YouSaid · the spoken record

Marc Merrill

lines on the record
29
first
2024-07-25
most recent
2024-07-25
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “The games industry is this really special force within tech because you look at how the PC came into the consumer household, how GPUs came to be, how 3D came to be, how VR is happening right now. The games industry has really been this sort of like alpha nerd kind of early adopter set of technologies that then comes to actually ultimately revolutionize the rest of the tech industry.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Comes to AI and gaming, there's still a lot of uncertainty, but the gaming community has always been quick to embrace new tools and new technologies. So given its track record, other industries would be smart to learn from these pioneers.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Often talk about how You knew that We're going to be invented. Could extrapolate that gas stations would be a thing, right? Because that's kind of the first order. By the way, in a world of horses, you need stopping stations.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think ultimately you can create the most value here because if you're successful, you're bringing in net new players, right? Like you're not trying to cannibalize Call of Duty or the legends and say, hey, come over here and play this game instead. Actually, appealing potentially People who don't self identify as gamers today, but they might see something, say, character AI. Hey, that's actually really compelling So I think that's the long term promise of end-to-end gaming that we're very excited about.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “About it, I am just that there's going to be sort of Waves of innovation. And so the first wave is... Making the same games that we Cheaper Scaled before. Think they would be valuable companies that do that and do that well. I think long term the incumbents are actually the most likely to capture Valley from the sort of faster, better, cheaper route the game development. Then, so the second wave, which we are even more excited about, is the potential for AI to create entirely new markets. So this is like new types of gameplay experiences, new social experiences involving agencies. Types of genres that use AI as part of its core game loop that we haven't seen yet.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Despite players being siloed in their chosen platforms and floods of content being available, there may just be one major wave that could disrupt it all. Artificial intelligence. AI is already capable of helping us write stories, create artwork, and build software. Some of the core components of game development, but it also presents a host of new opportunities, like more personalized narratives and custom virtual goods or AI players that can help test games, and even tools for analyzing player activity. Here is John's take.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The industry is in a tremendous amount of flux about channels for receiving your content and channels for paying for your games. I don't think we know how it's going to resolve, specifically the regulatory environment. The diaspora of platforms right now is pretty frustrating. Like if you want to watch a television show right now, it's your guess as to whether or not it's on Netflix or Prime or Hulu or Disney Plus, which is now kind of Hulu, but not yet Hulu or Crunchyroll or Peacock or whatever. And I think that players don't really want that in their games. I think they're much more discerning as players in games and they're also more religious, which is why you see the divide between Steam and the Epic Game Store. And I think that you got to rewind backwards from what the players want.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So we built a few things. We helped them link their subscriber sort of status to special roles in Discord automatically. We handled some of the payment gateway pieces related to that. We just sort of made Discord a better tool for them. And anyone who sort of watched Discord grow up and was also watching Twitch at the time could see it. It was obvious. Like all the big streamers were using it. And the funny thing is the first few that talked about Discord, we didn't pay them. So we met Lyric at like a TwitchCon and we were just like, hey, here's our really cool thing. And like, we can't pay you. We don't have money. But we think we built something cool and we'd love just to get your feedback on our product. That was the conversation. A week later, he gets on stream and says, this is the best built piece of software for what I do that I've ever seen. And you can just see the lyric spike. Boom, right? And that was a nice way to sort of validate that we should ride the Twitch rave because there are people.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We noticed was a number of streamers on Twitch trying to figure out how to better manage their communities. It was very clear that there wasn't a great tool for them. They were patching it together with everything from Ventrillo to TeamSpeak to other sort of pseudo-Discord-like solutions. And we decided after we saw some sort of small uptick from some smaller streamers to just invest in that a little bit. We thought, hey, if we could show them that our tool is really good at what it does, we could provide them with some stuff that is streamer specific, creator specific, and we could get them to use Discord while they're gaming with their friends. It will literally show the world what our product is intended to do. Discord was really intended for like you and your 10 friends to hang out. It was never intended to have hundreds of thousands of people on it. Even though that happens now, the original attempt was like bring people together through games, hang out, build your small community.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Good stand at Discord and he like showed me this cool thing, and there was a social love, and then our social team would be like, Thank you so much for hanging out with us. And it was just as effusive sort of love feel. And so the reason I say this, the reason why, those people are your most important asset from day zero to the end of year one, your most important asset. They're the ones that are going to tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. Probably before the world sees it because they're using the product so much, so intently, so passionately that they'll know bugs that you don't know about. So embrace them.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Now you're in a world where you've got your first hundred, 10,000, 50,000 users. The question you have to ask yourselves is, within those groups, who are your super fans and what are you doing to encourage their behavior? That's the thing I actually think works best for growth. Something we did phenomenally well at Discord. If you were a Discord super fan and we saw you, you knew that we saw you. You just knew it. You could tell that we were loving you right back. And I remember Stan would always say, still Stan's the CTO of Discord. Stan would always say, my favorite thing to do is to get out of writing code and go to PACS and talk to the people about the code I'm writing. And he loved it and he would always insist on being there and ask questions and take feedback. And he would whip out his phone and show some new feature he was thinking about and get feedback. And he just really got into that. And then, of course, on Twitter, you know, same day, someone's like, I just spoke.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Conversely, if you are a game developer and you don't think of yourself at all as the consumer tech person, you mostly go inside out from your own inspiration and intuition into shipping it out into the world. There's like Hideo Kojima is like my least favorite example of this kind of developer. All he wants to do is make what he wants. And if you like it, then great. But it doesn't matter. It's about him. That's also a noble way of being. But if that's your way, do the other thing. Learn to be obsessive about the customer and the market and work backwards from their needs rather than your own inspiration.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Developer by trade. He is a consumer internet technology product developer. So that's one kind. And then the other kind is what I would call real games companies or real game developers. Both are actually really important. But I think the highest level feedback or suggestion I give to any of you is figure out which of those two things you are and then just do the other thing. If you consider yourself a consumer internet tech person, you think more about what is the market saying and you're thinking about the customer, which is nice actually. That's good. You really need to tap into the internal part of you that has very strong sense of...”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The Holy Grail is the customer, and you just obsess about the customer. And when I showed up at Riot I used to call our customers users because that's what everybody in consumer technology calls users. They call them users. I didn't realize how much I hated that until I started calling them players. And when you think of them that way and you start using language like that and you envision what they do with the thing that you're trying to give them, it just changes everything about how you can make great products. And so that for me was like, that was a huge inflection point is just becoming really explicitly customer obsessed. You don't make your dream game, you make players dream game. And I think that is a very helpful way of thinking about it. I think there are basically two kinds of game developers in the world. There are people who are the consumer tech companies who got into games. Mark Pinkas, who was here yesterday, was my boss. I love him deeply. He has passion for the gaming space, but he's not a game developer.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Care, right? Like that is the secret sauce right there. It got to the point on League of Legends release notes, I was putting in parentheses next to the big beats, and we would give them credit for giving us the feedback. There's another detail that's going to sound completely insane, but when we had about 50 all the way up until about 250,000 monthly active players, I would meet with the top tier players and it was first come first serve in a ventrilo server. It was capped at 200. And I would just go every Sunday starting at 4 p.m. I would just go down the line of the 199 other people and ask them what sucked. And that was what fed the release notes.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It all out. I did it for three days straight, and it was horrible. And they're just eviscerating the product right there, right? Like just right in front of everybody. And the whole thing I just kept doing was writing down their feedback, writing it down. And by the time I got back to the office after that Kentia hall debacle, I had a punch list that was more effective for the overall trajectory of League of Legends than if I'd tried to sit in a room with our top designers. At the end of the day, it's not personal. They are as angry and as furious about the state of the game because”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “When League of Legends made its big announce, we went to E3. And I had a booth at the end of the end of a row in Kentia Hall. We told our community, if you want to do resume reviews, come by. All we had was our community and no one knew who we were. We were a 45-person studio at the time, but everybody else thought we were three idiots in a garage, right? And the day started super sad. It was just me and a couple other in the booth. And within a few minutes, people are showing up. They usually just wanted to talk about the game. And I was like, I'll talk to you about the game, but I have one commitment. Before I talk to you about the game, you have to tell me something that completely sucks about League of Legends. And it's a qualitative question. It doesn't matter what their answer is. I'm just going to source with them like, oh, is it a friction related to matchmaking? They might say like, oh, it takes me forever to find a friend. It's like, okay, cool. Is that a matchmaking problem? Is that like a friends list problem? But I'd go through and...”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It used to be that back in the day, marketing was this combination of PR conferences and events and building case studies with your customers and doing field marketing. And it was sort of this very repeatable playbook. Like the whole industry is getting foundationally disrupted. It's shifting really towards the idea of a lot of B2B founders actually instead talking directly to their audience, building direct channels with their customers, building in public, building a sense of a buzz around the work that you're doing. And we certainly see that a ton in AI where the primary hunting ground for acquiring customers, for attracting funding, for recruiting employees actually has been Twitter and LinkedIn and Discord and some of these other platforms. And I would certainly encourage anybody that's kind of working in a B2B context to really consider the same.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Competition is seed numbing games even beyond the competition that we see here in the West. Most of the Asian game companies call it Mihari, Tencent, NetEase, they're actually all moving west, and this has been an effort that has been going on for some time, but I think it's really accelerated recently, the crackdown that China has had and gotcha boxes and regulatory playtime and so on and so forth. Just to use an example of Mihailyo, I think it's opening three year four offices like here in the West Coast alone and hiring a massive number of people. It's something to think about is if you are starting a game studio today and having to potentially compete against developers that can feel massive workforces that are working around the clock and have very, very deep understanding of like monetization, how to run free-to-play economies and so on. I think it's hard to compete with one of these larger guys just”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “There are some amazing people at those two companies. Don't get me wrong, they really are, but the resume alone is not what is actually going to help you be successful as a startup. And you can waste a lot of time, a lot of money. These people are expensive often. Sometimes they're seeking the same salary they got off of Xbox. And the thing is, they're probably really great in those environments. But when you're a team of 10 or less, 20 or less, 50 or less, it's a completely different ballgame. So all that amazing experience, all the knowledge that they have, all the skills that they have, don't necessarily apply to the early stage.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Happened to us and our overall applicant pipelines over the last 60 days is we are flooded. We are seeing heads of studios apply for like base tier leadership jobs. Trust me, if you guys are not checking your email inboxes right now, you're making a huge mistake. Everybody's emailing everyone trying to find a job. And some of these people don't need to. They're just looking to get out of the studio that handled their, I won't name any names, but they handled their folks very poorly. And so if you have cash, just figure out how you want to focus because there'll be so many people who are trying to get in.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “When you look at the market today, there's less than 10 of these product pitches still alive, meaning like as the economy's kind of gotten more condensed. And I heard everybody talking earlier today about how there are founders who prefer to operate in a more financially constrained market because it makes it kind of easier to ignore a lot of the riffraff and the noise. I don't disagree with that. In fact, I would say that we now find ourselves in a very interesting situation where we're one of a few, whereas three years ago, we were one of so many it wasn't worth doing.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “What we codename Fellowship This open world co op free to play game. There are a lot of people who were telling us like there are dozens of these, they're so expensive, no one's going to want to fund this, it's going to be ridiculous. And I think if you look at the market two years ago, all that pushback was totally right.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Convincing That viral dance Of his popularity Ability to buy it as an em Charact While this pop culture breakthrough is great news for the industry Still has its challenges Much of Industry investment To less than a quarter of its post pand”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Started a fortnight, a smash hit that everyone in the globe was talking about for years. Right after Fortnite, you had on my guess, which almost made the pandemic livable, then you had games like Elden, followed by Hogwarts Legacy, followed by now Power World. And so now it feels like every mirror you'll have like one or two games that just kill the cultural fabric and just becomes the thing that everyone talks about, which I find is really amazing and a sign that games has come into its own right as a piece of culture.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Entertainment medium for the future. And it's inevitable just based on consumer watch time and engagement time if you just measure it in minutes and hours and monetization. I think the folks on the business side are starting to really understand that gaming is actually larger than film, TV, books, magazines, radio combined. And you can actually build and monetize your IP and have daily interaction in a way that you wouldn't otherwise.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “A lot of Hollywood are intensely interested in the games industry because they've just seen in the last year not just the Mario movie, not just what's happened with Hogwarts Legacy, Last of Us. I've had a ton of meetings with everyone from the team around JJ Abrams, the bad robot people, the Eisner family who ran Disney for many years, the folks around Ridley Scott. And Riot has obviously been pushing from the gaming side. And it really feels like there's a tremendous boom that's happened in the same way that Marvel and the superhero franchises sort of became the core IP that then unlocked basically the last, I don't know, 10 years of films. What you're really seeing is just an aging out of the population of folks that grew up watching two-hour movies and that's their primary method of entertainment. And as that group ages out, I think what we'll see is we'll see gaming ultimately dominate and become the primary.”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “You're starting the game company, there's never been more tools and new technology to help you build games. There's never been more sources of funding and there's more players of games today than ever before. There's three million gamers around the world, like Southeast Asia, Africa, India. All of these emerging markets are coming online at the same time, like we have more distribution platforms that are hungry for content. Netflix is getting into games. I just heard that Walmart and Verizon last month are really excited about games. Apple Arcade, Steam is at all time highs. There's just never been more demand for great content. Overlook An”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I'm very excited because I legitimately believe that right now we're in the Sakharov Authority of a gaming renaissance. Jonathan Partner and founding investor of A16Z Game. Previously worked at Rye Game. Ride Games The company was acquired by Tenson. Recognize Riot as the creators Of Which sees 15 million”

    2024-07-25 · a16z Podcast · Founders Playbook: Lessons from Riot, Discord, & More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source