We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP363: The Game of Investing w/ Bing Gordon
Episode Date: July 23, 2021In today’s episode, Trey Lockerbie sits down with Bing Gordon. Bing is a legend in the silicon valley world, having first been a co-founder of Electronic Arts (EA), then went on to be a director at ...Zynga, Audible, Zume, Duolingo, and others. For the last 18 years, he’s also sat on the board at Amazon. He’s now sitting on the other side of the table, as a partner at the prestigious VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: (04:01) The gaming industry and how it’s evolved since his time at EA (19:21) What it’s been like to sit on the board of Amazon and how that opportunity materialized (49:52) What makes a great investment and how founders should be protected at all costs *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Trey Lockerbie Twitter NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
On today's episode, I sit down with Bing Gordon.
Bing is a legend in Silicon Valley, having first been a co-founder of electronic arts or EA,
and then going on to be a director at Zinga, Audible, Zoom, Duolingo, and many others.
For the last 18 years, he's also sat on the board of directors at Amazon.
He's now sitting on the other side of the table as a partner at the prestigious VC firm
Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield, and Buyers.
In this episode, we cover the gaming industry and how it's evolved since this time at EA.
What has been like to sit on board at Amazon and how that opportunity materialized?
What makes a great investment in how founders should be protected at all costs?
And so much more.
Bing is one of the most interesting people I've interviewed so far.
He brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to everything from entrepreneurship, to fundraising, to investing, and beyond.
I know you will enjoy this as much as I did.
So sit back and enjoy this discussion with the fantastically brilliant Bing Gordon.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Welcome to the Investors podcast.
I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today I am honored to have with me Bing Gordon.
Welcome to the show, Bing.
Thanks, Trey.
When I was kind of looking into your background, I got to tell you, it was one of the most
interesting bios I've come across.
You're a pretty interesting dude.
You know, started working in Disneyland, then went into commercial fishing, ended up in gaming
and everything else.
And I even read that you go to Africa on occasion to study tribal dance.
Is this true?
Is this all true?
Yeah, I thought there was photographic evidence of many of the above.
Incredible.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about through all that, how you do you.
came to be an executive at EA?
There's the really, really, really long story.
There's a really long story.
There's a long story.
The short story is that I became enamored of the concept of virtual worlds.
When I was a punk-ass kid working at Disneyland, they have these robot characters fixed
in place they call audio animatronics.
There was one of Abraham Lincoln, for example, and then there are a lot of them in the
rides like Pirates that Careby and all the pirates that do stuff.
And I had this fantasy that they could come to life, walk around, and I could save and restore stories with them.
And then commercial fishing one day we were weathered in, and my other deck candle,
while I'm cooking after we worked all day out in the rain, fixing nets, came in with a Heathkit catalog,
a cover which was build your own home computer.
And I went, ah, that home computer is going to allow me.
to build what I call virtual Disneyland.
And then through other series of fortunate events, I wended my way to Stanford Business School.
And at Stanford Business School, I met a guy who wanted to do the same thing for dice
and card sports games based on a baseball card game called Stratomatic.
And five years later, he said, I want to start this company.
And I said, great, I've got three award-winning guys to start.
an agency, and he said, no way, you've got to come on board. So I did. And seven years later,
Electronic Arts IPOed, and seven years later, Goodby, Berlin, and Silverstein, which would have
been Goodby, Berlin, Silverston, and Gordon got picked by Ad Age magazine as the advertising
agency of the year. So, multiple good choices, but all happenstance a long way.
When you look back at your time there at EA, what's the most memorable event?
event that comes to mind. Were there any other big wins where you rang a bell and he said this is
kind of a career changer for me? You know, there are many. I found that the moments that most
resonate for me in gaming are moments where I've got a mental image of a loved one or best
friend combined with a screenshot. That was the surprise. It wasn't like film or TV where you just
look at the highlight. It's the highlight attached to a person. So a lot of the moments were
when my daughters played games I was working on and gave me feedback.
Those were the most resonant.
The first great moment that I wrote a business plan and said,
someday games are going to be bigger than movies or music,
and I really went, you know, you're so dumb, but we'll invest in you anyway.
And we said, someday there's going to be games that sell million units.
And a few years later, we had launched the EA sports brand with a tagline.
If it's in the game, it's in the game.
And I'm in New York going to see kind of various retailers, Toys R Us was headquartered
in New Jersey, I stay in New York.
And I get in a cab, and the cab he looks at me and I'm carrying a little briefcase with an EA
sports logo on.
And he goes, EA sports, it's in the game.
And that's when I thought, that's what a mass market feels like.
That was kind of the first great audience reaction moments.
You know, we had plenty of other moments around games.
We had some wonderful moments with Dr. Jay when we did the Dr. Jay and Larry Bird game.
Pat Quinn of the Vancouver Canucks were doing a hockey game.
And both times they just said, hey, you guys, stick with your day jobs.
That one really resonates with me at the cab because I can't hear EA without saying the entire tagline in my head every time.
Interesting enough, this is a lesson anybody doing marketing.
the client gets tired of the brands before the consumers do.
Because after doing EA sports in the game for one year,
the CEO of EA at the time came and said,
okay, what's your tagline this year?
I said, what do you mean what's the tag on this year?
He said, well, you know, what's the new year?
I said, no, you don't understand.
This is it for the next 30 years.
He said, 30 years, no brands last that long.
And I said, no, over my dead body.
And similarly, after we did John Madden football,
I'm in charge of it.
the next year, the EA Salesforce says, we can't sell another one.
Walmart and Toys or Us, another retailer said we won't even carry it.
And I had a guy named Rich Hilleman, who I worked with for a long time.
We looked at the other.
I said, we'd buy it.
And so we went ahead and did it.
So you learn again and again and again and again when the experts are wrong.
And sometimes the experts are your own self.
So you do have to pay attention to not taking away too many forever truths from temporary failures.
That's great advice.
Would you say that is it a gut feeling that mostly drives you?
Is it sort of a scratch your own itch that seems to win out for you and these choices over time?
There is instinct.
What I discovered, so I acted a little bit in New York for a while and found out about a third of
playwrights who had hit plays, never had another one.
It was in music.
It was called One Hit Wonders.
And as I could tell the issue with One Hit Wonders is they make their first artwork for
themselves, and then they become successful, and they no longer are the common man. So if they
make something for themselves after they're successful, it doesn't resonate to large audiences.
So the trick for creative people is you make the first thing for yourself, but for the
second thing, you've got to make it for specific others. I learned this in advertising,
creative people are not inspired by averages. They want to know, show me Trey Lockerby,
show me his Facebook page,
show me his LinkedIn page,
show me his Instagram,
show me his TikTok.
I want to know this exact person
and I'll solve for this exact person
but I'm not going to solve for
white male 34,
lives in L.A.,
drives a Prius.
It's a Model 3,
but I'll take it.
Well, I was going to say
maybe you're a little more new age of than that.
Going back to, yeah,
gaming will be bigger than film.
Gaming will sell more than a million
units. I mean, we have far exceeded those expectations. Did you ever dream that gaming would become
even what it is today? No, it's bigger than we thought. We thought that one day 50% of humans
would play games every month, and I think the number is about 70% now. The guy who is the
marketing consigniary for Intel and Apple, for Steve Jobs and the various leaders at Intel,
It was named Regis McKenna.
He was the first great marketer in Silicon Valley before Benny Off and Dell and all that.
And he had an ad agency, PR agency.
And I spent a lot of time with him kind of back in the 90s.
And he had a resonating piece of wisdom that I've seen seeds elsewhere.
He says, technology always takes off slower than you think.
But what it works is bigger than you can imagine.
And that's kind of what happened in the games.
By the way, that's what happening with the Internet.
That's what happening with LeVar.
And that's what's happening with Airbnb.
So this technology does have a way of making more dramatic change you can imagine.
It's probably going to happen with Bitcoin that's happening with Stripe.
And it happened with games.
Then it happened with e-commerce.
I remember in the kind of in the late 90s, I was becoming an enamored of Amazon and thought
the future of games was going to be digital, not packaged goods.
Because I was there when packaged goods got invented.
when I started in games, games shipped in baggies.
So package goods, boxes were like this innovation.
People who came in the games business after boxes thought, well, games are always in
box.
I said, no, no, that was just a temporary invention.
The next thing is going to be digital.
I said, well, you're crazy.
Games are being in boxes my whole life.
And I said, yeah, not in mine.
Yeah, I'm curious about that intersection between gaming and commerce.
I'm not that familiar with the gaming industry, but from what I'm hearing, the most
popular model right now is this freemium model where you can play the game for free, but then there's
sort of these pinch points along the way where you can then pay more to kind of continue with the game.
And that raises some questions around like impulse control and other potential gray areas around.
I'm curious, what is your take on the freemium model?
Television is a freemium model, kind of with advertising.
This guy, Dan Demetri Williams, at USC Annenberg School, and he found out that 30% of the value
in a freemium community was people who never paid.
And just think about it.
You'd rather be in a stadium full of people for a YouTube concert,
even if a third didn't pay.
You know, if they're empty seats, you don't like it as much.
So when I was growing up,
commerce was a saying caveat ampedo,
which is Latin for buyer beware,
which is you give me the money,
and if you're screwed,
your fault, you didn't pay attention.
And that's kind of the history of commerce,
back to the Romans, caveat emptor. And the premium model is vendor emptor, seller beware,
because it costs you money if you don't make people happy enough to ever pay. So Facebook started
out their way, dual lingo started out that way. And these digital businesses having lots of
usage helps you tune your product rapidly. And when your product gets perfect, then it makes people
happy, some will pay. So the interesting thing about the premium game is business,
that the rest of the world hasn't figured out yet is people only pay when they're happy.
Imagine how great that would be if commerce was such, you only paid when you were happy.
And literally, in the premium model for games, we discovered that people can play 10 days, 20 days,
they don't actually give you money until they think they're going to play for another 30 days.
You know, when you think of games, they almost seem just like this benign thing that are just for entertainment.
But in digging a little bit deeper, you start to discover how much.
much tech is really behind this.
I mean, when it comes to consumer insights, it's almost unprecedented.
With even more data, you know, Zingo, when it first started getting big, it was getting,
you know, petabytes of session data.
I started in the game business when 140K seemed like a lot.
I remember when the IBMAT, the PCAT came out and it had 640K of RAM.
We're at, oh, my God, now we can really do something.
Now we can make an endless game.
Yeah, and you obviously helped pioneer this over at EA Sports originally, but did you ever
think that gaming would get to this point where you have such incredible data about the customer?
It's still more potential than actual.
In games, you know, if you start out, the business model is you make more money per user
on average than a cost to acquire them, and you make much more money from the user,
minus the cost to acquire them than it take to build the game.
And the games generally don't become valuable until they're $100 million revenue per game
for multiple years in a row.
So that's kind of the number.
And, you know, in 2010, these premium games average about two cents an hour.
When we started electronic arts, I set the goal of $1 an hour of value for the customers.
So they go to a local computer store and buy a game for $40.
bucks. Let's make sure there's 40 hours of gameplay. World of Warcraft, they figured out that they
got, they average 19 cents per hour of play. By the way, Netflix is 11 to 14 cents an hour,
and cable TV in the U.S. monetize it 17 cents an hour. So games monetize about like streaming
movies, about like streaming music, but it wasn't always the case. I can't remember where you got
off in this, but if you go to a motion picture theater, for example, your tickets, five
bucks last 100 minutes. So now you're at kind of three bucks an hour, but if you put in the parking
and the popcorn, it can end up being more paperback books. If you read 60 pages an hour and you
get a 300 page book, hardcover for 25 bucks, that's four or five bucks an hour, paperback at 10
bucks, it's a buck and a half an hour. This is not just games. This goes all the way back to
Michelangelo. Creators have always had to, on the one hand, make good stuff, and then on their hand
figure out a business model. Influencers have to be entertaining, but they need to figure out
a business model. That happened on Pinterest, it happens on Twitch. It happened with authors.
It happens with podcasters. You know, you say, I got a voice. I can entertain the crap out of people.
You're not an artist if you can't figure out a way to turn your hours into money either directly or through an intermediary.
Well, I'm glad you brought up Twitch because that was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars, which seems like a steep amount, but turned out really well.
And you've had quite an amazing career on the board at Amazon.
And one story that I imagine a lot of our listeners aren't aware of is the fact that you came up with the idea of Amazon,
Prime on a bike ride with John Doar. So can you share that story with us? So Kleiner Perkins,
the story of investment firm, was Series A investor in electronic arts. I got to know
Brooke buyers on the board for a decade. He was a founding partner of Kleiner Perkins. I always told me,
you got to meet this prodigy named John Dorr, who is the best young salesperson at Intel at the time.
And so I met Brooke and then John, in fact, my wife was John's primary headhunter in the late 80s and early 90s.
So we've known these guys forever.
And so in the late 90s, John and Brooke invited me as kind of a friend of Kleiner, so I was a fan to participate in investing,
but then also came and gave a speech at their CEO conference.
It was kind of legendary bringing people together this before other venture firms convened
the CEOs for shared peer-to-peer learning.
And so I did that.
And the next year, I didn't have to talk.
I came back as an invited guest.
And a couple months later, John and I are out for bike ride.
John's kind of an aerobic athlete.
And he said, I forgot to ask, how did you like the CEO conference this year?
I said, I liked it.
First, I didn't have to speak this year, so I could just enjoy it.
That was great.
And second, I really like seeing Jeff Bezos in person, but I think he's doing it wrong.
And John goes, what do you mean?
I said, well, I think of, I'm an Amazon customer.
When the boxes show up in my front door, it feels like Christmas.
I think it's kind of what I call an internet treasure.
This is a company built on the internet that is proof that my generation is better than my
parent's generation.
It gives me joy.
It gives me kind of up levels my self-image.
And Amazon is one of those.
Jeff talked and he said, we're the most customer-obsessed company in the world.
that's our goal. And he didn't tell a single customer story. You know, how can you be customer
obsessed without talking about people? And he goes, what would you do? And I said, well, I'd start a loyalty
program for people who want to be VIP used to Amazon. That's kind of the way I feel about it.
And he goes, I said, well, they don't always work, but it'd have to be done right. He says, well,
well, that's interesting. What would you do? I said, well, I'd give better shipping.
because they were doing Super Saver shipping at the time for 25 bucks, you get two days of shipping for
free. And at the time, analysts thought they were famously crazy for giving away so much.
I said, I gave even a better shipping benefit. I'd give a concierge for out-of-stock items
or popular items. And I think I ought to get a letter, a customer letter like Bezos
and shareholders' letters I was already a fan of every month. And he goes, oh, that's interesting.
What would you call it? I go, John, he says, no, really, what would you call it?
go, Amazon black.
I've always admired American Express cards.
I never had one, but anybody who pulls one out, they're kind of a total all-star.
And then I go, wait, right.
No, Amazon users is better than that.
That's derivative.
American Express always use it.
And he goes, well, what would you?
I go, Amazon Prime.
Nobody's ever used Prime before.
And he goes, huh, okay.
And then we went back right again.
And he called me the next day and said, would you fly up to Seattle and go out lunch with
Jeff Bezos. And I said, well, yeah, and weeks later, this is fall of O2. So now it's a day
before. I'm thinking, oh, God, I'm going to me, Jeff Baylor's been on the cover of Time magazine.
And I didn't know Amazon toast and all that stuff. So I sat down and wrote my five Amazon ideas.
I said, you deserve it. And he walked into lunch and he came in, you know, kind of bouncing on
his toes. He's always had abnormal amounts of energy. And he comes in. And he comes in. And
And I'm sure in the first minute, his big laugh broke out.
But he was absolutely charming and totally in the moment.
And I handed out an eight and a half-and-a-leven piece of tight paper.
And he said, well, I'd feel like kind of a dork just showing up.
I know John said, why don't I go to me?
I thought I'd least bring a gift.
So here's my five ideas for you.
And he went, huh, well, that's interesting.
He said, nobody's ever showed up for me with kind of a document before to get started with.
First find out later that Amazon was becoming a writing culture.
That's eventually led to me getting invited to be on the board.
And founders make a mistake of thinking that board meetings are like going to the principal's office and just trying to get out alive.
I tell founders, your job is to get five usable ideas that you actually write down and calendar by the end of the meeting per half-day board meeting.
You know, to tell your board, if I don't get five useful ideas,
as you all saw.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Back to the show.
The board meeting is really interesting.
and you've sat on a number of boards now, and that Amazon experience is, I'm sure, very informative
for that board experience that you've now had at other companies.
Amazon is famous for 14 different leadership principles that they abide by.
I'm curious how you compare those leadership principles with other companies you've worked with,
and if you started your own new company today, if there are any of those principles that would be must-have.
Let's see. So Jim Collins in the book, Built to Last, he says that the values you espouse for your company, as near as you can tell it doesn't matter what the values are. It's how well you follow them. It's the alignment that matters, kind of the clarity of alignment. If you were ever a teenager, you know how crazy it drives you when your parents say, do what I say and not do what I do. So it's this conundrum. You want kids to say.
take risk and do stupid stuff. You just don't want them to do the stupid stuff that in retrospect,
you realize it was riskier than you thought at the time. The leadership principles, I like,
I've seen a bunch of people get recruited into Amazon after other success. And they find it hard to
believe that values and mission statements actually matter until you see it tested and borne out.
You know, Amazon, it's in the public record that when people interview at Amazon, they get interviewed against those leadership principles.
And so if you're adding 25% new employees a year and you interview 10 people to get one, it means every employee on average has to interview two and a half people a year.
Managers do more than that.
So it's in your face when you get told in this interview cycle, you're interviewing Trey, you're interviewing, you're interviewing,
doing on think big and disagree and commit.
Find out what has he done in his career that proves how aligned he is of those principles.
And then you get together with everybody else with the interview loop and everybody says,
here's what I think based on the two I covered.
Here's what I think based on the two I covered.
The principles are operationalized that way.
And electronic arts the way we operationalize the values where once a quarter,
It had a six value, A, C, T, I-T-I-O-N, a mnemonic thing you used to remember.
And every quarter, one employer would get a statue of one of the six values.
But that was it.
And then we kind of informally thought, never promote somebody to do a V-P-U isn't an icon
for one of the values, never-provoked somebody to V-P-U is deficient in one of the values.
But that's kind of soft.
And it's not operationalized.
And Amazon did operationalize it.
It's kind of the genius of Bezos to figure out how to automate stuff to reduce kind of friction and confusion along the way.
You just thought, as many founders should think, that building an organization, it's a web service architecture with modules, which are teams, with I.O.
And then there's an API layer, which is cultures and goals and communication processes.
You know, I've called Jeff the inventor of invention.
It's astonishing to me how much parallel invention gets done and does it by basically
making the inventors in the company to be able to have a hands-free relationship with
the rest of the company.
Do you think Jeff Bezos's skill set is replicable?
Do you think it's learnable, teachable?
Yeah, it's learnable because he learned it.
The best learner, so it was two things.
Learning is motivation, but it's also reducing stuff to first principles.
So the best thinkers, you know, Jeff and Reed Hoffman and Dresen and scientists to go to first
principles.
And Bezos says, I build strategies not on what changes, but what endures.
And so, you know, speed of light endures.
TikTok does not.
Trying to capture ephemorality with comets going through the solar system is just probably not
quite as good as being in touch with kind of the whole galaxy. The flywheel is kind of written on
the back of the napkin, and it's still, which is what consumers always want. You know, they want
convenience selection and lower prices, any questions. So now, in each one that you deliver can
improve the next one, and then what do you inject into the flywheel to make it spin up? And that's
kind of the secret to digital businesses is low friction in creating flywheels.
Andy Jassy, interestingly enough, talking about how do you interview people?
And Jassy not only has this amazing work ethic and high motivation and real clarity,
Jassy might be the best writer in the company, is really, really good.
You talk about music.
He started out wanting to be a music promoter.
And he kind of wandered in a different direction.
But he just says that the key for him in an interview is to the person that he's interviewing
have a mental model of how they learn.
It's a thing that the investors never talk to founders about, but how do you learn?
You talked about games and data.
Having data isn't that useful.
You want data that the more data you have, the more you can learn.
And then the learning supports new experiments, and that's its own flywheel.
Usage leads to data, which leads to improved product, which leads to more usage.
and then experiments as an input to data and product improvement.
I like to look at icons in the world of digital who are learning machines.
Like Brian Chesky of Airbnb who I don't work with is just a learning machine.
And you can see there even Jeffrey Katzenberg, he famously tried to have a lunch with a new person
he found interesting every week for 20 years.
There's a bunch of ways to learn.
You can do with books, you can do it with people, you can do with experiments, sometimes
you just do it with paying attention.
But the founders who turn into great CEOs at scale all tend to be learning machines.
And by the way, that says when you put together your board, your investors, don't optimize
for valuation, optimize for your personal learning.
I love that.
So you're no longer on the board at Amazon, but he spent about 14 years there.
And if we go back to talk about endurance as you were just touching on, I'm curious as to what your opinion is on Amazon Game Studios.
You mentioned this kind of effect with technology where there's a long tail advantage over time.
But so far, Amazon hasn't really produced any big hits on the gaming side.
