As the scene opens with applause, Mike is playing Lemurs Chemistry.
Thanks. I'll be right with you guys. I just— need to—
Just finish your game.
Yeah. Almost done. 17 seconds on the clock, you know?
The audience laughs as Mike puts the iPad away.
This game is totally addicting. It's one of those games that you get on the App Store for a couple bucks, and then you regret buying it, because you spend half your life playing it.
Like, I'm super addicted to the game Bejeweled. I'm sure you've all heard of Bejeweled. I'll play that game—I'll spend all day playing that game—and then I feel like I've wasted my whole life, because I've learned a bunch of useless information, right? All the rules that the game teaches you, they're not really useful.
But this game is different, because the rules of this game are rules of actual science, so when you play this game, you're not so much wasting your life, as you are learning something that's useful. When you're done with your game, you're actually smarter than you were.
It's kind of like, it's like junk food that is the healthiest food that's available for you. That's the whole idea behind this game. And the fact that I really enjoy the game is kind of surprising to me.
You might think to yourself, "It's not surprising that you like this game. You made the game. You're biased."
But that's not actually true, because I've made other games before, and I've never enjoyed playing any of them. Most notably Tap Tap Revenge. I never enjoyed playing that game. It didn't really matter, because there were 30 million other people who enjoyed playing the game, and that's all it really took to make it really the first number one game on the App Store.
But the fact that I made the first number one game on the App Store is actually the biggest threat to the company and the team that made this game, and that's what I want to talk to you guys about. That's the purpose of this whole silly intro, is to talk about the journey that we went on to get to what is in my estimation really an excellent game, and some of the mistakes that I made.
The first mistake, I'll tell you right off the bat, is making a game. If you want to hear a surefire sign that the people that you're talking to have a bad idea, are arrogant, and over-estimate their own abilities? It's if they tell you that they're going to make a game.
If your idea is to make a game, it's a bad idea, and you shouldn't.
Maybe those people will say, as I said, "Well, look. Sure it's hard to make games, but I've made games before, and those games have been very successful, so I'm the exception to the rule."
That's where the arrogance comes in. Having made a great game is no guarantee that you'll make another great game. When we started working on this thing we said we wanted to be the next Angry Birds. What a ridiculous thing to say! Not even the guys who made Angry Birds can make the next Angry Birds. They've made other games since, and none of them have hit like Angry Birds. The reality is, no one in the industry knows how to make games.
It's not like it used to be. It used to be you had companies like PopCap that were like the Pixar of games and they would churn out hit after hit after hit, but that's not true anymore. Not even PopCap is around anymore. The fate of every game company is to eventually fail and be eaten by a larger company. Everything eventually swirls toward the two black holes that are EA and Disney Interactive. That's what happens to game companies.
The first game company, the one that had Tap Tap Revenge, that was eventually acquired by Disney. It's what you might call a successful exit. But you don't see me here saying, "fuck you." Obviously I didn't get fuck you money, right?
There's way better ways to make money than making games. But making money really wasn't what we were trying to do. What we were trying to do was save the world, save the whole world, all across the multiverse. The smallest of ideas.
You see, a year-and-a-half ago, when I started putting the team together to make this game, what I wanted to build was the singularity. I wanted to build a giant computer that we could all upload our brains into and live forever. Just the smallest of ideas.
And getting from there to here required an enormous amount of scope narrowing. It required an enormous amount of pain. That's the thing. When you hear about someone's grand idea, and you compare that to the smallness of the actual shippable idea that they ended up going with, that difference, it represents a lot of pain. It represents a lot of suffering. It represents a lot of hurt feelings.
And that's the history of this game. You know, we have a team of about three people, but there's sixteen different names on this game. Sixteen credited, royalty-earning names, on this game. Most of those people are gone. Most of those people will never talk to me again.
So the first mistake was in thinking that being successful meant that I somehow knew what I was doing. The second mistake what in thinking that I was an exception to any kind of rule.
And the third mistake was in thinking that the most important thing was to put together a team of people who I liked, and would get along well with.
Now, you hear this all the time. Hell, you might have heard this in this very room. Hell, you might have heard it from me. Because we always say this, right? "The most important thing is team fit. Make sure that you're with people who you like. You can always learn the skills necessary."
Yeah, that's true—if we're talking about the technical skills necessary. You don't know how to program? We can teach you to program. Will that make you a good programmer? Probably not. Because being a good programmer is not about knowing the technical skills of programming, any more than being a good marketeer is about learning the technical skills of marketing.
It's not about technical skills. Ultimately, it's about grit. It's about stick-to-it-tiveness. It's about being able to take a kick to the crotch, and being able to get up and smile and get right back to work again.
Let me tell you a little bit about the story about how we made this game.
We put together a team of five people—five people who I really liked a lot. Not all of them were the best at what they did, but we all seemed to get along, and that seemed to be the most important thing.
And then we raised some money, and we only raised as much as we needed. We didn't want to raise any more. We didn't want to let go of any equity. We were so in love with our own ideas. And we started hiring people.
And this project, it felt like destiny. It felt like, we were called by something bigger than ourselves to build this. And that was a huge, huge mistake.
It is very dangerous to feel like what you're doing is destiny.
Because it might be destiny, but that doesn't mean that it's pre-ordained. It doesn't mean that your success is foretold. It doesn't mean that if you build it, they will come.
None of that stuff is true. Just because it feels like it's your destiny, the only thing that's going to earn you is trouble.
In my instance, for example, we hired this game designer. Why did we hire him? Because we needed a game designer, and then we met him.
And, I thought, "Why would we meet a game designer when we need a game designer, unless it's fate?"
Yeah. That's a terribly reason to hire anybody, right? Not only is it a terrible reason to hire anybody in the first place, but it's an especially terrible reason because what ends up happening is: you've made a terrible decision. You've hired somebody based on no data at all. And then it turns out that person is not a good fit for the project, is not a good fit for the team.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that that person sucks. I'm sure that person is great in a different situation with different people. But not on this project. Not with this team.
But because it was such a terrible and arbitrary decision, ironically it's a decision that you want to defend the most, right? Nobody wants to say, "Oh my God. I was drunk. That was terrible. I shouldn't have done that."
Everybody wants to say, "No no no no no, I'm sure it's fine. It will work out."
So not only did we do a lot of bad hiring, but we didn't fire people fast enough.
By the way, a good time to fire people, is when you still like them. When you can say, honestly, "Look, it's a not a good fit: you, the team, the project, all together. Maybe another time. Not now."
And that has to be true. And if you wait too long, if you wait to the point when you really are about to strangle each other, that's too long. You're going to burn bridges.
Burning bridges is not good. It's not good for your health. It's not good for your team. And it's not good for your project.
We worked really, really hard on this. Like, stupidly hard. Like, there was a time, a time period of somewhere between four and six weeks, when some of us didn't even leave the office. Like, literally did not leave the office. Slept under our desks. Got a couple hours of sleep a night.
We really killed ourselves over this one. We really suffered, and we really made each other suffer, and we really pushed ourselves to an edge.
You know, I'm not going to say you shouldn't do that. I'm not going to say that was the biggest mistake. It's regrettable. Any deathmarch is regrettable. The reason why they call it a deathmarch is because not everybody's going to survive, and anything where people die—hehe—is regrettable.
But at the same time, I do believe in art through adversity. I've yet to meet anybody who's made something that I really look at and say, "Wow! I'm really impressed by that!" and had them say, "Yeah! We did it all between the hours of nine to five. We took weekends off. We took evenings off. We had a really good time with it."
Anything I've ever truly been impressed by has been born of insanity and suffering, so I don't regret the insanity and suffering—necessarily. Maybe we should have done a better job of picking the people who we would go insane with, but what are you going to do?
This is where that whole idea of not really working with the people you like—you can like them. It's OK—you need to work with people you respect. Right? That's the catch.
You need to work with people you respect because they're professionals, because they deliver what they say they are going to deliver on time, every time, with no excuses, and you will be impressed by what they do.
Give me someone who I am impressed with their work, and I will put up with any obnoxious personal habits. I don't care if that person hates me, and does what they do out of spite for me, if what they do is so excellent that every time I see it, I am surprised and delighted.
I've worked with some really obnoxious people. But if they produced, and if they produced reliably, then good things happened. Liking someone will not make them good. Liking someone will not make them respect deadlines.
Liking someone will not make you like their work. Quite the opposite. It's just like with this game. We made this game, so I'm inclined to hate this game, and the fact that I don't is surprising to me.
No, the biggest mistake that we made was in thinking that we knew what we were doing, and so we were going to do it. And we told everybody, "Leave us alone. We have work to do. A lot of work to do." And we did our work. And we thought that we would turn around and show it to people, and be like, "Ta-da!" and they would be like, "Wow!" And then we would just sort of glow.
But it doesn't work that way. In fact, I remember, this was about, end of last November, beginning of last December, when we finished up the 1.0 of the game, I took it home, and I showed it to my fiancée, who plays games all the time, and she's just like, "meh."
And I was like, that really kind of sucks. You know? It would be one thing if she doesn't play games, and then she's like, I don't really play games. But she does play games, and she's, OK, and she puts it down, and she plays a different game.
And I remember, she said, "How come you didn't show this to me, you know, before, when it was fixable."
And I was like, "Because I wanted to surprise you, with how good it was."
And she's like, "That was not a good idea."
But we had something, and it was amazing that we had something. It was genuinely amazing that we had something, because just a year before that, we were trying to build the singularity, and now we had an actual game. We had an actual game that was a game that nobody had ever seen before. We made a new game dynamic, right?
This reaction game dynamic, it's all based on the combustion of hydrogen. So you have hydrogen, and you have oxygen, which are both stable molecules. They're not particularly useful.
If you combine them, then according to the combinatorics of two of one thing and two of another thing, you get all these different intermediates, called radicals.
You've probably heard about, like, free radicals. They're bad! Anti-oxidants! Blueberry juice! Things like this. Free radicals are bad. They're bad. They're very reactive. They'll damage you biologically. They'll damage the plants in the game.
So you go from something that is stable and useless, to something that is unstable and dangerous, but then those will react to create water, which is stable and useful.
So it's a really nice, simple game dynamic: Stable and useless. Unstable and dangerous. Stable and useful. Really nice, and we invented that.
We invented that based on actual science. We worked with an actual chemist. We actually went through the research papers, the actual scientific research papers, and we found errors in the research papers, and we corrected those errors.
We confirmed our model with the Princeton Combustion Lab, who are the world leaders in this stuff. And when we published this game on the App Store, the editor of Nature Chemistry looked at it and was like, "Looks like some dodgy science."
And I was like, "Dodgy science my ass! Our science is tight!"
And he was like, "Oh!"
And that felt good.
And it felt good to have something to ship, even if half the team quit, and even if people were furious. We had something, and it was something. It was really something, and we shipped it.
And nobody cared. We sold like a hundred copies. Which is basically: if you ship something, and you sell a hundred copies, it means that all of your family and friends bought it.
And it comes to show you, first of all, how few family and friends you actually have. I mean, a hundred's a lot of people, but not, you know— It's really easy to get on Twitter and feel like you have thousands of friends, but you don't.
You have thousands of people who are willing to pretend to be your friend a little bit, but if it comes to spending two dollars to prove that friendship, I mean, come on, that's— No one's going to do that. Most of your friendships are not worth two dollars. That's the sad reality of things.
And we ran out of money, and that really sucks too, because it doesn't matter how much you like somebody, if you can't pay them, and they need a paycheck to pay their rent, then it's not going to get you very far.
So things kind of started to suck. That was about the point, the last time we did a project like this, where I completely burned out. When you put so much effort into something that is basically an exercise in faith and you fail, it becomes a test of faith, and a test of faith will destroy most people. It destroyed me that last time.
But luckily, I'd taken a lot of advice from people the last time around, and learned a little bit about how to deal with this stuff, and so I looked at it as a positive. I said, OK, so only one, two hundred people bought this game. But look, we have five-star reviews. Not a lot of them, but we have five-star reviews.
Because the nice thing about when your friends are the only ones who buy your app: they're not going to leave you one-star reviews and complain about why your app sucks. They're going to leave you a five-star review and then complain about why your app sucks.
I compared it to when I was in flight school, and we learned about something called ground effect. I don't know if any of you have flown an airplane. I'm sure most of you have been in an airplane, and you know what it feels like when the airplane lands, right?
You're coming down, you're coming down, you're coming down, and then you get right above the ground, and you kind of float there for a little bit, and then you come down that last bit. And if it's a nice smooth landing, then that's exactly how that happens.
Well, what ends up happening is, when you get within a wingspan of the ground, then the air that's bouncing off the wing, keeping you aloft, will then go down, hit the ground, come up, and then hit the wing again. So you get this extra cushion of lift right by the ground. It's called ground effect.
