YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Young

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28
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2018-01-26
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2018-01-26
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1
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  1. “These high LTV games where the lifetime value is higher than the CAC, a very sophisticated user acquisition organization that forms the basis of a new type of publishing company. And then all of the apparatus necessary to do that well today, tools, technologies, systems that are made available not just to our own internal teams, but to other game teams and game companies and application developers that might want to operate their user acquisition at the same scale and capability that we do today. the consumer tools and technologies, content and services that customers who play these games want and need to serve their insatiable appetite to communicate with one another, to consume media about the things that they love and to be a part of this kind of wonderful world of games and games media. So if we're successful five years from now, we will be on the path to building”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Everybody would just be much better if it's like, hey, yes or no. Ultimately, I think that there is an opportunity to build an entirely new type of gaming company and then media company that's born from games, a company that's as enduring as Electronic Arts has been or Activision has been in the space. In the Western markets, I think there's ultimately the opportunity to build a company that is as meaningful and as impactful and as scaled as a company like Tencent has been in the East. People often forget that 55% of Tencent's revenues come from games. The games industry is exceptionally scaled and the audience of people who grew up playing games are the same audience of people that watch television shows, go to movies, participate in many of the consumer things that your listeners find. And so for us, what that really means is how do we go build a company that has the ability to prosecute that scaled marketplace today? And so that means”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would most like to see VCs respecting the time of entrepreneurs. I can tell you that when I go spend time talking to a VC, there's three types of interaction I have. There's one interaction which is like very exciting. Holy shit, we have to work together. Those are obviously great, but they're few and far between. The second, which I appreciate almost as much, is the, yeah, we're not interested. Thanks for your time, but it's highly unlikely for us to do anything. And the third is, oh yeah, you know, we should stay in touch. You know, how about we try to schedule something for a month from now or eight weeks from now? That kind of slow roll or slow no is, you know, it's just wasting the entrepreneur's time. And I get why the VC might want to do it from retaining optionality standpoint. But at the end of the day, the likelihood that I'm going to end up working with someone who's so rolled me is really, really low. So I think.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “There's a group called Gaming Insiders, which is sort of an email group that I'm a member of. And I find that interesting certainly from time to time. I have to tell you, I'm not a huge consumer of newsletters and I'm not really a huge consumer of reading blogs or reading websites. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but the idea for me of basically after 200 words on a web page, I find it really, really difficult to focus.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “My mother crying when I told her I wasn't going to go to university and instead I was going to make video games. Me being absolutely determined to prove to her that that was the right choice.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “World War II by Winston Churchill, best book I've ever read. It gives you intimate insight into how leaders make decisions at points of great stress.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “transparency, that honesty, that kind of connection. I think that you have to be radically transparent. There's no benefit to being anything other than radically transparent, and you have to start that from the very outset. You also have to”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, when you're assembling a board, I think it's all about figuring out the makeup of that team and being very selective about the people that you have around the table. Fred Destin always stresses the importance of the importance of the”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Mike Maples. Being as the wizard brain, Mike is the lizard brain, or as probably he would like to be the thunder lizard brain. But the lizard brain, in that Mike very expertly states the obvious. His instincts about what you should do at any given point in time are not particularly complicated by a whole bunch of sort of thoughts of finesse. They're just very obvious and very thoughtfully presented. And Mike helps you pragmatically think through problems. Someone like Noah from KP's Growth Fund, you know, Noah is a world-class financial engineer. And as we try to go build the company that we hope to make here ultimately, having that set of complementary intelligences that can aid me and in combination with Bob who sort of understands our creative process here better than anyone, that group of people, I think is a pretty well-cost team of individual.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think when you're assembling a board, the thing that you want around the table are a set of complementary intelligences. So what you want to try to avoid is too much overlap in terms of their ability to help guide you. And so what you're really doing is you're just trying to assemble a team of people that together can help you build the very best company that leads to the very best outcome for everybody involved. And so our board today, for example, you have people like Bing, you have like Maples, you have my co-founder, Bob Stevenson, you have Noah Knuff from KP Growth. And each of these people brings something very different to the table from my perspective. In the case of Bing, you know, I've always thought of him as the wizard brain, you know, the guy who can think orthogonally can give you wild feedback that helps you think in a different way. When I think about...”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Knowledge from the future that the way the Japanese mobile market had developed, it really led the Western market in terms of audience engagement and monetization. And these ideas of LTV versus CAC were particularly mature in that market and it was felt like something that we really needed to understand more deeply. And so at the end of the day, the decision to sell that company boiled down to really just two very simple things. was the valuation right and did we feel like it would be an enriching experience and i think in both of those cases the answer was was yes so i think for people who are going through the process of asking themselves whether they will sell their company the first question that they need to ask is ultimately what are they trying to achieve and what are they trying to accomplish once they've answered that question then they can make the determination of whether or not that will be best served by being a part of another company and going through that acquisition process”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Interested in joining us. As we went through the process then of assessing whether or not those companies would be a good fit, there were really two things that we paid attention to at the time. The first is the obvious, which is like is the valuation appropriate for where we were in our life. Did it feel like the right thing for us to do economically, for our investors and our employees and the founders of the company? But the second thing was, would it be an enriching experience? You know, we were not particularly interested in selling the company and then just leaving immediately. We were only interested in continuing the process of trying to build our company and learn and get as much value out of that outcome as we possibly could from a sort of an educational standpoint. So for us, it was really driven predominantly decision to sell the company to DNA, which was a Japanese publicly traded game company. That decision was motivated as much by the fact that we felt like they had almost”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, specifically with NGMOCO, we reached a point where we felt like the valuation that we could get for the company at that particular moment was at its peak, at least for the short term, this apex evaluation that it would be difficult for us to get back up to again on a multiple basis for many years. And so as we realized that, we became more open to the idea of being acquired. Although it was not general operating practice to kind of focus on that or think about that. But we became open to it because we just realized, hey, you know what? The market is beginning to get much more crowded. The position that we hold will only be defensible for a relatively short period of time. And so now we would be open to the idea of being acquired. And that happened to coincide with a number of companies approaching us and saying, hey, would you?”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean, I think what he means there is that you make a choice to sell your company. And there are two outcomes. One's a good one and one's not so good one. The good one is you're doing really well. You have lots of suitors that are approaching you asking to acquire the company because they have a need. And you make an active choice that that is a better outcome than for you on balance than going alive. And so that's sort of the good outcome. The bad outcome is, hey, the business didn't quite go the way that you hoped it would go. And now you need to find the softest landing possible for the people that you have a responsibility to, the employees, the investors, and you have to try to maximize the outcome and the return. And so if you don't want to be sold, you can't be bought. You know what I mean? Like at the end of the day, it's an active decision that you have to make in both of those scenarios, whether or not you truly want to sell your company and join another or go on to the next thing.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Method of reaching that customer is through paid marketing. And so the type of organization that you build today is an organization that is world class at managing user acquisition across every performance marketing channel, every measurable marketing channel that you possibly can. And so on the CAC side, it's about what's the cost of an impression or the cost of ultimately the cost of an install, which is the click-through rate on that ad, the conversion to install when someone hits the app store. And then on the software side, it's how effectively do you convert that cohort of customers into a paying customer? And then how effectively”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Retailers essentially muscle in and get more shelf space for the products that it was selling. And so at the time when I was at Electronic Arts, you built the game. Those games cost anywhere from $5 to $100 million to make. You launch them on a predetermined date. You pre-manufactured the discs and then sold those discs directly into retail. And so demand planning the scale of production, the amount that you were going to spend on marketing, both in print and outdoor and television became a very, very important piece of the puzzle. And it's why actually licensed intellectual property became so important in the traditional games business. If you compare and contrast that to the type of organization that you need to build when you're in a purely digitally distributed world, really the access to the customer, albeit abstracted through an app store has been provided to you. And so your predominant”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So at Electronic Arts, today it's different because electronic arts has evolved and changed and so it'd be difficult for me to kind of comment specifically on how the company there is structured today. But while I was at Electronic Arts, our primary method of distribution was to consumers on DVDs that they purchased in stores. And so that meant having a sales force that sold directly to those retailers. Electronic arts actually in the game space pioneered the idea of a dire-to-retailer distribution model and it was one of the very, very powerful assets that the company has. You know, when you think about EA, you think about it as, oh, it's the company that makes Madden or it's the company that makes FIFA or Battlefront. And certainly those franchises have helped that company grow and develop. But its first great asset, I think, was its Salesforce and distribution. And it afforded it the ability to, by going directly to the”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Makes it easier for customers to find the things that they want. You could make the argument that in a sea of products, it's equally difficult to find stuff if it's not editorialized or presented to you in a certain way. But my sense is that today paid is the number one thing that you need to think about, especially if you're operating in a very dense or crowded marketplace like the app stores.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, it's an essential channel. It's very difficult for me to imagine building a business with any predictability that relies on as its sort of core premise the idea of making things that are popular and viral solely. You know, you're happy to have things and you strive to make things that a broad audience of people like and that has the mechanisms to be adopted organically from customer to customer, but you really do have to appreciate and respect paid channel as a method to find customers. And so what that really means is you start looking at your business as an LTV versus CAC business and that then has huge implications on the type of organization that you build, the type of products that you build, how you engage customers, how you monetize customers, how you hunt for those paying customers within the marketplace. I'm not sure, by the way, necessarily that free and an open distribution necessary”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Have grown much more quickly. Those misalignments between the interest of the platform holder and the opinion of the platform holder and the interest of consumers basically means that the rate of change in those constrained systems just isn't quite as fast as it would be in an open system.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I think the fact that we don't have free and open distribution in the long term stifles the rate of change. I think the primary reason for that is often that platform holders and consumers' interests are not necessarily always aligned. If you think back to Apple's introduction of IAP, for example, within a, this is within a constrained platform like iOS or the App Store. There was a long period of time, a relatively long period of time, where Apple said free apps are always going to be free, paid apps are always going to be paid if we have an in-app purchase product, it will only be available for paid games. And of course, today, the scale of the free freemium, free-to-play marketplace relative to pay-for-download marketplace is pretty dramatically skewed towards free. It took a lot of lobbying and a lot of effort to get Apple to see that opportunity. If that had happened a year sooner, the market may”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Two thoughts. The first is we tend to That being said, platform shifts are inevitable, whether they're just platforms that are hardware platforms or distributions. And the way I view them simply as opportunities that you have to time effectively. And so with each shift in platform, you need to ask yourself a couple of really simple questions is one, when will it be real? And two, what user behavior has changed and how do I leverage that? And I think if you keep those two things at the heart of your decision making process, you're going to find yourself in a better position than if you just get caught up in the excitement of something new and jump in sort of willy-nilly.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, every audience has a hardcore and it's something that you need to find and understand and cultivate and deliver a product to because it gives you this sort of authentic foundation upon which the rest of your audience will stand. So that's a key lesson for me. And along with that, everything ultimately has a natural audience. So if you had two teams or two game teams, one game team is working on a game based on Star Wars and another is working on a game based on Babylon 5. They're both exactly the same team, exactly the same game, the game based on Star Wars will just simply outperform the game based on Babylon 5 because the audience appeal of Star Wars is that much greater. And so when you're building products that you're trying to reach scaled audiences for, you really do have to ask yourself what do those audiences want? What do the customers ultimately desire?”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Really from working on Lord of the Rings, so I built a series of Lord of the Rings games in very close collaboration with Peter Jackson and Wing Nut Films and New Line Cinema, and they were very successful series of games based on movies. And one of the lessons learned from Peter Jackson is that the path to the mass market goes through the hardcore.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I did not personally do a great job of doing that, but it is important to do. I think at that stage in my career in particular, I was very, very focused on charging forward. And so sometimes when you're in a large company and the large company doesn't quite see your vision and you're not doing a great job necessarily of communicating it, you can buttheads more than not. I was fortunate in that 51% of the time I was right or 51% or more in my assessment of what needed to be made or how we should build something. And so I was given the benefit of the doubt in most cases. But I do think that it's very important for a leader to be able to communicate upwards, outwards, you know, throughout their organization. And that's certainly something today that I hold sort of very, very dear to the way we operate here. So I think that's one lesson I think EA is a consumer company and you're trying to build things for the mass market, the mass market of gamers. I think one of the lessons that I learned”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, so let's say a few kind of key takeaways. The first is big companies tend to have particular agendas. And so when you work at a big company, it's important to really understand what those agendas are and make sure that you're building things that are consistent with them. And throughout my career at Electronic Arts, there were times where I was perfectly aligned with what the company was doing and there are other times that I wasn't. And generally the times that I wasn't, the outcomes weren't as good as they could have been.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “That was backed by Kaina Perkins iFund. And we scaled that over the course of the following few years to one of the largest companies in the space, sold it at the end of 2010. In 2013, left the acquiring company and started this company network, which is my second venture-backed company, KP's also an investor, along with Floodgate Fund and some others.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yes, so I'm from the UK, grew up in the UK, and at a very early age taught myself to code, decided not to go to university and instead start in the wonderful world of video games. Very quickly realized that I was not the world's best video game programmer and like a lot of failed engineers basically became a manager. In the video game business, that's called a producer. So I was a video game producer in the UK, made my way to the United States, joined Virgin Games, Richard Branson's Virgin, had a game company, which was one of the leading game companies at the time. And then in 1997, I joined a company called Electronic Arts and stayed with Electronic Arts for 11 years as a producer, executive producer, general manager of studios. In 2008, I left EA and started one of the first mobile game companies, a company called NG Moco.”

    2018-01-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source