep the product cheap, and make it absolutely exceptional. Both of those steps were crucial to their business.
  • Everyone at Atlassian said how much they enjoyed working there. The benefits are good and everyone works out in the open in the same office.
  • Atlassian's in an extremely competitive industry; there are over 50 difference corporate wiki products, many issue/bug trackers and Atlassian competes both with enterprise giants like Oracle and Microsoft and with free products. It's not hard to be cheaper than the large clients but the software also has to be good enough to justify paying about $1000 for a license. They are thus extremely sensitive to quality, making their issue tracker public, and allowing everyone to see feature requests.
  • I asked whether people steal the product, considering that Atlassian gives away the source code with every license. The company said yes, and that they don't do anything about it because people who want to steal the product are going to steal it. Businesses don't really want to steal things though, so they get enough paying customers.
  • We got onto the subject of blogs because the marketing team said that blogs are an important part of their marketing strategy, because they have to create and deliver a great experience for their customers. We then were told how blogs let us advertise how we think about things and that a blog is a good landing page for companies trying to find out more about you. Sounds great.
  • Luck has been another resonant theme of this trip. I spoke to one executive at Atlassian whose first company sold out to Cisco, I think, for $1.2 billion and second company sold to another large SV firm for $300 million. Other people became extremely rich and powerful because they were one of the founding members of a startup, or were in the right place at the right time. Some lucky people are probably not so good and some people that worked at failed companies are good. Of course, by virtue of being a rich white male over six feet tall, I have already hit the jackpot.
We also had a dinner in the city with entrepreneurs, which was fun, but it's getting late here. Entrepreneurs aren't very different than the rest of us, or more risky, but they are extremely good at getting things done and running projects. They also prefer to be their own boss. I'll leave you with this video by Pete Diamandis about energetic fundraising. Tomorrow: Lockheed Martin and EMC.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Everquest, the great leveler

Posted on
H/T to Tyler Cowen:
The problem with [economic analysis]—as plenty of left-wing critics have pointed out—is that all things aren’t equal. Some people are born into rich families, and blessed with great opportunities. Others are born into dirt-poor neighbourhoods where even the most brilliant mind coupled with hard work may not forge success. As a result, economists have warred for centuries over two diverging visions. Adam Smith argued that people inherently prefer a free market and the ability to rise above others; Karl Marx countered that capital was inherently unfair and those with power would abuse it. But no pristine world exists in which to test these theories—there is no country with a truly level playing field. Except, possibly, for EverQuest, the world’s first truly egalitarian polity. Everyone begins the same way: with nothing. You enter with pathetic skills, no money, and only the clothes on your back. Wealth comes from working hard, honing your skills, and clever trading. It is a genuine meritocracy, which is precisely why players love the game, Castronova argues. “It undoes all the inequities in society. They’re wiped away. Sir Thomas More would have dreamt about that possibility, that kind of utopia,” he says.
There's interesting commentary throughout. In The Matrix, the character Cypher was asked whether he would be willing to trade his real lives for a fulfilling virtual one, where he had high status and all of the benefits that come with it. The choice was presented as evil because Cypher accepted it and he is a bad guy, but this hypothetical scenario is becoming a real option, because of massive multiplayer online games. We can see that many people are opting to spend most of their free time online, because the online world can give them high status where they don't have it in real life.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Monday

Posted on
I'm currently in Silicon Valley on a networking trip sponsored by my school's Information Technology Advisory Board. Each day, we visit two companies, and each night I will post summaries and thoughts. Here's the recap of Monday's action. Microsoft
  • A common misconception about people from Silicon Valley is that they don't care much about their appearance. That's crap; most people that I've seen care very much about their appearance. They just care about it in different ways than we are used to. Case in point: our host, Scott Mauvais '90, wore a ponytail to his mid-back, which is probably a very credible signal for non-tech types.
  • Mauvais earned points for opening the floor up to questions right away. For most speakers this is an effective tactic, and we had lots of questions about Microsoft.
  • At the same time, it quickly became clear that while Mauvais was knowledgeable about Microsoft and cared about the company, his area of expertise was limited to what he worked on, which was very much about enterprise software and very little about competing with Apple or putting together Windows Vista. Many answers started off with "I only know what I've been reading in the paper." Students continued to ask detailed questions about other Microsoft departments.
  • Many students also enjoy using questions as signaling. If you hear anyone open a question with "I spent last summer doing X" or "I did a computer science assignment on X," you can stop listening immediately, because they've already shared every bit of information that they care about sharing.
  • Most new Microsoft Stores have clauses in their contract that prohibit the landlord from allowing an Apple Store within a certain perimeter of the Microsoft Store. If an Apple Store moves within that range they have to pay 50% of the Microsoft store's rent, we were told.
  • Mauvais had a good insight about the Mac vs. PC debates. For Microsoft, it didn't make much sense to spend a whole lot of money fighting the Apple campaign, because if Apple increases its market share from 6% to 12% Microsoft's revenues are not hurt very much. However, the campaign allowed Apple to define Windows in a negative light. Microsoft was not able to define Windows in a positive light.
  • Microsoft is trying very hard to move people away from keyboards and mice. I have seen the future, and it is a touch interface. Touch interface is more precise and allows for multi-touch and intuitive gestures. Microsoft had some cool demo touch screen interfaces, and a Windows Surface and they were pretty cool. It's clear that we are just scratching the surface as to the best ways to interact and operate a touch screen computer. Unfortunately only two companies (Microsoft and Apple) are working on improving this interaction. We will see when Apple's tablet comes out but I bet it will do very well.
  • Microsoft has bigger fish to fry than personal software; it will continue to lose the public relations debate to Apple, because Apple's primary focus is on products for personal use. Microsoft has the enterprise market pretty much cornered (and still has an unbelievable edge in desktop computers). It will lose the PR battle but earn lots of money. This was also a constant theme in Mauvais's responses. "We're too busy making money," etc.
  • Microsoft epitomizes the feature creep problem. When you have half a billion users or so, every single one of the features in their products is used by someone, who will be angry when that feature changes or is removed. Fifty percent of "new-feature" requests for Microsoft Office were for features that were already a part of the product.
Meebo
  • Meebo is probably the exact opposite of Microsoft: only 60 employees and the whole company is located on two floors. Our host was Robert Leon '04, whose appearance was also carefully calculated. Robert pitches Meebo to other companies.
  • In the old days (and by "old days" I mean several years ago), most people found content by punching in queries to Google and entering sites through Google. Hence companies spent a lot of money on search engine optimization. Now, users are increasingly being driven to content through friends, via Facebook or Twitter or RSS. Thus sharing, and tools for sharing are extremely important. According to Meebo no one (fewer than 0.3% of users) clicks on the "Share This" links at the bottom of blog posts or on most web pages.
  • The most important lesson from Meebo was listen to your customers. Meebo started out as a chat client that allowed users on various platforms (AIM, Facebook, MSN Messenger etc) to talk to each other. That's only a small part of their business now; the most profitable part of their business is that they figured out a way to allow people to share links and videos, really easily. Here is a video demo of the sharing software.
  • So far, the most effective innovation for sharing Web content has been YouTube's putting the video URL immediately next to the video you are watching. I never thought about that before.
  • Meebo has over 100 million users ("reach," in the sales community) so they are a valuable source for businesses like, for example, movie studios, who need to push awareness of their movie and have a big opening weekend.
  • According to COO Martin Green the whole web will be using Javascript floating bars at the bottom of the web browser, like Facebook's, within the next year or so. I'm not sure if there's a moneymaking opportunity here.
  • Robert made the excellent observation that when you are fresh out of college, you do not know anything. So in job interviews, you need to act extremely interested in the company at hand, and also act like someone who people would enjoy hanging out with. Especially at a startup, it's important to be able to work well with colleagues, and be enthusiastic enough about the product to put in long hours. Robert pointed out that you don't learn much in a liberal arts college except "how to think." I would not even argue that much. Robert was, however, the social chair at CMC. Being a social chair is excellent preparation for a career in sales, and for making people feel comfortable around you, probably much more useful at the margin than trying for an excellent GPA.
  • Meebo subjects all new hires to an extremely extensive interview process. Not only does this show the applicant that Meebo cares but it's an effective way to vet applicants. They also make every applicant go through a simulation of job tasks, so the sales people have to pitch the product to the hiring committee, or an administrative assistant has to explain what they'd do if the boss's pager went working. This is excellent practice, as work sample tests are the most effective predictor of whether someone will be good at their job. In a small firm the costs of a bad hire are tremendous; it's very important to get the position right. In general they like to promote people from within the firm, but if you need a lot of experience quickly they'll go outside.
  • Meebo had this cool chart of how people communicate - you have Private and Public on one axis, and Real Time and Asynchronous on the other axis. So this is the breakdown:
    • Private, Real Time is SMS and Instant Messenger;
    • Private, Asynchronous is email;
    • Public, Real Time is Twitter;
    • Public, Asynchronous is like Facebook walls.
    We use all of these technologies. Everything in the industry is moving towards Real Time for everything. I handle SMS and email in the same program. The line between Private and Public is strong. But it's a reminder that how you choose to communicate with someone is as important as the content. Marshall McLuhan lives!
  • "Startups either have customers or they have a business plan. Very few have both." I don't know enough about startups to say whether or not that's true.
  • Static clients like AIM are dead. Everything is moving within other applications like Gmail chat or Facebook chat. That's why Meebo had to adapt and move into other people's sites, rather than staying with Meebo.com. Only a small percentage of their traffic is still using Meebo.com.
At dinner I sat next to a very successful executive who sells smart energy and renewable energy products. He also has three houses, one of which is one of about forty properties on a man-made lake in Palm Springs. His wife works at a solar energy company and agreed that lots of the gain people get from generating their own energy is canceled out by increased energy use; it's not clear whether utility companies are actually substituting out of coal and into renewable energy, or just adding more renewable energy to their 'portfolio.' Solar technology is rapidly becoming cheaper. This is turning into an essay, but I'll close by saying that I need to work on being less critical. It is way too easy to be critical, especially because a lot of academia demands it; not many teachers ask you to write a complimentary essay. As Mr. Leon pointed out, a lot of your job qualification at this point is just being someone who people enjoy being around. I need to make my business more about making the people around me feel good. Tomorrow: Electronic Arts, Atlassian and a dinner with entrepreneurs, including the CEO of Scribd. I'll try to refrain from asking the VP of Marketing when Sim City 5 is going to come out.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Notes on a trip to Vegas

Posted on

In no particular order:

  • Like Washington D.C., Las Vegas is best visited at around 3 AM. Everything is still open, the most interesting characters are out, it's warmish outside and the crowds are not there. You can cruise the whole Strip in the middle of the night and get all your sightseeing in. Especially with all the neon around.
  • I made two double-or-nothing bets for $20 each, one with better than 50% odds and one with slightly worse, and lost both. On a low bankroll stick to low bet sizes; the rush of winning comes more from winning than from winning large amounts. Walking out of a casino with more money than you walked in (and your share of free drinks) feels great.
  • Bill Gates used to pay for all of the high-roller accoutrements and then play $5 a hand blackjack. This site has a bunch of helpful tips about how to play blackjack, where to find low minimum tables, how to calculate the house edge based on the specific rules of the game, etc. I was surprised by the number of people who gambled but did not know basic strategy. Not knowing basic strategy is like walking by quarters on the ground without picking them up. Then again, gambling is all about throwing away money.
  • I would recommend starting with at least 10 times the minimum bet. If you aren't willing to risk that much money you probably shouldn't be playing. I did not follow my own advice but it was my first time going to Vegas in about ten years.
  • If you build an awesome new hotel, it helps my hotel because Vegas is a more attractive tourist destination. But it also hurts because people are going to want to go to the new hotel more than yours. Obviously it varies by hotel but my guess is that the first effect dominates. Note also that most of the casinos are owned by the same groups.
  • Be prepared to spend money. The goal of every hotel Las Vegas is to intertwine spending money with having a good time. Vegas will cater to your every whim if you are prepared to spend enough money. Needless to say your mindset towards your wallet is completely different when you're in Vegas; it's disorienting and glamorous, you're out with your friends and you want to impress them, etc. Even though I ended up spending less money than I had budgeted for the weekend, it was still surprising to see how fast it goes. It will go even faster if you're buying drinks in the clubs, which I didn't.
  • I could look at two people flirting and tell with around 95% confidence whether magic's going to happen or whether the guy should be trying his luck elsewhere. But when most guys are hitting on women, they tend to think the woman hasn't made up their mind yet, or that they can make a woman decide to go home with them, especially by spending money on drinks or access (bottle service) or gambling. This makes me tend to think that all of the positional purchases you can make in Vegas are the casinos rent-seeking from betas. Alphas will take what they want, and you can always have a good time without spending too much money.
  • I talked and danced with a few girls while I was there but I was fairly suspicious of hired guns, especially after a guy in the elevator told us he got robbed by a girl after bringing her back to his hotel room. If it looked too good to be true, it probably was.
  • You can play beer pong at Excalibur. You can bring your own cups and beer, too, and then go play the $3 minimums, some of the lowest on the Strip.

Las Vegas is the largest tourist trap in the world, a place with no inherent physical attraction. The whole place is designed to make you equate spending money with having a good time, and for the most part they are successful. On the whole I found the trip unfulfilling; there's always pressure to spend more and there's the constant feeling that Vegas people are only interested in you while you're spending money. Your best bet in Vegas is to find a nice restaurant.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Cleaning is cathartic

Posted on

This is the product of ten hours of work over the past week. I just wish I’d thought to take a before picture.

The floor, shelves, desk, drawers and closet were all full of clutter. I’ve been able to use my desk for the first time in three years or so:

A Clean room

Several rules for room cleaning helped:

1) If I haven’t used or worn something in the last year it needs to get thrown out or given away. I made one exception, a pea coat which will be useful when I live somewhere cold. I took all of the clothes that I didn’t bring down to school with me and put them in two boxes in the attic. If I don’t use them over the next year they’re going to goodwill. Should I throw them away now? Probably, but I’m sentimental.

2) Every object in my room fell into one of three categories: Keep, Archive –> Trash or Trash/Giveaway. Everything in Keep found a place, in a drawer or on a shelf. Archive –> Trash is stuff that I want to remember, news clippings of high school sports games, old papers, photos, and other old items, where the physical item is just clutter. These will get scanned or photographed and then discarded. Trash/Giveaway is the biggest category; I tried to find a home for everything that I didn’t want in my room, in the hands of friends or on Craigslist.

On the scale of things having a clean room is not that big a deal, or that much to be proud of. However I put off this project for years; I started over the summer and only finished this morning. In the future I’m going to cut down on purchases of vacation trinkets, clothes, books in print, CD’s, and toys. I am going to increase purchases of hard drives, wireless products (speakers, printers, phones etc), and e-books. The Unclutterer blog has useful advice for how to store things.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Great teachers

Posted on
teacher There's a good essay in the Atlantic on what makes a great teacher. Teach for America recruits 4,000 new teachers out of college every year and keeps detailed data on which ones succeed and which don't. This allows them to provide better instruction in the summer cram before they hit the classroom in the fall, and select candidates that are most likely to succeed. This seems like the sort of data that you would expect schools to collect, but because of teachers unions and a lack of competition, most schools and states go out of their way to avoid collecting this sort of data. The most successful predictor of experience in the classroom is the ability to manage and complete a large project in college. Grade point average (especially in the final two years of college) and "leadership experience" are the two most powerful predictors of classroom success. Teachers that report high life satisfaction and high perseverance - Angela Duckworth's "grit" - also did well. Successful teachers are constantly getting feedback, evaluating their teaching style and checking to see if the students are learning. They also expect high performance from their students, and work backwards from that goal to make sure they can get it. The author misses the somewhat obvious point that these traits are valuable in any profession. This means that schools are competing with other industries for good teachers, who probably have opportunities elsewhere. I don't know a finance firm that wouldn't want someone with a good GPA, who demonstrated the ability to manage large projects in college (and is happy with their life to boot). Teaching is an alluring profession, maybe because it's an easy way to gain high status, at least inside the classroom, where 30 or so kids do as you say (and you can run the classroom however you want). But the pay isn't great, and schools are not good at compensating teachers for excellent performance, or at retaining talent. Until they devise more effective pay structures (and Race to the Top, President Obama's $4 billion funding carrot, is helping), great teachers will remain diamonds in the rough.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Two good, recent videos

Posted on
The 70-minute critique of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (it's amazing how when you break down these things, they make less and less sense), and Richard Sapolsky on depression. Sapolsky, a biologist, argues that depression is a physical disease - you would never tell someone with diabetes to "snap out of it" yet we try to tell depressed people this all the time.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Feeling moral makes you act worse

Posted on
Ryan Sager had a good post a few weeks ago discussing how if people do things that make them feel like a moral, good person, they are more likely to behave immorally. For example, white people who voted for Obama felt they had more license to be racist in other parts of their lives. Thus it makes good sense that the most shoplifted book in America is the Bible:
I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was. “The Bible,” he said, without pausing. Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. “Some people think the word of God should be free,” Bercu said. As it turns out, Bibles are snatched even at the Parable Christian Store in Springfield, Ore., the manager told me, despite the fact that if a person asks for a Bible, they’ll be given a copy without charge.
I recommend your library. Most local churches also would be happy to give you a copy of the Bible, for free.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.