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Bing Gordon

lines on the record: 59
first: 2021-07-23
most recent: 2021-07-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Your way in a little like dating, you know, for getting the phone number in the first date, that's okay. It's fun for a while, but you're really trying to figure out how to help the other person grow and have that Hall of Fame life. I think it was just the wrong mental model of board members and CEOs. The CEOs aren't demanding enough of their investor board members. And it's partly because they don't know how.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Founders are irreplaceable. So your job as an investor is to find ways to help future proof the founder. And you can't do that if the founder isn't motivated to be a learning machine. But in that case, you want to not be an authority figure, but a consultant to their success. It's just shocking to me that that's not even in public discourse. It's usually investors who say we're going to help the CEOs. They don't really mean it because they don't think it's in their business model to help the CEOs be better. You know, again, I mentioned Redolf and he's somebody who's always there to help. I think Ben Horowitz's always there to help. You know, some pretty famous. So, you know, Door is always there to help, lines always there to help. Most just give it lip service. So after you get through the dance of kind of valuation and investment,”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't seem like thought through option. It's just if you want to get good at something, how do you do it? I found, I do kind of have the soul of a teacher, even though I was pretty unteachable, a chip on my shoulder for authority figures. So in trying to learn from mental models, again, kind of the first principle. So how do you create the mental models? I wish I knew then what I've learned now. If I would have been better with grownups, I maybe could have found somebody who could have told me who could have helped me learn in a way, you know, when I was 20. So I've been trying to make up for my own deficiency with other people ever since.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your goals are, but what are your forever OKRs? And so for a founder, Eileen Lee coined the concept of unicorn. The founder, if you're going to start a company, change people's lives, get the unicorn valuation. Now maybe it's Decca Corn. But when you start out, why not go for greatness? Just as, you know, if you're drafted as an athlete, why not try to get on the Hall of Fame? Well, you start thinking, no, I just want to feed my family and get a house for my mom. All I want to start, why not aim for the Hall of Fame? And then, you know, you get somebody like Jerry Rice says, well, you got the skills, but work ethic is the best way to do it. Work ethic, forever motivation. And so professional athletes, which I like as a metaphor for a bunch of things, work ethic is almost always what separates the great from the good. So forever OKRs, and it's love processes that are repeatable.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say, I want to have a good life. Then I go even further and say, well, have an all star year and get in the Hall of Fame or whatever you're going to do. So, you know, then I'd say, hey, Trey, what's Hall of Fame for podcasting? You go, well, Michael Lewis is in my Hall of Fame. Okay, what does he do that you don't do? Now, what's the difference and how do you get from here to there? So it's forever okay ours, the number one job of a CEO is have product market fit. The number one job of a salesperson is hit the sales quota and an A plus 120%. By the way, most founders don't know how to set goals for their direct reports. Nobody knows how to set goals for a CFO. Nobody even knows what a COO job is. So I encourage founders really early on to start having a discussion before people underperform about what good looks like.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nine, who are you rate at eight? And a forever okay is the factor on which you differentiate a 10 from an eight. And then it does turn out that in Forever OKRs have a good life. There's only been one. It was a Harvard study of a bunch of graduates kind of at age 20 to 22. What do you want to do in life? And they found that late in life the people who reported high satisfaction with life had no substance abuse, no chronic illnesses between one and three long-lasting best friends and a lasting good marriage is a key to it. And so it's do something you like, have long-term friends and don't fall prey to the sins of disease and substance abuse.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason is at first you set goals as tasks. You know, like, hey, Trey, your goal is eight podcasts in the next quarter. And you get to the end of it and said, I did my eight podcast. They go, yeah, but we forgot. The goal was wrong because somebody else did 15 and they just kicked ass on our podcast and you went from number one to number seven. Oh, you should have said that as a goal. Well, I thought that if it was going to be eight podcasts, then you would hit that goal, but actually it was a different goal. So I start out with what I think of as forever OKRs in personal life and in work life. And I've got my own checklist of what they are, but I can actually sit with founders and say, benchmark the world to figure out your forever. So if you want to be a podcaster, who do you admire? Tell me all the people you know are podcasters. Who do you rate at 10 of your education?”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not part of the investor founder discussion, but it's so predictable. And then a thing that I've kind of invented that's kind of proprietary to me, I call forever OKRs. And OKRs were invented at Intel. I was actually at Intel doing it part-time while going to business school. But it's basically goal setting with an attitude. Most people who start”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“250 people a can anymore. You got to start working through other people. And my experience is high potential cognitive prodigies can learn stuff fast. They can't learn at the rate of Moore's Law, but they can learn stuff fast. And the hardest thing to learn is the people skills, first one-on-one and second in groups that scale from five to 25 to 100 to 250 to 1,000 to 5,000. Almost all founders run into the same issues along the way. Daniel Eck was Spotify would say the thing that we prepared for is you're going to outgrow some of your execs at each one of those states. It's just unlikely that 100% of your execs are going to have the learning skills and the motivation to improve to the next level. It's shocking that it”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things for you. The first is there was a book called Passages about Life. You know, teenagers, all teenagers have this body chemistry issue and then they psychologically trying to figure out identity and, you know, late in life, people have pretty typical issues. Well, founders have pretty typical issues that are scale related. And you go from kind of tribe to a village and somewhere at about 25 people you start having to put in place processes at 50 people you have to hire your first bureaucrat at 100 people you don't know everybody in the company's name anymore and then at somewhere between 150 250 you become a leader of leaders most founders can still operate as chief product owners or chief tech officer of vp sales even at 250 people but at my”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More broadly, I think about it is where numbers can make people's lives better. My goal is hall of fame contribution to the game business, hall of fame contributions to Hall of Fame CEOs. So CEOs and Hall of Fame works. I think investors, especially at venture level, are not as fungible as I'd originally imagined. And I did say, you know, the founders, you want to get five useful input ideas per half-day board meeting. Well, if you already have a lot of experience in a certain category, it's easier to add value to the founder.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Direct competitors. So I got to go look for some other stuff. And it turns out there's so many investors of so much money that if you don't have time to learn about an industry, you can't create enough value. So there are some investors who are kind of traction investors. When they find out everybody wants in, then they want in. And one way or another, you pay a higher price or you charm or you do something else. Then most of the investors I know, like Ted Schlein at Klanor Perkins, he's probably the best investor in cybersecurity. He's been doing it for kind of over 20 years. You know, he's got a reputation. He's got a reputation in Washington. He's built this cohort of followers again and again and again and again. So I think VAT's having kind of a narrow focus. I've tried to end up primarily focusing on games and gamification.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on, I was surprised by two things, especially in a ventral firm like Kleinor Perkins that thinks so big. I always thought, you know, put money in, get 100% return in three years. That's really good. But in place like Cliner Perkins, they're looking for every now and then 100x return. And knowing that they're going to stay involved with that founding team for seven to ten years. So you end up having to go bigger, longer than I'd imagined beforehand. And I'd say the next thing is I'd kind of thought it would be cool to see all these new things I can learn. My friend Vinod Kosla used to be a Kleiner and started on Berme just said, it's really competitive out there. You end up investing in stuff you know. So Bing, nobody else knows kind of games like you do. So stick with that. And I thought, well, you don't exactly want to invest.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To own it forever, of course, makes everything else more valuable. And if nobody wanted to actually own a Van Gogh, their value would go down. And so the NFTs, I think it's two things. It's the forever instinct to collect that probably goes back to cavemen and cave ladies. You know, look at my collection of wooden clubs I've got or bear's teeth. There's speculation that it might become more valuable. So the interesting thing about NFTs is for the first time you can build an artwork or creation where every time it resells, there can be perfected a royalty back to the originator.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not as much of a completionist. There are collectors of all type. And in addition, there are speculators. And so at NFTs is a combination of collectibility with blockchain cryptocurrency type speculation. So if you missed Bitcoin or you missed Ethereum, here's something new that you can speculate will follow the same kind of bumpy growth path. that you're going to find some people to make things catch fire. There's got to be some people who want to just collect and own, who don't want to sell. If nobody really wants to own a Seth Curry card, Seth and Steph brother card, they just want to keep it in liquidity. It's just not as valuable as some people want to own it for a long time. So I think in general, you want about a third of the people who just take something out of market because they want”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, collectibility, I learned really early on from child psychologists that the urge to collect is part of child development. It's kind of age seven to 10 when you do stamp collecting and rock collecting and Barbie collecting and beanie baby collecting. And it's kind of a normal, the first manipulative in world competence. They start out learning names and learning words. That's kind of learning. But this collecting his own and puts stuff together. And for most people, there's some kind of urge to collect this sticks with them forever. It kind of harkens back to their good old preteen days before life became complicated. We've just always found that collecting matters. You know, Pokemon got to catch them all. I grew up collecting baseball cards and I was a mediocre collector. I never actually finished any collector.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff make your world better. And there, the problem is power and clarity and brightness. Turns out it's easier to, Moore's law is better for increasing logic at a rate of 2x over 18 months. Whereas batteries and power and displays are not increasing at the same rate. So photons are easier to improve than atoms.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still see my friends, but now there's new better stuff in the world. Jay Allard had this vision at Microsoft kind of in the early days, the Xbox is you can be Arthur, you can put on goggles, walk through the world, and you can see a virtual sword stuck in a rock. And now the game is, how do you pull the sword out of the rock? Either you be Arthur, you do something to become the Arthur and pull it out. Everybody can find a sword and a rock. Everybody can be an Arthur, and it's just a matter of computer programming. I think VR is in your ear telling you you are there with problems about collision accuracy and problems about nausea and problems about performance and problems about pixel resolution. AR is the promise of see other people while you do.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a fan of Pokemon Go. I've been playing that every day since I first came out. But interesting that Pokemon Go, the AR is really the Google Maps. So it's the 2D mapping with a little bit of 3D, but it's the 2D mapping of the world and a safe place in the world is astonishing. They did a game that didn't work. It was a Harry Potter game. And they had a thing called port keys where you'd think about in the Harry Potter there's like train eight and three quarters and nine and three quarters and something like that. You'd walk up and if you're a wizard you could find a rail line between two Muggle rail lines. And so there's problems of AR to make the world better. There was Neil Stevenson was doing a game for, he's the author was doing a game for Magic Leap. And there what you want to do is you put on your AR gun.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then as a gamer, I think that all platforms need killer apps. So my simple mantra is consumers buy a new platform for one piece of software. So in the Sega Genesis costs $150 and John Madden football costs 50 bucks, they're basically paying $200 to get John Madden football. And so we had to make it worth $200. And there's not, you know, so if the Oculus Quest 2 cost, whatever, I think like $200 software costs 40 bucks. There's no piece of software right now worth $240.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This time it's real. My daughter grew up kind of in the shadow of gaming. She goes back and look at popular video games in the 80s and go, Dad, did you guys really think this is realistic? It's stick figures. It's kind of loony tune. Yeah, we did at the time. You know, Dr. J and Larry Bird, which is just stick figures. And Dr. J famously had a finger roll. It wasn't in the animation, but people could see it. It was kind of near it. And like thinking that Mickey Mouse really has five fingers, you know, your brain tells you it's there when it's not there. So VR's got to get to this pixel accuracy. It's got to get to moving around. Right now, the accuracy in Dreamscape is because there's cameras in the ceiling. It's been 100 grand of cameras in the ceiling to get inch accuracy. Most people can't do that at home. So there's still some hardware.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out and you touch the carpet, it would be kind of not centimeter accuracy, but maybe inch accuracy and your finger would say goodwill carpet, but your brain would say stonewall. And so bringing the hands in made a huge difference. Then they had other things like they give you a stick and they'd project you a torch and then they'd put your face near a heat lamp and you go, dude, that's a torch. As it's a movie business, we're in this suspension of disbelief. And the one thing with most of the me about VR is the way that it works your inner ear. I haven't found anybody get tired of it. You don't see through it. Whereas video games since the Atari VCS, every six years there's an order of magnitude increase in polys per second in RAM. And so the first two years of every new console system, we call it...”