YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Ganju

lines on the record: 97
first: 2014-11-19
most recent: 2014-11-19
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

“Sure, sure. So for my software engineers, I love a book called Don't Make Me Think. Which is a book about usability and making software and user interfaces that are friendly to people. And often you see these software engineers where they kind of scoff, and everyone's encountered this guy. It's an IT guy or a software engineer that scoffs at the novice user, right? They say, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, this guy doesn't know how to use this thing. This guy doesn't know how to use Photoshop. He's so dumb or he doesn't know how to make his network. He doesn't know how to connect to the network. And he's so dumb. And that attitude is something that needs to vanish. And if you look at successful companies like Apple, where things just work, none of the engineers have that attitude, right? They have the attitude of a bad software company has the attitude of if somebody doesn't know how to use something, it's their fault because that user is dumb.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you'll go into pivot tables. But nobody in the history of Excel, no matter what kind of computer genius they were, started day one and was like, how do I make macros work or how do I make pivot tables work? They all started this way. It's just the Excel. And that's like the big sort of secret of mathematicians in general is that everybody started from one plus one equals two and filtered their way up. And it's just each step is not a big step once you understand the previous step.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so now that 100 instead of just being 100 is the sum of two other cells that each say 50 And so you just work backwards from there. You just take each cell and break it down into its subcomponents. And pretty soon you have a working Excel document. And it doesn't need to be more complex than that. And that's a great start. And you'll do that for a while and then you'll be comfortable with that. And then you'll be like, what is this pivot table nonsense that everyone's talking about? Is it actually useful?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But basic Excel is none of that. Basic Excel is I have, you know, it's just that. I have 10 door manufacturers or whatever, 100 door manufacturers that are making 10 doors and you multiply those two cells together and you get a thousand. And that's how you should start. You should start with just the one row. So let's start with just the one row of I'm going to make a thousand doors. So you say that that third cell equals the first cell times the second cell And then so now if you change the numbers in the number of door manufacturers you have the thousand will automatically shift. And then you say, okay, well, how many, why do I have this many door manufacturers? Why do I think I have 100 door manufacturers? And it's like, oh, because I'm going to hire 50 this month and 50 next month.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we do it all internally. And then again, like macros are just way, way ahead of anything we're doing. Just getting a standard Excel sheet working, just let's call it 10 rows and 10 columns is fine. And you can build up from there as you learn more and you get more comfortable. Again, this is going back to that attitude again, saying I can't do macros and I can't do like V lookups and I can't do pivot tables.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or budget, right? If it's a hundred million dollar project, you should spend $10 million just researching it. If you think there's a 10% chance it's going to fail and more than 10% of projects actually fail, right? So if you think there's a 25% chance that it fails, you should spend $25 million researching a $100 million project. This is assuming that you're going to take the research project is going to take this odds of success to 100%. But still, it's not a perfect world that nobody knows these exact numbers, but certainly the amount of forethought or research that's done in general is way, way, way under what even a ballpark estimate would say that the amount of forethought should go into it.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The number of projects that fail in business. And then the amount of research or forethought that goes into them. In general, that's way, way off, right? And to go back to probability, if there's... Even if you think there's a 90% chance of something succeeding and a 10% chance of failing, well, then it's worth it to spend 10% of the time ahead of time to see if it's going to work. And so, what that means is if you're starting a 10-week project, you spend a week to research it. And people don't do that. People spend two hours thinking about it. And they go, that'd be a great idea. And they hop off and do it for 10 weeks, right?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things will automatically update? Yeah, this is done in Excel. Each column is a month. And so you can see time progressing, going to the right, and then each row will be one of these things. Again, with this monster zinc, it's how many door manufacturers I have, how many do they make in a month, what's the defect rate, et cetera. And then as a month turns into reality, you overwrite the projected assumptions with the actuals. But I think in general, what I'm saying sounds really simple. But people don't do it. People just don't do it. In general, lots of companies that I visited or, like you said, like smaller startups that I help out with in an advisory role, they just don't do these things. And if you think about”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what it was. And it's like it's sort of the mark of intelligence to learn from your mistakes and change your attitudes of things. And so they were sort of, Colbert was riving for brand and carry as a flip-flop.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you add lines and as you refine the numbers for each line. And then so basically you start to fill in the actuals and you look at their deviation from your projections when you started. Yeah.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And over time, you generate a really solid understanding of that game, of whichever initiative it is that you're planning.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The doors are defective. So it's actually not 300 doors generated in the first month, it's 270 doors generated in the first month. And so then you add a new line in your business case here that is going to subtract 10% from your finished product of doors.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So the goals are set quarterly. So every three months they have set this goal. So going back to this monster's income, that would be a three-month goal would be the, you know, we're going to generate one more gigawatt of power. And then each week they're going to follow the numbers that were the breakdown of this plant. So they say how many door manufacturers had I actually hired this week and how many doors did they actually manufacture this week. And then you start to get confidence around those numbers. You start to see, oh, crap, I can't hire 100 door makers in a month. That's actually going to take me two, three months to hire 100. But I can hire 30 in the first month. And they're each going to contribute $10. So I'll at least have 300 doors in the first month or whatever. And you'll learn something new. You learn that, oh, 10%.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But really, breaking down the plan and multiplying these numbers through to get to the goal is really the difference there between success and failure. It's not complicated math, right? It's just, you know, I need a thousand doors. So I need 100 door manufacturers that can each make 10 doors in a month. And then I'll have a thousand doors. And so none of it's calculus or any of this other stuff, but it is rigorous in terms of you have to be able to, when you break it down to the individual components, those things have to be executable, right? Can I actually get 100 door makers and does each of them actually make 10 doors a month and et cetera?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then so then how do you make a thousand more doors? Well, you need like a hundred door manufacturers that each make 10, and then you try to do that, but then you realize there's like a 10% defect rate, right? And so it's sort of building up from there. And understanding the math behind it, and then understanding if that's realistic. Can I have 100 door makers or whatever I just said? Is it realistic to hire that many that quickly in one month or whatever”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gigawatt more, right? And then it's like, okay, one gigawatt, great. How do we get there? And then, well, okay, so each door generates, you know, a megawatt, you know, each door that you manufacture to a new child's bedroom generates one megawatt. And so you need to generate a thousand more doors. You need to manufacture a thousand more doors to get this one gigawatt.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mike Wazowski. Yeah. That was pretty close. That was close. That was close. So they go into these children's bedrooms and they make them laugh and that generates electricity for the city that they live in Monstropolis, which is the name of the city. And so let's say one day they're short on electricity. And so the first thing, so then the CEO of Monstropolis or CEO of MonsterZ Inc is like, let's generate more electricity. And then a bad way to do it would be like, let's just try to generate more. And a good way to do it would be like, let's generate one more, like one.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mike Lukowski or something? Man, I can't believe I'm blanking. Sounds good. It's Sully and Mike Wakowski or something. Anyway, right. So, you know, any team member that crushes it that week, we give them one of the stuffed animals and they're the Monster of the Week and stuff. So it's this sort of recurring theme. But my example that I used was they have these doors to children's bedrooms where they go and they make them. They used to scare them, but now they make them laugh or whatever.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We use that monsters ink. So monsters are occurring kind of theme at ZocDoc. So the monsters from Monsters Inc. I'm blanking on their names now, but those characters from that movie.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good example, right? If you want to build a billion dollar company, what do you need to do? What kind of revenue do you need to justify or what kind of earnings do you need to justify being a billion dollars? And then what sort of markets or what sort of opportunities are available that would create that much earnings? And then how are you going to get there? You can't just say like, let's just build a billion dollar company. And so, I mean, it's good to have that goal, but then you need a plan to execute as well. And I think that one of the big improvements that we've done operationally is what I call business cases and it's what it's the math of how you're going to get there. And the example I use, which is sort of just a fun example, was”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Math to figure out how to get themselves into space. But I feel like in business and in life, people just say. I'm just going to add this much, or I'm just going to create this much more X% more of whatever is going to happen. And they haven't really done the underlying math, right? Yeah”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then at review time, it's easy to see whether you did it or not. But then the next problem after that is that people just say, yeah, that sounds like a good number. Let's get a million more people to use it or whatever. But there's no basis in how they're going to get to that million, right? And so, and the analogy I like to use is when they tried to put the first man in space or the first man on the moon, they didn't just say like, okay, let's get in the rocket and like burn the rocket as hard as we can and maybe we'll get into space. They did all the math behind it, right? They were like gravity pulls us this much and we have to take this much weight up. And so then we need this much fuel. But this much fuel then adds this much weight also to the rocket. So that causes its own set of problems. And then there's wind resistance and everything, right? And they did all them.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's try to accomplish X. Let's try to get X more. Let's just try to get more people using ZocDoc, right? As opposed to let's get 10 million more people to use ZockDoc are different goals just psychologically speaking”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that the easiest example is that people, so smart goals means specific measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. And so it's sort of a framework to help you pick goals that you can objectively hit or miss. So measurable means I'm going to do, I'm going to lose exactly 10 pounds or at least 10 pounds in the next two months or three months. And then you can objectively decide at the end whether or not you've lost 10 pounds, right? As opposed to saying I'm just going to lose weight and then you don't really know whether what kind of goal and you don't, it doesn't work psychologically, right? You're just like, oh, I'm just sort of vaguely losing weight. And putting down that goal and literally putting it on your wall actually gives you something to strive towards. But then the next problem after that. So the first problem is just setting objective goals, right? Instead of just saying.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love poker as well. I think poker is a great example of math, of a combination of math and sort of emotional intelligence also coming into play. But poker is a great sort of reflection of all the stuff we've been talking about. Of course, the books I've recently read a great book, which is called How Not to Be Wrong. The power of mathematical thinking. And this book by a guy named Jordan Ellenberg is exactly what we're talking about. It's like it's written for an audience of people that have historically been intimidated by math or just thought, gee, I'm not good at math, and introduces things in a very simple way and then works up to more complex concepts. In the way that we just broke down probability with this dice game. And so that's a great book, and I hope it does well, and I hope alleviate.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if you start simple and understand the conceptual underpinnings and then just work your way up from there, I think that sort of every field of math can just be broken down that way. You just start simple and not get intimidated by all these Greek symbols.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I'm a bit dumber than I look, but that's a different story. And so, right, but then that's the genesis of it, right? So now let's roll two die. And what are the odds of getting two sixes? So the odds are that each one has a one in six chance. Of getting a six. Each die has a one in six chance of getting a six. And you multiply those together, and the odds of getting two sixes are one in 36. Yet. And so now, right, so now you could do the game again, right? Would I pay you? How much should I pay you if you get a 36? How much did I pay you if you get two sixes, I should say? And it just goes from there, right? It just gets more and more complex. And then blackjack then is just more of the same thing. It's just a more complex version of the same thing.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you can start to see at which point you would break even, which is five. I'll cheat and give you the answer. But at $5, you would break even exactly, right? If I paid you $5 every time a six showed up, then you would lose $5 for each dealer rolls. And then you would win $5 when you got the six. I'm tracking”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, but that's the genesis of it, right? The genesis of it is all math, really, is starting from these common sense or these real world problems and saying, okay, well, how do I understand this problem? My intuition says I wouldn't play it. If I only want a dollar when I hit six and I would play it if I won $1,000 when I played six, what would I do at $10? Would I do it at $3? And, you know. So, you know, start from there. And we can walk through this problem, right? Let's say a simple way to think about this problem is let's assume in six roles you get one of each, right? Let's say we roll it six times and you get one, one, one, one, one, one, one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five, and one, six, right?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, plate not. Yes. That's a player not to play. If a six was $3, if I paid you $3 when a six showed up. Would you play that game?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so you play that game, right? So now the question is at which point should you play or play it or not play it, right? Would you play it at $3?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you wouldn't play that game. And so it's intuition, right? Now let's change the game and say that if a six comes up, I pay you $1,000 And if one through five each come up, you have to pay me $1.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, okay, yeah, exactly. And it's like, you know, and that serves the, you know, that even intimidates me. And I think I know a fair bit about math. But the best way to do it is to just start really simple and then work your way up slowly. And so, you know, when you want to talk about probability, let's play a game, you and me, right? Let's play a game where we roll a die. And if the number becomes 6, if the number is six, I pay you a dollar. And then number is one through five, you pay me a dollar, right?”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that people get intimidated because they, you know, they sort of look online and Wikipedia especially does this. You go and you're like, what is expected value or something? And you look at it. And Wikipedia immediately gives you these Greek symbols. On the first, and everyone's seen that, right? Like the first paragraph of”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to be, let me refine it a little bit, to state it really precisely. It's not that one of those people, one of those 23 people could go and ask the other 22, and odds are we'd find the same birthday, right? It's that any two of those 23 people have the same birthday. Does that make sense? It's a little bit different, but it actually, I think that's where the misconception comes in, is that, you know, you kind of take from it like, wow, if I walked around and asked 22 people, like there's a 50% chance that...”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Power to crunch the crap out of numbers. And a lot of things that were, I'm trying to make it like laymans, a lot of things that were closed form solutions, which means they got solved through these sort of complex equations that you see with lots of weird symbols in them. Now computers can just sort of brute force, crank out the answers to them. And in a better way, too, because it's sort of you can more closely mirror reality with a computer than you can with a closed-form solution like a calculus equation. And so I don't think it's not a big deal if most people don't know calculus, but there's fields of math. Which are certainly helpful in understanding.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, sure. I think there are certain fields of math that are extremely important and just become more and more relevant every day. And you see this kind of the big data sort of, I hate to use buzzwords, but that sort of trend that has come into favor in the last few years, which is a very real thing, despite the buzzwords, there's a lot of sort of information to be gleaned and improvements in our society to be had from statistical analysis. So statistics and probability and statistics are things that are just going to become bigger and bigger parts of our world. In terms of calculus, I don't think if anything, calculus is sort of diminishing because that sort of field of math was more applicable when you didn't have a giant computer on every desktop, giant in terms of processing.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and certainly that's certainly every school has that sort of self fulfilling prophecy when you start to get that, you gain traction and all the best kids want to go to your school. But I think that they are very vigilant about keeping the computer science curriculum current. And so you can see, and I had a couple friends that had gone to different schools at that time and also majored in computer science. And I was learning Java at the time, which was the hot new thing. This is like 1996 or something. And we already had courses in Java. And my friends were still learning stuff in C. And so, you know, I think that the new schools are, the best schools are very diligent about keeping the curriculum up to date, especially the industry and the technologies changed so quickly.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andreessen is from their Max Levchin from PayPal. It's from there, you know, a bunch of sort of illustrious current Silicon Valley moguls are from there. So, yeah, it's a good school. And I certainly really, really fell in love with computer science when I did those four years and kind of knew that that's what I wanted to do as a profession.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's actually a formal training. You can actually go to a four year college and get a computer science degree. So that was great. And so I went to University of Illinois, which is like sort of a top five computer science school. It kind of flirts in and out of there some years at number four and some years it's number seven or whatever.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it turns out that writing Tetris on your calculator does not actually win you the cheerleaders. But that was my best strategy at that time. Suffice to say I was single for high school. But then, and so my guidance counselor kind of saw these kind of things too and recommended to me that I go and major in computer engineering or computer science. And that was something that was not even really apparent to me that that was a whole major and stuff. And of course, this is in the 90s and you couldn't just Google things. And so it was just information. It was almost like a revelation to me that you could just go and do this as a profession.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reconstruct that game, which the game in that movie is called Global Thermonuclear War. And it's a pretty violent game. And I tried to recreate it with my nine-year-old brain trying to deconstruct where to deploy nuclear missiles. And I was actually working on it at school and grade school. And my principal walked into the computer lab, and I got in big trouble because I was making a game called Global Thermonuclear War in fourth grade. But, you know, but that was the genesis of my interest. And then in high school, we had these programmable calculators. And I started writing games on the calculator and giving it to all my friends in the way that misguided nerds are. At age 15, I thought I would get a lot of girls this way.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So in terms of the computer science, I started the way that many computer nerds start, which is I started programming at an early age, like nine or ten years old on my Apple IIC and just trying to make games, right? Like those games, you know, we had the Atari 2600 and I had some simple games on my Apple. And I was like, I want to try to do this. So I bought a book on basic programming and I tried to make a couple games. I tried to reproduce the game from war games that if you remember that with Matt Broderick. So I tried to”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, certainly it has that open table aspect where you can book appointments online, of course. It also has the Yelp aspect where you can see reviews and you can see photos. And you can also now check in, which means you can fill out your medical history forms online before you get to the doctor.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. We are currently about 500 to 600 employees and over 6 million people visit ZocDoc each month to search for a doctor and to give a little background. ZocDoc is a site where you can come, you can search for a doctor and you can see reviews. You can see photos and you can book an appointment right online. So in the way that you can book everything else online these days, we're trying to bring doctor appointment booking online.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, sure. I grew up in Chicago, in the west suburbs of Chicago. My parents were both doctors, so nice, comfortable sort of bringing. I was very fortunate in that way. Went to undergrad, majored in computer science, finished in 1998, worked in Austin, Texas at a company called Trilogy for a year, but then decided that the dot-com boom of the time was just way too hot for me to be working at a larger company. So all the gold hunters of history, I moved out west to California, you know, for the gold rush of 1999, I guess you could call it, and tried my luck at a couple startups there.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it was like one of those leagues that you join and ended up being the champion that year. I played a lot of pool in college and then since we were both just out of college, I had still retained all that skill. If you played me right now, I'd probably be really rusty.”
2014-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 45: Nick Ganju on The Majesty of Ping Pong, Poker, and How to Write Hit Songs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT