Category: Monocategorized

A few weeks ago I wrote about Minecraft. I promised to spend some time talking about Terraria in the future. As people on the internet are fond of telling you: The Future Is Now!

I have spent a few years marveling at how deep they have made the game while constraining added complexity. Unfortunately, it is really easy to miss out on that depth for a couple of reasons. I want to talk about the depth of Terraria (Warning: there will be some spoilers) as well as try to explain the gap that prevented the game from being even more popular than it already is.

So let’s break it down. Terraria is a game about digging, fighting, and building. You dig holes and cut down trees, you fight creatures that show up while you are harvesting materials, and you build structures to house your treasures and attract non-player characters once you have hit specific goals in the game.

Let’s talk about digging holes first, where digging holes is a simplification of all forms of resource extraction, including cutting down trees. You dig in Terraria for two reasons. The first reason is to accumulate materials. You need stone, ore, wood, and many other materials from the environment to build things. Similar to Minecraft, you have to construct intermediate crafting stations in order to make more complex items. You also need to build homes for non-player characters (NPCs). NPCs will start to show up when you hit certain milestones, including killing specific unique bosses in the game, completing random ‘events’, and hitting additional in-game milestones. The second reason to dig in Terraria is to find specific areas, including a jungle temple, different underground biomes that house treasure chests and creatures, and eventually getting to “the bottom of the world”.

Digging is a pretty basic mechanical activity. As you explore the world, you find new ores and metals you can use to craft faster picks. There are also some materials in the game that cannot be harvested until you get a sufficiently high-enough-level pick to harvest them. You get some pretty cool harvesting/digging machines by the time you reach the end-game. This is not a new mechanic. You need to make a simple pick out of wood in Minecraft in order to eventually make an iron pick in order to eventually make a diamond pick.

While you explore the world via digging, you discover a few things. When you start to dig deep underground, you discover heart crystals that let you increase your total health pool. You also discover that digging deep is hard in two ways. It is hard to get back to the surface from deep into the earth. Also, it is very easy to die horribly from falling. There are a variety of ways to mitigate these issues, including grappling hooks and magic items that prevent falling damage. These two mitigation measures greatly increase your boldness and risk profile in going very deep when you master them. Over time you also find items that let you return to your home base, either on a single use basis or whenever you click on them.

I think that a significant number of players lapse once they have identified this pattern. I also think that is tragic. There are a few things that a player needs to experience in order to take Terraria to the next level. If you experience neither of these things, then you have missed most of the game, in my opinion.

The first thing that a player needs to experience is a goblin invasion. The goblin invasion generates an NPC underground that the player needs to rescue. This lets players acquire a vital crafting item for the game: The Tinkerer’s Workshop. I think that burying this NPC so deeply is a mistake given how vital the Workshop is to end-game progression. If you never experience a randomly generated goblin invasion, nor cause one to happen, you will not create this underground NPC. If you do not find the underground NPC, you will never free him to sell you the Workshop. I will talk more about the Workshop later.

The second vital experience is defeating the final “normal mode” boss: The Wall of Flesh. I have put a lot of links in here to various items to help you progress. I am going to omit linking The Wall of Flesh on purpose. There is a trick to summoning The Wall of Flesh. There is also a trick to defeating it. I will not spoil this for you and I am not sorry.

After you defeat The Wall of Flesh is when the game switches from “learning and progression” into “elder play”. The game will make some substantive changes to the map at this point and it will start “hard mode”. Hard mode will introduce new monsters, new ores, and new bosses into the game.

The thing I like about this mechanic is that it resets the game and mostly preserves the map. It makes significant changes to the monsters and gives you a sense of urgency to mitigate some of the damage to the world. Killing The Wall of Flesh simultaneously resets the player’s power curve against new creatures. I think this is done wonderfully and it is underappreciated as a powerful mechanic.

The new “hard mode” world introduces a variety of bosses that are tremendous fun to fight. There is an actual “end game” boss that does exist. Almost all of the bosses have an in-game item you can use to respawn them and farm them for crafting materials and items.

I want to return to the Workshop now. As you master the hardmode world, you start to accumulate more and more items that give you different benefits. The challenge is that you have a limited number of slots available to equip these items.

The Workshop will let you combine multiple items together. The starting NPC in the game will let you show him an item and he will tell you what items it can be used to create. I think this is also buried slightly too deep in the game. It took me a while to figure out that I should show him every item I found in order to figure out the best items to make. For your convenience I am going to share the link to my favorite “fully crafted” item, the Ankh Shield. 

These are all very cool things.

The very best thing about Terraria is none of these things.

The thing I love the most about Terraria is that almost everything about your character’s power and abilities can be replicated by equipping items. The rest of it, your health pool, can also be replicated by consuming easily obtainable items. With some amount of homework and farming by one character, you can essentially set it up so you can create a second end-game character in under five minutes—either an alternative character (“alt”), or a friend you have invited to come play with you.

I have sunk over five hundred hours into Terraria at this point. I think it is hard to see how amazing this game is in under one hundred hours. I also think that one hundred hours is a pretty unfair burden to the player. They could make some minor changes to the game in order to help players see the elegance of their design related to the Workshop, and better breadcrumbs to incentivize fighting The Wall of Flesh.

I have deliberately left off discussions about flying and constructing boss arenas. I have not discussed potion making or the role of potions and campfires in boss battles. Most of these are minor incremental systems that just make an already interesting game more interesting.

I would encourage you to check out Terraria. It is a fun game and a time consuming game that has incredible depth with modest complexity.

I also think as we are in the middle of many conversations about the future of games that we will see more core games that throw away experience points and leveling systems and turn them purely into in-game representations similar to Terraria.

Thank you for reading along! With five hundred hours of gameplay I was terrified this would be twenty pages long or laced with ruinous spoilers. I think I found the balance I was looking for. I have at least one more game design review queued up around Diablo II for the next few weeks.

Now that my application for helping game masters resolve their tedious creativity problems is live, I also reserve the right to shamelessly flog it here… like some sort of for-profit shill (Warning: Shameless for profit link included).

I spend a non-zero amount of time each month mentoring engineering leaders. Some of them are on teams I work with directly and some of them pay a nominal fee for mentorship. I dispense as much of this wisdom as I can for free (via this very blog!) and I am willing to give everyone a courtesy hour or two each year if they just have simple career questions. As a parent and professional I cannot afford to do more than that without material consideration. If you can accept that people are willing to pay for a dungeon master to play table-top games, you can probably accept that people are willing to pay for professional coaching.