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Centimeter accuracy in order to get this new trick of virtual reality, which is it fools the inner ear and to think you're in space. And the problem with virtual reality first is that goggles are hard to do, but originally they were tethered. So all the Oculus first party games, if you wander through a space, you had to teleport. And your feet don't move, so you can tell you're not doing anything. So the trade-off of you are there for any year didn't kind of match your optical recognition and your sense of motion. So then the location-based VR with things like Dreamscape and the Void was pretty interesting because they discovered they could project virtual reality, a stone wall, or a spaceship wall, and then they'd put a piece of plywood with crummy carpet on top of it.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found again and again and again if you start measuring for immersiveness we found that people acted more immersed on a flat screen than on a curved screen. What causes people to immers, we could see it again and again is a challenge, pixel accuracy collision. You don't want to feel uncoordinated and fast response time. You know, you want kind of 60 frames a second response time so it feels like you're in the real world. Then you want geospatial sound surround sound. And if you get that, people forget that it's a flat screen. So if you put on virtual reality goggles, guess what? No longer have that pixel accuracy. You reach out to touch and axe and it's kind of plus or minus a couple inches.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a streamer, they start talking to each other. First, they talk to the streamer, then they talk to each other. You can even see in something like the crown channel, the Twitch Live, that if there's a bunch of concurrence watching and the chat isn't flowing like crazy, people go, what's going on? This isn't Twitch, you guys. Talk someone as with anything when you start posting. You feel more belonging when you post and you get something back from someone else. You feel more like a member. The next thing you know, you start building this together. It really is live streaming with community is kind of magical. And you don't really see it anywhere else. So much of the history of entertainment is one to many. Celebrities, they don't even see their fans anymore. Twitch is all about, it's like Mosh Pitt with words. I think it's going to become a model that we see more often.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then when Amazon got involved, there's the flywheel of Twitch kept going, which is kind of more streamers, more audience, better tech. And if you go to TwitchCon, it's a bunch of colorful people and they are kind of like the new John Stewart. They've got a gift to Gab. They can talk for four or five hours at a time. The interesting thing about video games is it's high resolution video image that you can project your face over the top of. You don't have to go out with a camera and create videos. So games is kind of a natural. It's interesting on Twitch right now is musicians are starting to use Twitch. Even AOC, the politician, she used Twitch. And what's emerged on Twitch is this community aspect, which is when you get enough Twitch people.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advised than to actually do. They all succeeded in big ways coming from what was basically a failure of Justin TV. And what Emmett started out, and I knew him all the time, what Emmett said is, I've got to make it work for streamers, just as Pinterest had to make it work for pinners, and YouTube had to make it work for creators. And so for the first five years, Ammet just solved in the team, a pretty good original team with Kevin and others. They just solved for how do we make streamers happy. And Emmett had this early aha that game streamers wanted only three things, money, fam, and love, and not necessarily in that or they got fame. They figured they could make money sooner or later. And so he built this site with a bunch of tech, the genius tech there, because videos really hard to help people get money, fam, and love.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, back in the day. So, interestingly enough, so Immort, he and Justin Conn and Mike Siebel did this thing called Justin TV. And it was basically video blogging. And it didn't work. Video at the time was really expensive. They were doing that right before Instagram came out. It was really expensive. So the three of them went three different ways, trying to figure out what to do next. And Emmett said, there's some people who are blogging their video game play. They do something that's a Leroy Jenkins moment. They want to show it off. And instead of on YouTube, they put it up live and talk about it. I think I can make a company of that. Mike Sebel said Instagram a video. I think I made a company of it. He called it social cam. He sold it to Auto Desk. Now he's running Y Combinator. And Justin Kahn said, it looks more fun to put money into other people and let them do the work. So what I learned from Justin TV is it's easier to invest in.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, you're a prime customer, get some valuable stuff for free in your favorite game. I have told people forever that what do you give to the friend who has everything? A virtual sword in the game of their choice.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon has a feature called Prime Gaming, which very much like Prime Video and Prime Music, if you're a prime subscriber, it used to be if you subscribe to Prime, guess what? You got a shipping benefit. And Jeff figured out really early on, oh no, this is so valuable. Why don't we give them free movies? Why don't give them free music and now free games because games in entertainment media are unique that people will pay for snippets snippets of music are free, they're in the public five seconds, stems are in the public domain. Nobody pays for a page of a book. Nobody pays for five seconds of a movie. Epic sold 7 million skulltrooper digital costumes in a Halloween week a couple years ago at $15 a piece. So prime gaming does that.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your team runs back the opening kickoff for a touchdown. You go, uh oh, now everybody thinks it's too easy and you're going to have, you often have a tough fourth quarter. And when Eviscerate them and they go, wait, wait, we just scored. Coach, why are you guys a hard dose? No, no, this is going to get worse. This work, come on. You guys, look, we may got to touch on that, but you missed that block. Don't ever do that again. I think I end up looking for micro signs and when do you get optimistic and what caused optimism. Amazon also does a really good job of focusing not on outputs. So revenues and output and what are the inputs? Well milestone delivery is an input quality milestone delivery is an input quality of people is an input I have found that the thing to pay attention to in the creative process is helpful to do it along the way.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably. I'm optimistic the two games that are now in various stages of release, one called Lost Arc and one called New World, both have a lot going for them and getting pretty good kind of beta test reaction. One irony is that many of the companies in games that have become hyper successful failed miserably prior to that. Activision failed miserably. EA had one week where the stock went from 41 to 11. The supercell got, it was a studio in a failed company, and they all got laid off. So sometimes the failure is precursor to success because it really focuses you. It's a lot easier to have easy success. But by the way, success can sow the seeds of failure. You know, think about it if you're a football fan.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supports new experiments, and that's its own fly reel. Usage leads to data, which leads to improved product, which leads to more usage, and then experiments as an input to data and product improvement. I like to look at icons in the world of digital who are learning machines. I think Brian Chesky of Airbnb, I don't work with, is just a learning machine. And you can see Jeffrey Katzenberg, he famously tried to have a lunch with a new person he found interesting every week for 20 years. There's a bunch of ways to learn. You can do it with books. You can do it with people. You can do it with experiments. Sometimes you just do it with paying attention. But the founders who turned into great CEOs at scale all tend to be learning machines. And by the way, that says when you put together your board,”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the flywheel to make it spin up. And that's kind of the secret to digital businesses is low friction and creating flywheels. Andy Jassian, to say enough, talking about how do you interview people? And Jassy not only has this amazing work ethic and high motivation and real clarity. Jassy might be the best writer in the company. He's really, really close. You talk about music. He started out wanting to be a music promoter and he kind of wandered in a different direction. But he just says that the key for him in a new view is, does the person that he's interviewing have a mental model of how they learn? It's a thing that investors never talk to founders about, but how do you learn? They talked to someone, you talked about games and data. Having data isn't that useful. You want data that the more data you have, the more you can learn. And then the learning”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's learnable because he learned it. The best learner, so two things learning is motivation, but it's also reducing stuff to first principles. So the best thinkers, you know, Jeff and Reed Hoffman and Driesen and scientists who go to first principles. And Bezos says, I build strategies not on what changes, but what endures. And so, you know, speed of light endures, TikTok does not. Trying to capture ephemerality with comets going through the solar system is just probably not quite as good as being in touch with the whole galaxy. The flywheel is kind of written on the back of a napkin and it still nurses is what a consumers always want. They want convenient selection and lower prices. Any questions? Now, in each one that you deliver can improve the next one. And then what do you inject?”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've called Jeff the inventor of invention. It's astonishing to me how much parallel invention gets done and does it by basically making the inventors in the company be able to have a hands-free relationship with the rest of the company.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A quarter, it had the six valley A C T I O N, a mnemonic to make it easier to remember. And every quarter one employer, we get a statue of one of the six values. But that was it. And then we kind of informally thought, never promote somebody to a VPU, isn't an icon for one of the values, never brought somebody VPUs deficient in one of the values. But that's kind of soft. And it's not operationalized. And Amazon did operationalize it. It's kind of the genius of Bezos to figure out how to automate stuff to reduce kind of friction and confusion along the way. You just thought as many founders should think that building an organization, it's a web service architecture with modules, which are teams, with IO. And then there's an API layer, which is cultures and goals and communication process.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon, it's in the public record when people interview at Amazon, they get interviewed against those leadership principles. And so if you're adding 25% new employees a year and you interview 10 people to get one, it means every employee on average has to interview two and a half people a year. Managers do more than that. So it's in your face when you get told in this interview cycle you're interviewing Trey and disagree and commit. Find out what has he done in his career that proves how aligned he is with those principles. And then you get together with everybody else with the interview loop and everybody says, here's what I think based on the two eye covered. Here's what I think based on the two I covered. The principles are operationalized that way. At electronic arts, the way we operationalize the values where one”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see. So, Jim Collins in the book Built The Last, he says that the values you espouse for your company, as near as you can tell, doesn't matter what the values are. It's how well you follow them. It's the alignment that matters, kind of the clarity and alignment. If you were ever a teenager, you know how crazy it drives you when your parents say, who would I say not do what I do? You want kids to take risks and do stupid stuff. You just don't want them to do this stupid stuff that in retrospect you realized was riskier than you thought at the time. The leadership principles I like, I've seen a bunch of people get recruited into Amazon after other success. And they find it hard to believe that values and mission statements actually matter until you see it tested and borne out.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm sure in the first minute his big laugh broke out, but he was absolutely charming and totally in the moment. And I ended out at eight and a half by 11 piece of tight paper. And he said, I said, well, I feel like kind of a dork just showing up. I know John said, why don't I go meet you? I thought I'd at least bring a gift. So here's my five ideas for you. And he went, huh, well, that's interesting. He said, nobody's ever showed up for me with kind of a document before to get started with. First find out later that Amazon was becoming a writing culture. That eventually led to me getting invited to be on the board. And founders make a mistake of thinking that board meetings are like going to the principal's office and just trying to get out alive. And I tell founders your job is to get five usable ideas that you actually write down a calendar by the end of the meeting per half day board meeting.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American Express cars. I never had one, but anybody who pulls one out, they're kind of a total all star. And then I go, where? Nah, Amazon deserves better than that. That's derivative. American Express always use it. And he goes, well, what do you like? I go, Amazon Prime. Nobody's ever used Prime before. And he goes, huh? Okay. And then we went bike right again. He called me the next day and said, would you fly up to Seattle and go have lunch with Jeff Bezos? And I said, well, yeah. And weeks later, this is Fall of 02. So now it's a day before I'm thinking, oh, God, I'm going to meet Jeff Bailey. He's been in the cover at Time magazine, and I didn't know Amazon Toast and all that stuff. So I sat down and wrote my five Amazon ideas. I said, you deserve it. I walked into lunch and he came in, you know, kind of bouncing on his toes. He's always had abnormal amounts of energy.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customer obsessed without talking about people. And he goes, What would you do? And I said, Well, I started a loyalty program for people who want to be VIP used Amazon. That's kind of the way I feel about it. And he goes, I said, but they don't always work, but it has to be done right. He says, well, that's interesting. What would you do? I says, well, I'd give better shipping because they were doing super savers shipping at the time for 25 bucks. You get two days shipping for free. And at the time, analysts thought they were famously crazy for giving away so much. I said, I give even a better shipping benefit. I give a concierge for out-of-stock items or popular items. And I think I ought to get a letter, a customer letter like Bezos' shareholders letters. I was already a fan of every month. And he goes, that's interesting. What'd you call it? I go, Sean. He goes, no, really, what would you call it? I go, Amazon black. I've always admired.