video games

In today’s podcast Rob is joined by American businessman, electrical engineer and founder of Atari games Nolan Bushnell. Together they discuss how Nolan found success in video games, having Apple founder Steve Jobs as an employee and why ideas are rubbish until you work on them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Each time sales slow down on your product, bring out a new one. Slowly but surely you will become a real company receiving orders and gaining customers. As long as you can keep ahead of everybody creatively, you can become the power.

• The probability of you being a successful gamer in the E sports world is the equivalent to you getting signed up to the New York Yankees. If you make it you can make a lot of money but it is up in the 1% category. Inject practicality into your children wherever possible.

• To be in a relationship with an entrepreneur, you have to embrace chaos and unpredictability. Every once in a while you have to push all of your chips out on the table, some of those chips would usually be put away for house payments which is difficult. The risk profile for an entrepreneur is much higher than normal and much higher compared to a wife and a mother.

• Everybody has a good idea when they’re in the shower. What determines what you do when you get out of the shower? Can you make that idea your own by working on it? Ideas are basically rubbish, you do not own these ideas until you work on them. The more you work on your ideas, the more you own them.

• To be disruptive is to do things that have never been done before in a way that fundamentally changes outcomes forever more. Mathematically there are things called singularities which are things that wipe out the history whilst going forward. True disruption is a singularity.

BEST MOMENTS

“I instantaneously knew that if I screened with a coin slot in my arcade it would earn serious money.”

“I always thought that video games were going to be massive and disruptive, and I felt that  if we tried really really hard we could get a little piece of it.”

“Games have to be easy to learn and hard to master.”

“If it’s fun it can make money.”

ABOUT THE GUEST

Nolan Bushnell is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. Nolan has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed America." Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video gameindustry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012 he founded an educational software company called Brainrush, that is using video game technology in educational software. Nolan is credited with Bushnell's Law, an aphorism about games "easy to learn and difficult to master" being rewarding.

[Business, mindset, entrepreneur, disruptors]

VALUABLE RESOURCES

https://robmoore.com/

bit.ly/Robsupporter  

https://robmoore.com/podbooks

 rob.team

ABOUT THE HOST

Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor, and property educator. Author of the global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK’s No.1 business podcast “Disruptors”

“If you don't risk anything, you risk everything”

CONTACT METHOD

Rob’s official website: https://robmoore.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robmooreprogressive/?ref=br_rs

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979

disruptive, disruptors, entreprenuer, business, social media, marketing, money, growth, scale, scale up, risk, property: http://www.robmoore.com

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk bring on special guest Ben Hanson (co-founder of MinnMax) to open up the listener mailbag and answer some BURNING QUESTIONS. What games does the crew wish they were better at? What are some timeless mechanics? And what are the most memorable button prompts in gaming?

ONE MORE THING

Kirk: Spiritfarer

Maddy: Horizon Zero Dawn 

Jason: Super Mario 3D All-Stars

LINKS

Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/join

MinnMax: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiUhKqsBH-Is2VeC2sykEfg

Who Is John Frum: https://www.topic.com/who-is-john-frum

One More Thing:

Kirk: Fall Guys (mediatonic, on PC and PS4, free PS+)

Maddy: Zoo 

Jason: The Epic/Apple/Google war

Support Triple Click: https://maximumfun.org/join

Epic's complaint against Apple: https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf

TRIPLE CLICK PICKS, VOL 1

1. Disco Elysium
2. Return of the Obra Dinn
3. Hollow Knight 
4. Outer Wilds
5. Destiny 2
6. Bloodborne
7. Breath of the Wild
8. Divinity Original Sin II
9. Hitman 2
10. AC Odyssey

Black Game Devs: http://www.blackgamedevs.com/

The Last of Us 2 epitomizes one of gaming’s longest debates [Chris Plante, Polygon]

Loot crates are virtual prize boxes available for purchase in video games, containing mystery items like customizations, powerful weapons, or rare gear. They are also the subject of the most downvoted Reddit comment of all-time, the crux of a debate about the definition of gambling, and a window into the history of human evolution.

Fires threaten the Amazon, Montana Governor Steve Bullock talks about his 2020 White House bid, and Tracee Ellis Ross discusses "mixed-ish" and her hair care brand Pattern Beauty.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Another mass killing last night but the media is less interested in covering this one. Why is that? Also, Media Matters compiled a video highlighting all of the "bigotry" at the Daily Wire, but it’s really more like a greatest hits compilation. Date: 08-08-2019

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael Babineau is cofounder and CEO of Second Measure. Second Measure analyzes billions of credit card transactions to answer real-time questions on consumer behavior. They were in the Summer 2015 batch of YC and you can check them out at SecondMeasure.com.

Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.

You can find Michael on Twitter @mikebabineau and Kevin is @ilikevests.

The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:35 - What idea did Mike apply to YC with?

01:20 - Where did the idea come from?

4:35 - From project to company

10:20 - What info did investors want to know that Second Measure could provide?

12:05 - Their first customers

14:35 - The primary use case of Second Measure for VCs

15:20 - What questions are they trying to answer?

19:35 - Data examples from their blog

21:05 - Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix

23:35 - Post: Holiday sales rocket Peloton memberships ahead of SoulCycle active riders

25:05 - Post: Prime members deliver for Amazon every day

27:35 - Second Measure's product development process

29:35 - Finding good data scientists who work from first principles

37:05 - Why is credit card data so messy?

42:05 - Cleaning data

44:20 - Using their product for competitive analysis

47:35 - Their sales process

49:05 - Raising money from Goldman Sachs and Citi

52:05 - Focusing on a specific problem

54:05 - Keeping the product compelling when it's table stakes

Today, I interview fellow Ottawan and the founder and CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke. In case you’re still new to the internet, Shopify is the largest ecommerce platform that allows people to easily set up online storefronts to sell everything from jewelry to surfing lessons.

Shopify began as a simple two man operation selling snowboards online, but it became clear rather quickly that it had the potential to grow into much more. Now Shopify employs more than 4,000 people and supports more than 600,000 businesses online. It’s a remarkable story, with a remarkable leader at the helm.

There was so much I wanted to talk to Tobi about that we hop around quite a bit. Here are a few of the topics we discuss:

• Tobi’s thoughts on how video games helped him prepare to run a company
• How selling snowboards online slowly transitioned to the creation of one of the biggest tech companies in the world
• Why Tobi intentionally headquartered Shopify outside of Silicon Valley and how that fits into his overall growth strategy
• One of the most underrated resources Tobi leans on to mine nuggets of wisdom when trying to get insight or solve a problem
• The hard and valuable lessons Tobi learned as they scaled from a 2 employee company to a 4,000 employee company
• What the “Tobi test” is, and how it helps Shopify team members become more adaptable, unified and prepared when things go haywire
• How employees use the “trust battery” and how it fosters better teamwork, communication, and productivity throughout the company
• The benefits of hiring employees in a “secondary market” as opposed to a “primary market” and how that contributes to the unique culture at Shopify
• Tobi’s decision-making process and his philosophy on making quick vs analytic decisions
• Tobi’s unusual morning routine that gets him in the right mindset to tackle the day
• His optimistic view of AI and machine learning and how they will impact the way we do things in the future

And more…

Whether you’re building a business of your own, want to create a more dynamic and unified culture at work, or just like hearing entrepreneur war stories, this episode will not disappoint.

Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/

Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/

Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

One of my favorite writers online is Steve Kamb, who operates a fitness website called Nerd Fitness. What I love about Steve is that he's made fitness accessible and fun to people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in physical fitness or strength training. He takes inspiration from video games, pop culture, comic books, etc. and creates workouts and life lessons. He just wrote a book called Level Up Your Life, and on the show we talk about how video games can be a template for leading a better and more fulfilling life.

To play a game of "Tetris" is to invite a geometric invasion into your mind. After hours of intense block manipulation, you finally set aside your gaming device. You take a deep breath, close your eyes -- and there the frenzied, multicolored tetrominoes continue to cascade across your vision. They build walls in your dreams and shape the patterns of your very thought. What's going on inside the mind of a "Tetris" player and what can we learn from so-called "Tetris" syndrome. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The disturbing trend of school shootings around the world has dragged violence in video games into the hot seat. But are violent video games actually more capable of producing real violence in gamers or is it just the latest victim of societal hysteria?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everyone knows that video games are entertaining -- but could they have therapeutical value? Tune in and learn how Tetris may help victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.