My first job ever was as a scripter on U7. Great times, and wonderful to see that there's still such an enthusiastic community
2,290 karma · joined October 9, 2008
Technical lead for the Knowledge engineering team, leading efforts such as AI tutors, personalized Learning, automated documentation pipelines, and social learning
As a Principal Software Engineer on the Creator Marketplace Team team you'll have the independence, opportunity, and the end-to-end responsibility for challenging, complex, important services within the Roblox ecosystem.
The Creator Marketplace Team empowers Roblox to accelerate the development of 3D experiences by providing assets and tools to meet any need. Creators can publish plugins, models, audio and other assets to Roblox Studio for developers to use in their experiences. Today we have tens of millions of assets in the marketplace, making search quality of critical importance.
An accomplished programmer in one or more of these languages: Java, Python or C#/C++. 5+ years experience.
Experienced in analyzing Search and document data using some of the following technologies: Airflow, SQL, Hive, Spark, ElasticSearch, MapReduce, Pig.
The idea is to stand in for the breakroom and the happy hour.
(We're all ex-Kongregate - I was CEO).
That isn't it. Starbucks didn't open its sixth store until 1984.
https://www.datainnovation.org/2019/01/national-survey-finds...
Cars already know whether a passenger is present of course.
The point is really that taking VC money requires you to try for a billion dollar company. Founders should think hard before they commit to that path.
TechCrunch says there were 23 billion dollar exits in the first eight months of 2018. Call it 35 per year.
That’s about as likely as being on a Superbowl-winning football team.
Young people often neglect realistic opportunities for success to chase unrealistic dreams. As do entrepreneurs.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/18/global-unicorn-exits-hit-m...
Edit: Emily gave a talk on it at the IGDA Summit, but unfortunately it's only available to members.
Before I was at EA, I started a game studio in the CD-ROM era. We published an RTS-puzzle hybrid game through Activision, which was a critical success but a commercial failure. Because of the distribution and funding model then, Activision owned the copyright. That meant that we couldn't make a sequel to correct the things we'd screwed up the first time around.
When we started Kongregate in 2006, internet distribution was there, but it was very hard to make money. There were no smartphones and Steam only distributed Valve games.
The goal of Kongregate was to fix that. We contributed to the change, though smartphones, Steam, and digital distribution on consoles were the big drivers of course.
Knowing that many of those investments will be worthless, they want to maximize the number of shots they get towards a billion dollar company.
If 1/3 of their companies are a 3x return, and the rest become worthless, the fund has failed. They’re all aiming for the one company that will deliver the big returns that offset all the failures (and the high fees they charge LPs.)
Seed stage investors are different. YC, for instance, spends much less time with each company, and therefore can take lots of shots.
Growth stage venture is different too. They aim to invest a few years before a company goes public, and are fine with a 3x-5x return. They are taking much less risk.
The VC model also creates a fundamental tension with the founder. Founders get one shot at a time. $50M exits represent life-changing money for them (as long as they didn’t raise too much money.) VCs pressure them to take greater risks than are rational for the founder. This is why you want to look for VCs that will truly put the founder first. Or keep control of your board.
Joel Spolsky explained this well 15 years ago, so we knew about it going in and chose a founder-first VC firm.
Here’s that post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...
Thoughtful VCs will do what’s right for the founder. It’s rational because their reputation matters so much when competing for investments. This has changed for the better since Joel’s post.
But the weird thing is that if our VC investors had known at the outset that they would have a 3x return on their money in three years, they probably wouldn't have made the investment. A 50% annual rate of return is not worth their time. That's not what their LPs are looking for.
The angels made more like 6.5x and put in less time - most of them would take that deal all day long. I'm an angel now, and I definitely would. So perhaps startups that need capital but aren't looking to be billion dollar companies should consider just raising a seed round from angels... The difficulty there is that angels do want an exit, not dividends from a profitable company that stays private forever.
The Bay Model is well worth visiting. While the Reber Plan to dam up the bay would have been an environmental disaster, the model is really cool. It was actually used for many years after the plan was abandoned. It was only the rise of fluid dynamics simulators that made it obsolete.
No, it covers any reproduction in a tangible medium, whether or not you distribute.
I believe a court has ruled that RAM copies count. I'm not finding the case now though.
I think the journalists would have a strong Fair Use argument...
You do develop a kind of situational awareness over time.