Business is a good game – lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.
Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.
I’m glad to see the casual game play coming back now on the Internet, games that aren’t violent, that aren’t complex that you can sit down and you can have some fun.
I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.
I must confess I’ve always had a couple of pinball machines in my home and really have enjoyed some of the old classics, like Fireball.
The truth is just an excuse for lack of imagination.
If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it’s history.
People hate to and will not read instructions.
Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?
I’ve always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.
Being your own boss is much superior to working for the man. Including working for your father.
I think in terms of businesses, in terms of things that are really big and marry technology with entertainment. That’s where I like to spend my time.
Radical innovation is difficult to fund. It seems scary. And the really radical things seem even more scary.
Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese’s were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.
I appreciate the fact that technology and games are a big part of life.
My perception is that I’m a guy who really does a lot of homework surrounding any project that I do.
I always try to do something nobody else has done.
In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory – and I think it’s pretty well borne out – is that in the ’80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.
One of the big concerns I have is that most of the HR departments in a lot of companies are hiring away from creativity and they don’t know it. For instance, they are requiring everybody to have a college degree. The most creative people I know couldn’t deal with college.
The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren’t always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I’ve come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as ‘lame.’
The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.