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Fall 2009: Semester in Review

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Better late than never:
  • I started off the semester by ruthlessly pruning and declining activities. I stopped playing and refereeing intramural sports and I also stopped working out. This gave me lots of time every day; I went to the Athenaeum about twice a week, went to sports games, and read books for pleasure. Later in the semester, when I felt more comfortable, I added writing for the CMC Forum and coaching youth basketball.
  • I took a trip to Scotland for a week and still did well in every class. I overestimate the necessity of being on campus during the semester. I need to take more weekend and week-long trips. Especially because travel stimulates the brain; I was productive the whole time I was in Scotland and after I got back.
  • The decision I made that led to the most productivity was deciding to blog once a day for over a month. Blogging once a day got me in the habit of writing and thinking about things in terms of writing posts. I soon started submitting posts to CMC Forum, and landed a paid position. Within about four or five weeks I had more posts up than any other writer.
  • When I set my own hours for sleeping, I tend to sleep for at least nine hours, and/or take naps during the day. The optimal amount of sleep is between six and eight hours; not only am I awake for an extra hour but I don't feel as tired during the day. When I am sleeping in a room by myself I sleep longer; when I'm sleeping in a room with other people I get closer to the optimal amount of sleep. For optimal productivity I should probably live with a room-mate.
  • In my long and illustrious academic career, the grade I'm most proud of is an A- in Algorithms this semester. That class was really hard, and I skipped most of the prerequisites, and I was the only CMC student in the class. Furthermore, the teacher held office hours right after class, instead of before it, so if the assignment was coming due and you had questions, you could be stuck. I solved this problem by working on the problem sets for two to three hours immediately after class finished. This way I could ask the teacher when I got stuck. I also learned how to use LaTeX, the formatting language.
  • I used a binder for each class to stay ruthlessly organized, with sections in each binder for Notes, Homework, Handouts, Tests/Quizzes and blank paper. I filed every sheet of paper that was handed out. This saved a lot of time when it was time for exams.
  • The best purchase I made this semester was a pair of plaid Chuck Taylors, which drew a bunch of compliments and which are probably now my favorite pair of shoes. I made a lot of non-purchases that were also good, see below.
  • I'm finding that it's extremely difficult to deliver on everything I promise to do. Many people promise to do things because they want to signal reliability. The people they promise to may expect them to follow through, and then again they may not, because of the planning fallacy and because many people promise many things. I have cut down on the number of promises I make in the hopes of following through on all of them, signaling be damned (then again, writing this on my blog is also a form of signaling. My words are not reliable; hopefully my actions will soon begin speaking for themselves).
  • I started drinking coffee this semester. I only really noticed a difference in my energy level on two occasions. Maybe it prevented me from being sleepy but on most occasions it did not make me feel particularly energetic.
  • Probably my favorite two parts of my week were going to breakfasts with the same group of friends every day and going bowling on Wednesday nights. Scheduled activities with friends are excellent for my happiness. I should ensure that I have scheduled activities with friends wherever I am.
  • I took a tennis PE class. I'm much better at tennis. I also can bowl with spin now, and my scores are soon going to be higher than they were when I was bowling straight on.
  • I skipped only one class all semester. I missed three breakfasts. I completed every single homework assignment.
  • For the second semester in a row I did not buy any textbooks. I politely asked each teacher at the beginning of the semester to put the textbook on reserve at the library. Others I borrowed or checked out through Link+. When you are not sure how much you are actually going to use the book, don't buy it.
  • My biggest enemy continues to be my own head, which tries to seize on any awkward moment, missed call, Internet criticism or forgotten invitation and construct an elaborate scenario, ignoring the vast majority of data points and focusing only on a few. Most nights are good and then some nights it's hard to open the dorm room door and talk to anyone. This semester was probably my best yet in terms of mental health.
  • I wasn't very successful in my goal of finishing every paper, and studying for every test, at least one day in advance. I did push out planning and work ahead of my usual schedule, which is do it all at the last minute. Next semester hopefully I will be able to move up deadlines. Betting people money, or putting money on the line is still the most successful policy for getting work done. If I could automate the process of making the bets, so that every time I have a paper or test, my friend knows that I have to finish a day early or pay up, I would probably be much more productive. I don't stress much.
  • I had two large projects at the end of the semester that I did not manage very well. These projects were more or less the first time I had a month-long exercise that I had to complete myself. I am now aware that I need to work on time management for projects.
  • If you had to graph my effort for the semester it would look like this: A all the way through Monte Carlo/the day my controversial Forum article comes out, then about D from Monte Carlo until the Wednesday of Finals Week, then A+ for two straight days until I finished finals. This is good; I now know that I can work hard for exactly twelve weeks, which is up from previous semesters. With practice, in the future I will be able to push this number higher.
  • Cold calling is an excellent way to make sure students are prepared and following along. I have never prepared for a class more thoroughly than I prepared for Professor Meulbroek's case studies, because if I got called on to begin the case, I needed to be prepared.
  • Teachers should be much tougher. For the second straight semester, I was positively surprised by the grades I received. I know people are drawn to teaching because they love students and watching kids learn, but students would be better off if they received a message that told them they weren't working hard enough, than a message that says, "Your current work rate is acceptable." I know that us students should be responsible for monitoring ourselves, but outside motivation never hurts.

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Subsidize measurable benefits

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You can grow your prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for willpower. However growing this part of the brain is pretty painful; imagine waking up every morning and running sprints, or resisting a candy bar in front of you. For most people growing the prefrontal cortex is clearly not worth it. However, maybe if the benefits of exercising willpower were more visible, the reward matrix would change, and people could get excited by the growth in their cortex, they might be more willing to grow their willpower, which would allow them to focus and work hard for long periods of time, with a clear gain to society.

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The value of shortcuts

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In business, "There's got to be a better way to do this" often has a profitable answer. Electricity is a shortcut for people who are used to burning oil lamps all the time. Laundry machines are shortcuts for people who previously hand washed their clothes. Facebook allows you to get to know people well without actually talking to them very much. These innovations have helped cut down the amount of time spent on household chores. Academia does not encourage taking shortcuts, indeed, teachers frown upon taking shortcuts. Teachers don't like it when students use Cliff Notes or brag about their grades even though they did none of the reading. Does doing all of the required work for a course correlate with receiving a good grade? Yes, but if there's a way to earn the same grade (and learn the same amount of material) while spending half as much time on it, I would probably do that. One example is fixed-time programming - you say "I'll try to find a solution within 30 minutes" to a programming problem and if you don't find it, you let the problem go, or try an easier approach. My CS teachers don't talk too much about how to code more efficiently, even though our time as students is valuable. The academic disdain for shortcuts probably springs from the fact that acquiring a credential like a masters or a Ph.D requires a fixed investment of time, which enhances the quality of the signal provided by higher education. Naturally teachers want their students to do the same, "put in the hours" so to speak. But ask people like Cal Newport and they'll tell you to ditch the workaholic approach to school, because there's an easier way that gets better results. This is not to be confused with doing half-assed work or turning in a first draft of a paper. H/t to Josh Siegel.

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CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Friday

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Applied Materials
  • Everyone knows Moore's Law, that semiprocessor power doubles every 18 months. I asked if there was a similar law for solar panel efficiency. George Davis said no, mainly because his product is dependent on outside conditions like the weather. Solar panels are more effective in California than in Germany.
KKR
  • Some speakers are very good and know how to be interesting. They will take whatever question you ask and run with it. With these speakers, you want to ask a general question and let them run with it. These types of speakers are also good at ignoring the question you asked and answering the question you probably should have asked, or the question they want to answer.
  • Other speakers will stick to generalities, like "We worked hard and we had a lot of success." Faced with this type of speaker it's best to get very specific about what you want to hear about. "Could you tell us about the single biggest mistake you've made during your time here?" George Roberts, while brilliant, falls into the second category of speaker.
  • The BusinessWeek article about their plan to emulate Berkshire Hathaway was based off of one comment they made; while it would be great to be Berkshire, that's not really their plan.
  • KKR is going public because the only way to grow their business is through growing the amount of assets they control. They can get more money if they go public. They've tried to go public four different times but failed; if your idea makes sense, be persistent.
  • One of their biggest mistakes was not changing management quickly enough. It's hard to fire someone.
  • I asked Mr. Roberts if it was true that he used to spend lots of time proposing acquisitions while he was in school. He said yes; he would look up companies in an industry magazine and then write proposals. If the company didn't write him back, it only cost a postage stamp. That's a great attitude. Now it's even cheaper, because of email. While striking a deal or getting someone important to write back is low, the cost of sending email or a letter is lower.
  • Another student asked his opinion on the financial crisis. Roberts in turn asked the student what he thought. The student said he didn't know, so Roberts asked him what his gut told him. I thought that was interesting, because a lot of times your gut reaction is misleading. Consider most people's gut reaction to a minimum wage, to a bubble or to free trade.
  • Roberts told us to go work for a company that sells a product, so that we can learn how businesses work. You can't really learn about that on Wall Street.
  • I asked Roberts how he negotiates. He said most of all people do business with people that they like and trust. And that you need to be able to listen to what other people want. Good advice, I guess.
Chair Rankings It's important to have good chairs. Without further ado: 1. KKR 2. Microsoft 3. Applied Materials 4. EMC 5. Meebo (excellent chairs, but lose points for only having six) 6. Atlassian 7. Google/Youtube 8. Lockheed Martin 9. EA

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CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Thursday

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Google
  • The trip started off with a very nice young lawyer showing us the campus and telling us about all of the Google perks and quirks. For example, every worker must be within 150 feet of free food, the building numbers start at 42, some guy built a vending machine that displays prices based on how healthy things are, we take lots of awesome trips, here's a screen that shows what people are searching for in real time, etc. These are traps. The message that everyone should have taken from all of this is, We are fucking good at selling ads. They only afford all of the perks because the people that work there are unbelievably talented, and they don't want those people worrying about anything besides organizing and archiving all of the world's information, and otherwise doing really cool shit. All of the perks are like flashy traps. Never forget that Google is really good at making money.
  • Google is also very good at a meta level; they're not only good at delivering relevant search results and selling ads but they're also good at being a company. Everything at Google is well thought through, and works well. While you're on the toilet, you can read a daily 1-page tutorial on good coding practice. The company is constantly re-evaluating what they are doing and the sort of proceses they use. The word several employees used is "It's a mess around here right now." It was a similar to the practice of the best teachers in the Atlantic article on great teachers from a few days ago - when evaluators want to come see them, they all say that the evaluator can't come in right now, because they're revamping their whole math curriculum or implementing a new module. The theme is constant improvement. Google is trying desperately hard to stay nimble and maintain the ethos of a small startup.
  • I observed that Google employees are very good at getting things done. When something should be done, like the chairs are uncomfortable or the recycling program stinks, Google people are very likely to just do it. Respect.
  • When you assemble the world's greatest talent in one area and create an amazing culture, you can do unbelievable things. Most of the world's greatest works of art were produced in two Italian towns in a period of about 100 years, during the Renaissance. The University of Chicago had pretty much every good economist and finance professor in the 70's and 80's - Fama, French, Coase, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Black and Scholes, Harry Markowitz, Kenneth Arrow and Friedrich Hayek were all there. I would argue there's a similar concentration of talent in Silicon Valley right now.
  • Job titles are irrelevant. No one at the company does exactly the same thing for very long - people get shifted around within the company, they work on different projects, they learn about new things. The needs of a company change rapidly, so the idea of training people for specific tasks (or even trying to centrally manage an economy) is a little silly.
  • Monetary compensation isn't as high as at other companies but Google outspends everyone else on perks, and rewards its top talent very well (In the range of baseball player salaries, according to Jonathan Rosenberg). Most people in SV are very focused on work-life balance; short commutes, and doing a job that doesn't drive you up a wall with boredom or frustration. SV people recognize the importance of quality of life.
  • Jonathan Rosenberg is one of the top people at Google. He compared career hunting to surfing; your goal is to catch a big wave and ride it. Rosenberg continually tried to figure out what the next new thing in technology was, from creating information systems within companies, to helping companies collect outside information, to creating fast Internet connections, and finally search, moving from company to company as the hot new product changed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin convinced him of the money in search when they said, "Search is the moment that the user tells the computer what you're looking for."
  • It's interesting to see how companies divide up the workspace. At Meebo, everyone was out in the open, with three or four people all facing each other in clusters. Same at Atlassian. At Google and EA, most people had three-person cubicles. EMC had tall individual cubicles you couldn't see over, and corner offices. Google also had these cool yurt things that blocked out sound and had individual temperature control. Pretty cool.
  • Everyone has at least two screens, usually giant ones. Those aren't cheap; companies must realize that having so many screens helps productivity.
  • The question ramble: In the face of silence, people get nervous. I love when someone asks a question and then starts to ramble on and on, trying to fill the silence. Often they provide a justificat
  • When you're sitting around a conference table, you need to pick your seat well. The best seats are closest to the speaker, on the sides of the table. The next best seats are at the other end of the table, directly facing the speaker. The next best seat is in front of the speaker, so that if you were facing the table your back would be to the speaker (if chairs are there). The worst is on the sides, away from the speaker. Often the speaker takes the side of the table closest to the door. It's a tactical mistake to walk all the way into the room and take the furthest seat; you want to take the best seat and leave the stragglers in the worst spots.
  • The opposite strategy applies for sitting in the backseat of a crowded car. The last person in the car never sits in the middle seat. Thus, delay moving towards the car by all possible means.
  • Google Labs are a way of telling employees that there aren't any rules about which products get chosen; if you have a product you can put it in Labs. To get a product out of Labs, it needs to get used a lot. Google doesn't care much about profitability for their products, because they make so much from ads. They have the luxury of time that many other startups don't.
  • Rosenberg told a great story about how an internship he applied for came down to the final two applicants, himself and Mr. Perfect, who was tall and handsome and beat him at everything. Rosenberg hit it off with the employer's administrative assistant and Mr. Perfect didn't, and Rosenberg got the job. "If you want to know which first-year bankers are going to make it, ask the assistants which ones they like. The ones they like are the ones who are successful." The lesson is be nice to the people that set your schedule; they work harder and for lower pay.
Youtube - Steve Grove '00
  • Steve Grove is a great example of someone who gets stuff done. He proposed to the Kennedy School of Government that he would fly around the world and film their graduates doing all of these amazing things, and they agreed to fund him. So he got to go around the world for free and get some experience filming people.
  • Grove also wrote up YouTube and pitched a politics channel to them. He pretty much built the Youtube politics division from the ground up, and has interviewed many candidates. He took initiative and landed two really cool jobs.
  • It's pretty cheap to generate video and post it on Youtube. How long until we have 24-hour coverage of a candidate? The Barack Obama Youtube channel, giving you 24 hours of Barack, commentary on Barack, testimony from voters, donor drives, etc.
  • Youtube's starting to transcribe videos. This allows you to get an idea of the speech, and then read the rest of the transcription. You can also search within the video by keyword.
  • Before the JK Wedding video, Chris Brown's "Forever" was #270 on the Billboard charts. After the video it shot to #4. Youtube begged UMG not to pull the video, now they share the revenues from ads based on the video. There's money to be made there, instead of pulling content that you produced.

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Usability bleg

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Is there a tool that lets me make one click (or better yet, one keyboard shortcut), copy the link on the page I currently have open and popout a window in my Gmail account right to the address field, with the link in the body of the email? Or facebook - to other people's walls? I must send out about five of these a day, at least. Update: In Google Chrome Apple-L or Ctrl-L on a PC lets you highlight what's in the address bar.

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Recap/Blog Promise

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Today I met George Roberts of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and I met Robin Hanson, one of my favorite writers. I asked Robin if he'd like to come speak at CMC and he agreed. Affiliating with so many high status people all week has made me pretty tired; tomorrow I'll have recaps and some new content tomorrow. I'm gonna start a new blog promise and put a bar on the side of the page: I'll debate, or discuss, any topic with anyone that's interested, either through email Q&A or podcast. The only rule is I get to post it on my blog afterwards.

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CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Wednesday. “Drive the boat, don’t let the boat drive you.”

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Lockheed Martin
  • Lockheed Martin's only customer is the government, and they don't have much competition, so I knew their facilities and company paraphernalia were going to be outdated and corny, but I didn't expect them to be so outdated and corny. Walking into Lockheed Martin was like walking into a time machine. I doubt anyone at the company will ever check this blog, so I'll say what I feel.
  • At the start of our visit we were ushered into a conference room, where a woman named Connie joked with us about acronyms. "What does POS mean?" she asked. The adults volunteered point-of-sale. "What else?" We all think it means "piece of shit," but we weren't about to say that. Connie says, "Parent over shouder! Right?" I thought this was funny, but we'd soon realize Connie had no idea of the other meaning of POS.
  • We then were played a series of Powerpoint slides with a voice-over. The voice over said things like, "At Lockheed we care about freedom, integrity, and ethics. We uphold the highest ethics and work to keep America free." Clearly, Lockheed missed the presentation in third grade that explained you need to show that these things are true, instead of telling people about them. Hell, Soviet Russia wrote all sorts of beautiful things about the proletariat and the values of socialism, but when it comes down to it, Stalin killed over 30 million people through mismanagement. My point is that actions speak much, much louder than words. If you want to convince us you're an ethical company tell us a story about some government official who wanted you to do something slightly unethical, and how LM refused to do it, or how LM debates the morality behind every new project it takes, or relate to your colleagues in a way that exudes trust and confidence. Don't put that shit on a Powerpoint slide, because no one believes it.
  • Connie started talking about how she left the company but came back to it because of its superior ethics. I asked her to be more specific about the ethics involved at Lockheed Martin, because I was curious about the answer, considering that many people would consider it unethical to have an inherent interest in the growth of the defense industry, the placement of production facilities in many different politically states, and the production of weapons and systems that are used to kill innocent people. I'm not kidding, Connie was unable to produce an answer better than "The ethics here are good," and this is the person you put in the front of the room to introduce the company to prospective hires? I just checked out their website, which is significantly better, but the whole thing reeked of a company that hasn't faced much competitive pressure in some time.
  • We were taken on a tour of two separate facilities. The first was a giant room that tests optics for giant lenses like the kind that get put in telescopes like the Hubble. Pretty technologically impressive although I wondered about the cost and other things and the questions could not be answered, of course, because of confidentiality.
  • The second one was a facility that makes solar panels of the sort that get put on the wings of the Space Station and most satellites. I was amazed to learn that one panel, 15 feet x 5 feet, produces about 1000 watts, or slightly more than enough power for the average lightbulb. Power in space is at an extreme premium. Apparently you can't just load the ship with lots of batteries, because they're heavy and don't last as long as the satellite's expected life. The technology here was impressive as well.
  • Almost all of the CMC alums we've met so far have been white, and the vast majority have been men. The successful alums will mirror the composition of the school 20 to 30 years ago, which was overwhelmingly white and male. This doesn't look so good today but I don't know a good way around the problem. Hopefully people will understand that change is slow.
  • One CMC alum at LM spoke very slowly and idiosyncratically, which affected the way we thought about the things he was saying, and probably our initial opinion of his competence. I wonder why people like that do not hire speech coaches. Perhaps they are unaware of the problem, or the way they come off to others? Obtaining reliable feedback is difficult. He may be doing fine with his current speech patterns but he could be doing much better if he learned to speak in a natural way, pausing in appropriate places, putting the accents on the right words and raising and lowering his voice appropriately. Marshall McLuhan is still alive.
  • In the Q&A I tried to ask about the competition, to get the execs to speak about their business and the inherent inefficiencies, and Chris Jones asked about fixed-rate contracts vs. cost-plus contracts. The principal agent problem is alive and well in government contracting, and many rationalizations were floated, from providing a quality product for a high price to protecting America to being a 'boutique' client, who charges high prices but delivers a quality product as well. Currently government officials cannot do fixed-price contracts because they make too many changes to the products they ask for. This is unfortunate.
  • I could never work for Lockheed Martin.
EMC
  • EMC brought a bunch of employees from all different areas of the business in front of us to tell their story and answer questions. While it's entertaining to hear about people's life stories, they only had a short amount of time in front of us and I wish we could have made more of it. For example, one sales executive started talking about how he set the record in Nordstrom single-day shoe sales with more than $10K in sales in one day. That's outstanding, and since we've figured out the most interesting conversation we can have, let's discuss sales for the next 20 minutes; I don't need to hear about three other companies that you went to where you also were outstanding at selling products. Unfortunately most of my colleagues disagreed with me.
  • It was nice to hear from a bunch of different employees about what they did at EMC and what their jobs entailed. However it's difficult to get a sense of how someone is as a manager from listening to them speak. Some people are good at speaking and could be bad bosses. Others are probably not very good public speakers but know exactly how to motivate people. I'm not sure the halo effect applies here - if being good at speaking means you're probably also an effective manager.
  • Marketing differed by the age of the company, throughout the week. The newest companies we went to were the most interested and the most effective at using Twitter and Facebook to put their message out. Other companies were not able to do this so much. This could also be because the old companies are generally bigger companies.
  • There's no such thing as a common acquisition; each acquisition is unique and each company is unique.
  • Are Australians really cooler than the rest of us or is a selection bias at play? Maybe all of the boring, uncouth Australians don't make it offshore.
  • Repeating Peter Diamandis's theme from yesterday, one of the key ways to contribute as a young person is to be extraordinarily enthusiastic. You need to give people a reason to recommend you and being enthusiastic is the best way to do it. If you do every task assigned to you extremely well, and ask for more work and do that extremely well then you're someone that people are going to recommend to future employers. At our young age, we don't know much about anything. Enthusiasm is key.
  • Several people at EMC told us that we should engage in more informational interviews. Hardly anyone says no to an informational interview (if you frame it in terms of "I need your help"), and you get to advertise yourself for free, plus I really like talking to people about what they do and what types of problems they solve.
  • One executive told a story about an acquisition that was almost complete, until the EMC execs and the company's execs had a party, and it went "like a junior high dance, with all the EMC people on one side and the other company's people on the other." This emphasizes the importance of being likable, and selling yourself to people. If you are likable, and you can make other people feel good when they're around you, doors are going to open. If not, you might succeed by sheer force but the odds are strongly not in your favor.
  • More good advice was to be extremely flexible. Prove you can do the work they assign you to and then you'll be given better work and more responsibility. The key is to get in the door.
  • EMC gets points for staying away from slides and telling stories. Most of the speakers were very good at telling stories. Almost all said "That's a good question" after the question asker wrapped up. I don't know if they practiced that sort of thing but it makes the question asker feel very good, and it's a good habit to develop.
  • It's important to develop mentors that are outside of your direct company line, so that you have someone to turn to when you have an ethical decision that does not have a vested interest in the answer.
  • EMC had high cubicles and corner offices. I understand the company's big but I think the open office is a much better solution. Cubicles serve mostly to preserve and reaffirm the status of the cubicle dweller.
  • One person who came and spoke to us found every single job he'd been at because a friend recommended him to the boss. Nepotism is alive and well. Networking is an important skill; everyone needs to get people in their corner, who would be willing to go to war for them. This is much harder than getting good grades.

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CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Tuesday

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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.

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Everquest, the great leveler

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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.

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