Usually you use if for landing, but you can also use it for taking off. Now, you've probably never experienced this if you've only been in a big jet plane, because they tend to land on pretty stable surfaces. But smaller planes land on a lot of different types of surfaces. And not all of those surfaces are smooth and paved.
So if you're going to take off on a field where maybe it's all grass or something, rolling along the ground with those little wheels is not a good idea, so what you do is you roll until you can just pop up into ground effect, so you're floating above the field. And then you can gain the necessary speed to rotate and take off.
But what you must never do is mistake ground effect for flying, because if you do that, you'll pop up, you'll go and you'll rotate, and you'll just crash, because you don't have enough lift to take off. We had launched into ground effect.
Well, I'm not going to say we were lucky or unlucky. There's not enough ego in the world for this, but the day after we launched this thing was the day of the Newtown school shooting in Connecticut, where some crazy fucker went in with a bunch of guns and killed a bunch of kids, and frankly I didn't have the stomach to market a game aimed at kids after something like that.
So when we sort of picked it up after that happened, and looked at it, we made the decision to not really market the game. We made the decision to let it hang there in ground effect and try to fix the problems that were really becoming clear with the game.
First and foremost, nobody understood the game. That was the hardest thing, and we knew this was a problem. It's not like we didn't test the game. We tested the game with all kinds of people. We tested the game with kids. We tested the game with adults.
We were trying to get something that both kids and adults would enjoy, but the problem is that we couldn't get something that both kids and adults would enjoy. We would either get something that kids would enjoy and adults would be confused by, or that adults would understand, and kids would be bored by.
And so kind of at the last minute, as we were running out of time, we made the decision. Let's err on the side of the kids. If the kids are having fun, then the adults will buy the game.
Well, that turns out to not be true at all. It turns out that if an adult does not understand a game, they assume that a kid will not understand the game, because adults assume they're smarter than children, and most of them aren't.
The first 4 paragraphs of the next section (about a minute of video) are tacked onto the end of this section. The repeated information is deleted.
I know, it sounds funny right? I mean, you are smarter, because you have a lot more experiences, but you aren't smarter because, like, what is a good scientist? A good scientist is somebody who is willing to do experiments on the world, just to see what the truth is.
A bad scientist is someone who thinks they know what the truth is. And that's what an adult is. They're a bad scientist. They think they know what the truth is, and when they see something they don't recognize, they assume it must be bad or wrong, because it doesn't match what they have in their heads.
Kids don't have those preconceived notions. A kid will just sit down and experiment and figure things out, and that's what the game was designed for. The game was designed so that you would experiment and figure things out, and you would learn chemistry innately that way.
But adults don't operate that way. Adults would look at the game, they would say, "I think I don't know enough chemistry to play this game. Is there a manual? There's not? Oh. Nevermind then. My kids are not going to get this."
So we needed to make make something people would understand. First and foremost.
The other thing was, we had a game engine. Yeah, you could do these reactions, and you could make water, and you could water the plants, and you could damage the plants, and you could heal the plants, and you could do all of the things that you would expect in a game, but that's not a game.
That's the core of a game. That's what you would call, in startup terms, the MVP, right? We had the MVP, the minimum viable product, but we didn't have, for example, leveling. We didn't have, you know, like, a timed mode. We didn't have anything that you would really want to go back and play again to try to improve your score. We didn't have any of the things that make a game, a game.
And so that was something else that we needed.
And so we started working on those things. And we thought, give us a week. Well, give us a couple of weeks. Well, give us a month. Well— So then it's four months later. The game has been out for four months. It's sold a grand total of 300 copies.
We had one simple task, which is: make this something that looks like a game, that feels like a game, that people will understand, and we just couldn't do it. We tried, and we tried, and we tried everything and it just didn't work.
We would try one thing, and that wouldn't work. Then we'd try another thing, and that wouldn't work. And we were just sort of on this weekly cycle of getting all excited, feeling like we'd figured it out, putting it in front of testers—
Wednesday, by the way, is our test day, because Wednesday Appsterdam has the Meeten en Drinken, Cafe Bax, every Wednesday night at 7 p.m. So every Wednesday night we knew where there would be a bar full of people who would be good for testing the game.
And every Wednesday night it was disappointment that people just, they didn't get it. We weren't good at it. It sucked.
And so finally it came time for NSConference. NSConference is this conference that has been held for the past five years in the UK. It's one of my favorite conferences. And I had actually conceived the game at NSConference.
You know, sitting there with my colleagues, people who I have known for years, people I've worked with, and I had this idea to make a chemistry set for the iPad. That's kind of where the singularity had narrowed down to at that point. And now it's time to go back and I didn't really have anything.
And there were people from Apple at that conference. Like, former and current Apple employees. Future Apple employees at that conference. And every time I would see them, I would say something like, "Well, you know, I know the game's not really worthy of an Apple Design Award," and they'd be kind of like, "Yeah."
And it started to feel really really bad. It was the low point. It was really, it was the low point. Like, not only did I not feel like I could make this game. I didn't feel like I could make any game. I didn't feel like I could make apps anymore.
I felt like, my entire skill set had, I don't know, become obsolete, or maybe had never existed. It was a serious crisis of faith, a serious crisis of confidence. It was kind of the end of the road.
In desperation, I started asking people, "What am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong?"
And people would be like, "Well, er, you should ask so and so." I was really nervous. And so I finally got to the point where a friend of mine, we've been friends for years and years and years, this guy Dan Pasco, who runs a company called Black Pixel. He's like, "Well, let me tell you what you're doing wrong."
And I really, I steeled myself, right? I steeled myself for some just fundamental teardown of my personality. I mean, at this point I was really ready to throw everything away and start over. I'd lost faith in everything.
And he surprised me because he said, "What you're doing wrong is, you're assuming that you have the ability to do this stuff alone. And you've never had the ability to do this stuff alone.
"I mean, look at Tap Tap Revenge. You have a great team of people. You had 1.6 million dollars in angel funding. You had a million players for the jailbreak version of the game, before you even got started. You can't just write that kind of stuff off.
"You've always been a product of the people around you, of the people who you're able to inspire into doing this stuff. You yourself are nothing."
It's a really hard thing to hear, but it felt better than what I thought was going on. I thought I was in exile. I thought all these people who had been my friends for years didn't want to talk to me anymore, maybe because of the stink of failure that was upon me.
But I found out that that wasn't true, that that exile was completely in my head, and that the reason nobody talked to me was because I told everybody, "Don't talk to me. I'm busy working on this game."
I know, right? It sounds completely stupid to say, "Leave me alone. Don't talk to me. Why am I alone? Why is nobody talking to me?"
That's how it is. That's how this stuff happens.
And so, what he said was, "You need help. You need to ask people for help. You need to get help."
And so I started asking people for help, and a lot of people offered to help. And a lot of them couldn't help. They wanted to help, but couldn't. Everybody has their own problems they have to deal with, and it's really easy to be like, "OK! We're going to do this! We're going to get help! This guy's going to help us!"
And then he can't, and then it's a really dangerous thing to just kind of fall back into futility and dispair. And this is where the grit comes in. This is where the pushing through comes in.
We literally sat down and had a meeting—those of us who were left in the company, which weren't many. Some of us who weren't going to be around much longer, and that had become obvious.
And we had a meeting where we said, "OK look, this game sucks, and when we finish it, no one's going to care. But we said we're going to do it, and we're going to do it. And we're going to do the best job that we can, even knowing that it is a futile effort."
Because that's what things looked like to us. And we set out, and we continued working, even though we had no money, even though bills were due, even though rent had gone unpaid, and even though we didn't really see where it was going to go anywhere, we were going to do it because we said we were going to do it, and that's the way it was going to be.
It's that kind of idiot American attitude that makes a successful entrepreneur.
And so we did, and we got help, and little by little, people started attacking the game.
Bill Dudney, who literally wrote the book on Core Animation, looked at our graphics code, and looked at our performance, and gave us some suggestions for how to fix our performance, a lot of which involved, "You did it wrong. Throw all that away. Here's how you're supposed to do it."
And the performance started to come together, and things started to not be so jaggy and horrible.
And Matt Legend Gemmell from Scotland, who's really an experience guy, and like, by the way, the part of the app I was not going to ask for help about was the experience, because if there's anything—
Like, when I was hardcore into engineering, and I tried to go to Apple, I wanted to work on the performance team, because they were the most hardcore guys there, and they said, "Nah, this guy's an experience guy. He should stay on the front end."
And I've worn that rejection like a badge of honor, and whenever it's been like, "Maybe we should get help with the experience," it's like, "Screw that. I'm the experience guy. Let's get help for graphics. Let's get help for the design."
And so going to somebody who really is like a peer, and being like, "I know that we're equivalent, but I suck. Could you help?"
And he really, just his fresh eyes. He was able to look at it, and he said, "Maybe the reason why you're having such a hard time explaining the game is because the game is just unexplainable. Maybe the game is literally just too hard to learn."
And so he started looking at the game not like a game, but just like an app, just the way that you look at anything, and saying, "You have ten different chemicals, ten different molecules, and they all have a different color of bubble around them, and those colors mean nothing.
"Maybe the colors should represent what they do. Green is good. Red is bad. And then you won't have to explain so much that this is good and this is bad, because you'll be able to tell by looking at it. And for that matter, throw some icons up in there. It's water? Put a little water drop on there. Make it really obvious that it's water."
One thing that doesn't work in product design is subtlety, and boy was there a lot of subtlety in the game that needed to be squeezed out. You really have to kind of hit people over the head with things sometimes.
I was a journalism major, but before that, I was an English major, and that can really give you an appreciation for subtlety. You want to write a book that people will be talking about a hundred years from now? Subtlety. You want to make a product that will be successful now? Screw subtlety.
And so little by little we worked on the game, and it started to come around, and it started to actually become better. And little by little, people starting coming back around. That stink of failure started to go away, and there started to be a little bit of excitement.
And then we were to the last week. And in the last week, the designer who we had been working with had basically disappeared. And the engineer we had been working with, his health failed him. We worked him too hard. He went to the hospital and he stayed there.
And so it was just me, sitting there and coding. And one of the other partners doing some testing. And the other remaining partner, doing what he could. And we just pushed through, and pushed through. And we hoped that something would happen with the design.
The Wednesday before the Monday of the deadline, I took all of this pressure that people were putting on me to simplify the menu system, and I sat down, knowing full well that it was way too late to do something like this, and I took all of the buttons from all of the menus and I put them on one big screen, and I spent a day just rearranging them until day turned to night, and night turned to day, and then I saw it.
I had arranged everything into a periodic table. And I knew that I had something. I knew that we had the interface. It just looks terrible is all.
And so we tried, just tried to get that designer to do some work, and he was just blowing us off, six hours at a time. I'll do it this evening. I'll do it in the morning. I'll do it this evening. I'll do it in the morning.
Finally it's Sunday night. The deadline is on Monday. Sunday night, my other partner comes to me and says, "Maybe we should get another designer."
And I said, "If you can find a designer who's willing to pull an all-nighter with us, then I will pull an all-nighter with him."
Or her. It turned out to be a him, because he found somebody, and we worked on it. We worked on it all night, and by the time the sun rose, on Monday morning, there was the menu. And it actually looked good. And the game actually looked good. And it actually was fun.
And the composer, the sound guy, came in, and he said, "I want to make some more sounds for it," and I'm like, "Dude, I'll give you 24 hours," and he did! He came back in 24 hours with all these extra sounds, and we put in all the sounds, and then all of a sudden it was the thing got up off the table, and walked out the door. It was alive!
And just like that, it all came together, and we had our game.
You know, there was a time, a couple of weeks before the end of that deadline, when I thought that we had something that was good enough, when I thought that we had finally put sufficient stuff, power ups, and bonus rounds, and sufficient stuff in there to actually get the game to the point where people were having fun, and I thought that the polish was pretty good. I thought it was good enough. I thought it was ready to ship.
Then I had a friend come visit and he looked at it and he said, "It's this close. The pacing isn't quite there. The tutorial's not quite there. The polish isn't quite there."
That is what sent us on that last scramble in those last couple of weeks to try to get things to the point. Just people telling you that your stuff isn't good enough. People challenging you further. People telling you the things that you hate to hear because you know that they're true: It's not good enough. It needs to be better.
But that's what it took. And so at the end of this, a year, a hundred thousand euro, a bunch of burned friendships later—
What I've learned from this is: You don't ship with toughness, and you don't ship with skill. You ship with humility and gratitude. And it's not you, but the people around you, who are going to make your product successful.
Yes, you have to have the toughness, and yes, you have to have the vision, But you can't do it on your own, and the harder you try, the worse you're going to make it for yourself. Maybe even so bad that it will lead to ultimate failure.
And that's the short version of the story. Time for beer and some questions.
Mike picks up a beer from off camera, and leans back suavely.
Question unheard
Right now it's on the App Store. It is on the App Store. We actually decided to do an utterly different type of launch this time. Every launch I've ever done has been an incredibly hype-filled launch, right? This idea that how you do on that first weekend is going to determine how you do forever.
But I don't think that's true. Ultimately, I don't think the launch is that important. I've lost faith in that over the years, and a lot of that comes from advice that I've been given over and over again. Especially from the people who know this stuff the best. Especially from the people at Apple, who say, "It's a long term thing. It's a marathon."
One weekend isn't going to make it. Also, talking to friends of mine, going into this thing, I had all these mistaken notions. If we could just get to number one, then we'll be set forever. If we could just get featured by Apple, then we'll be set forever. If we just win the Design Award, then we'll be set forever.
But I started talking to a lot of friends of mine, who I felt like, they were set. They have their products. They have the revenue. Everything was good. And they disabused me of that idea. There's no such thing as being set forever. Not if you're in this for actually making projects that are going to change the world in a meaningful way.
Because there's no finish line. There's no amount of money that is going to satisfy you, if you're not satisfied with the way that the world is. There's no amount of success that's going to be enough.
And realistically, this stuff comes and goes. I mean, most people have never even heard of Tap Tap Revenge. There were 30 million, 50 million, some insane number of millions of copies downloaded. Number one app, acquired by Disney—all of this crap that sounds really impressive on a résumé. No one's heard of it.
I go to the Apple Store. It used to hang on a 60-foot banner at One Infinite Loop. I go to the Apple Store. It's not on any of those iPhones. None of the employees are playing it. Nobody's heard of it anymore. This stuff is short-lived.
Getting to number one is not going to make your app. Getting featured is not going to make your career. None of that stuff is long-term. It's all just short term. It has to be a long-term situation.
So, we're soft launching it. We put it on the App Store. We didn't tell anybody. We started making videos of us playing the game and posting that. And then we'll splice that together into a nice, short little video that looks more like a commercial and less like a Let's Play, and then we'll put that up.
We quietly got the Dutch localization in. We're uploading that as soon as I finish talking to you guys. We started working on the accessibility, so that everybody can play the game, regardless of what kind of challenges they face.
At a certain point, about a week from now, we'll start sending out some review guides. We'll start getting people interested, and we'll let this thing snowball a little bit. There's not going to be a huge launch weekend. There's not going to be a singular event where some goings on in the news cycle can make or break what we're doing.
It's a long term thing. We'll do it as long as we can, as long as people care, as long as it's getting better, and as long as we think we can make it better. And if that means having to go out, and earn money doing other stuff, so we can continue to support the terrible addiction of making games, well then, so be it.
Because you should never do this stuff because you like it. You should never do this stuff because you want to. You should do this stuff because you have to, and there's no more comfortable way for you to make your living.
I worked for a while in App Store analytics, and what I saw is that almost all games are there for like a week in the App Store Top 100, maybe Top 10 if you're very lucky. And then afterwards they just disappear, and I think Big Fish even that's their strategy. Just push it for two weeks, and then you have to earn the game back. So how are you going to make sure that people keep on using it. Are you going to make the game that addictive, or...?
The game is super addictive, that's true. It's also relatively simple. The game itself is not simple, but the game mechanic is simple, so there's a lot of places you can go with it. But the other thing is—this is a lesson that I learned years and years ago—I used to work on this app called Delicious Library.
Delicious Library was the first really famous app, right? The first kind of modern, really well known app, and you'd hang around the floor of Macworld, or you'd hang around with a bunch of developers, and everybody and their mom had heard of Delicious Library.
And at a certain point, that was the idea: Delicious Library is totally tapped out. Everybody's heard of it. But I would go to the grocery store, and nobody knew who I was. It was like nobody had heard of it.
Realistically, we were probably capturing one percent of one percent of new Mac sales, and the app actually increased its sales year over year every year I was paying attention to it, even though we hadn't had any major updates, even though the app was played out.
The reality is, the market is an enormous, endless ocean of possibility. There are tons and tons of markets to be tapped. This game could be ten years old and it would still be new to a lot of people. Hell, I bet that Tap Tap Revenge, if we actually put forth the effort into doing so, could find new customers even today.
Because there's a lot of people in the world, and Apple in particular, our platform provider, they're going through extraordinary effort to continue to expand those markets and expand those markets. That's why the localization comes in, for example. On the App Store right now, we have something that's great if you speak English, and not so great otherwise.
But next week, it's also going to be great if you only speak Dutch, which is especially true of younger kids. And a week after that, German. After that, French, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, for God's sake, there's a billion of those guys. Especially for something that's four bucks a pop, there's a lot of capacity out there yet to hit.
But the other thing is, we're exploring non-game-related ways to make revenue, because honestly, making games is like heroin. It's not a good idea. It's just not.
So one thing we've looked at— When I look at smaller mistakes— We never should have made this game. Nobody should ever make any game, but we never should have made this game, because we had this product after a month. Right? After a month we had taken the research papers. We had modelled the reactions. We had a fantastic chemistry simulator.
If we had spent our year working on making that chemistry simulator better, we would have the realtime, interactive chemistry simulator—the only one in the world. We would be serving a vertical market. We could be charging forty—hell we could a hundred bucks a pop—and what are you going to do? There's only one.
But we didn't do that. Instead of taking that month of effort and leveraging it something we could make money with, we idiotically pursued making something that might make four dollars. Making games is a stupid bad idea. And making games out of science, while noble, is an incredibly stupid bad idea.
What we should be doing is making science visualization tools. Right? The money is in tools. The money is in solving boring problems in an elegant way. Look at the people who are making money on the App Store. Not the top downloads, which doesn't mean crap, but the actual top grossing?
What you're going to find are a bunch of really interesting solutions to a bunch of really dreadfully boring problems, right? Financial software, right? Stuff that does your taxes. Stuff that helps you take two text files and figure out what's different between them. Boring, boring stuff that's selling for sixty, seventy, eighty euro a pop, right? Way, way better markets.
I would have to be the most successful game of all time for this thing to make Kaleidoscope money, right? For this thing to make Quicken money. Because at the end of the day, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, the value proposition of a game is poor, right? Because how much money is it worth to you to waste your time? Like, none. Negative, right? You shouldn't be wasting your time, and if you're spending money to waste your time, that's especially bad.
You might argue that being bored is a use case, but I would argue that it's not. Right? Most people are bored because they're procrastinating doing something that they should be doing anyway. On the other hand, if you're spending a hundred dollars on some problem, and I can give you a forthy dollar solution, that's a clear value proposition, right?
Anything like that, any kind of business process. The stuff that I used to write in the enterprise? That was some good software. I didn't know what I was doing, and they were very boring domains, but at the same time, that was stuff where there was actual pain that was being resolved, and there's money in that. There's real money in that.
So we have a lot of idea for games we'd like to make, but what I think we're going to try to do, if we manage to do something like this again— make the science visualization first, market the science visualization as such, and then maybe, if we start to get really full of ourselves again, think about turning some of those into games.
On a scale of one to ten, from the concept of the game that you had, to what is there right now, how would you rate it?
I guess it depends on what the scale is, or what the scale means.
For you personally, from the idea that you had, or the concept that you had for the game, and you envisioned, and what you have made.
The thing that you have to understand is that this entire process has been emergent, and that's why—a big part of why—it's been so terribly painful.
If I was trying to solve a problem, an actual human problem, that gives you a very nice, narrow domain scope. It either solves the problem, or it doesn't solve the problem. It solves a problem well. It's hooky. It's viral. But it's all about solving the problem or not solving the problem.
We didn't know what this was, right? We started trying to save the world, right? And first we tried to do that in a very literal way, and we wasted a lot of effort, and we got a lot of people excited for nothing, right?
When we decided the best way to save the world was not to build a giant computer we could put our brains into, was not to work on a keyboard that you could use with your brain, but would in fact be by making games based on science in an attempt to make people smarter in general? We lost a lot of people.
And we half-lost a lot of people, which is worse. You know when somebody decides that they don't like what you're doing, but they aren't quite decided so they keep working with you, and they're like the living dead. Those are the worst people to have on your team.
Every time you change what you're doing, every time you narrow your scope like that, you lose people. Every time somebody spends a bunch of energy and effort writing the code to implement a feature, just so you can turn around and say, "Mm. Nah," and take it out, you lose people.
There were these two guys, their names are Sjef and Niko. Great guys. If you had talked to me about this game before I met these guys, I had this grand vision, right? It was like, 118 mini-games, and all this visual storytelling, ninety pages of original illustrations—all kinds of crazy shit that never would have shipped in a million years.
And these guys came in, game designers, hot off of game design projects, and they basically just stood there with this look on their face while we were talking, so that in three days of trying to describe what we were trying to do, we sort of self-censored that down, smaller and smaller and smaller.
We would not be here, we would not have shipped this game, we would still be just in a pile of ideas, if it weren't for these guys coming along. And these guys worked alongside us, right? When we were in the office for a month, these guys were in the office for a month, working their asses off, sweating, trying to get stuff done.
And then, when we finally got to the finish line, we took most of their work, about ninety percent of their work, and just threw it away. This game, in its original form, had a twenty-page illustrated science manual. Twenty hand-illustrated pages that was painstakingly researched, written, and drawn—would not pass user acceptance testing.
Users would not accept it, so we had to take it out. Those guys will never talk to us again, because we took out their work and we threw it away. And it's frustrating, right? It's frustrating because if we had known it wasn't going to work, we could have saved them all that trouble. But we didn't know.
Half the stuff that made it into the game was implemented, tested, thrown away, reimplemented, and then accepted. The engineer who ended up in the hospital? He once said to me that basically he was this close to punching me in the face, except for the fact that, before he had a chance to, I turned around and deleted as much of my own code as I had of his.
And then he realized— He didn't say this. I'm putting these words in his mouth, but he realized that it's not that I'm malicious. It's just that I'm an idiot, right? But that's how it is, right? Maybe that's the English major in me.
Somehow I got taught that the way to build something of quality is to build it up and tear it down, and build it up and tear it down, and build it up and tear it down, and every time you do, you just end up with this little layer, and little layer, and little layer, that somehow ends up with something that is smooth and polished and excellent.
The way that the character illustrations look, right? Nobody sat down and drew the characters. It wasn't as easy as that. Sat down, drew the characters, scanned it, cleaned it up, printed it, did it again, like sixty times. That's the difference between a well illustrated character, with all those different line sizes, and all of that excellence.
It requires that kind of building up and tearing down and throwing away, and what you end up with is a gigantic pile of garbage that is ten times bigger than what eventually end up shipping. But that burns people out—especially Europeans.
Seriously, working with Europeans— As an American, working with Europeans has been such an incredible challenge. And I'm grateful for it, because I didn't come here to tell you guys how shit is done. I came here to learn, right? As I do everything: to learn.
Part of that is, it's easy to work with people who are dedicated and will follow you to the ends of the earth. It is harder to work with people who will turn around when things get hard and say, "Screw this. I quit."
I call this the European Sanity Problem. Europeans are entirely too sane for entrepreneurship, because as soon as things start to suck, they realize, "I had a good life just working at the bank," and that's what they'll go do.
Whereas an American will say, "Ugh! This sucks! I hate you," and then they just sit down and continue doing their work. Maybe it's because you'll lose your health insurance, but I think a part of it is that we're just used to pain somehow. I don't know.
Europeans have, in general, a very good life and are, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Spoiled. You're all spoiled. Yeah. And I don't hold it against you. I think that that's sane. I think that's rational.
In that same way that if somebody knocks on my door at the wrong time, I think that they're a burglar and are coming to try to kill me. It's my crazy American way of thinking, and it's not healthy, but it is useful sometimes. Rarely, but sometimes.
I will say this: if I think about— I mean, it's hard to say. If I compare how marketable and whatever this is, compared to my wildest fantasies when I started? Obviously, the stuff that I started with is way better, because it's imaginary unicorn bullshit.
But realistically, none of that stuff was shippable, right? And that's really what it comes down to. You're always going to have amazing imaginary things that are better than anything.
This isn't just a beginning of the project versus end of the project thing. This is super important, right? Because one of the things that sucks about shipping product, as opposed to working on product, is that every time you have an idea, the idea is perfect and shiny and new, and will solve all of your problems.
And then, when you kind of get through the process halfway, you realize how problematic it is, and it becomes a big pain in the ass, and there's all these issues with it. And then you have a new idea that is perfect and shiny and new, and you're like, "Screw this old thing. We'll finish that later. I'm going to work on the new thing."
And so what you end up with is a bunch of half-completed stuff, and instead of completing it, you want to— it's a kind of procrastination, you know? And this has led me to understand that focus, real focus, is like a long-term relationship, right? Because relationships are the same way.
When you meet someone, and you fall in love, and they're perfect, and amazing, and then you realize that they fart like everybody else. They leave their crap on the floor. Every other kind of problem. And then you're like, "Screw this person. I'm going to go find somebody else who's perfect and awesome and amazing."
And they turn out to be defective as well. You can spend your entire life basically going through people and being like, "Are there no normal, non-defective people on this planet?"
Until one day you understand that a long-term relationship is not about finding the perfect person. It is about making things work. It's about putting in effort. It about compromise and tolerance, and all of these non-sexy, non-romantic ideas. But that's maturity. That's adulthood.
And that's the difference between a professional who has focus, and an amateur who has ideas. A professional will sit down and do the work even when it sucks and the idea has been proved stupid and flawed and normal. Because they know that every glorious thing is just something that's stupid, sucks, and is normal in disguise.
Can I get an Amen?
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Your goal is for making the world a better place, right? So, in the best case scenario, how do you hope that Lemurs is going to go?
Best case scenario? Well, let me tell you.
First and foremost, I mentioned this thing that nobody knows how to make games anymore? So from an investment and planning standpoint, it's terrifying, utterly terrifying. But the sick, sick optimist in me looks at that and says, "That means the market's wide open!"
Right? I mean, if people knew how to be making games, they would be making games, and if you wanted to make a new kind of game, it would be very difficult, because that's not how you make games. But now, nobody knows how to make games, so it's all up for grabs.
So this idea of a game that's just a regular game, except instead of having an arbitrary game system, it has a natural system, so that when you're playing the game, you're actually learning something? That's an idea that might find purchase.
Maybe not with this game. I mean, this is a very simple game. It's like the Bejeweled-level of game design, right? Gaming has long since moved on. But at the same time, you have to start somewhere. And maybe people will play this game. Maybe they'll hear about this game. Maybe other game makers, who are better at this than I am, will make games based on this idea.
Maybe this will become the way that games are made. Maybe we'll look back on a time and say, "It used to be that we made games based on nothing. Now every game is based on science. It used to be that gaming was a waste of time, but now gaming is how you learn."
It's not about gamification. It's about changing the way that games are made. If we can change the way that games are made, not so that we can be the sole source of these kind of games, but so that this is how all gaming would be made? Could you imagine a world where every game is teaching you something that is useful.
Because every game is already teaching you something, but if every game was teaching you something that is useful. The metaphor that I always use is the "nutritious and delicious" metaphor, right? You want to eat Febo (local fast food chain), but you know you should eat vegetables instead.
But if Febo was the best food for you? What a glorious world that would be! If McDonalds, if Burger King, if all of this fast food was actually the healthiest food on the planet? Everyone would be in great shape! What a glorious world that would be!
This is the equivalent of that for your brain, because what is a video game but the fast food of apps. And so if we could make this fast food into the healthiest, best for your brain type of app that there was? That would be a glorious revolution.
And I would happily die in anonymity just to contribute the drop that led to to the ripple that made that happen.
Actually, it's more like a comment, that when you talk about games as a waste of time? Why? I can understand now on the iPad that games are kind of like one direction, you play a single player with one game. But games could be a way to connect to other people, to share, to engage. That's something that, well, that's like what you have with a beer in a bar. You could have the same people spend an enormous amount of time on the Internet, talking to other people, playing together, just fun. Isn't that something positive?
No, I think that you're right. It's kind of separate issue, but this is another obsession I have with games, right? The idea of the game as conversation. It's a separate phenomenon.
You know when you have a friend, and you have this conversation with your friend online, and now that you have Twitter, now that you have IM, there's no need for a separation of time between conversations.
You can maintain a conversation all the time, but nobody has that much stuff to talk about, right? So every conversation, it starts interesting, and then it eventually goes to just a series of:
You: hey
Them: hey
You: how's it going?
Them: good how are you?
You: hey
Them: hey
You: :)
Them: :)
It really starts to degrade, and then the conversation stops and it's a real shame.
But, if you have games that are designed for it in particular, you can really get a conversation going. Any sort of asynchronous turn-based gaming experience, for example, is going to be fantastic for this, because instead of:
You: hey
Them: hey
it's:
Your move.
Their move.
All you're saying when you say "hey," when you send a smilie, or when you send your move, is "Hey, I'm here. We're still friends." It's that very simple sort of ping back and forth that maintains that line of communication, the carrier signal, if you will, on which the greater parts of friendship are built.
But still, you can design for or against that, right? And I really believe in the social aspect of gaming. I haven't really talked about it, but, for example, in Tap Tap Revenge, there was the ability to play with your friends.
Now, there's two different ways to implement that. There's the standard way of doing that, saying I have my iPhone here, and if you have an iPhone, you can get on the network, and we can play together.
But I was insistant that you have the ability to say, "Oh, you like this game? Let's play!" and put it down, and play with two hands on one device. Two-player one-device mode, so that the game would be inherently social, and there would no hardware requirement to having that social interaction.
Similarly with this game. It's a true eleven-finger multi-touch game, and it really is easier to play when your friends are helping you, because there's a lot going on.
And so, a game like Angry Birds, it's a fantastic game, but if I'm playing Angry Birds, and you, because you're obnoxious, or a little kid who doesn't know any better, you start touching my screen? You're going to screw up my game, and I'm going to get pissed off at you, and that's not going to be a good social interaction.
On the other hand, with a game like this, if you start touching my screen, I'm like, "Yeah, yeah! Grab those ones! Keep those out of there. Put them in the pot." Right? All of a sudden, you're part of it, right?
There are games where you want to talk to your kids, but you can't because your kids are sitting here playing the game. This is a game that you can play with your kids. With or without your kids, right?
But that social element, it's something you have to think about. And so, when you make a game—which you shouldn't— When you make a game, you should consider, "Is this game making it easier for me to socialize with other people, or is this game driving an anti-social wedge between me and other people?"
In the same way that, for example, I made a very conscious decision to try to keep violence out of the game, because even though I don't think that violence in video games necessarily causes violent behavior, I think that immersing yourself in a culture of violence is just bad for you and society in general.
And so I try to keep violence out of the game. I don't want to play a game with my friends that involves shooting them in head or vice-versa, right? It has a certain social element to it, but I feel there are other ways for us to socialize other than shooting each other in general.
So, yes, a game can definitely be useful as a tool for social interaction, which I think is itself a good thing, a platform for positive change, but at the same time, it still requires conscious design. You shouldn't fall ass backwards into the social aspects of gaming. You shouldn't assume that every game is going to be inherently social, because it's not true.
But you can design a game to be inherently social, and that will help. You can design a game to be social in a way that will make it not social. For example, if I said, "You need to make the game more social," and you didn't know what you were doing, you would say, "Oh, OK. Then I'll just have a thing where I can brag about my high score on Twitter and Facebook."
But that doesn't make the game social, it just makes your friends hate you. Like, seriously, has anybody ever seen anything from one of their friends on Twitter or Facebook about their high score in a game and not just wanted to block them?
Have you ever said, "Oh really? That's your high score in the game? Let me see if I can beat your high score." Nobody ever says that ever, right? You think you're making it social. You're making it less social. You really have to think about these things.
And I think every game has the possibility to be an educational experience. It just requires a little bit of design work up front.
There might be one more thing actually. There might be one more thing, one more question. From last time when you were here, remember you talked about getting to finding out your purpose, what you really want to do, right? What you should be doing, as a company, as a person, in life, and now you're going back to Tap Tap Revenge, and now here you are today with something you feel that really does something great to the world. Could you elaborate a little bit on that process. Because sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you're building something you might be unsure about, and you look back at yourself today, realizing what you did back then, doesn't make sense for you as a person, but at the same time, you're doing it.
Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, that always happens. There's this whole cognitive dissonance thing, right? Where you'll say one thing and do another thing. All the time. Always. That's just how it is.
So, last time I was here, what I talked about was, yeah, you should do everything— you should do everything to death. You should do everything— it should come from the heart, and you should always know what you're doing, right? You should be able to recite it in 60 seconds, what you're doing, because it shouldn't be bullshit.
I absolutely think that that's true. I think that that's a prerequisite for things. But just because you know what you're doing, and it's coming form the heart, doesn't mean that you're doing the right thing, or that it's going to be easy. I mean, that's important, right?
The problem that most people have, I think, is that they have no idea what they're doing, they don't really believe in what they're doing, and they're lying to themselves and to the people around them. But once you get past that, you haven't really solved anything. I mean, you're still in the same situation that you're in. You're just a better person to deal with that situation.
And so, just because you are doing something that means everything to you, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy. It doesn't mean that it's pre-ordained. It doesn't mean that things are going to fall into place for you. There's no such thing as the magical path. There's no such thing as—
The path of Dharma is a hard path. Hell, maybe the hardest path, and just thinking that because what you're doing is good or meaningful is going to make it easy? That's a big mistake. Having surety of mission, having surety of what you're trying to do? It's strictly internal. It doesn't change the world around you. It doesn't change the reality of things, or the nature of things.
There's a certain point in your life, I suppose, where you came to that realization that you wanted to do something a lot more meaningful, right? It's not looking back insight. At that point, obviously, you were doing what you really enjoyed doing, at that point, building apps, right? But the reason I'm asking also is I often hear your feedback when you hear people pitch their ideas, right? Like, why should this be on this planet? There must be a purpose for it. Why did you decide this is the thing you're going to spend your life on?
It's also about understanding the decision maybe, the reason why I'm asking, because it's a long term decision, it's something that, from your start that idea, there's some implications and you might go to work on this business for five, ten years.
And it might be also something about that realization, before you even started, right? If you have that back in the day, if you'd have done different things.
Yeah. Here I think is a related concept to what you're driving at. I've always said that you should never work with people who are doing it for the money, right? And the reason why you shouldn't work with people who are doing it for the money, is for no other reason than that those people are not reliable.
Those people are not reliable because when things start to suck, they will realize that there are easier ways to make money than building products. Gambling, for example. Much easier than building products. Takes a lot less time, and probably has a higher chance of success, right?
Building products is about strapping yourself in for misery, tying your heart to something that will most likely not be successful. That's the reality of things. You want to make a game? There are 260 games submitted to the App Store every single day. Two hundred and sixty, every single day. You could make the best game in the world.
But if that's your fate, that's your fate. You're going to have to accept that it's going to suck sometimes, right? So, if we had gotten to that point two month ago, where I, trying to build this game— It was not only going to kill me, but I ended up in the cardiologist's office. I'm 36. I had to go see a damn doctor because I thought I was having a heart attack, because my stress level was so high, right?
When you really think that thing is going to kill you— If I wasn't trying to do this to save the damned world, do you think I would have been able to get through all of that, based on just sheer stubbornness. I'm not that American, come on. It's not going to happen, right?
And that's what it all comes down to. The people I was working with, the ones who were able to stick around and actually do something that was actually useful, even if they didn't survive in the long term, were only able to do so because they believed in the stuff that we were doing.
If you didn't believe in the stuff, if you were paying lip service to these ideas— Anybody who was working with me on this game, because they thought, no matter what they said out loud, that they thought that it would be awesome to have the number one hit game to roll around like a rock star, if they saw themselves hanging around Silicon Valley with a nice car and a gender of their choice on each arm—
A lot of people say that they're doing something because it's their destiny. They say that they're doing something because it's going to change the world, but inside, they're thinking about the car. They're thinking about the money. They're thinking about the glory.
That stuff, those dreams, they're just not strong enough. They're not strong enough to get you through the actual misery and pain that is doing this stuff. No matter how much money you think you're going to make, you will be disabused of that.
...
Thanks.
Applause
There was one other thing that I wanted to say, that I didn't manage to work into the story of everything, but I'll throw it out here for you, because I think it's a super useful thing.
There was a point in making this when I realized that I had fallen into a certain anti-pattern, and this is something you should all pay attention to, because it really gives you the idea that you're not working with the right people.
If you find yourself in a situation where, say, everyone is coming to you with every problem, and looking to you to solve that problem, where everyone expects you to have all the answers. Or, alternately, there's one person in your company who everyone brings every problem to, who solves everybody's problems, and everybody goes to that person expecting them to solve all their problems?
That is a bad situation, because nobody has all the answers. Not you. Not anybody. There's no such thing as the one person who solves everybody's problems, and if you're in a situation where it feels like there's one person who solves everybody's problems, not only is that a very bad formula for success, but it is also a good sign that that person is going to burn out, or something.
Look at anything where things have gone horribly awry, and tell me if you don't have a situation where one person has all of the answers. You know those situations where everybody drinks Koolaid and dies? That's because one person has all the answers, right?
That's not a situation that exists, and I think that we really, we want to fall into the pattern— I don't know about you guys, but it feels like, certainly for me— I would love to not have to make decisions, and not have to answer questions, and just be told what to do, and have it be the right thing, and be able to do that, and not think about this stuff. But that doesn't exist. That's not a real world situation.
And so, the sign that the team was unhealthy, was that everybody looked at me to solve all problems, that people brought me problems, and not solutions, and that everybody expected me to have all the answers, and I didn't have all the answers. So, be careful for that.