Do you think it's just a matter of time before those land and Amazon Game Studios starts to compete in a bigger way?
Probably.
I'm optimistic the two games that are now in various stages of release, one called Lostark and one called New World, both have a lot going for them and getting pretty good kind of beta test reaction.
One irony is that many of the companies in games that have become hyper successful failed miserably prior to that.
Activision failed miserably.
EA had one week where the stock went from 41 to 11.
The Supersell got, it was a studio and a failed company, and they all got laid off.
So sometimes the failure is precursor to success because it really focuses you.
It's a lot easier to have easy success.
But by the way, success can sow the seeds of failure.
Think about it if you're a football fan, when your team runs back, the opening kickoff,
for a touchdown and you go, uh-oh, now everybody thinks it's too easy and you're going to have a,
you often have a tough fourth quarter. And when you're a coach, you know that when it's too
easy for your team. That's when you eviscerate them. And they go, wait, wait, we just scored.
Coach, why he gets a hard-hose? No, no, this is going to get worse. This is where come on.
You guys, look, we may have got to touch on that, but you miss that block. Don't ever do that
Again, I think I end up looking for micro signs and when do you get optimistic and what
cause optimism.
Amazon also does a really good job of focusing not on outputs.
So revenues and output and what are the inputs?
Well, milestone delivery is an input, quality of milestone delivery is an input, quality
of people's and input.
I have found that the thing to pay attention to in the creative process is how people are
doing along the way.
So the secret sauce is in place there.
It's not the recipe that's the issue.
It's just a matter of time, in your opinion.
Amazon has a feature called Prime Gaming, which very much like Prime Video and Prime
Music.
If you're a Prime subscriber, it used to be if you prescribed a Prime, guess what?
You got a shipping benefit.
And Jeff figured out really early on, oh no, this is so valuable.
Why don't we give them free movies?
Want to give them for your music?
And now free games, because games in entertainment media are unique that people will pay for snippets.
Snippets of music are free.
They're in the public.
Five seconds stems are in the public domain.
Nobody pays for a page of a book.
Nobody pays for, you know, five seconds of a movie.
Epic sold seven million sculpt trooper digital costumes in a Halloween week a couple of years ago.
at 15 bucks apiece.
So Prime Gaming does that.
It's, hey, you're a prime customer.
You get some valuable stuff for free in your favorite game.
I have told people forever that what do you give to the friend who has everything?
A virtual sort in the game of their choice.
Twitch is a total anomaly.
It just boggles my mind.
I'm not close to the gaming industry at all.
But from the outside looking in, it's just kind of baffling what the appeal is for that
and how it's become such a massive business?
You ever watch MTV?
Back in the day, sure.
Yeah, back in the day.
So, interestingly enough, so Emmett Shear, he and Justin Conn and Mike Siebel did this thing called Justin TV.
And it was basically video blogging, and it didn't work.
Video at the time was really expensive.
They were doing that right before Instagram came out.
It was really expensive.
So the three of them went three different ways, I was trying to figure out to the next.
And Emmett said, there's some people who are blogging their video game play.
They do something that's a Leroy Jenkins moment.
They want to show it off.
And instead of on YouTube, they put it up live and talk about it.
I think I can make a company of that.
Mike Siebel said, Instagram, a video.
I think I made a company that.
But he called it Social Cam.
He sold it to auto desk.
Now he's running a white combinator.
And Justin Kahn said, it looks more fun to put money into other people and let them do the work.
So what I learned from Justin TV is it's easier to invest in advise than to actually do.
They all succeeded in big ways coming from what was basically a failure of Justin TV.
And what Emmett started out, and I knew them all the time, what Emmett said is,
I've got to make it work for streamers, just as Pinterest had to make it work for pinners.
And YouTube had to make it work for creators.
And so the first five years, Emmett just solved in the team, a pretty good original team with Kevin and other.
They just solved for how do we make streamers happy.
And Emmett had this early aha that game streamers wanted only three things, money, fame, and love.
And not necessarily in that, or they got fame, they figured they can make money sooner or later.
And so he built this site with a bunch of tech, the genius tech there, because video is really hard.
to help people get money, fame, and love.
And then when Amazon got involved, you know, there's the flywheel of Twitch kept going,
which is kind of more streamers, more audience, better tech.
And if you go to TwitchCon, it's a bunch of colorful people,
and they are kind of like the new John Stewart.
They've got to give the gab.
They can talk for four or five hours at a time.
The interesting thing about video games is it's high-resolution video image
that you can project your face over the top of.
You don't have to go out with a camera and create video.
So games is kind of a natural.
It's interesting on Twitch right now is musicians are starting to use Twitch,
even AOC, the politician, she used Twitch.
And what's emerged on Twitch is this community aspect,
which is when you get enough Twitch people with a streamer,
They start talking to each other.
First, they talk to the streamer, then they talk to each other.
You can even see on something like the Crown Channel, the Twitch Live, that if there's a bunch
of concurrence watching and the chat isn't throwing like crazy, people go, what's going on?
This isn't Twitch, you guys, talk someone.
As with anything, when you start posting, you feel more belonging when you post and you get
something back from someone else, you feel more like a member.
and next thing you know, you start building this together.
It really is, is live streaming with community is kind of magical, and you don't really
see it anywhere else.
So much of the history of entertainment is one to many.
Celebrities, they don't, they don't even see their fans anymore.
Twitch is all about, it's like Mosh Pit with Words.
I think it's going to become a model that we see more often, this participatory community
media. It's like kind of Reddit, a subreddit with video.
It's incredibly interesting. Going back to your early dream of creating a virtual Disneyland,
it seems like from the outside looking in that that has essentially arrived. There was a flood
of investment into virtual reality about five years ago, but it seemed like the market maybe
wasn't quite there and the money dried up a bit. But now it looks like the hardware is well-priced,
the overall tech is compelling enough.
It's at mass market levels now.
What is your take on virtual reality?
Do you see investment moving more into this space in the near future?
You know, what I found again and again and again, if you start measuring for immersiveness,
we found that people acted more immersed on a flat screen than on a curve screen.
What causes people to immerse, we could see it again and again, is a challenge,
pixel accuracy collision. You don't want to feel uncoordinated and fast response time. You know,
you want kind of 60 frames a second response time. So it feels like you're in the real world.
And you want geospatial sound, surround sound. And if you get that, people forget that it's a
flat screen. So if you put on virtual reality goggles, guess what? No longer have that pixel
accuracy. You reach out to touch an axe and it's kind of plus or minus a couple inches. And it can be
fast and the sound can be pretty good. You can do spatial sound. But so now the question is,
you want to give up that centimeter accuracy in order to get this new trick of virtual reality,
which is it fools you in her ear and to think you're in space. And the problem with virtual reality
first is the goggles are hard to do, but originally they were tethered. So all the Oculus
first party games, if you wander through a space, you had to teleport. And your feet don't
move so you can tell you're not doing anything. So the tradeoff of you are there for your
inner ear didn't kind of match your optical recognition and your sense of motion. So then the
location-based VR with things like DreamScape and the void was pretty interesting because
Because they discovered they could project virtual reality, a stone wall or a spaceship wall.
Then they'd put a piece of plywood with crummy carpet on top of it.
You reach out and you'd touch the carpet.
It would be kind of not centimeter accuracy, but maybe inch accuracy.
And you'd touch it.
And your finger would say Goodwill carpet, but your brain would say stonewall.
And so bringing the hands in made a huge difference.
Then they had other things like they'd give you a stick and they'd project
your torch and then they'd put your face near a heat lamp and you go,
dude, that's a torch.
As it's a movie business, we're in this suspension of disbelief.
And the one thing with the most interesting to me about VR is the way that it works
your inner ear, I haven't found anybody get tired of it.
You know, you don't see through it.
Whereas video games since the Atari VCS, every six years, there's an order of magnitude increase
in polys per second in RAM.
And so the first two years of every new console system, we go, this time it's real.
My daughter grew up kind of in the shadow of gaming.
She goes back and looks at popular video games, the 80 and go, yeah, did you guys really
think this is realistic?
It's stick figures.
It's kind of loony tune and said, yeah, we did at the time.
you know, Dr. Jay and Larry Bird, which is just stick figures, and Dr. Jay famously had a finger roll.
It wasn't in the animation, but people could see it. It was kind of near it. And like thinking that
Mickey Mouse really has five fingers, you know, your brain tells you it's there when it's not there.
So VR's got to get to this pixel accuracy. It's got to get to moving around.
right now the accuracy in DreamScape is because there's cameras in the ceiling.
It's been 100 grand of cameras of the ceiling to get inch accuracy.
Most people can't do that at home.
So there's still some hardware issues.
And then as a gamer, I think that all platforms need killer apps.
So my simple mantra is consumers buy a new platform for one piece of software.
So on the Sega Genesis costs 150 bucks and John Madden football cost 50 bucks.
They're basically paying $200 to get John Madden football.
And so we had to make it worth $200.
And there's not, you know, sort of the Oculus Quest 2 cost, whatever, I think, like $200.
And software costs $40.
There's no piece of software right now worth $240.
In AR, because I'm especially interested in that as well, what's the best innovation you've seen to date?
I'm a fan of Pokemon Go.
I've been playing that every day since it first came out.
But interesting enough, Pokemon Go, the AR is really the Google Maps.
So it's the 2D mapping with a little bit of 3D, but it's the 2D mapping in the world
and the safe place in the world is astonishing.
They did a game that didn't work.
It was a Harry Potter game.
And they had a thing called Port Keys where you'd think about in the Harry Potter,
There's a, it's like train eight and three quarters and nine three quarters or something like that.
There's where you'd walk up and if you're a wizard, you could find a rail line between two muggle rail lines.
And so there's problems of AR to make the world better.
There was a Neil Stevenson was doing a game for, he's the author was doing a game for Magic League.
And there what you want to do is you put on your AR goggles.
I still see my friends.
but now there's new better stuff in the world.
Jay Allard had this vision at Microsoft, kind of in the early days of the Xbox, is you can be Arthur.
You can put on goggles, walk through the world, and you can see a virtual sword stuck in a rock.
And now the game is, how do you pull the sword out of the rock?
Either you'd be Arthur, you do something to become the Arthur, and pull it out.
And so now everybody can find a sword in a rock.
Everybody can be an Arthur, and it's just a matter of.
computer programming. I think VR is in your ear telling you you are there with problems about
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pixel resolution. AR is the promise of see other people while you do stuff, make your world
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slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Where do you see things like
NFTs or even digital currency working their way into the gaming world? Well, collectability. I learned
really early on from child psychologists that the urge to collect as part of child development.
It's kind of age seven to 10 when you do stamp collecting and rock collecting and Barbie
collecting and Beanie Baby collecting. And it's kind of a normal, the first manipulative in world
competence. We start out learning names and learning words. That's kind of learning. But this
collecting is own and put stuff together. And for most people,
there's some kind of urge to collect the sticks with them forever. It kind of harkens back to
their good old pre-team days before life became complicated. We've just always found that collecting
matters. You know, Pokemon got to catch them all. I grew up collecting baseball cards,
and I was a mediocre collector. I never actually finished any collection. I'm not as much
of a completionist. There are collectors of all time. And in addition, there are speculated.
And so at NFTs is a combination of collectability with blockchain cryptocurrency type speculation.
So if you missed Bitcoin or you missed Ethereum, here's something new that you can speculate,
we'll follow the same kind of bumpy growth path, that you're going to find some people
to make things catch fire.
There's got to be some people who want to just collect an own who don't want to sell.
if nobody really wants to own a Seth Curry card, Seth and Steph brother card, they just want to keep it in liquidity.
It's just not as valuable if some people want to own it for a long time.
So I think in general you want about a third of the people that just take something out of market because they want to own it forever.
Of course, makes everything else more valuable.
If nobody wanted to actually own a Van Gogh, their value would go down.
And so the NFTs, I think it's two things. It's the forever instinct to collect that probably goes back to cavemen and cave ladies. You know, look at my collection of wooden clubs I've got, or bears teeth, there's speculation that it might become more valuable. So the interesting about NFTs is for the first time, you can build an artwork or creation where every time it resells,
there can be perfected a royalty back to the originator.
I want to talk a little bit about your investing philosophies.
You're now sitting on the other side of the table, right, as a partner at Kleiner Perkins.
What has been the biggest shift for you going from an operator, board member, now on the venture side?
Early on, I was surprised by two things, especially at a venture firm like Kleiner Perkins that thinks so big.
I always thought, you know, put money and get 100% return in three years. That's really good.
But in a place like Clanner Perkins, they're looking for every now and then 100x return
and knowing that they're going to stay involved with that founding team for 7 to 10 years.
So you end up having to go bigger, longer than I'd imagine beforehand.
And I'd say the next thing is, I'd kind of thought it would be cool to see all these new things I can learn.
My friend Vinod Kosla, used to be a clienter and started with him for me, he just said,
it's really competitive out there. You end up investing stuff you know. So Bing, nobody else
knows kind of games like you do. So stick with that. And I thought, well, you know, you don't
know exactly want to invest in direct competitors. So I got to go look for some other stuff.
And it turns out there's so many investors, there's so much money that if you don't have time to learn
about an industry, you can't create enough value. So there are some investors who are kind of
traction investors when they find out everybody wants in, then they want in. And one way or another,
you pay higher price or you charm or you do something else. And most of the investors I know,
like Ted Sline at Kleiner Perkins, he's probably the best investor in cybersecurity. He's been doing
it for kind of over 20 years. You know, he's got a reputation. He's got a reputation in Washington.
And then he's built this cohort of followers again and again and again and again.
So I think that's having kind of a narrow focus.
I've tried to end up primarily focusing on games and gamification.
More broadly, I think about it is where numbers can make people's lives better.
My goal is Hall of Fame contributions to the game business,
Hall of Fame contributions to Hall of Fame CEOs.
So CEOs and then Hall of Fame works.
I think investors, especially at venture level, not as fungible as I'd originally imagine.
And I did say, you know, the founders, you want to get five useful input ideas per half-day board meeting.
Well, if you already have a lot of experience in a certain category, it's easier to add value to the founder.
You've done a lot of executive coaching and worked with a lot of founders.
I'm curious if you have sort of a common denominator, something that with every founder
seems to be some kind of issue that they have to overcome.
Two things for you.
The first is there was a book called passages about life.
You know, teenagers, all teenagers have this body chemistry issue and then they psychologically
trying to figure out identity.
And, you know, late in life, people have pretty typical issues.
Well, founders have pretty typical issues that are scaled.
related. And you go from kind of tribe to a village. And somewhere at about 25 people,
you start having to put in place processes. At 50 people, you have to hire your first
bureaucrat. At 100 people, you don't know everybody in the company's name anymore. And then
at somewhere between 150, 250, you become a leader of leaders. Most founders can still operate as
Chief Product Officer, Chief Tech Officer of VP sales, even at 250 people. But at about 250 people,
you can't anymore. You've got to start working through other people. And my experience is high
potential cognitive prodigies can learn stuff fast. I can't learn at the rate of Morris law,
but they can learn stuff fast. And the hardest thing to learn is the people skills, first one-on-one
and second in groups. That scale from 5 to 25 to 100 to 250 to 1,000 to 5,000,
almost all founders run into the same issues along the way. Daniel Eck with Spotify,
I would say the thing that we're prepared for is you're going to outgrow some of your
execs at each one of those states. It's just unlikely that 100% of your execs are going to have
the learning skills and the motivation to improve to the next level. It's shocking that it's not
part of the investor-founder discussion, but it's so predictable. And then the thing that I've
kind of invented that's kind of proprietary to me, I call forever OKRs. And OKRs were invented at Intel.
I was actually at Intel. I was doing it part-time while going to business school. But it's
basically wall setting with an attitude. Most people who start trying to do OKRs or
managed by objectives find it really frustrating. The reason is at first that the goal, you set
goals as tasks, you know, like, hey, Trey, your goal is eight podcasts in the next quarter.
