Had a lot of fun building one of the demo units. Straightforward build and incredibly rewarding to build your own machine.
52 karma · joined March 15, 2007
I suspect that Bogost would agree that nearly every 'great' game he's identified creates a very strong intrinsic motivation in its players - or at least a majority of them. And that the challenge of creating a great game is figuring out how to get people to be intrinsically motivated to play your game.
There's no book or program that tells you how to create an intrinsically motivated game; it's about experience, trial and error and mastery of game development.
But there is a book that tells you how to create extrinsically motivated task; that's the gamification industry. Hence he calls it 'bullshit' and hates it as the 'real' gamification of things would be redesigning processes/learning/work/etc. for intrinsic motivation rather than just giving people badges for swabbing the floor without customers complaining (and redesigning the world is much, much harder).
I visited Berlin a while back and my buddy was telling me about a bunch of guys who've built a successful business (dozens of engineers) just cloning 'hot' American products.
It's got to reduce the number of people working on brand new ideas. (I'm not suggesting that you can't build a great business by copying somebody else's work, but you won't build a world-changing, super innovative company doing so)
Walking into work via a half a block long corridor with cable strung over your head and the clack of your feet echoing along it is a great way to start the day
Examples I've seen are people in marketing departments who can write a little python script and suddenly analyze hundreds of thousands of data points. Or someone who combines thousands of geo-targeted data points to better decide where to open chain x's new store.
Traditional companies are structured so that there's a "marketing" team and a "business intelligence" team of dba's-cum-statisticians. 90% of the time, if the marketing person doesn't ask the perfect question, they don't get a useful answer - and the BI person is on to their next task.
The coder can both ask the question, generate the data and then iterate based on the results of the output. Hugely powerful and can't be done by 90-95% of people in most companies.
Creating Passionate Users used to be a favourite but alas the writer has been the target of a vicious stalker and stopped writing.
If all you're doing is creating a corporation for legal protection, then do it yourself.
One word of advice though, think through how many shares you want to issue. If you're going to offer stock options, then issue a huge number - like 10 million. If you don't think you'll need options, then go for just a few.
If you pick too few now, you'll need to hire a laywer in the future to help you with a stock split or share issue to increase the number of shares.
Also, one other word: if you're just incorporating for yourself and don't plan on getting any venture funding in the foreseeable future, incorporate as an LLC so you can pass the tax losses from your company on to your personal taxes.
If he can get 260K page views, even a 0.5% clickthru @ only $0.10 an ad is $130. Not great, but if you can do it every day you've got a site that's pulling in $50K in revenue a year. Not bad, but could be something to explore.
I totally agree with you that you need to know where your business is going to go and if you want to get real funding you'd better have a business plan, but if you're running a $12K test, why not just make sure you think there's a model and then test it?
Thoughts?
Anyone have additional books that they've read?
It's also not just 2nd year lawyers talking - Rosati (yes, the dude with his name above the door...) was one of the first speakers.
If you can relate to this and are interested in trying to solve this problem, read the post and drop me a line.
There's real money committed to building a prototype with more available. Let me know if you're interested and we should talk.
You're a C-Class Corp right? Therefore you pay the corporate franchise tax. If you go to the link on the page entitled "Franchise Taxes Here": http://corp.delaware.gov/frtaxcalc.shtml
it tells you what it should be. Your fee will vary depending upon how many shares you have outstanding, but I'm guessing you have less than 3,000 therefore it will be $35.
Also, let me ask you why I'd ever want to hire you on as salary-only; you'd have no incentive to stay (I'm a big fan of splitting the equity pie to make sure everyone shares in the upside and have incentives aligned).
Thoughts?
Here's another way you might be able to justify a re-negotiation.
Think of what value your company will have five years from now if it gets sold/goes public, etc. Let's say it's $100M; your options are worth $500K.
Now think of how much you'd be making if you weren't at a startup. Let's say it's $95K.
If you took your $20K and put it in the stock market and earned 7% a year on it (that's almost a sure thing as that's the historical yield on the market), you'd have $115K.
Now how likely is it that your startup is going to be worth $100M. Let's say it's 20%. Then your $500K is worth 0.2500= $100K.
From that perspective you'd be better off working somewhere else under your current employment contract.
I have no idea if these numbers are legitimate in your case, but it could be another way of you getting a better deal.
Let me know if you want any more ideas.
2) What is your BATNA? That's jargon for "Best Alternative for a Negotiated Agreement": if you don't get what you want what will you do? Will you walk away? Is your company f!cked if you walk away?
Hopefully this can frame your thinking.
Let me know your thoughts.
Anyone else here love their Blackberry interace or hate it? Anyone here have an interface they like (and why)?
What will be interesting is whether they can be the operating system that a bunch of the Taiwanese ODMs use to become serious players in branded handsets (rather than just making them for other people).
Now you can test an idea for a few thousand dollars and a couple of weeks time by a few people; the market will tell you if it works or not and you're off.
If it doesn't work, who cares-at least you tried and didn't waste too long at it.
I-and I suspect everyone else reading YC News-can probably think of dozens of tools that I'd love to see (and if you're a reader you've probably thought about this too and are thinking of starting a company to build this tool).
I've actually just gone through this process. I'm a Canadian who just finished school and here are the option my US-based immigration lawyer laid out for me:
1) E2 investment visa: not easy to do. You need to meet an undefined "minimum investment criteria" which is typically $500,000 but if you're lucky you may be able to get in with less.
2) TN-1. A legitimate option for Canadians and Mexican. You need to find an American to own your startup in the U.S. and you start a company in either Mexico or Canada. You then get hired by the owner of the U.S.-based company and get a TN-1. You can't be the owner of the U.S.-based company but you can have an option to buy the whole thing.
The nice part about this is that you then get the American-based company to issue you an H1-B visa the next year and you're well on your way to a Green Card.
3) L2. Find someone on an L1 visa and marry them. You can then work for anyone in the U.S. including your own company