There is a considerable spectrum for mentoring and professional coaching. At one point in the past I was working at a startup where we all received the benefit of a professional leadership consulting service from a wonderful coach named Sally Wilder. I greatly enjoyed that experience. There were a lot of takeaways for all of us from the experience. Today I am going to talk about one of those takeaways: The Binder of John Szeder.

If you have read some of my previous posts about t-shirts (link pending) or know anything about kids who grew up in the eighties, you know I have an ownership fetish. I love my physical goods. T-shirts, books and DVDs please. I get that the kids-these-days want subscription services and digital hats. It should come as no surprise that I treasured receiving a unique physical token as an outcome of our wonderful coaching session.

To be clear, Sally Wilder is not in the business of unique book publishing. Sally Wilder is an amazing professional coach for transcendent leaders. The months we spent together included some take-home assignments for personality tests, interviews with team members (peers, leaders, and subordinates), and multiple sessions where we took the outcomes of these meetings and tests and discussed them in deep, deep detail.

There were five of us who enrolled together to work with Sally, including my boss and three of my peers. It is safe to say that this put a significant dent into our company’s learning and development budget. It was absolutely worth it. At multiple times in your career you will hit a ceiling that is hard to penetrate on your own. External mentors and professional coaches help provide you with tools to break through that ceiling. I have observed that coaching and workshopping sessions are pretty common in sales organizations and sports, and hackathons are an individual contributor equivalent to these in how it helps you refine your craft.

It stands to reason that there are equivalent leadership growth tools—setting aside my own ringing endorsement of Sally and her coaching service.

It is hard to put into words what my binder means to me, and what that time we spent together entailed. I am not going to give a lump-sum review on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It would be too easy for you to go off and run your own online personality tests. You would be completely missing the point by doing so.

The value here is a blend of these assessments, the interviews with people on your team, and the results curated and discussed with an independent source. It is easy to take some leadership coaching courses and it is also easy to get feedback from your direct manager on things you can improve. 

There are questions in each case. 

In the case of a leadership course, do you know if it is helping to identify and provide targeted feedback for areas where you individually need to improve? Is it a generic course that gives you a general sampling of all the materials where you need mastery, or is there a meaningful framework included for how to apply that to your day-to-day on completion of the course?

In the case of your direct manager, I have more poignant questions from my own experience. Are you working in an organization where there is room for your professional experience? Are you working with a “zero-sum” manager who might not give you the best growth advice or leadership opportunities because they need you in your current role for them to be successful?

Those are hard questions to ask. I was denied an opportunity early in my career to take a senior role on a team because my existing manager wanted that role. Other times, I have seen people on career ramps that are slowed down because the existing leadership structures enjoy the scarcity of their rank. When you get to staff engineer and senior director of engineering, there are very few advancement opportunities for people to get to “engineering fellow” or vice president of engineering, and it does cross the minds of some managers and leaders that they need to make sure no one jumps their place in line regardless of ability or merit.

These are important questions to ask yourself. Not everyone has the luxury of a strong and trusting leader. It is valuable to get an independent assessment of your leadership growth path and a list of things to work on. It is a sign your company is willing to invest in you considerably if they are willing to spend learning and development dollars on hands-on professional leadership coaching and a sign they are willing to have you grow with the company.

Working with people (and companies) who are willing to give me transcendent professional opportunities is one of the most important things to me. Early in my career I tended to be reactive in pursuit of my career goals. After a certain point that became an obstacle for me and I started to think proactively about where I wanted to go from that point onwards.

My goals today include giving these transcendent opportunities to other developing leaders. One of the first engineers I ever hired is now the CEO of his own company and has closed series A funding for it. Other people I work with are not quite so far along. When I sit down with them as team members or as a mentor, I love to bring out my binder and talk with them about it. 

There is a certain vulnerability in sharing a printed assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and I think that it helps people to see that is okay. I find it constructive to be transparent about the journey I was on and things I needed to learn. I hope it assists them to go through their own transcendent professional change.

If they still struggle with it, I will do my best to send them to someone who helped me along the way.

Thank you as always for reading! Please feel free to share this on your socials or forward via email to anyone who you think could benefit.

Should I put up a Patreon for these articles? Should I continue to link to Amazon sites (Warning: This link has an affiliate code!) with the intent of making pennies on a Sunday morning?

Maybe I should just continue writing weekly out of the goodness of my heart and just know that it makes the world a little brighter and more abundant!

I wrote an article a while ago about depth and complexity. I mentioned two games that have incredible depth without terrible complexity: Minecraft and Terraria. I am going to attempt to put on my game reviewer hat and talk about each of them individually. This week I am going to talk about Minecraft to kick things off.

There are a lot of people who play Minecraft—millions, maybe even tens of millions or more. Minecraft has an incredibly simple user interface for players and it has an incredible brand promise to its players that it lives up to. There are actually multiple ways that Minecraft is successful:

• Create interesting things with your friends online.
• Explore an infinite randomly generated world.
• Build up your character inventory and increase your ability to take bigger risks over time.
• An incredible “first night experience”.

Wait what? An incredible first night experience? Of all the things you will read about on the subject of Minecraft, this is probably the last thing you would expect someone to talk about. I think it is one of the most important parts of the game and one they only recently have embraced as a part of franchise management.

Let’s talk about what that means. I am going to describe my first night experience with Minecraft as an illustrative example.

My character appeared at the top of a hill overlooking a small pond. The area was surrounded by jungle trees that produced wood and cocoa beans. I started to flatten out a small area of terrain and chop down a large number of trees. This is likely very consistent with everyone’s first few minutes of Minecraft.

There is an incredible amount of learning and habituating going on in that first ten minutes. Cut down trees. Make a crafting table. Collect wood, dirt, and maybe make a few tools like an axe or a shovel.

I mention ten minutes for a reason. Once you get reasonably familiar and have gathered a small pile of materials, things start to change dramatically because the first day is about to end and the sun is going down.

It is not clear to me if people know more about the onset of nightfall now compared to when the game first launched but I was totally not prepared. Nobody tells you that the beautiful pristine jungle hilltop beside this quiet contemplative pond is about to turn into a furious hellscape at sundown.

What I did not know at the time is that hostile monsters spawn when the sun goes down. In fact, any place that has darkness is likely to spawn a monster. Some of them are simple creatures like spiders and skeletons. A few of them are vicious adversaries like the Enderman and the nefarious Creeper whose sad face adorns so much merchandise.

The Creeper is a piece of work. His amazing abilities will completely blow your mind… And everything else too. The only thing that a Creeper does is sneak up on you, play a sound sample of someone lighting a fuse, and then game-end himself by blowing himself up and everything around him.

There is some hilarity in this as well as some tedium. Later in life my humble little world was the eventual home to a set of amazing fortresses and was visited often by two of my young children. I observed that I fell into the pattern of using a considerable amount of dirt and stone blocks patching Creeper holes around my base and replanting my gardens after they would log out. It was very much akin to the way that a parent does a quick tidy pass on the playroom during naptime. I am digressing from my tale.

Needless to say I got blown up by a Creeper and all of my inventory scattered around the flattened hilltop.

I immediately went into panic mode and began erecting dirt walls to keep the creatures at bay. 

This worked great.

Then a spider spawned nearby and climbed over the walls. I cannot recall if I was able to get any weapons at this point—the details are unclear. I may have savagely throat-punched that spider until he ceased to be. It screamed horribly through this whole ordeal. I may have been screaming too.

Since the walls were insufficient to keep the monsters out, I began to do the only thing that any sane person would do. I buried myself in the dirt. Without sufficient resources to keep the creatures at bay, I furiously began putting dirt over my head and making a solid impregnable cube of dirt from which I would laugh at the horrors outside trying to claw their way in.

This worked great.

Then a Creeper spawned inside my fortress-of-dirt-itude and decided to redecorate.

This was almost the end of all the surprises of my “first night”. You can imagine a gentle nature-show narrator at the start of my voyage describing my surprise and delight at the beginning and how they turn into the thirstiest esports shoutcaster as the darkness descended.

At this point the only thing left to do was to cue the Benny Hill music as I frantically ran around punching things and dodging Creepers as the sun began to peek over the horizon.

The last really visceral moment of my first night ordeal happened as the sun fully crested. I saw a number of zombies die in the sunlight which clued me into the dangers of night.

I decided to go back into the jungle to get reinforcements, now that I understood the importance of shelter and light.

At that point, a skeleton standing underneath a tree turned towards me. I decided to step out of line of sight behind a tree since I learned mere minutes ago that skeletons are ranged attackers. I waited a few moments and leaped out from behind my tree to find that the skeleton is now on fire.

I recall thinking “Flaming magic skeletons?” and freaking out as I leaped in and tried to beat it to death. I caught fire and died. By the time I was able to get back to the sad pile of wooden sticks, blocks of dirt, and shoddy tools, the flaming skeletal archer was gone.

As a side note, this last bit of surprise was just me not realizing that skeletons and zombies burst into flame in daylight and that they slowly perished. I really thought that the game had spawned some horrible, high level creature on me, given me a solid drubbing, then teleported away laughing.

I was more prepared the next night—and by more prepared I mean I had a well-lit dirt hut with a tiny hole where I could cower in fear, gently rocking front and back waiting for the daylight to emerge. Was it cowardly and pathetic? Probably. Did I live the entire night without dying? Definitely.

I want to unpack this a little—not in a therapy way (at least not right now). If you think long and hard about how the brain works, and how we learn and what we get rewarded for activities, that first night is a powerful experience . You are constantly re-evaluating your environment based on the things you encounter. You spend the day leisurely building piles of dirt and chopping down trees and crafting your first items. Suddenly the game switches it up and drops a few different flavors of hurt on you. Each of these creatures teaches you valuable lessons. By the next morning you have a solid frame of reference for how to deal with the most common creatures you will encounter for the majority of the game.

After a few years of discussing Minecraft with other players and parents, it became clear there is an interesting pattern of behavior. Many players, myself included, will play in a world for a while and build up to a certain point. Sometimes they will plant crops, sometimes they will travel to The Nether and search for a Nether Fortress. Invariably a substantive portion of players will restart in a brand new world for no apparent reason.

The not-so-apparent reason is they are hunting for their first night experience.

This is probably one of the bigger hooks in Minecraft and is a sign they crafted a great game. World of Warcraft has an excellent early user experience also. There are elements of safety as well as a few elements of risk. You get to play for a certain number of minutes to build patterns of play and learn how to interact with the world, then you run into conflict and at least one creature that has the ability to game-end you.

There are three exact moments that this “first night experience” happens again for most players in the early release of Minecraft.

The first is when they find an underground mine. Mine happened to be precisely underneath the palace I built my fortress. That was incredibly serendipitous. I invested a significant amount of time into exploring and illuminating the mine. Unfortunately there was very little payoff for the time invested. I did not know it was just a random terrain feature.

The second time this happens is when you craft your Nether portal and travel to the next realm as a part of progression. The terrain is vastly different. The creatures are stronger. The rules change. Learning how to survive and master this environment is a slight increase in complexity. The creatures you find here, especially the Blaze, are needed to acquire end-game materials including potions and “Ender Pearls”. You can Google that up if you want to learn more.

The last time this really happens is when you open the End Portal and go to face the Ender Dragon. Once again you are in a brand new terrain with very different rules.

I apologize for the spoilers but there is nothing much left to do after killing the Ender Dragon. Setting aside the time you spend building fancy fortresses, roller coasters, and chicken farms there is not much else to do.

I think this was one of the largest failures of Minecraft. I also think that it is being marginally addressed by its new owners.

Minecraft is a reasonably shallow game. You have three environments, and you only need a handful of items to “win the game”. One of the nice things about the game is that you do not need experience points for much. You mostly use experience points to craft magic items.

You could set up the game, farm until your fingers bleed, invite a friend to come in, load up on gear, and defeat the final boss within the first twenty minutes of character creation. I think that kind of power transfer is incredible and amazing. Many games, including World of Warcraft, create a lot of artificial constructs, like “Soulbound Items”, to thwart players who enjoy this kind of thing. I think Warcraft constrains their audience by creating rigid ownership rules in this manner.

The good news is that they appear to be slowly solving this problem. If you started playing Minecraft today they have patched the main world to include many more biomes. Each biome has its own flavor and has a new item here and there. This is a step in the right direction. They may have complicated things for speedrunners by making more Nether biomes and increasing the time it takes to find a Nether Fortress but they also made the game much more fun and engaging.

Minecraft could be so much more. They struggled a little with their modding community early on and I remember playing the Aether mod and being very impressed with the concept, before a puzzling and unfortunate interaction happened between the company owning Minecraft and the modding community which resulted in a parting of ways.

If you are looking at the internet today, you will see a lot of people writing articles about “The Metaverse”. Minecraft is absolutely going to be a part of “The Metaverse”. How it manifests itself in that future is a little uncertain.

At the very least you will see people knocking off the aesthetic and maybe even some of the mechanics. I would bet cash money you will see people recreating Creepers and Endermen.

With a little work, Minecraft could invest some more time in their Portal items. This would take them a lot farther in the metaverse direction if players could create their own portals to each other’s Realms and even to their own private worlds (admittedly there are CaSh MuNnY reasons why Microsoft might fight the latter suggestion).

In the extreme case Minecraft could get back to where it all started and come up with ways for people to create their own “first night experience”. By letting players create their own worlds with different rules, different creatures, and different biomes, they could recapture that powerful magic that is such a quintessential part of making it a great game. They lost this momentum when they blew up the modder community. I admit I was pretty saddened when this happened and it does look like Minecraft is trying to regain their lost momentum with them.

I cannot help but wonder what Minecraft would look like today if that strange break with modders did not happen. Actually I know. The game is called Roblox, and while it has a worse looking aesthetic, they embraced the modding community and made it their own as a result of the pointless slap fight between Minecraft and its own modding community. It is now worth billions of dollars and probably has more traction with young players than Minecraft does.

In a few weeks I will be giving a similar rambly lecture on Terraria. You have ample time now to install it and get one hundred hours of playtime in. You can make me a few filthy nickels if you have a Nintendo Switch and want to buy it at this link (ThIs LiNk CoNtAiNs An AfFiLiAtE CoDe). You will probably want to play it on the PC instead.

If you get it for the PC and still want to send a few filthy nickels my way I searched for some merchandise (AlSo HaS An AfFiLiAtE CoDe!1!) that will get nods and chuckles from The True Gamers in your life.

If you find the previous links distasteful I apologize. I like filthy free nickels as much as the next person. Maybe more because I stop to pick them up more frequently than most people do.

Thank you again for reading and please Social this if you enjoyed what you read. I am out of funny names for Snap, Twitter, and Facebook, and this is probably too many words for the first two platforms anyway. See you in a week!

I have been fortunate to be a part of many great teams over the course of my career. Every time I am on one of these teams I constantly update a list of people with whom I would be willing to work again. It is a surprisingly large list. I go over that list of people whenever I take a new role and try to figure out who would benefit from joining me.

It is said that people do not leave companies, they leave managers. I believe this is very true. I also think there is some corollary expression on joining companies. People are more likely to join a company if they have the potential to work with a great manager or leader, especially if they have worked together in the past.

This is why many companies slap a non-solicitation clause in their employment contracts or exit agreements. Let’s talk about what that means and more importantly, what that doesn’t mean.

Most companies will put a non-solicitation agreement in their offers of employment. If you find one of these, there are two significant questions to ask. 

The first question is “how long am I agreeing to this?” Generally a non-solicitation agreement is for a year. I do not know that I would accept a multi-year non-solicitation clause in a contract without significant consideration like an exit or a giant pile of equity. The reason you get a one year non-solicitation agreement is that it gives a departing individual a very strong disincentive to reach out and keep in touch with existing employees. There are some clear “out-of-sight and out-of-mind” benefits for a company to discourage these kinds of interactions.

The second question to ask is “are non-solicitation clauses enforceable where I live or where I work?” This is a trickier question. As a leader or a manager there are a lot of things to understand about employment law and this is one of them. I signed a non-solicitation agreement under the laws of the state of California. I will add the standard I-Am-Not-A-Lawyer clause here before stating that I do not believe they are really enforceable. Here is a shiny internet link for you (without Amazon associate codes).

I understand that people will raise an eyebrow at you if you go and poach the living jeepers out of a past employer. Some people will say “something-something-morals” and “something-something-ethics”. Almost nobody says “something-something-retention-bonus”. We have all been somehow convinced that doing the best thing for yourself and for people you work with is somehow wrong and somehow does not have material value. If you take a look at that income gap between yourself and the C-staff five levels above you in their cloud-castle-in-the-sky it honestly does not cost the company much to give someone a retention bonus if they feel like they need to keep you stapled to your chair for another year.

Let’s get back to our non-solicitation conversation. Team building is hard. During the hiring process, when you screen new candidates for joining a team you will run into false positives and false negatives. If you already have worked with a person, you generally know what you are getting. Hiring people you have already worked with is a good way to reduce the risk of growing your team. There are a number of benefits around predictability and familiarity that I won’t go into.

Let’s talk about what to do when you have an aching sensation to bring your former teammates into your new company and you are duty-bound by contract or some half-baked notion of loyalty to your previous employer not to solicit them.

You can start laying the groundwork now if you have not already left your job. The first thing you can do is to engage in regular social activities together like going out for a drink, a monthly board game night, or even taking kids to the park together. Maintain social ties that transcend work with your best people if you can.

I always try to figure out people’s hobbies and interests to see where we have an overlap. Gaming nights, drinking festivities, and youth activities are easy for me as a game-playing, scotch-drinking parent.

The next thing that is important to do is to make it clear to people that you really enjoy working with them. You can write that on their LinkedIn profile. You can tell them in a 1:1 meeting. One of the things that I always tell my best people is that I want to be a lifetime reference. This is absolutely a true statement whenever I say it. It has the added benefit of me learning that they are on the market and looking for a new opportunity when I get that reference call.

The final thing you should do is point out to your teammates that you are under a non-solicitation agreement. It is likely in their own employment contract too. They probably signed it without really caring what it means, especially if it is early in their career. They might not remember it, nor understand that their former leader is bound by it, and take your one year of silence as a lack of interest. It is important to people that they understand that you are bound by a non-solicitation agreement.

You cannot infer that people always know these things are true. If you make it clear to people that you loved working with them, would love to work with them again, and that you have a non-solicitation agreement, they are probably willing to reach out and ask how you are doing in your new role if they feel the same way.

There is one final thing to add here. You have a nuclear option. If you are under a non-solicit, or are unsure of these things, you can talk to your current employer and their legal team. In some cases they might tell you that you are free and clear to go ahead without any burden. In other cases they might tell you it is worth it to recruit your former team members and that they will take the risk of legal action.

The deep truth is that legal action is scary for everyone. If you have just left a startup, they might be needing to have a clean bill of health for fund raising or an IPO. If they have a messy sheet filled with non-solicitation legal action that has significant costs for them to bear.

If you have just left a larger company and they pursue legal action, then you can Glassdoor that shit. Who wants to go work for a company that will sue their former employees?

In the end, one or two team members will not destroy a company. Most companies should accept one or two defections as the cost of doing business. If you poach three former team members, you are clearly exhibiting a pattern of behavior and you should expect a legal warning sent to you or your employer. The sad truth is that generating that legal warning is probably as expensive to a business, if not more expensive, than sitting down with the remaining employees and giving them a retention bonus which is truly the outcome that should matter.

The one thing to be careful about when bound by a non-solicitation agreement is recruiting “key contributors”. That could destroy a company, or at least a line of business. Hiring away a mid-level engineer is one thing, but if you are hiring away the key creator of a company’s intellectual property, you might find they are more aggressive towards trying to show significant damages.

I would love to live in a world where companies throw out the bullying tactics of non-solicitation agreements. It makes sense for people to want to work together again if they have good team dynamics. As a more principled way of dealing with this problem, it would be amazing if teams were given incentives to stick around when a strong leader leaves. You could make the argument that aligning (and by aligning I mean increasing) incentives for teams and their leaders might have been one of the reasons the aforementioned leader left in the first place. That is a conversation for another week.

Thank you again for reading my ranting. This is a spicy and contentious topic and I know my view is probably controversial.

Related to the Amazon affiliate code above, I want to shout out to you all for giving me enough referrals that I was approved as an Amazon affiliate. I am not sure where to spend my forty five cents of unfair earnings.

I will leave you with two links to merchandise to see if I can increase my incredible marketing empire beyond the realm of Roosevelts.

For starters, I would heartily endorse Abundance (please click on this clearly annotated Sponsored Link) because you will see me throw that word around quite a bit. The sooner we all embrace an abundance mindset the better. Abundance!

The second link to grow my nefarious wealth by audience clicking is brought to you by Semantic Software Design (this link also takes you to Amazon). This is probably the greatest book I have not yet read. I reserve the right to revisit my five stars on Yelp once it trickles up to the top of the pile. See you all next week!

I remember attending a GDC talk one year where the speaker spent about five minutes talking about complexity in games. To demonstrate complexity creep they showed a screenshot of World of Warcraft for a level one character. You have a few buttons, one or two quests, and very little else. The next screenshot was a max-level raiding character with an ocean of buttons and addons. The speaker observed that “the complexity of this interface parallels that of a commercial jet plane.” He was not wrong. It is amazing how well World of Warcraft manages to ramp up the complexity of the game without overwhelming the player.

A considerable number of designers would talk about the importance of creating depth in a game without increasing complexity. Some of the people listening will nod and smile here—they will also have no idea what the difference is. The majority of designers who regurgitate the “increase-depth-but-do-not-increase-complexity” mantra throughout the course of their design projects will shit up their design with so much complexity you have to wonder if they even know what it means.

So let’s unpack the difference a little through some illustrative examples.

Bejeweled is a classic casual game that has reasonable depth and not much complexity. You swap gems on a board of tiles. If you create a matching set of three or more gems, they will disappear and new gems will drop down from the top. It does not take long for the average new player to get familiar with this mechanic and not much longer afterwards to master it. You would not expect people to play much more than five or ten minutes and be done with the experience.

People played this game for much more than five or ten minutes because they increased the depth of the game over time. The game of Bejeweled will start off with four or five colors of gems on the board. After you have made a number of matches the number of different colored gems goes up slowly. Each new color of gem decreases the likely matches, and the game gets harder. You do not consciously notice the new gems being added into the game and the difficulty starts to ramp up. This is a great example of increasing the depth of a game.

Let’s fast forward five or ten years and talk about the spiritual successor to Bejeweled: Candy Crush. Candy Crush essentially possessed the same match-three mechanics as Bejeweled. It was much more successful for a variety of reasons. Candy Crush initially possesses the same depth structure as Bejeweled. It is different because over time it gradually increases its complexity.

It is important to note the increase is gradual. Unlike the original Bejeweled, Candy Crush is broken up into levels with specific objectives. Every 20 levels there is a hard progression gate and they introduce new types of candies and blocks over time.

Each of the new candies that gets added to the game creates a new mechanic. Some of them will block players from making swaps on the board. Some of them will change over time. Each new mechanic requires the player to think about how to complete the level objectives differently due to the new obstacle added.

The previously mentioned World of Warcraft also increases its complexity gradually. You get a new power every few levels, slowly increasing the number of buttons you have to press and the number of game mechanics to think about. The game is very complex by the time you get to maximum level and start learning elder play patterns.

Two other great games that possess considerable depth are Minecraft and Terraria. It does not take much time for the player to become familiar with the mechanics of both games that will persist all the way through to the end. In the case of Minecraft, making potions and magic items is probably the most complex thing you will need to master in order to defeat the final boss. In the case of Terraria, you will need to master creating combinations of items to get all of the buffs/powers possible in a limited number of inventory slots while you battle bosses in carefully constructed arenas.

Adding depth to games as a designer is very hard. Not many games do it well. I cannot tell you how to do this well in two sentences. Or paragraphs. Or years.

Adding complexity to a game as a designer is easier. The problem is that it puts a burden on the player and it runs the risk of making the game feel unfamiliar or frustrating. Both of these are serious problems. When adding complexity to a game, it is important to put in scaffolding for the players to experience new mechanics or game elements in order to get comfortable with them. It is also important to control the flow of complexity into the game. If you add too many elements too quickly, then players will stop having fun and find something else to do.

This also translates into product design. I am launching a product soon and the first version of my MVP (minimum viable product) was slightly too complex for a first time user. 

I had to sit down and carefully go through the feedback of my first ten test users and revamp it to reduce that complexity. The early feedback suggests that the changes I made were helpful there.

If you are in the business of creating software for consumers, I would highly recommend spending some time playing successful games and thinking about depth and complexity. It will transform your craftsmanship.

It is interesting how many people have good ideas that are similar. One of my personal favorites comes out of a product that I really wanted to make for a long time. I went so far as to prototype and pitch it to a number of mid-tier game publishers. The thing that fascinated me about the game pitch was that the vast majority of people who I spoke with, who were the decision makers for their portfolios, said “I would absolutely love to play this game!” They immediately followed that with “But we would not publish this here.” The game was a product fit with their portfolio and would be a customer fit for the people they wish to market to. There was probably one thing in the game pitch that was really off-putting to publishers and I should have removed it once, just to see if it would generate a different reaction.

I want to talk about the off-putting part of the game pitch because it is one of the big reasons that Fortnite is the success it is today. No I am not Al Gore and no I did not invent the internet. As I said, many people have good ideas that are similar.

I believe that Fortnite clearly demonstrated something that I wanted to prove for many years now.

It is better to create dolphins than to find whales.

I suppose that statement makes more sense if you were up to your elbows in mobile game publishing, or spent three years in the trenches sending facebook invites to mitigate the costs of your social game customer acquisitions.

There is a taxonomy of game spenders that is generally applied to free-to-play games. Yes. Free-to-play games are not-always-free-to-play. Download a top-performing game on your phone if you have no idea what I am talking about and enjoy the free education you can get until the game itself wants you to spend 19.99 (most popular!) to remove some sort of negative emotional experience like loss or waiting one hour.

The taxonomy is as follows:

A grinder is someone who plays a game for free. As an aside, I generally try to play many popular games as a free player as long as possible. I look for the point at which the game becomes nearly unplayable without paying. I refer to this part of the game as “the grindwall”.

A minnow is someone who buys one or two things, generally from one dollar to ten dollars.

A dolphin is someone who buys more than one or two things and generally spends twenty to eighty or even one hundred dollars.

A whale is someone who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars in a game.

I am not going to attack the whaling strategy of game companies here. People have done the calculation on running a mostly free game and know how much they can spend on acquiring one hundred random customers to find one whale. Collecting revenue from whales in games is reasonably well understood by many people with tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in marketing budgets to keep that segment engaged.

I will point out that I do not have tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in marketing budgets. Should I apologize for being poor? Maybe if more of you clicked an affiliate link I would have tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars with which to market things (Site disclosure: if you click that link and buy something Johnny gets paid a fee). I forgive you for not doing so. Even Amazon itself has pointed out that I am really bad at affiliate marketing.

So what can you do without a massive customer acquisition budget? I wrestled with this for a while and tried to figure out a strategy which would give me a first mover advantage or possibly even a sustainable competitive advantage. Something something MBA amirite?

If everyone is spending all kinds of money looking for high value customers (the whales), it probably does not make sense to spend money to try to find medium value customers. You will not be able to “spend differently” in most channels; your efforts will simply be lost in the noise.

Perhaps the right thing to do is to market to players who are not known to be spenders and entice them to spend a modest amount.

This wound up in my game pitch.

After being declined for more than one or two years, it is interesting to see that this is the pattern that makes Fortnite such an amazing success.

There are a lot of people out there who claim to understand the success of Fortnite. I think that most of them are wrong. Fortnite is not successful because it is an amazing battle royale game. Fortnite is not successful because it has an amazing aesthetic.

Fortnite is successful because when you see someone else owning something that you like, it is really easy to spend five or ten dollars to buy that thing.

Most people cannot wrap their heads around the spending patterns of Fortnite players.

It is fun to bust a move in the lobby with three people who have the same moves you do. 

It is fun to put on an outfit inspired by your favorite game or movie that just partnered with Epic. 

It is also fun to pull out a pickaxe that looks like a giant christmas ham and beat someone to death with it—if you are a better player than they are.

All of these experiences grant you no additional power in the game. They are all also relatively inexpensive and tremendously pleasurable.

Epic Games has taken a decent amount of money from my household. We had a few years of big fun as a family running in Battle Royale. None of us would contemplate spending a single penny in one hundred percent of all other battle royale games.

Epic Games took people who otherwise did not want to spend money in a category and made it fun to do so.

They created dolphins.

I would argue that Riot Games does a similar thing with League of Legends. The stuff you buy in League of Legends is reasonably specific, does not cost thousands of dollars, and lets you have great fun in a game that only has two shitty levels. Maybe I am not a League of Legends fan. That is not the point.

I think that most new genres are spawned by companies who are successful at creating dolphins. Even if they did not spawn the genre, I also think that a good slice of top performing games in really healthy product categories get there by the same means. I would argue that Minecraft, Terraria, and even the Diablo franchise fall under one of these two categories.

The audience reaction varies when someone takes existing franchises that are beloved by dolphins and attempts to convert the IP into a whale-centric model. After all, we all have phones. I think that there are a lot of people who feel that whale-centric distribution models require too much dark pattern maintenance to be good products. I also think there are a lot of people who accept it because they have hobbies that have a similar sized budget that they feel is comparable. I acknowledge the debate and just get more popcorn.

The next time you find me working on a game I will probably come back to this article. I hope that the thesis described here will withstand the test of time. I will also write some more about my thoughts on Diablo, Minecraft, and Terraria. Each of these games has done amazing things that I would like to articulate.

You might also find them inspiring some of the systems I will be putting into future products.

Thank you again for reading. I have a few posts queued up here on game design as well as some posts on mentorship. I am also putting the finishing touches on my “tedious creativity” application for dungeon masters. You will hear more about all of these things in the coming weeks and months!

This week there was an article in the news about Kickstarter looking to put itself on a blockchain. Generally I see a lot of “something something blockchain” articles and think to myself “yeah, that is a hard no”. Kickstarter being on the blockchain actually makes a lot of sense.

I am not here to talk about that today.

Today I am here to talk about t-shirts and why I removed crowdfunding from my bucket list.

Crowdfunding looks exciting. You have an idea that you are too poor to execute, you tell the world about it, and everyone interested gives you some money to build it. People wrote a bunch of articles on how to succeed with crowdfunding. I read them all voraciously, hoping to leverage the Power of The Crowd to build one of my dream projects one day. While there is a definite investment by the crowd into “I wish to back the project of someone who made something in the eighties or nineties that I really loved”, there are also some additional people who will back new projects from creators who have no track record. Online experts published crowdfunding stats about all of this. They tracked the number of people you have as facebook friends and twitter followers and correlated those to successes and failures.

I personally backed about ten projects myself. The outcomes were split evenly between “I got what I paid for”, “I never got anything and I want revenge”, and “I forget what happened—I just wanted to support the creator”.

A half-dozen friends crowdfunded their own projects while all of this was happening. The most recent of these was a fun little tabletop game. In three cases I offered to eyeball their product offerings, and see if I could provide any feedback.

Universally I observed three things in each of the kickstarter proposals.

The first is well written about. Making physical goods is hard and expensive. Put enough profit margin into your physical goods offerings so you do not sink all of your crowdfunding earnings into making rewards. Remember to account for international shipping costs too.

The second is that pricing is really tricky. I had the benefit of working in publishing and platform businesses and I got to learn a considerable amount about pricing. I am by no means an expert at pricing, however, there are some very important prices to support in your Kickstarter. If you have gaps in your price offerings it will make it harder for you to get your project over the finish line. I generally looked to see if there was a 50 dollar offering that made sense, a 75 dollar offering that made sense, and a 150 dollar offering that made sense. These are the levels I would contribute to someone’s kickstarter. Generally speaking I found that one or more of these tiers was missing. If “John-as-potential-funder” does not have a price point that he will invest at, it is hard to move him up into 200 dollar land. If there is not enough interesting stuff lower then he will also not move down. This is a great way to get to zero million dollars quickly.

The last thing was really a personal one for me.

I am a sucker for physical goods. When I see a Kickstarter I want to back, I look at the aforementioned 50 dollar to 150 dollar window to see what has the nicest physical offering I can buy. As an Ultima fan from the eighties, I was stoked that I could get a big box for Shroud of the Avatar. It sits on the shelf next to my Collector’s Edition Ultima Online box.

I am grateful that I was able to talk to a few people early enough in their crowdfunding plans that I could give them some of this feedback. I also took advantage of that to do some help-me-to-help-you kung fu.

I told them to sell me a t-shirt.

I will repeat my earlier statement about not being a marketing guru. I will also repeat my earlier statement that crowdfunding is hard. You can be forgiven for not including an important price point and you can be forgiven for not thinking about selling a t-shirt.

I also think that it is one of the best things to put into your crowdfunding campaign.

For starters, t-shirts are not terribly expensive. There are some logistics on sizing to solve for, and certainly international shipping is a pain, but if you put a t-shirt into a 70 dollar or higher tier, you will be able to make money with it to support your wonderful project. If you price it in the 30 dollar or 50 dollar tiers, not so much.

It also turns your biggest fans into advertising machinery. Before you look horrified, people will also be happy to be your advertising machinery! I wear a Macallan scotch hat sometimes. I also have Justice League t-shirts. People have commented on my World of Warcraft hoodie in the grocery store, even though it is from the Alliance.

[Required Disclosure: The above links are shameless attempts to get you to buy something and generate an affiliate fee. I have less than thirty days left for one of you to buy anything I have linked before Amazon considers me a failure and revokes my as-of-yet-unused affiliate code.]

Coffee mugs are cute, as well as collectible box sets. The challenge with those is that you do not take your collectible box sets out into the world with you and I have questions if you are taking your crowdfunding mug to Starbucks for refills.

People who are better at this marketing stuff than I am will tell me this is some clear “one plus one equals three” marketing. You get your investment from the crowdfunder who is now a walking talking billboard and you might eventually get one or more socially validated customers.

I was glad that each campaign where I gave some feedback was successfully funded. I am also glad that I was able to get t-shirts out of them where it was possible.

If you are about to jump into crowdfunding, I would love to hear about it. I would be willing to stare hard at your crowdfunding plan for thirty minutes and talk about it with you afterwards as a courtesy.

If you do not want to listen to me ramble on about your plan directly, at least try to follow the three pieces of basic advice above. If you do not, you run the risk of losing your shirt.

As I am putting the final touches on my “Tedious Creativity” product for game masters, I want to talk about one of the dumbest things I have done in my career.

In 2007 or so, mobile 1.0 was starting to wrap up. It was pretty clear that the party was over, and people were either leaving on their own or being not-so-gently escorted to the exit.

My business partner and I decided to shutter our fledgling studio before this happened and each of us went our separate ways.

I sat down and tried to figure out my next steps. There were two marketplaces that were adjacent to mobile games. The shitty, casual, downloadable games market, and the shitty Flash games market. I spent about a month in analysis paralysis on which of these two markets made the most sense for me to spend time and energy on.

The mistake I made here was meme-worthy. I was the “why not both?” kid. And that was absolutely the dumbest thing to do.

I had two sets of contractors working on projects. One was a tribute to “The Oregon Trail”. A downloadable casual game where you travelled west across a pseudo-random map including a mountain range, some rivers, and eventually settled in the west. It generated a fun little narrative outcome based on how many wagons, resources, and people you arrived with. It had some interesting progression structures and the ability to choose multiple different wagon masters to help give different outcomes.

The other project was a limited Flash game that told the first leg of a three-part story. It was the story of a young farm boy on his way to learn how to become a wizard. The game was a simple puzzle game where you matched items on a board for simple offensive and defensive spells in battle. There was deliberately no progression added to the game.

The good news and the bad news is that both titles shipped and recouped their investment. This was good news because I did not lose my shirt. This was also bad news because they did not generate profit.

While I learned a great deal about each platform, it was not enough for me to make a decision to commit to one or the other, and in the intervening window of time it took to ship both of these products, each marketplace was maturing, and going the way of mobile 1.0. They were both collapsing and were soon to be gone.

The mistake I made was to split my focus between these two different marketplaces. There was almost nothing that could be leveraged from each project into the other. They each had different audiences—they each had different technology stacks. It was a fun design exercise and I learned a tremendous amount from each product.

I have done some analysis on game designers and game studios over the years. I always ask people if they can name ten different designers who have had “best sellers” in two or more categories.

It is a very small list. You can count David Jaffe, Jon Van Caneghem, and Will Wright among them for certain. The list breaks down at that point and you really have to squint at the other game designers and their products and nitpick. I do not know that I have ever seen that list get to ten designers.

It is probably tremendous hubris on my part to think that I could have gotten two “base hits” in two different categories concurrently. Even in early mobile two of the products I worked on were top five best sellers in the same category.

I am spending some time thinking about this right now because I am about to launch a product and thinking about what to do next. I have decided to reopen my back catalog and picked a game to iterate on. I chose one of the first two games I have ever made—a simple RPG I built for the Pocket PC—to be the basis for my next project.

There are a few reasons for this.

The first is that it is the product I want to make.

The second is that it is time to stack up my projects more effectively.

If you look at games like Diablo, Torchlight, Fate, and others, you will find out that there is a core of individuals who, working together, have honed their craft in this space. All of them went on to make a successful game in its category and in its genre after they initially worked together on one project or another. Sometimes it was at Blizzard—sometimes it was at WildTangent.

The core team that did Diablo went on to make a studio called Flagship and worked on a game called Hellgate London.

As a customer, I was super excited to hear that the Diablo team was making a new game. The instant I saw the trailers I felt like I was pushed off a cliff.

It was nothing like Diablo. I immediately became unexcited.

I think there is a decent-sized segment of gamers who felt the same way. The game launched and did not attract a massive audience.

It is my personal opinion that this product would have done much better if they stuck to their core expertise—they should have stacked up their projects.

You can look at Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, and many other game designers who have built their careers on a stack of games. It is a good model to follow.

Quite often, if you peer into the history of a particular game studio, you will find the same thing. Studios develop expertise around a particular genre or audience. They will find repeated successes with that genre or audience.

You will also find that many of them have early projects that did not do well or were cancelled. In some cases they used these projects to build a core audience or a core technology upon which they could grow.

Starting businesses is hard. Getting successful with consumer products is harder. Making a profitable game studio is probably one of the hardest intersections of those two statements.

I have had a few people over the years inquire about some elements of my back catalog that were successful. I always give them the same reply. 

“I will partner with you to do the game you want, but it will need to be the third game we do together”.

While this might be the best long term win-win outcome, generally it is not met with enthusiasm. There is a long and complicated discussion there about leverage, ownership, and strategy that will need to wait for another day.

I hope you all take away the importance of stacking up your projects and figuring out how to leverage them better using my counter-example. While I have learned an amazing amount from the various projects I have worked on, none of them gave me any of that famous “one plus one equals three” magic that you need to succeed in the business world.

Looking forward to lamenting about some other stupid crap I should have done differently next week!

Twas the night before christmas and the lights were down low
The energy all taken by an ethereum bro
The stars overhead were shiny and glinting
And pictures of monkeys were furiously minting

Their marketing felt like a kick to the groin
As the shillers would pimp their collections and Coin
Maybe people paid extra to buy their own token
Because the supply chain for real things is totally broken

The ships with their stuff are all stuck in the ocean
Somehow corporate stocks are still upwards in motion
We no longer hear about the planet and Greta
We all rolled our eyes as FB became meta

Tim Epic and Tim Apple are still fighting dirty
Epic takes twelve percent, Apple still takes thirty
We all managed somehow to get some work done
We all managed somehow to go have some fun

As flights are all filling and as we all go back indoors
We resume our dining, our playing and our chores
A few companies had the incredible cheek
To pay five days of pay for a four day work week

Will we see more responses to staff indignation
To attract back the talent from “The great resignation”?
We all watched Activision reach a new low
Which coincidentally rhymes with “new CEO”

Let’s take a deep breath, this year’s almost through
We stand on the precipice of 2022
So let down your hair and let out a great cheer
And have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I spend a day each week with my professional hobby. I promise I will actually talk about it soon. I do not want to share the details while it is still approaching “Da Real MVP”. The “DRMVP” is the “MVP” you launch after you build your first “MVP” and discover it is not “V”. If you do not know that MVP is Minimum Viable Product, by the way, we should talk more often.

I am paying someone full time to work on this product. I am hopeful that we will be able to make some money off of it somewhere. If you want to know more about what I am building, search my blog for the subject of Joe the Elf. Okay fine. It is located at Joe-The-Elf. Happy? I saved you some typing. Read that later if you haven’t already.

I am paying to build this product in its entirety because it constitutes enough risk that no one in their right mind should put a dollar towards it. I could probably convince someone that it is worthwhile to invest in this product; however, I absolutely guarantee that I would spend more time trying to convince someone of that than actually building it. Maybe it means I am a shitty salesman. I don’t know.

I do have one other project that I think would be fundable. Something something NFT. I also know that it will be an uphill project to get it funded because it is the second professional hobby I am starting. My theory is that my first project will launch and require a little bit of attention here and there, but it will effectively be operating with minimal adult supervision very soon.

The problem I am going to have with raising money for my second project has already manifested itself. I have been given extremely negative feedback about raising money for it twice by people I really appreciate, and once in video form, while listening to someone who is an investor in the something-something-NFT space.

“You are not serious about your project if you are not on it full time”.

I listened to them. Really I did. I bit back the urge to send them a fax with my feedback.

The truth is that it is a bunch of bullshit. I won’t go into the long conversation about family, children, life choices, and investors that will invariably ensue. As a parent of six kids, one in college, it is probably not a good idea to go all in 100% on my professional hobby even if it possesses outsized returns. You cannot buy baby clothes with options, nor pay for college with equity.

Somehow my life choices make me a bad entrepreneur.

Okay. Accentuate the positives. I want to talk about Elon Musk. Actually, I don’t. Not really. Enough people talk about Elon Musk. Let’s think about him for a minute, shall we?

If you asked an investor today if they would invest in Elon Musk’s company, they would probably say yes. They might also ask “which one”?

According to the collected wisdom of the easily-distracted investor, Elon Musk is also a bad entrepreneur.

From the boring company, to space trucks, to rocket ships, to electric cars and flame throwers, the dude has got some serious focus issues, right?

And yet, he totally would be worth putting your money to work.

That is because Elon Musk is an ultrapreneur.

What-the-what-what?

If you spend any time looking at investor stats, you will observe that a large number of investors throw money at young folks fresh out of college (whether they completed it or they dropped out of it; it does not matter). The burn rate of a single person who shares an apartment with two other people is remarkably low. It means you can write a lot of checks to a lot of people. A lot of very similar people.

You might see where I am going with this. There are studies out there about the best age to be an entrepreneur from a return-on-investment perspective. There is a bit of a disconnect between the pattern of behavior of investors and the pattern of returns.

If you expected me to say “something-something-cognitive-bias”, you are right. Everyone pattern-matches on the young tech bro who can build a whole product for what it costs me to keep my kids fed and clothed and in college for a year.

Let’s go back to my new word: The ultrapreneur.

What exactly is that?

An ultrapreneur is someone who is making a new business as a part time project.

There is a vast untapped ocean of people who have the vision and dream to build something amazing while blending it into their current work-life balance. Sometimes that work-life balance involves family, and sometimes it might involve additional part-time professional obligations. A good number of friends of mine are building really awesome projects on their own time and dime because they have done the math and concluded that in the amount of time it would take for them to write it all up and convince someone to take an investment journey with them, they could have just built the thing and shown off the investment hypothesis in a live trial. Given how little it costs to build products now, you will see more and more of this happening.

I think that, over time, the investment community has neglected and dismissed the bulk of the ultrapreneur crowd. The exception here is when it is someone who has already demonstrated a few significant exits, such as the aforementioned Elon Musk.

As the current venture model patterns crack and show signs of strain, I am expecting a tectonic shift into alternative funding patterns. Sequoia Capital has figured this out. They are focusing on optimizing their exit strategies. Eventually, venture capital firms are going to start examining the top of their funnel. Less “four twenty year old dudes sharing apartments while they work eighty hour weeks” and more of something else. I want to spend some more time unpacking this in the future with you all.

Unfortunately, I need to get back to work on my hobby project now that I have basically raised a giant middle finger to the entire institutional capital industry… I hope to inspire additional people to become ultrapreneurs when my project becomes successful!

PS: Yes there is more to come. Consider this to be one of them teasers that gets dropped on you by the Netflix.