YouSaid · the spoken record

Bing Gordon

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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Change you can imagine is probably going to happen with Bitcoin that's happening with Stripe. And it happened with games. Then it happened with e-commerce. I remember in the late 90s, I was becoming enamored of Amazon and thought the future of games was going to be digital, not packaged goods because I was there when packaged goods got invented. When I started in games shipped in baggies. So packaged goods were like this innovation. People who came in the games business after boxes thought, well, games are always in boxes. No, no, that was just a temporary invention. The next thing is going to be digital. I said, well, you're crazy. Games are going to box them my whole life. And I said, yeah, not in mine.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's bigger than we thought. We thought that one day 50% of humans would play games every month, and I think the number is about 70% now. The guy who is the marketing consignlier for Intel and Apple, for Steve Jobs and the various leaders at Intel, was named Regis McKenna. He was the first great marketer in Silicon Valley before Benny Off and Dell and all that. And he was an ad agency, PR agency. And I spent a lot of time with him kind of back in the 90s. And he had a resonating piece of wisdom that I've seen seen elsewhere. He says, technology always takes off slower than you think, but what it works, it's bigger than you could imagine. And that's kind of what happened to games. By the way, that's what happened with the internet. That's what happened with Lavongo. And that's what's happening with Airbnb. So this technology does have a way of making more dramatic.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to know this exact percent, and I'll sell for this exact person, but I'm not going to solve for white male 34, lives in LA, drives a Prius.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is instinct. What I discovered is I acted a little bit in New York for a while and found out about a third of playwrights who had hit plays, never had another one. It was in music it was called One Hit Wonders. And here's I could tell the issue with One Hit Wonders is they make their first artwork for themselves. And then they become successful and they no longer are the common man. So if they make something for themselves after they're successful, it doesn't resonate to large audiences. So the trick for creative people is you make the first thing for yourself, but for the second thing you got to make it for specific others. How do I learn this in advertising? Creative people are not inspired by averages. They want to know, show me Trey Lockerbie, show me his Facebook page.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly enough, this is a lesson anybody doing marketing. The client gets tired of the brands before the consumers do. Because after doing EA Sports in the game for one year, the CEO of EA at the time came and said, okay, what's your tagline this year? I said, what do you mean what's the tagline this year? He said, well, you know, what's year? I said, no, you don't understand. This is it for the next 30 years. He said, 30 years, no brands last that long. And I said, no, over my dead body. And similarly, after we did John Madden football, I'm in charge of it the next year, the EA Sales Force says, we can't sell another one. Walmart and Toys R Us and other retailers said we won't even carry it. And I had a guy named Rich Hilleman, who I worked with for a long time. We looked at each other. I said, we'd buy it. And so he went ahead and did it. So you learn again and again and again and again when the experts are wrong. And sometimes the experts are your own self.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New York, going to see kind of various retailers, Toys R Us was headquartered in New Jersey in the Ark. And I get in a cab, and the cabby looks at me and I'm carrying a little briefcase with an EA Sports logo on, and he goes, EA Sports, it's in the game. And that's when I thought, that's what a mass market feels like. That was kind of the first great audience reaction moments. You know, we had plenty of other moments around games. We had some wonderful moments with Dr. J when we did the Dr. J and Leonard Bird game, Pat Quinn of the Vancouver Knocks were doing a hockey game. And both times they just said, hey, you guys, stick with your day job.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are many. I found the moments that most resonate for me in gaming are moments where I've got a mental image of a loved one or best friend combined with a screenshot. That was the surprise. It wasn't like film or TV where you just look at the highlight. It's the highlight attached to a person. So a lot of the moments were when my daughters played games I was working on and gave me feedback. Those were the most resonant. The first great moment that I wrote the business plan and said someday games are going to be bigger than movies or music. And everybody went, you know, you're so dumb, but we'll invest in you anyway. And we said someday there's going to be games that sell a million units. And a few years later, we had launched the EA Sports brand with a tagline, if it's in the game, it's in the game.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to allow me to build what I call virtual Disneyland. And then through other series of fortunate events, I wended my way to Stanford Business School. And at Stanford Business School, I met a guy who wanted to do the same thing for Dyson card sports games based on baseball card game called Stratomatic. And five years later, he said, I want to start this company. And I said, great, I've got three award-winning guys to start an agency. He said, no way, you got to come on board. So I did. And seven years later, Electronic Arts IPO'd. And seven years later, Goodbye Berlin and Silverstein, which would have been Goodbye Berlin Silverstein and Gordon got picked by ad age magazine as the advertising agency of the year. So multiple good choices, but all happenstance along the way.”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's the really, really, really long story. There's the really long story. There's a long story. The short story is that I became enamored of the concept of virtual worlds. When I was a punk ass kid working at Disneyland, they have these robot characters fixed in place. They call audio animatronics. And there was one of Abraham Lincoln, for example, and then there are a lot of them in the rides, like pirates of the Caribbean, all the pirates that do stuff. And I had this fantasy that they could come to life walk around and I could save and restore stories with them. And then commercial fishing one day we were weathered in and my other deck handle while I'm cooking after we worked all day out in the rain fixing nets came in with a heath kit catalog to cover which was build your own home computer and I went aha that home computer is”
2021-07-23 · We Study Billionaires · TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT