z on life

For some reason I woke up this morning and really wanted to play some old school Warcraft 2. In my opinion, it’s the best RTS of all time, but I am biased via serious nostalgia. It’s been forever, and by that I mean at least 5 years since I have even set foot inside the lands of Azeroth, Lordaeron, and Draenor. To my dismay, I didn’t have OS 9 Classic installed so I couldn’t boot up my disc image and hop on over to Battle.net so I was left to look at some YouTube clips (see below) of other people playing. On a good note, I saw some clips had come onto YouTube within the last month which means people are still playing and that is awesome. I look forward to playing again once I get my computer adequately equipped.

So I was thinking about what I liked War2 so much and thought I’d write about it. The game was originally release by Blizzard in December of 1995 when I was 8 years old. It dominated my life for the next 5-7 years with varying degrees of obsessive attachment. For a while in elementary school, I would wake up at 5:30AM, 2 hours early, just to get a few games in before the drudgery of school. I would come home and put off my homework for 3, 4, 5 hours at a time because of playing War2. All my closest friends played and we would either sync up over IM, phone, or bring computers to each other’s houses and play sometimes for 12 hours at a time. And yes that meant carrying desktop machines. We would sit on the phone together while playing just for fast hands-free communication, tying up both the phone line for the dialup modem and the house phone. My parents were usually less than pleased. It was an addiction. It was a serious problem. But boy was it fun.

So why was it so fun?

If I could make a product with even half the long-term appeal as War2, I’d die happy. That said, I decided to think back and dissect what made it so great.

The game was relatively simple with only a handful of unit types, buildings, upgrades, and players generally stuck to a handful of maps (GoW, Friends, PoS, HSC, and maybe a few more). It was a relatively newbie friendly game with a not-so-steep learning curve to capture the basics, but gave enough room to grow that seasoned veterans could wipe out more novice players with ease. The game was both inviting in the short-term and challenging in the long-term, a combination that is hard to get right.

The end-game scenarios begged you to play one more. By that I mean winners always felt they could play a rematch to win in even grander style and losers always felt as if they ‘knew why’ they lost and could correct it next time. This is an interesting dynamic, that games always seemed closer than they really were. Moreover, the games were relatively lightweight and you could be up and playing again in literally less than a minute from ending the last game, greatly reducing the psychological barriers to deciding to play again.

The unpredictability of gameplay was so fascinating in that the same exact game setup could yield very different types of games. A 2v2 Garden of War could be over in 5 minutes with a well-coordinated rush or could last 2+ hours with players choosing a long-term power strategy. When you were launched into a new game, you never knew if you were in for a quick, scrappy scrum or a drawn-out epic battle and this kept things interesting. You played for the epic games, but quick fights were also very gratifying, so you left happy no matter what. But overall, the variable degree of satisfaction and surprise kept things new and alluring each time you immersed yourself in a game.

The tension of the rock, paper, scissors dynamic creeps in at the beginning of each game. All you can see is you and your allies’ base, with the fog of war obfuscating the rest of the map. Every second the apprehension builds. Will it be a rush, a power, an offensive tower, a quick expansion, or some hybrid? The complexity compounds when you have a team-game. Both rush? Both power? One of each? And what if it’s 3 or 4 players per side? Wow, it gets crazy. A good strategy is 20% guesswork and 80% execution, but great guesses can prove to be powerful. The serendipity of choosing the right or wrong counterstrategy to your opponent is enough to create anxiety but not enough to leave the game to pure chance.

The masculinity of destruction is so empowering for the players, who, by the way, were mostly male. There is simply nothing like a group of fully upgraded and bloodlusted ogres pounding a townhall down or a death knight casting death and decay in an enemy’s gold flow. It feels amazing to slaughter your opponents troops and leave a path of razing and sheer destruction behind you. It’s one of these things that feels so indescribably good but you don’t know why and you just can’t explain it to someone who “doesn’t get it”.

The game is very much a social experience both for real-life friends and friends made through online play. As I said earlier, my friends and I would play religiously day in and day out. If any of us was lukewarm on playing on a given day, the others could easily convince them to play ‘just one’ that turned into many games and many hours of fun. Like all bad decisions, you will almost certainly follow a few of your friends jumping off that bridge if they push hard enough. After all, they need you or they can’t play that awesome 4v4 match!

Rankings and clans pushed the achiever-types to constantly want to pump their stats. Playing with some of the big online personas (the best players) was awe-inspiring. I remember wanting to be in some of the best clans so badly that I would dream about it. It was something to aspire to that never got old. If you made it, you were in the club and got to append a clan symbol to the end of your name, a sign that you were among the elite and obviously cool. I would seek out games with the top players and try to impress them. Because I never quite made it, I was always looking up to them and their God-like statuses. It kept me going.

The gameplay was not long tail in that there were a few core setups that were played over and over again. I would say 80+% of games were GoW or Friends with high resources on fastest speed. This meant that everyone was training to perfect the same set of tactics and it was not as though every player had their niche map and setup. This made the competition all the more fierce and wins all the more rewarding. If you can win on some obscure map because you have specialized unique knowledge of the terrain and strategy, that’s okay. However, if you can win consistently on the map everyone is an expert at and plays many times a day, then you are really powerful.

Every game was about the team and not the individual. In games like Diablo and WoW we see the end goal as a selfish one, to advance your character. Although I did play Diablo a lot and loved it, there is something unique when the win involves the whole team and is for the whole team, especially if you’re playing with real-life friends. The ‘Aha! We did it together. Yes!’ moment is what meant the most for me. It’s like going to war with your best friends and coming out the victors, something that’s so uniquely special.

So what got me to stop playing?

The last key War2 moment I remember was a 2v2 Garden of War match where my friend Derek DiPietro and I were beating Metal and Azteca, the top-ranked two-some in the world at that time. Upon sensing defeat, they disconnected their modems and dropped. We got a ‘disc’ instead of the win. Somewhere in the depths of the hard drive of an old machine in my house, there is a screenshot of the pending victory, and that’s what counts. I guess having won the ultimate prize was enough and my play trailed off from there.

I still played a few times off and on since then. Even more surprising is that now I am 21, it’s 13 years after release, and I still have the urge to play. Blizzard definitely did something right.

Let’s say you’re a brilliant hacker or any other breed of wild intelligence. You’re young, maybe high school, college, or shortly after, and show the potential to achieve enormous success and to make huge sums of money. You haven’t made it yet, though, so you haven’t hit a state of financial security and would obviously like to have more money than you do. You may need money to pay off college, or to quit worrying about paying the bills so you can focus on being entrepreneurial, or just want a bit more of a comfortable life now and pay it off later. So, if you’re in this scenario, would you sell life equity?

What exactly I mean by life equity is the following:

1. You find someone interested in your potential.
2. They give you X dollars up front.
3. You give them in return Y% of your earnings every year for life.

There’s lots of ways to do this like allocated the money in tranches subject to performance, a variable percentage of future earnings, etc. But let’s keep it simple. If a benefactor wanted to give you $1MM right now for 10% of all future money you made, would you do it? If not, what if it was 5% or even 2%? If yes, what if it was 20% or even 50%?

The pros:

1. You can stop worrying about baseline finances.
2. You can earn interest on the money you now have in the bank.
3. You can engage in ventures without seeking early external funding.
4. You can spend money to alleviate stress and increase professional performance.
5. You can get career help from your benefactor who has a vested interest in your success.
6. You can do things, go places, and help people you couldn’t before.

The cons:

1. If you’re really successful, you actually end up losing money on the deal.
2. Every year you have to think about how you traded a one-time gain for an annual loss.
3. If structured wrong, you may have incentive to do nothing after getting the money.
4. Being able to do anything you want is hugely distracting and a career detriment.
5. You are accountable to your benefactor for returning good money to him or her.
6. You now have a much weakened sense of urgency to go far in your career.

So would I do it? The truth is it depends on the numbers. A good deal is a good deal, and certainly money at different points in life has a different value, and for most people that utility curve is monotonically decreasing so money up front can be a rational choice. On the other hand, there is something special about making it on your own, not having things given to you, and having complete control. It should be the process of building success, not the financial reward itself, that is valuable in life. If you’re confident in yourself and have the basic necessities to live, I think the answer has to be no. So would I do it? Probably not, unless the deal was really good.

Cases where I think it does make sense:

1. The person is in abject poverty but shows huge potential. Even if it is just to pay for college, the money could make a huge difference.
2. The cash infusion can raise the expected career value of the person more than the annual percentage payment. This is like the minor league baseball player that recently wanted to do this very thing so he could practice instead of working two side jobs.
3. The person has a valid time-sensitive reason for needing money. Maybe it concerns the health or wellness of a family member or something else where the money loses its value sharply as time goes on.

But before the notion of ‘life equity’ could ever became a common financial product, there’s a couple things that need to be worked out:

1. How do you price such a risky and variable future cash flow?
2. Does equity lead to ‘voting rights’ for life decisions?
3. Is this purely financial? If not, how would intangible achievements (ie: Nobel Prizes) be split up?
4. What are the ramifications of people holding stock in others? Suddenly there can be a quantifiable benefit to favors and business relationships. Would this corrupt the flow of business dealings?

I am not sure this concept of life equity will ever exist above and beyond a few one-off cases. I have been told it has been tried in the past for very special scenarios and has not worked out (I don’t know when and where, but I am looking into that now). If it did, though, would you sell part of yourself? For how much and with what terms? It’s very interesting to think about. I’d love to hear some thoughts.

In the world of startups, everyone seems to have a different definition of ‘winning the game’ or ‘being successful’. With that said, I wanted to write about what I think winning is and is not.

To start, let’s talk about some popular ways to viewpoints on what it means to win that you hear in and around the startup crowd all the time:

1. Making something that millions of people use every day
2. Working with your friends, being comfortable, and having fun
3. Becoming Internet famous
4. Getting to a liquidity event
5. Being massively rich

To different extents, I disagree with every item above. Some of those are merely stepping-stones to real success, and some just have no place in the same sentence with the word ‘winning’.

Making something awesome that a lot of people use everyday is sometimes necessary but never sufficient in building a real business. Unless you can truly extract money from those users in a significant and sustainable way, I don’t see the point. Maybe the purpose of your work life is to just provide cool goods and services to the world. In that scenario, you’re really just running a charity event, in which case you need to acknowledge to yourself and others really what your true intentions are. But if the purpose of your work life is to build big companies, then focus on economic value by thinking about distribution, retention, monetization, strategy, relationships, and market before anything involving the word ‘cool’.

Getting to work with your friends with flexible hours and a low key work environment is great if you want to be a lifestyle business. If you are a disciple of the work-to-live philosophy, then that’s all fine and dandy. By all means, emulate the four-hour workweek. But if you want to build empires like Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Brin and Page, Dell, Bezos, etc, you will never get there if you maintain this type of philosophy. If you want to be funded by Sequoia, KP, Accel and that elite crowd, you’ll never get there in this mindset. When you’re in the office, the more blurry the line between friends and coworkers, between fun and business, between goals and leisure, the worse off you will be.

Becoming Internet famous is a really funny goal that many people have but few will admit. At the end of the day, famousness stands for very little expect maybe a fulfilling feeling inside to someone who needs that. Can you imagine coming to your board and saying “Well we missed earnings and we’re going to have to liquidate at a loss on all of your investments, but at least now people know who I am when I walk down the street.” That sounds absurd and is absurd. If fame comes with the process of being a successful businessperson, then that is what it is. But if you seek out fame for the purpose of fame itself, you actually stand to have less of a chance of succeeding because you will make irrational decisions and spend too much time and effort worrying about the wrong things.

Getting to a liquidity event can be a huge win, but the concept of ‘exiting’ in and of itself is not. Many times startups push forth and push forth and push forth because they just don’t want to die. Amen to not dying, but what is the goal of what you’re doing? Is the point to not fail? Is the point to prove that you were right after all and that “this can work”? Do you need to see the company ‘exit’, even if it is a tiny sum of money with years of handcuffs, just so you can think you “didn’t waste that time” in your life? Does exiting make it somehow worthwhile, even if you could have made more money over those few years working at Google or building new and better startups? Hey, if you’re going to hit it huge and explode with a 10-figure market cap, by all means exit and buy a Ferrari. But if you’re on the other end of the spectrum, are you really being rational, or are you hanging on to the concept of ‘not failing’ instead of focusing effort on a new massive success that could be up for the taking?

Being massively rich, in a self-made way, has correlation with “having won” but does not for sure indicate causality. After all people do get lucky, are benefited by serendipitous events, or find themselves in the right place at the right time. But in the end, most of these people still earned it. In my mind, though, these people have won a battle, not the war. I feel like the key to winning the war is in a process and not in any one result. It’s those people who have built up a methodology, a framework, and a desire to do it again and again and to do it huge. These are the Marc Andreessens of the world. The other side of this coin involves all the people I mentioned earlier Gates, Jobs, etc who have really focused on one company and taken it all the way for many, many years. Instead of doing it again and again, these people are all about extending it further and further. It’s the not the money, it’s the push to always be looking up even after you have the ability to be comfortable for the rest of your life.

So then what is ‘winning’ to me? Here’s a couple definitions or elements that seem much closer to what I would be comfortable with:

• Going from 0 to multi-billion dollar IPOs and beyond
• Putting yourself in a position to work with the best people
• Doing in aggregate what the fewest other people have been able to do

IPOs and huge exits are a good, tangible way to look at things. Money as a scorecard is fine, because virtually everyone who’s at the very top of that scorecard has earned it, either via sustained hard work or a huge string of success after success. Analogously in the non-startup world, you could argue that running a key division of a company or managing a huge fund and growing the earnings or worth by a large multiplier is just as good. I completely agree. There are lots of tangible ways to win.

Being able to work with the best people is an indicator of success. It means that every day, you get to experience the joy of pushing out the most creative, strategic, business-savvy ideas at the fastest possible rate. You get to solve problems that other teams can’t possibly imagine solving. If you think of life in terms of how many interesting experiences you get to have, working with great people can make that number explode. Every minute of every day can be incredible. While others can pay to go anywhere in the world, drive fast cars, and even go to the moon, you can’t pay to work with the best. Sure you can sometimes just set up the economics so that they make sense, but if really good people don’t respect you and see you as a winner, they won’t want to bet some portion of their career on you. If you can get to this point where the best want to be around you, you are on your way to a win.

The last is my personal favorite: measuring the size of your win by how many people have been able to carry out what it is that you did. We as people naturally seek to be different and new things excite us. We love to do what others can’t, not to evoke jealously, but because it is has core appeal. Professional athletes are one a million, same with movie stars, senators, and the like. Being a top of the top businessperson is more on the order of one in a hundred million. Striving for that is exciting, not because you get famous, but because getting there means you solved the most difficult and dynamic problems the world has to offer. Think about your aggregate level of accomplishment and what percentage of the world is at or above it? Chances are, that number is large. How can you get it down an order of magnitude, or how about five orders of magnitude?

Notice I have left out anything besides work. Nothing was stated in here about life, family, friends, fun, none of it, except how it was bad to mix lifestyle and work. The enjoyment of life outside of work as completely and wholly necessary, but it is an even more macro question of balance between the career-facing facts stated here and the elements of fun, happiness, and personal enjoyment elsewhere. What do I mean? You will be on some trajectory to win at some magnitude in the professional sense, and depending on what that is, you will have some portion of time to spend on the rest. The end goal of life on the whole might still be happiness, but the key is deciding how big you will win professionally, how much happiness that generates for you, and how much you will need to seek from other sources such as personal enjoyment of friends, family, leisure, and so forth.

So what should all of this mean to you? Really, it should mean nothing. This is how I look at things, but everyone is different. Winning as defined here isn’t for everyone, and I think it is awesome that not everyone goes down that path. I will say, though, that when I meet people, I am always curious how much they really want to win and win big. The ones who want it bad are the kind of people I enjoy working with.