YouSaid · the spoken record

Nolan Bushnell

lines on the record: 66
first: 2017-02-27
most recent: 2017-02-27
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

“And it was that frustrating feeling of I'm spending all this money on something that, you know, I want to have, but I don't want to be spending this kind of money on, quite frankly, anything that is going to be thrown out.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boy, that's a real hard one because, you know, I Some of the bad decisions I've made, I'm not sure that I would like my life to not have had them. And I'm not sure that if I were to give myself advice and change that trajectory, I would end up where I am right now. And I like where I am.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were able to go back to, I mean, now you are an elder statesman of the tech world you were in your 70s, and if you could go back to Nolan Bushnell in the late 70s or early 80s and say, hey, you know, I want to give you some advice. What would you tell yourself?”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope that I'm not there yet I want to stay on the steep part of the learning curve. And in fact, I've even done a methodology on it. I force myself to do something totally outside my comfort zone every year. And I write down eleven things that I think I can accomplish in a year that are outside my comfort zone. And then I mix them up, put a number on them, throw a pair of dice, and I have to in that year do what the dice tell me to do. And I've discovered a funny thing. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's a generalized principle that when you do different things you're happier. This process of exploration and of discovery and of winnowing out the game and the metagame is very satisfying.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no question that a good failure is good for your soul. There is nothing worse than feeling like you are invincible and really cool and entitled. Being entitled is probably the ugliest thing that a person can be because all of a sudden it's not what you do. It's who you are. And people who rely on who they are as opposed to what they do become very banal.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that I didn't understand the nature of entertainment. Now that sounds funny coming from the amusement park and all that, but entertainment is very fragile. It's driven on novelty. And so when we would first open a unit, people would come from all around because it was novelty. So there was sort of a half life of a shine in which you say, gee, you know, this is St. Louis. Looks to me like I need four more Chuck E. Cheeses. When in fact what you were seeing is this novelty bonus and that people in normal life didn't really want to come to Chuck E. Cheese three times a month. Wanted to come to Chuck E. Cheese every other month. We got overbuilt because we got another false positive”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I sold the company when we were about two hundred and eighty stores and half were franchise at the time. So we build about 120 and franchises build about 140, I think.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, sometimes I feel that inadvertence shines on me because I hadn't even thought about franchising. A guy came in and said, I want a franchise. And I said, okay. And we started franchising. And so the franchise business was hugely profitable.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was all the technology and the one open store. The one open store was cash flowing half a million dollars a year. And they let me pay it $100,000 a year for five years. And that was maybe the deal of a lifetime. So I had this business that was positive cash flow day one while I was still chairman of Atari. And I had a team of people that had been working on it. I brought them on my payroll and we immediately expanded to the second store. This one was 25,000 square feet. And I was having more fun at Chuck Cheese than I was having atari. Atari was getting political. So when we decided to part ways, I decided I could focus all my time on Chuck E. Cheese and I was kind of happy about it.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to clarify, you sold Atari to Warner, and I guess Chuck E. Cheese was kind of part of that deal, right? Because you created it while you're there. So for you to keep Chuck E. Cheese, you had to buy it back from them.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was basically in San Jose. We took over a old Dean Witter office and it was like 5,000 square feet and that was huge compared to pizza parlors at the time. We knew the day we opened that we'd made a huge mistake and it was too small.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly what my marketing department said. And they said. They said there's no way, Bushnell. That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. They said we couldn't even, you know, they'd be on the garden. We wouldn't get our health license. And I said, okay, you name it. I don't care, but it has to be a happy name. And so they came back all smiles the next week and they said we've got the name. It's a three-smile name. And I said, what is it? And he said, Chuck”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to understand, when I bought the costume, I thought I was buying a coyote. The code name was Coyote Pizza. And my guys, I said, how's the coyote coming? He said, what coyote? And I said, well, the costume I sent you. He says, oh, you mean the rat? So all of a sudden we had a problem. So I said, okay, we'll just change the name. It won't be Coyote Pizza anymore. It's going to be Rick Rat's pizza.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I realized that I really wanted to have a branded mascot and that I wanted it to be a longer form entertainment. I figured kids are going to be wanting to play the games. Parents are going to be bored. The more I can entertain them, less they're going to be bugging their kids to leave. So I said, let's do some animated skits. The whole idea was to roll this out, make it seamless, not have labor costs, just make it happen. So, anyway, I went to an amusement trade show, bought a costume,”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the math is very simple. Before I sold Warner, we were selling games. These were coin operated games, remember. We were selling them for about $1,500. During their lifetime in CoinDrop, they'd earned $30,000 to fifty thousand dollars. So it didn't take rocket science to say I'm on the wrong side of this equation. I need to be operating these things to a bigger extent. But I didn't want to compete with the guys I was selling to, so I decided I had to create my own location. I thought to myself, why are people going to come to this freestanding arcade? And I decided that adding food would be a benefit because then families could come and that indicated pizza because there was wait time and that would be good gameplaying time. While I was still mulling this whole concept around, I went to Disneyland and went to the teak room.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, let me just stop here for a sec because this episode could end here, and we could say, okay, that's Nolan Bushnell, visionary who founded Atari. We are now going to talk about the second company you founded, which is Chuck E. Cheese.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not I kind of view business a little bit like a game of chess. You play the game, you play hard, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and then you set up the pieces and you do it again, and you don't have angst. Oh my God, I lost that game of chess. What am I going to do? Whoa was me. And what that allows you to do is to view a little bit as an outsider from yourself things that happen to you. So when something doesn't work out that well, you can say, gee, that was horrible, but it was an interesting experience.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I just thought that was so wrong on so many levels because. I don't think you need to arbitrarily create an us versus them mentality in your company, you know. And one of the things that happens when you're owned by a New York company, they think that you're laid back style is that you're not working as hard. And they think that people that come in at 10 should be fired. And so all of a sudden, there was this clash of cultures that got to be really ugly. And ultimately, they got tired of me and I got tired of them. And I was fired.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and slowly we brought in a president of consumer who had all the hierarchy, you know, reserved parking places and executive dining rooms and all the things that were anathema to me.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the sale I was not as rigorous as I had been, I sorted started taking care of my personal life instead of my business life. And I found that there were a lot of decisions that were being made that were really Really pretty toxic, I thought.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, I was a farm boy from Utah all of a sudden. I mean, you could buy a leer jet in those days for a million dollars.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's correct. And so without an ability to do that, I said maybe it's time to get a corporate partner. And so I started dialing for dollars from corporate partner Warner Communications showed up and said, we'll not only put up the money, but we'd like to buy you. We'll pay you money and we'll put money into the company and you will get this big royalty stream and we understand creatives and we're going to link arms and march into the sunset.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the summer summer of 76. And all of a sudden we had Christmas coming, and I knew I didn't have enough money, even with Sears, to be able to get this new massively wonderful product into the marketplace.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I felt that we had to take the company public to raise fifteen million dollars Which seems paltry now, but that was all the money in the world to us at the time. And the market hiccup, and they said there's just no way we're going to do it.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was opinionated, but he was never wrong in his opinions. You didn't have to worry if you empowered Steve to do something. It happened. I mean, Steve had one speed. It was full on. And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company. I'm going to be leaving You want to be my first investor, and I'll give you a third of the company for $50,000.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve Jobs worked for me, and he was a technician in quality control, and he was really good at it. I can remember him coming in and saying, Nolan, if you allow these kinds of soldered joints, you're going to have failures in the field that will ruin your reputation.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was a good manager of think that I always had a little bit of an inferiority complex in that because of my age I felt a little bit like a poser. Which was okay with me on some level because of my carnival background. But at the same time, I always felt that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And what I didn't realize is the most big companies don't know what the hell they're doing.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very, very different. And then we didn't have a dress code and we didn't have time clocks. We had this attitude that everybody knew what they needed to do and they were adults and they could wear what they want and they could come and go when they want and we weren't big brother. So we tried to make this meritocracy in which outcome was the only thing we counted.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We liked our rebel status. And we were rebel in it several ways. First of all, we were all young. I was the youngest CEO and people didn't know what to think about a CEO in their 20s. I mean, that was just off the radar. And I actually feel like I paved the way for gates and jobs and some of the idea that you can be young and still a serious businessman. But more than that, we got known as a real party culture because instead of bonuses since all our employees were in the early 20s, we'd have a beer bust on the back dock. And you'd get $100 worth of pizza and two kegs and you had a party. And that was totally unheard of. And of course we had a game room and we had ping pong tables, stuff that Silicon Valley kind of thinks is de-agor and necessary now.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't think of another one. We kind of always felt like we were the sleazy company who had focusing on fun instead of all this how many more megabytes can get on a hard drive”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly You know, it was just a magic time for technology. Silicon Valley at the time was. You were as likely to learn about a new technology standing on the sidelines of your kids' Little League team as you were at any other time. And several times I'd be talking about a technical problem we were having with one of the other parents and they'd say, oh yeah, we've got a chip like that in development. Would you like a prototype? It's not going to be really on the market for six months. And I'd say, yeah, we don't need production quantities for six months. You're not going to get that if you're a technology company in Oshkosh.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we realized at that time, when we were doing the one game $70, that this was an unsustainable business. And then a magical thing happened. Semiconductor company in Silicon Valley came up with a microprocessor. They were willing to sell us for eight dollars. And all of a sudden, our eyes were opened and we said, we can do Von Neumann architecture program based, put cartridges with ROMs in it, and we can have a program.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were quoting a retail price of $59, and we decided that we needed an extra 20 bucks per unit. And he said, that's okay. I can do that. Then I went through the math and there was no way that I had enough capital to put in the conveyor belts, to rent the extra facility, to buy the parts. And I called up and I said, you know, I really appreciate the order, but I said, I can't fund this. He says, oh, don't worry. I'll introduce you to Sears Bank. And so Sears Bank set up a bonded warehouse at the end of the conveyor line. And so as soon as a consumer pong dropped off the assembly line, they would advance us 80% of the contract price with Sears. And all of a sudden, it works.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sit down and we say, okay, if we were to build one hundred fifty thousand, how would we do it? And then the big question, how much money are we going to make after we spend all this money on the factory? And we realize that we didn't earn enough. And so I call it. The Sears buyer and say, I do this to you, but I'm going to have to up the price.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And we actually had to scramble because we didn't realize he was coming. He didn't say, Hey, I'm showing up tomorrow. He just showed up. And so we were in the conference room after that. He says, okay, yeah, I think we're going to do that. How many can you build? We didn't have a clue. Because we were building coin operated games, you know. Where a big run was five thousand We kind of do it huddled. And I said, let me check on that. And so we did a huddle outside the conference room. And I had my manufacturing guy there. And he says, well, you can probably do 25 And so not wanting to be soul sourced, I said, we can do about $75,000.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Exactly. I said these guys. Missing a wonderful opportunity. And so we were thinking radio shack. I was thinking TV dealerships. I was thinking all kinds of stuff. And then my head of sales thought about Sears sporting goods. And the previous year, Sears Sporting Goods really focuses on the inclement weather family room. They sell pool tables and ping pong tables and things like that. The year before they had made a consumer pinball machine for two hundred dollars, and they sold out, so my sales guy said, maybe these guys. And so he calls up the buyer at Sears Sporting Goods. He says, oh, that's kind of interesting. The next day he was on her doorstep.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't, I'm not easily depressed, you know. But I'm very easily challenged. And I said, you know, there's something not right here. We just haven't found the right guys yet.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. And so we thought, boy, you know, we spent all this money to get this thing developed, but all our neighbors wanted one, and they were happy to spend $79.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was a great demo and everything. But what we didn't know is that the toy business at that point in time did not sell anything that was more than thirty five dollars.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, once you had it on a single chip, then it was just a matter of putting two knobs on a piece of plastic. We started out essentially designing this little game-looking thing out of wood and painting it so that it looked like plastic, but it was really wood. And our idea was to take it to the toy show in New York.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One day we figured out that there was a new semiconductor technology called N channel MOS, and these chips once they were designed, you could buy them for five bucks. It occurred to us that we could put Pong on a single chip and hit a price point that would sell to the consumer.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when we were copied, we knew we didn't have as efficient a manufacturing. We knew we didn't have as much money. We knew we didn't have as good a relationship with the distributor chain that the competitors that had been dealing with them for 20 years had. And so I felt that my only tool was innovation and understanding of the technology, because copying the technology and creating the technology was different.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. But slowly we were able to get procedures in place. We were able to get systems and how we financed the company was we would sell for cash the machines. We had 30-day terms. Most of our parts, we had 60-day terms. So we'd get the cash literally 60 days before we had to pay for the parts for that.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had neglected to buy shipping cartons. So we couldn't ship them on common carrier. And so to solve that problem, we bought an old furniture truck and started making deliveries without cartons to Los Angeles.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was in Santa Clara, California Then we found out that we had a real problem. We could build these games literally in two days.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, Al, I think, was 23. He just graduated from Berkeley. We had a thousand square foot roll up, which we thought was huge for the six of us.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. And so Our big problem then is we had no factory, we had no systems, we had no procedures, we had no employees. I mean, we had, there were four of us.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was kind of the construct that we were dealing with. There's actually some very interesting psychology looking back on it. And one of the reasons that I think Pong was such a massive success is that it fed into the narrative of what was going on at the time. Just after the summer of love, the hippie movement, women's liberation was starting to rear its head. Pong by its structure made it lady's choice because it became very acceptable for a woman to tap a guy sitting at the bar on the shoulder and say, I want to play Pong. Would you like to play? I'll buy.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. To put it in context, people would come to me and say How does the TV station know that I turned the knob? Clearly their construct was that if there's something on a TV screen it came from a studio somewhere.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's exactly what we did. I looked at all the cache we had and we had enough cash to build like 12 units. You know, the minute I got off the airplane, I submitted the order for the parts. And we were off to the races. I get on the phone. I have literally orders coming in from all over the nation.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT