Just don’t use it, whatever you do.
It’s hopelessly buggy, it is the worst possible git client you could use.
And … for the third time, it just corrupted a git repository. This time I know it wasn’t user-error, it was just SmartGit.
Totally unforgivable.
This (“NESTA: Investing in Video Games”) was last month, but I’ve been too busy to write it up till now.
The most interesting things that I noticed at the event:
I felt a bit mean, hijacking their Q&A session. But, really … startups *need to know* about VH. It’s wrong for investment/government events to ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist; in the long run, everyone benefits from the existence and spread of VentureHacks.
If you’re interested in using an ES on indie projects, and you’re craving concrete examples, you might want to look at the comments (page 1 and page 2) on Mythruna:
“Since this is a developers forum, I’ll describe a little bit about what went on behind the scenes.
During the early development for this phase, I read about an architectural pattern called an entity system.
…
I had (pre Entity Systems) a plan for how I was going to store the placement of objects in the world but this past weekend when I actually got to implementing it, I couldn’t make that original plan work and came to the point where I needed to solve the general problem of world state storage. This is the kind of thing that Entity Systems make relatively straight forward… and by Saturday, Mythruna had an embedded SQL database that autogenerates tables based on the components stored. (HyperSQLdb for the win.)So at some point I swapped out the in-memory version of the entity system with the SQL version… and suddenly objects were persistent. It was so easy I had to double check a few different ways that it was actually working. :)”
…but of course, also: use the Entity Systems wiki – put your questions there, put your ideas there, and (most of all) if you have an ES project or ES source code you want to share, please add it to the wiki!
Even with version 4, the epic 5-year-old bug that makes Firefox unusable on Mac with any page that uses fancy forms like TinyMCE (these days: an awful lot of them) is still unfixed:
“We’re going to have to back out the core fix to this bug because of bug 620906.”
Sob. And, of course, the main workaround that everyone used to use doesn’t work any more either, since the author of keyconfig stopped updating it – and, as far as I can tell, Firefox still doesn’t let you remove this stupid, broken keybinding manually.
EDIT: yes, I’m annoyed – I just lost a load of data because of this bug *again*.
If that’s what you *think* just happened, then check this:
If so, flip it to ON, find a working wifi / 3G signal, and your documents will miraculously re-appear.
For most people, there is no way they want Gmail ripping all their private documents off the iPad – but this is apprently how Apple stupidly coded the Notes app.
You don’t get a choice; if that slider is “ON”, all your private stuff is deleted locally and saved to Gmail. There’s no warning, no user-interface to tell you it’s doing this – everything is silent. There’s also – so far as I can tell – no way to “reclaim” your documents and get them put back on the iPad, where they belong. Where Apple pretended they were in the first place.
If you ever accidentally hit that switch, all your documents just vanish.
What happens if you have no network connectivity, or lose 3G signal? Again, it seems you lose your documents.
Moral of the story: never, ever trust software written by a hardware company that refuses software engineering standard practices.
Minecraft is great. But it has one major problem: the narrative of each world is destroyed as it is created. Unless you work hard to do otherwise, the history of your relationship with the world is lost very rapidly. There’s no strata, no wearing, no signs of your involvement – just a too-clean result.
I found myself often deliberately “preserving” key moments in my worlds, such as:
So, here’s an experiment: a playthrough of Minecraft, but doing frequent git-checkins (approx once a day/night) to this github project.
I don’t even know if it’ll work; in theory it should – I’m versioning the Save directory for a single world – but I haven’t tried importing it to a new PC / install of Minecraft yet.
Feel free to try it – checkout the first checkin, see if you can load the world (NB: the save-directory is named “versioned” on my copy of Minecraft; you might need to name the containing folder the same).
Then try using git to advance through the different checkins, and see if you can view the world as I explore and modify it…
The focus is on facebook pages that drive commerce – which I assume means: revenue – somehow. A handy list for anyone looking for corporate FB examples:
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7540-101-f-commerce-examples
That link is tenuous in many cases (how does “running a competition” drive revenue?), but no more so than a lot of modern marketing campaigns.
I’ve been working on a new Scrum client for ScrumManagers, Scrum Teams, and Product Owners.
We’re ready for Alpha testing now – it’s simple, fast, and a bit ugly … but we’re using it for very simple projects already.
If your team uses Scrum, and you’d be interested in trying this, please send us a quick email via the application form here (at minimum, need your email address and some info about the projects you’d be trying this on and how soon):
UPDATE: I’ve had a followup email from them that suggests it’s legit, and we were just mis-targetted (I’d guess they’re using a call-list they got from somewhere that’s not great on its filtering).
Strange email exchange this morning:
Subject: contact [sic – no capitalization, no sentence]
Could you kindly supply me with your Business address and telephone number for the purpose of our database please?
Kind Regards,
Elisa
Elisa Sullivan
Liverpool Embassy
2nd Floor
New Broad Street House
35 New Broad Street
London
EC2M 1NH
What? Why? Who are you? Why do you want our phone number?
And, most bizarrely, why are you asking for info that’s – by law – published for free on the Companies House website?
I smell something fishy(ing attempt)…
I sent a couple of followup emails: “what database?”, we’ve never heard of you, what’s this for?, etc.
Responses were all dodging the question, and then she gave up with:
Ok thanks for your help Adam , sorry for any inconvenience caused.
Elisa
So, yeah. Probably a scam. If you get an emails from “liverpoolvision.co.uk”, I suggest you trash them.
(and if they’re a bona fide outfit, then … wow. They really don’t use email much, do they?)
There were a few games that came up in the 10 games you should have played session at GameCamp which I’d never heard of / played. One of these was SpaceChem – sounded interesting (the 5-second description was something like “great game which teaches you how to do real Chemistry”).
Someone else mentioned this game to me today, in passing, which reminded me to go check it out. I went to the website, looks vaguely interesting (although the site design is very ugly – normally a big FAIL in web-marketing – I’m happy to ignore that since I’m after a *game* here).
The only info I’m allowed to see about the game – no screenshots etc – is an embedded Flash video that’s taking ages to download, so long in fact that I gave up.
So I try to get the demo instead.
“requires mono”
Oh, FFS. Forget it. No, I’m not going to download 500MB (or however much it is these days) and endure extra debugging, manual configuration, etc just to install your game.
If this is a commercial operation (and it is, judging by their huge “buy now for $15” text), then it’s a waste of time to release a Mac version that’s any more complicated than “drag one icon to install”.
The Apple Mac Store is *live*, people! It’s even less hassle to buy things there (the “drag icon” bit is done for you automatically).
More generally, if you’re going to release games, don’t tie yourself to a 3rd-party platform that requires a large download and isn’t pre-installed by default on desktops.
Normally, I don’t allow “guest posts”, but I’m making an exception for my “10 Games You Should Have Played” series. I’ve been asking other games-industry people to write up their own lists + explanations, and that’s not always compatible with their personal/work/etc blog. When that happens, I’m happy to post them here instead.
So, here’s Richard Bartle‘s take (“co-creator of MUD1 (the first MUD) and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds” – but if you read this blog, you should already know who he is ;).
I think it’s a great list. I asked him to define in his own way what he meant by “should” (why are we saying “should”? who’s the audience? etc) and to run with it, which he did …
“OK, well modulo all the usual complaints about lists of 10, here we go.
I don’t have any rules per se, but I am sort of assuming that this is for people who play games or design games or want to know more about games.
Also, I’m going to go with categories rather than individual games (except in the last case). This is because it’s not the games themselves that are necessarily important so much as what you get from playing them. I will, however, give an example of a game in each category that I myself have tried.
You should always have a game ready to play. I don’t care what it is, but unless there is one you’re never going to expand your gaming horizons.
For me, right now that game is “Victoria II”, which I’ve installed and read the manual for but haven’t actually started to play. The reason I haven’t started it is because I bought “Mount & Blade: with Fire and Sword” and snuck that in front of it in the queue. Once I do start it, I’ll be looking for another game to play when it’s completed – hopefully not another damned sequel…
Games can be many things, but unless they have gameplay they’re not games. An abstract game only has gameplay. To understand games, whether to design, play, or study them, you need to understand gameplay; an abstract game shows you the game mechanics with everything else stripped away.
You need to play one. You may, if you’re keen, try think of a skin for it, but that’s not essential.
In my case, I guess the game would be “Chess”. I captained my primary school Chess Club, but my interest in the game waned when I realised that the openings were always the same and that people who were less good at the fun, thinking part could win by doing the boring, memorise-the-openings part. That came straight from an appraisal of the clear-for-all-to-see mechanics.
That said, I’d also like to give a shout-out to the altogether more obscure “Besikovitch’s Game”. Now that’s a mechanic with potential…
Everyone thinks they know why they want to play games, but they also need to know why everyone else plays games. They’re not going to get that unless they understand what it means to be part of the game. In a tabletop role-playing game, with the other players right there next to you, there’s no escape: you have to participate, you have to involve yourself, you have to become part of the game, part of the narrative. In short, you have to live the game. Unless you’ve lived a game, how can you ever hope to understand what’s gamingly possible?
For me, the hours I spent playing “D&D” with my friends in my late teens were some of the best gaming experiences I ever hard. I wish I’d been able to get a “Call of Cthulhu” group going, mind you, but it came out too late for me.
If a game is good enough that people will pay to watch it played, you need to understand what it’s like to play it. This gives you an insight into the theatrical aspects of games that you wouldn’t easily get from merely observing the performance. You don’t actually have to be any good at the game, and the game itself doesn’t have to be all that good either (in my case, “Snooker” fits both those categories); the important thing is to understand what gives a game presence. I don’t care whether it’s high
skill, clever strategy, viscerality, physicality – if you don’t play it, you won’t appreciate it.
In my own case, I played “Association Football” (yeah, soccer) at school (attacking midfielder if you must know); I was good, but we were never taught any skills or anything and most games descended into kicking matches. I nevertheless found out what made it “the beautiful game”, though.
There is a dark side to games, and gambling gives people a chance to sense it. Personally, I don’t like playing games for money at all; however, a lot of people love it. Everyone has their limits, though.
For some, gambling games are at their best when the amounts involved actually hurt if you lose them; for others, it’s the amounts that can be won that make the difference. The point of playing a gambling game from the perspective of this list is to gain an appreciation of the morality of games. When something stops being “just a game” and starts to take over the player’s life, that’s potentially a bad thing. Unless
you’ve seen it (or something close to it), you’re never going to understand that fully. Gambling games let you do that. Warning: you run a big risk with this if it turns out you’re the one who gets hooked…
For me, I used to play “Poker” with my friends over lunch when I was 17 or 18. We played for Tic-Tac mints. This was before “Texas Hold ‘Em” got big, so we’d play mainly “Draw Poker”, “5-Card Stud”, “7-Card Stud” or, occasionally, “Montana Red Dog”. We stopped playing when one of my friends, who consistently lost, had to borrow money to buy more Tic-Tacs; I decided things had gone far enough, and called
the lunchtime sessions off. From that point on, no way would I design a game that deliberately tried to addict someone to it.
Most games are built on the foundations of games that went before them, and an appreciation of their history means you appreciate the games themselves more. Games have a very long history (indeed, they go back into prehistory), but a modern game is unlikely to quote directly from ancient archetypes. They’re more probably going to quote from games from the generation before them. You therefore need to
play a bunch of old games to see where the advances were made. Unfortunately, “old” is a relative term: what you think is old might, to me, seem fairly new. What’s old enough for both of us is something from the year we were born in (or a year close to that). Play a game from back then and see how things have (or haven’t) changed. Bonus: you’re almost guaranteed to notice the gameplay more than you do in a (what currently looks) slick, modern game.
For me, the old game would be “Diplomacy”, which was released commercially in 1959 (the year before my birth, but that’s near enough). Ah, what a game! It’s trapped in its time, because it needs 7 players and could only really be played by post. Play-by-email is even more of a niche than play-by-mail was, so it’s not a game that is played a lot nowadays. Lovely mechanics, though!
Some games are just BAD. The mechanics are all wrong, they’re unfun, or no fun, or the rules are ambiguous, or they drag on and on, or there’s a dominant strategy, or … well, the list continues. If you play such a game, you can ascertain what it is that’s bad about it; this will enable you to avoid similar games in future and to avoid
making similar mistakes in any games you design yourself (see next point). The more you understand about games, the more you’ll be able to find the games that are right for you.
For me, tempting though it is to nominate “Trivial Pursuit” as the game that laid waste to the British board games industry, I didn’t actually play that. However, my personal pick is one that I’m sure many other people will share, too: “Monopoly”…
Game design is actually quite hard to do well. You’re not going to know quite how hard unless you try it yourself. In the attempt, you’ll come to understand more about games and what makes them tick – but only if you actually play the game (if
it needs more than one player, play it against yourself). If you actually are a game designer, this is something you will have done many, many times before, of course; just make sure you keep on doing it.
For me, well, all game designers have a corpus of games in various stages of completion that they have never shared with anyone else, simply because doing the design itself was the fun part.
I’m a bit low on computer games in this list, so I’ll go for one I did called “Mombasa” about the exploration of Africa. It’s not all that good, but the point is that I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t played it…
This is because I co-wrote the first virtual world, and therefore the more people who play these, the higher my kudos rises.
I’ll list the last MMO I played through up to the level cap as my example here: “Rift”. I came away not so much impressed by the game itself but by its developer, Trion Worlds, which is more understanding of its players than any other developer I’ve
come across except perhaps CCP.
It’s actually called “Finchley Central”, but I’ll go with the version that’s best known. This is a very simple game, the rules of which, in their entirety, are as follows: players take it in turns to name London Underground stations, and the first to say
Mornington Crescent wins. This is a game everyone should play, because it gets to the heart of what a game is: what happens when you freely and knowingly bound your behaviour according to a set of rules in the hope of gaining some benefit that you might not get. You play it for just so long as it’s fun, with people who also play for just so long as it’s fun. It’s the Magic Circle incarnate.
So those are my top 10 games that people should play. If you already played them, my apologies for having wasted your time with this list. If you haven’t played them, I envy you the treasure trove that lies ahead.”
Recently I had reason to contact a bunch of UK games studios. I thought the hard bit would be to find the names of all those out there. Actually, the hardest part was navigating their websites to do the outrageous thing of daring to send them an email…
Here’s a question for anyone lamenting the unlucky business lives of games companies: If your business cannot be easily contacted, how many opportunities do you miss before you even get a chance at them?
Plenty of failures, but some particularly amusing(ly bad) examples I’ve cherry-picked:
You can *phone* them on a pay-per-minute number (nice!), but you cannot email them. Brings new meaning to the phrase “(their) time is (your) money”.
The contact page shows up as the “games” page.
Wow. Great QA on your website there, guys. Did *no-one* check it before going live? Do you visit it yourselves?
(and the only things you’re allowed to talk about are jobs and PR. What does this tell you about their priorities, I wonder?)
You can download PHOTOS OF THEIR OFFICES 11!!!!!!1111 (featured not just once, but twice, on that page) … but you cannot speak to them.
Apparently, the only two possible reasons anyone would contact them is because there’s a bug in their games (support@), or they want a job (jobs@). Hmm. Again: does this reflect studio priorities?
No contact address, link, or form anywhere. Nice!
When you click the “contact” button, you get this monstrosity:
javascript:location=’mailto:\u0068\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0040\u0066\u0075\u006c\u006c\u002d\u0066\u0061\u0074\u002e\u0063\u006f\u006d’;void%200
(hackers trying to cross-site-script attack your browser? Or just a deeply incompetent web-designer? I’ll let you decide…)
HINT to Full Fat: webmail. Yeah. Think about it. Over 1 billion people use webmail as their primary mail client these days. Hmm.
Their email is a Flash app.
A FLASH APP. To display 40 characters of text. Ya, Rlly.
Also: it doesn’t work. When you run it, it displays the text, but won’t allow you to copy it. Huh? I have to manually transcribe the letters. Why? Why, for the love of all that is good?
(and if your spam-protection is really so outdated (and FAIL: you really don’t understand where spam comes from, do you, guys?), then why didn’t you just put a static image in there instead?)
…fill out this form, please (it’s auto-filling a spreadsheet for me that has everyone’s contact details + key info):
NB: I won’t be making this form public, although it might be interesting just to list-out all the names + websites at the end. I’m gathering this info to help with consulting engagements where several of our clients have recently asked something along the lines:
“Do you know any good game developers? We need someone to make X for us”
A few guidance notes:
Right now, no promises for new work – this is an experiment to see what the landscape of *current* UK studios is like – but I expect to make at least a few successful matchups in the coming months.
This is cool – a great use of Google’s tech, a great example of what it *really* means to drag Online Games and MMO’s out of the stone-age of “do what Diablo did, but with more people on screen”.
Sadly, it doesn’t quite work – none of the stereographic projection stuff (which is key to making Google StreetView) is working here. Oh well.
And it raises the question: why didn’t R* do this themselves, and make more of the R* Club (their “social/online” part to GTA) than the silly farting-about it was at launch?
If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you:
MT: We are griefers. If nothing is going to happen then we’re going to try to find something that screams and bleeds and poke at it.
RPS: Griefing is something goons are known for doing, but now I’m talking to you it’s not something I can imagine you personally doing.
MT: Technically speaking, by running a spy network I am griefing.
RPS: But would you go out and aggravate other players for the Hell of it if you were a lower ranking member of Goonswarm?
MT: Well, most lower ranked Goons make their money by doing that. Scamming people is a very quick way of making money in Eve. Rather than making an honest buck, you take that buck from somebody else.
and, much further down, maybe this will help you see how griefers often serve just as positive and valuable a role as all your “preferred” player-types:
RPS: For my money, Eve might be the most fascinating game in existence today. But that doesn’t stop it from being interminably boring as well.
MT: Right. I mean most Eve players are stuck in high security space mining, and a lot of the core PvE in Eve has you sitting there are watching three grey bars slowly turn red.
Goonfleet is a socialist alliance. We give people ships so that rather than being forced to rat [fight low-powered AI NPCs] they can take part in PvP, we teach them how to scam so that they don’t have to mine, we teach them how to make ISK most effectively, we give them a lot of ISK and we reimburse their losses. This way they can focus on the fun aspects of the game, like griefing and warfare, so they’re not forced to endure derp-derp-ing around high sec.
If they play your game, you should be glad; if they grief, you should be asking yourself why – and if you’re a commercial operation, you should probably be asking:
“are they fixing a problem for us?
can we afford to leave them to it, part of our unpaid workforce?
and:
is it worth our time trying to fix the problem itself, or should we accept their help and move on down our never-ending list of pending fixes?”
Great writeup in PCGamer about GameCamp4, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the feel of an unconference (and google the term if you want to know more).
The first unconference I went to, the very first session … the speaker clearly didn’t know what he/she was talking about. They mouthed a bunch of nice-sounding soundbites, but way out of touch with reality. Worked out OK – the audience took over, collectively, and turned it into a great session, with lots of people providing their own knowledge.
That’s when an unconference works great – weak speakers displaced by a more knowledgeable audience.
And then we have GameCamp4. I missed the session on “crunch”. If I’d been there, I’d have cried bloody murder before letting them settle on this:
“The general consensus at the end of the half hour seemed to be that, while a lovely idea, games needed a crunch time, otherwise they’d never be finished on time. The idea that crunch wasn’t all that productive was raised, but there was enough experience in the room to shoot it down. Turns out games developers are quite happy with their battery farm conditions. Or at least, the ones in the room.”
“enough experience … to shoot it down” … WTF? Bullshit.
Let me be absolutely clear, as someone with 10+ years experience, having run teams at multiple studios, and having worked on multi-million-selling titles:
Crunch is *abuse*. Crunch is never “necessary” to finish a game, it’s something the management requires or allows, when morally they ought to be preventing it.
Anyone who says differently, first ask their job role; If they say “producer”, “manager”, or worst of all “director” bear in mind these are the roles where people directly benefit through the abuse of others; be very suspicious. It’s akin to asking a Slave-Trader whether slavery is “a Bad Thing”.
I wrote a lot more, but it came across as a rant against Mike Capps (who’s infamous for implying that only 2nd-rate developers don’t crunch) and Erin Hoffman (who’s infamous for railing against crunch, and then doing a volte face and implying that all the abusive corporates are just poor, misunderstood humans who are lovely really).
…and here’s your chance to challenge it.
This was written in a frantic half-hour with 30-odd people with many different ideas and suggestions. My role was to shepherd the opinions towards a concrete list of 10. There *was* a specific agenda/aim I had in mind – but I didn’t tell people that up-front, I wanted to let them go in whatever direction they wanted.
Now it’s done, I’m reaching out to everyone who cares about this stuff, and saying:
Come up with your own rules for a top-10, define it clearly, and share your list.
Blog it, link it back here, and we’ll see what people come up with. I’m expecting a lot of variation on the inclusion-criteria for a top-10, and (hopefully) as much variation on the games people choose / reject.
A few weeks ago, London was host to the fourth GameCamp – a 1-day unConference devoted to games, game-design, and game-playing.
I wanted to give a talk, because that’s half the fun of an UnConference. I wanted to do something fun, interesting, and above-all *new*. What’s the point of giving a talk you could have given at a “normal” conference?
I vaguely remembered that Darius had once run a session on “Indie games that haven’t had the attention they deserve” (or something like that), where he’d cherry-picked some great fun games that were relatively unknown in mainstream circles, and gave them a free boost of attention.
I didn’t feel confident to do that myself,but I knew there were plenty of people at GC4 who were much deeper into the fringe of games and game-design, and no doubt *they* knew what was out there, and had played it all.
So, one quick scribble later:
“10 Games you Should have played (but probably haven’t)”
I was afraid I’d get an audience turn up and expect me to do all the work, where I needed them brainstorming and providing the ideas themselves. I could see it easily being shaped by the (lack of) variety of the first few suggestions, so I set out to come up with a wide range to kick off.
With a full TEN MINUTES before the start, I roamed the hallways, looking for victims. I spotted a few familiar faces, game designers and writers I could corral, and asked them for a quick 3 “games people should have played”.
First response I got, courtesy of Adrian Hon: “Paintball”. Ah. Thanks, Adrian. You just exposed the flaw in my title. I never mentioned the words “video” or “computer”, although I’d assumed them.
Other interesting titles I was given in the hallway included: Civilization (the computer game, via Adrian), Journey to the End of the Night (via Holly Gramazio, I think), Tetris Attack (ditto)…some good variety to kick us off.
We had a packed room, approx 20-30 people. I won’t detail the process, but in our 30 minute slot we managed a long list, with some brief explanation of the more obscure games, and then we voted on which ones should go to top-10. Fortunately, there were 10-12 games that were CLEARLY a lot more popular than the rest.
Here’s the full list (illegible with crossings-out)
And here’s the top-10, with their respective (approximate – I was counting fast!) votes:
[*] = so many I didn’t bother counting; more than 2/3 of the audience.
Relatively new. I had a brief look, seems to be a fair number of “entry-level” art jobs, as well as standard full-time roles:
One of those things that most business people don’t talk about unless prodded. I’m not sure why, but I assume it’s one aspect of the fear “don’t burn any bridges; don’t let anyone think you can be nasty; don’t let anyone see you’re human”. None of which are healthy, long-term ideals IMHO – although they may be a good idea for many people. (they’ll often keep you in a job you’re unsuited for for longer than you would survive without them).
“I have on many occasions regretted not firing somebody quickly enough.
…
I’ve made every excuse to myself in the past, “I can’t fire him now, he owns the customer relationships and it’s a crucial point in our sales process.” Or, “I haven’t given him a long-enough chance to prove himself – let me see how he develops” or even, “it will have a big impact on morale because she is well liked. I can’t afford that right now.””
Some other good points in the post from Mark, including his list of 3 key ideals in hiring. Although … I still don’t agree with his “if [you change jobs] 5-6 times there is probably a pattern that isn’t completely the fault of some asshole boss.”. Well, I agree with the deduction – I’m sure there is a pattern, something interesting causing these rapid job changes – but I don’t agree with his conclusion that this is a bad sign in a jobseeker / candidate *for a startup*. (for a corporate role, it’s a huge red flag; for a startup, it might even be a positive selector; IMHO it’s too complex an issue to make catch-all pronouncements like Mark’s)
(and c.f. my previous comments on hiring, e.g.:
“I’ve noticed practically no correlation between skilled people going on to fulfil greater potential – many did, but many got worse. I’d still hire very skilled people – you know they’re useful – but … and this is a reflection of my own interests … in a startup environment, I’d tend to look for the enthusiastic ones by preference.”
)
(From an aside by one of LinkedIn’s founding team (interesting blog post on what it was like raising the first Series A funding for LI))
This is one of the hardest things for “old style” European VC firms and Angels to get their heads around, IME. And it’s entirely true, IMHO.
In general, if you find your startup is like swimming uphill against a stream – no matter that you’re succeeding – then it’s either a crummy startup hardly worth doing, or you’re going about it the wrong way. In most startups there are many occasions when it’s difficult or hard work – but in each case, the “working hard” part is optional: you could keep working at a normal pace and still succeed; you just choose to work harder in order to take your “success” and make it “a bigger success”. If you have to work hard just to avoid failure … forget it.
I suspect it’s the infamous protestant work ethic that (perhaps) leads vast swathes of UK and EU people to believe:
“if I work hard, and I suffer, I’m (deserve to) going to succeed; I should expect it to be hard, and cultivate difficulty; easy things are to be suspected and – ultimately – avoided”
IMHO, it’s more likely that a lazy person will find a great product/market/timing and be successful … than that a hard worker will take a weak product/market/timing and force it to succeed by working their ass off. A startup is a company; more than any individual – if the idea is great, other people will join, and tend to pull the work-output closer to the average.
Think on this:
if you’re a lazy founder, every person you hire is bringing the average up. If you’re a workaholic, every person you hire is bringing it down.
(Who am I kidding? If you’re a workaholic, you probably aren’t allowing anyone else in anyway – and don’t have time to interview them. You’re working harder and harder, somehow subconsciously convinced that “hard work” will inevitably create “success”)