brinking - nabeel hyatt

Harvard panel on non-competes and the example of Turbine

I wasn't able to make the event at Harvard about non-competition agreements recently due to my second kid being born, but wanted to share Scott Kirsner's coverage of the event:

Harvard prof. Lee Fleming said that people and ideas move from states that enforce non-competes to states that don’t (think California.) His research has found that non-competes squelch employee mobility by about 20 percent, and 30 percent for experts in a given field. Fleming asked whether non-competes might stifle the reallocation of the best people to the best business opportunities.

A great example of this effect just came to my attention. It turns out that Turbine has been trying to introduce new non-competes. Now, I haven't actually seen the agreements but apparently they have some clauses saying you are not to work for a gaming company within 100 miles (or something like that). Many of the professions in game development are industry specific (level designer anyone?) which essentially means that once an employee has worked at Turbine he is almost guaranteed to move away from Boston for his next job.

This is particularly ridiculous in Turbine's case, since just recently an employee left for Harmonix then thought better of it after a few months and returned to Turbine. With their new non-compete agreement this would never happen, as the person would have likely left Boston altogether and simply taken a different job wherever they had moved. Turbine is poisoning their own pond out of fear instead of building the company from strength.

What makes a Social Game, a social game?

It's been a little frustrating to watch as the term Social Gaming is being applied to practically everything on a social network - so much so that even single player games on Facebook are now "social games." The folks at GigaOm have been pinging me about writing an editorial for a while, and this topic seemed worth starting a wider dialog about, so here it is:

What makes games social? (GigaOm)

Innovation Economy's Cool Companies

As a writer for the Globe, Wired, Fast Company, etc, Scott Kirsner gets asked what the "cool" companies around these parts are quite often. It's a common question I get as well, and I'm glad he took the time to give his off the cuff list based on the simple criteria:

- Is the company working on something important, or at least fun?
- If you worked there, would you put people to sleep explaining what you do?

Tim Rowe notes that 16% of the companies have been located at CIC, five are game companies, at least five has strong ties to the MIT Media Lab, and probably a bunch are somehow linked to Lotus. I note a distinct lack of wireless companies.

See the list here.

Big Fish Games steps into Casual MMOs big time

Congrats! The news is out that Seattle-based casual MMO Thinglefin has been acquired by casual games publisher Big Fish Games. Thinglefin was founded early this year by Asheron's Call Lead Designer Toby Ragaini, Jeremy Friesen and Ryan O’Rourke. Big Fish is a casual games publisher, and their President Jeremy Lewis runs it as one of those quiet companies that kicks ass month after month without having to scream about it at every conference.

They are still in stealth mode, but are working on a web-based casual MMO that obviously Big Fish thought highly of. With the huge number of casual MMOs in development right now, getting distribution is key to rise above the noise. With combination of the development team at Thinglefin, and the distribution muscle of casual games publisher Big Fish, they should be someone to closely watch.

I met Toby about a year ago as he was starting up Thinglefin, and he was nice enough to give me a couple-hour headstart in announcing their VC funding to the blogosphere. I will claim my very insignificant part in all of this, as I introduced Toby and Jeremy a few months back. Clearly, they got along. :)

Excitement versus confidence

There is one word to explain how I feel after spending the last week in San Fran: Excited.

After feeding on all the unbridled positive energy around here it makes me feel like we are building the best thing in the world, that will take over everything, and that we can do anything. The mixture of youth, positive ideas, and support of each other makes you feel like you can't lose. It's an awesome feeling to have that level of enthusiasm.

However, I worry a little about entrepreneurs who can get wrapped up in all the positive energy in the valley and what it might do to them. I'll be heading back to Boston with a raised level of confidence, but I also know that is not necessarily the best feeling to always have.

Excitement is incredibly important to keep you from thinking too small, to reach for big ideas and believe in them. But confidence can lead to trusting your direction so much you miss the train passing you by (or headed right for you).

• Confidence presents well to one person, excitement spreads.
• Confidence is sure, excitement is creative.
• Confidence leads to pushing your ideas, excitement leads to listening to how others can help your idea.

I have no right to be confident. Relatively few people really care about what we are building right now, no one has used it, and we have a lot to prove. But there is a huge opportunity out there, and I'm excited to see if we can pull it off.

8 Snapshots of Austin GDC '07

Virtual Worlds News has good liveblogging coverage of the talks at the Austin Game Developers Conference, including the panel I was on, Startup Lessons from Recent Online Games (audio is available here, for a fee). There's also stuff at Gamasutra and Raph's site. AGDC didn't have many overall themes, other than it feeling a bit like a bunch of MMO folks trying to ignore the social web crowd in their midst. So instead of a summary I'll do the same thing I did for GDC and give some snapshots of the last couple days.

On how teenagers live their lives online, and take that for granted.

"Fourteen year-olds playing our game were born in 1994, they've never not known the Internet. Pictures of them as a fetus could have been posted online before they were even born." - Sulka Haro (Habbo Hotel)

On user generated content, player control, and the feeling a player can effect the world.

"It turns out that a sense of autonomy is the single strongest relationship to sustained subscriptions [in an MMOG]." - Scott Rigby (Immersyve, Inc.)

On the dangers of not paying attention to the small percentage of hackers.

"Hacking is like a drug. If your whole guild is using it, you'll be pressured to use it too. Then, once our users try a hack tool they actually find it hard to get back into the game." - Minho Kim (Nexon America)

Austin speaking schedule & the start of the fall conference season

The end of August every year brings the descent of new Harvard and MIT students to Cambridge, the email inbox getting filled by VCs returning from vacation, and the start of the fall conference season. I don't particular like 90% of conferences, but every once and a while you get something like last year's Austin Games Conference and it makes it worth it. This year I'm a little more skeptical with the line-up but who knows.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to the Austin Game Developers Conference, below is info on the panel I'm on, drop me a line if you want to meet up.

Sept 5-7 - Austin Game Developer Conference, Austin TX. This has become the defacto massive multiplayer developer conference, with everyone from Bioware to Habbo Hotel showing up. Last year it was really great, small enough to be intimate, but large enough for variety. But they sold to CMP, so we'll see if that means it's on the same unfortunate trajectory as GDC.

Startup Lessons from Recent Online Games
Speaker/s: Daniel James, Raph Koster, Anthony Castoro and Nabeel Hyatt
Day / Time / Location: Thursday, Sept  6, 4:30 - 5:30 Room 1
Track / Format: Online Games - Business & Management / Panel
Overview: This august panel of the founders of recent hot MMO startups will get down and dirty with the details of how to do (and how not to do) the startup thing. Topics discussed will include: -Financing - how and where to get it, VC or publishing; -Licensing and IPs - build or buy? -Web 2oh - Bubble or basics? -Distribution -Revenue models -and trying to hire and recruit in boom times.

The rest of the fall sees the Flash Forward Conference in Boston Sept 19-20, Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose Oct 10-11, and the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Oct 17-19. I'll post my speaking gigs as the events get a little closer, and I always keep upcoming.org updated. Let me know if there are any conferences you're looking forward to that I might be missing.

When is CEO 2.0 good? Ambient hires ex Palm, Sony exec as new CEO.

My old company Ambient Devices have just appointed Carl Yankowski, the former President of Sony Electronics and CEO of Palm, to come run the company. Ironically, Marc Andreessen just posted his guide on How to hire a Professional CEO. I'll copy his very brief post in its entirety if you haven't read it:

Don't.

If you don't have anyone on your founding team who is capable of being CEO, then sell your company -- now.

Perhaps Marc was just talking about the lack of a CEO at inception, but I disagree with the rule to never hire a new CEO. An outside CEO is usually brought in for one of two reasons:

a) Holy shit, this startup is totally screwed, let's fire someone so we can blame it on him. You see this frequently, with the recent exit of Dave Sifry at Technorati as a good example.

b) Holy shit, this startup isn't a startup anymore, and the current challenges require someone entirely different. There are a host of examples here as well, such as Google.

A big mistake common of VC-backed companies is replacing the CEO when the startup is in real trouble (scenario A). Of course it's hard to maintain confidence with your CEO if the company is going through rough times. But every startup has some real dark days, and the best person to make sure that it does not die is the founding team. The only thing a company has at that low point is its culture and its vision -- both of which can only come from the founders. So either the culture & vision are worth saving and you stick by the team, or they are not and it's time to shut the thing down or sell it if you can. A new CEO does neither.

But, a startup has three phases: the jungle, the dirt road, and the highway. Being the CEO of each of these is really a different job. And being a good leader is understanding how to get people better than you at a job to do it, even if it's your own. Sometimes when the start-up is doing very well, but lacks some critical expertise to get to the highway, it's time for a new leader (scenario B).

I'll be honest and say this is a very tough thing for a CEO of a startup to talk about. It's one of those dark corners we'd rather not discuss with everyone. When it comes to Conduit, I don't think there is a person on the planet that understands as well as I do what we are trying to do here, and has the ability to execute on it. But, the startup you start is almost never the startup you end up with.

That's a lot of ramen.

Here at Conduit Labs we're announcing the closing of our $5.5m Series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. We're also using this occasion to launch the Conduit Labs blog and begin the dialog with everyone, so drop by and say hi. In the future we plan to give a pretty open and honest look at building this startup, everything from what fundraising was like to the technical hurdles we've hit dealing with Flash, and most anything else you guys are interested in chatting about.

The opening post is: How we started Conduit Labs

Virtual Goods Summit Video

Video from the recent Virtual Goods Summit is up, so if you weren't able to make it you can catch up now. I'm so glad Charles did this, since I had to miss the afternoon panels, and I can clearly see I was in need of a haircut.

Above is the panel I moderated: Why Virtual Goods Matter . Another panel chock full of great facts was the first one, Virtual Goods Success Stories, where Susan Wu of CRV does a great run down of the industry, and you get good stats from Habbo, Nexon, Neopets, and Tencent.

Rest of the videos here.