And you get to the end of it said, I did my eight podcasts. They go, yeah, but we forgot,
the goal was wrong because somebody else did 15 and they just kicked ass on our podcast.
and you went from number one to number seven.
Oh, you should have said that as a goal.
Well, I thought that if it was going to be a podcast,
then you would hit that goal, but actually it was a different goal.
So I start out with what I think of as Forever OKRs in personal life and in work life.
And I've got my own checklist of what they are,
but I can actually sit with founders and say,
benchmark the world to figure out of your Forever OKRs.
So you want to be a podcaster, who do you admire?
tell me all the people you know are podcasters, who do you rate at 10?
Who do you rate at 9?
Who do you rate at 8?
And a Forever OKR is the factor on which you differentiate a 10 from an 8.
And then it does turn out that in Forever OKRs have have a good life.
There's only been one.
It was a Harvard study of a bunch of graduates kind of at age 20 to 22.
What do you want to do in life?
and they found that, and I mean, late in life, the people who reported high satisfaction with life had no substance abuse, no chronic illnesses, between one and three long-lasting best friends, and a lasting good marriage is a key to it.
And so it's do something you like, have long-term friends, and don't, you know, don't fall prey to the sins of disease.
and substance abuse.
If you should I always say, I want to have a good life.
Then I'd go even further and say, well, have an all-star year and get in the Hall of Fame
or whatever you're going to do.
So, you know, then I'd say, hey, Trey, what's Hall of Fame for podcasting?
You go, well, Michael Lewis is in my Hall of Fame.
Okay, what does he do that you don't do?
Now, what's the difference and how do you get from here to there?
So as forever OKRs, the number one job of a CEO is have product market fit.
The number one job is a salesperson is hit the sales quota and an A plus 120%.
By the way, most founders don't know how to set goals for their direct reports.
Nobody knows how to set goals for a CFO.
Nobody even knows what a CFO job is.
So I encourage founders really early on to start having a discussion before people underperform
about what good looks like, what your goals are, but what are your forever okay?
And so for a founder, you know, Eileen Lee coined the concept of unicorn.
The founder, if you're going to start a company, change people's lives, get the unicorn valuation.
Now maybe it's decadcorn.
But when you start out, why not go for greatness?
Just as, you know, if you're drafted as an athlete, why not try to get in the Hall of Fame?
Well, you're starting, I'm thinking, no, I just want to feed my family and get a house for my mom.
Then, well, I want to start.
Why not aim for the Hall of Fame?
And then, you know, you get to somebody like Jerry Rice says, well, you got the skills,
but work ethic is the best way to do it.
Work ethic and forever motivation.
And so professional athletes, which I like this metaphor for a bunch of things,
work ethic is almost always what separates the grate from the good.
So forever okayers.
And it's I love processes that are repeatable by anybody.
And if you'll do the process, you can self-judge how you do.
it and put it to work.
See, this is what is so fascinating about you to me is that you are obviously an incredibly
creative type of person, right? Acting, doing all the dancing, and yet you have adopted
such a systemized approach. And how do you balance those two things? You know, that almost like
the computer science element of running a business with the creative.
It doesn't seem like thought through option. It's just if you want to get
good at something, how do you do it?
I've found, I do kind of have the soul of a teacher, even though I was pretty unteachable,
a chip on my shoulder for authority figures.
So I'm trying to learn from mental models, again, kind of the first principle.
So how do you create the mental models?
You know, I wish I knew then what I've learned now.
If I would have been better with grownups, I'd maybe could have found somebody who could have
told me, you could have helped me learn in a way, you know, when I was 20s.
I've been trying to make up for my own deficiency with other people ever since.
All right.
I have a lot more questions, but I want to be respectful of your time.
I've heard you talk about your one and a half rule where the audience might take one
to one and a half key insights away from the discussion.
Given that our audience are primarily investors, entrepreneurs, is there one key insight
from Bing Gordon that you want to leave?
Founders are irreplaceable.
So your job as an investor is.
is to find ways to help future proof the founder. And you can't do that if the founder isn't
motivated to be a learning machine. But in that case, you want to not be an authority figure,
but a consultant to their success. It's just shocking to me that that's not even in public
discourse. It's usually investors who say we're going to help the CEOs. They don't really mean it
because they don't think it's in their business model to help the CEOs be better. You know,
Again, I mentioned Reid-op, and he's somebody who's always there to help.
I think Ben Horowitz's always there to help.
You know, some pretty famous, so, you know, Door is always there to help.
Shline's always there to help.
But most just give it lip service.
So after you get through the dance of kind of valuation and investment, once you're one-year
way in, a little like dating, you know, the first date.
Yeah, that's okay.
it's fun for a while, but you're really trying to figure out how to help the other person
grow and have that Hall of Fame life. I think it's just a wrong mental model of board members
and CEOs. The CEOs aren't demanding enough of their investor board members, and it's partly
because they don't know how. Amazing. Well, Bing, thank you so much for being so generous with your
time. It's just an incredible career to study, and I really appreciate all the insights you've left,
especially as a founder myself. There's a lot to take away here. So I took a lot of
of notes that will be in the show notes. So if you guys want to check it out, you'll see that
on your favorite podcast app. And with that, Bing, I really hope we get to do it again sometime
soon. Thank you. Awesome. I may have version 2.0 sooner later. All right, everybody, that's all
we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, please go ahead and follow us on your
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