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I came back as an invited guest. And a couple months later, John and I are out for bike ride. John's kind of an aerobic athlete. And he said, I forgot to ask, how'd you like the CO conference this year? I said, I liked it. First, I didn't have to speak this year so I could just enjoy it. That was great. And second, I really like seeing Jeff Bezos in person, but I think he's doing it wrong. And John goes, what do you mean? I said, well, I think I'm an Amazon customer when the boxes show up in my front door. It feels like Christmas. I think it's kind of what I call an internet treasure. This is a company built on the internet that is proof that my generation is better than my parents' generation and gives me joy. It gives me kind of up levels my self-image in Amazon is one of those. But Jeff talked and he said, we're the most customer-obsessed company in the world. That's our goal. And he didn't tell a single customer story. You know, how can you become...”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Kleiner Perkins, the storied investment firm, was Series A investor in electronic art. So I got the know Brook Buyers on the board for a decade. He was a founding partner of Heiner Perkins. He always told me, you got to meet this prodigy named John Door, who is the best young salesperson at Intel at the time. And so I met Brooke and then John. And in fact, my wife was John's primary headhunter in the late 80s and early 90s. So we've known these guys forever. So in the late 90s, John and Brooke invited me as kind of a friend of Kleiner, which I was a fan, to participate investing, but then also came gave a speech at their CEO conference that was kind of legendary, bringing people together. This before other venture firms convened CEOs for shared peer-to-peer learning. And so I did that. And the next year, I didn't have to talk.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To figure out a business model. Influencers have to be entertaining, but they need to figure out a business model. That happened on Pinterest. It happens on Twitch. It happened with authors. It happens with podcasters. You know, you say, I got a voice. I can entertain the crap out of people. You're not an artist if you can't figure out a way to turn your hours into money either directly or through an intermediary.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To 14 cents an hour, and cable TV in the US monetized at 17 cents an hour. So games monetize about like streaming movies, about like streaming music, but it wasn't always the case. I can't remember where it got off on this, but if you go to a motion picture theater, for example, your ticket's five bucks lasts 100 minutes. So now you're at kind of three bucks an hour, but if you put in the parking and the popcorn, it can end up being more paperback books. If you read 60 pages an hour and you get a 300-page book, hardcover for 25 bucks, that's four or five bucks an hour, paperback at 10 bucks. It's a buck and a half an hour. This is not just games. This goes all the way back to Michelangelo. Creators have always had to, on the one hand, make good stuff, and on the other hand,”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still more potential than actual in games, you know, if you start out, the business model is you make more money per user on average than it costs to acquire them, and you make much more money from the user minus the cost to acquire them than it takes to build the game. And the games generally don't become valuable until they're $100 million revenue per game for multiple years in a row. That's kind of the number. And, you know, in 2010, these freemium games averaged about two cents an hour. When we started electronic arts, I set the goal $1 an hour of value for the customers. So they go to local computer store and buy a game for $40. Let's make sure there's 40 hours of gameplay. World of Warcraft, they figured out that they got the average 19 cents per hour of play. By the way, Netflix is a”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With even more data. You know, Zingo when it first started getting big, it was getting petabytes of session data. I started the game business went 140K. Seemed like a lot. I remember when IBM, the PCAT came out and it had 640K of RAM. Oh my God, now we can really do something. We can make an endless game”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there where Duolingo started out that way, and these digital businesses having lots of usage helps you tune your product rapidly. And when your product gets perfect and it makes people happy, some will pay. So the interesting thing about the Freemium Games business that the rest of the world hasn't figured out yet is people only pay when they're happy. Imagine how great that would be if commerce was such they only paid when you were happy. And literally in the freemium model for games we discovered that people can play 10 days, 20 days. They don't actually give you money until they think they're going to play for another 30 days.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Television is a freemium model, kind of with advertising. This guy, Danita Williams at USC Annaberg School, and he found out that 30% of the value in a freemium community was people who never paid. And just think about it, you'd rather be in a stadium full of people for a YouTube concert, even if a third didn't pay. If there are empty seats you don't like it as much. When I was growing up, commerce was There was a saying caveat emthor, which is Latin for buyer beware, which is you give me the money and if you're screwed, your fault you didn't pay attention. And that's kind of the history of commerce back to the Romans, caveat emporter. And the freemium model is Vendor Emter, seller beware, because it costs you money if you don't make people happy enough to ever pay. So Facebook started.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT