The Idea Dude

Desire Determines Destiny

2012-01-12T09:15:00.002-05:00

2011 turned out to a frenetic year of hope, opportunity and energy. We had 18 students work with us to create Carddit. For many it was their first jobs as co-op students. Beyond teaching them design and coding, I hoped they learned about passion, desire and perseverance.

John Maxwell has an article of passion being the fuel of persistence. He said, 'desire determines destiny' and the winning side is usually the team that 'wanted it more'. Passionate people use their passion to inspire them to clear roadblocks, to do the seemingly impossible. Dispassionate people find reasons to doubt, looking for reasons to stop instead of ones to push on.

2012 is for me the year of persistence. Enthusiasm doesn't pay the bills, neither does vision unfortunately. But what keeps us coming back day after day is the desire to achieve something special together. I'd like to look back and know I've made a mark no matter how small, I've made a difference to the life of at least one person, hopefully many.

In the darkest hours, the fuel of persistence is our passion, our desire, our beliefs. Without that, we, as a group and as a company would be without a soul. The internet does not scare us, but it inspires us and motivates us to participate. I truly hope that our desire is enough to determine our destiny.

I'd like to think last year, we made a difference to many lives of students that passed through Play Dynamics. This year, I'd like to think we'll make a difference to the people who are with me in creating this great company.

What do politicians and programmers have in common?

2011-12-12T18:33:00.002-05:00

Not all politicians are evil, I do believe some really mean well. They look at the current government and all its limitations and shortcomings and are inspired to do better. They stand on their soap box and tell people they will reduce taxes, create jobs, offer free healthcare. All good stuff. Some even have a plan of how to do it, finding excess and surplus and build efficiencies.

The reality is once they are in office, all the aspirations are met with a wall of complexity built by many governments that have gone before. They are faced with rules, lack of infrastructure, fear, regulations and practicalities. Often they leave office several years later having met very little of their campaign promises. As tax payers we'd like to think they were incompetent, but how can that be when many of our leaders were respected and successful lawyers, businessmen, accountants before they were politicians. They were killed by the unpredictability that comes with complexity.

Programming is pretty much the same. Having been on both sides of the fence, programming and managing, there is very little I haven't seen. Yes, there is posturing, pet projects, politics even in software. The hardest thing to accept that in software, everything takes about 6x longer than anyone anticipates (that's 2 x pi for the geek-minded). Anyone, whether a manager or a programmer looking at a problem from the outside will say the infamous 5 word phrase, "How hard can it be?". We don't understand why putting a button on a screen may take a day. Alas it's the iceberg effect.

In software, 90% of the complexity is never seen by anyone except those toil into the night. That one little button could in fact pack a whole of functionality, making the implementer change the order of the workflow, create new database tables, dependencies and even unanticipated side-effects (we sometimes call bugs). Like a new car, software degrades from the day it is shipped. New specifications, customer demands, changes in scope, changes in the market make us do unspeakable things to an otherwise perfect and beautiful system until weeks, months and years later we look back and say, "What on earth was he thinking?"

The answer is of course, the programmer was only thinking as far as he could see and chances are if he saw any further, he would have built a behemoth that would never have shipped on time. Even as a seasoned software developer, I have on occasion looked over the shoulder of my peers and muttered underneath my breath, "How hard can this be?" only to realize a week later that while the feature is simple, the system complexity made the implementation speed totally unpredictable.

Priceless

2011-10-20T14:06:00.008-04:00

Need I say more?

Little girl kisses kitten

Wil Power

2011-10-18T22:30:00.002-04:00

Yes, that's not typo. Wil Wheaton gave us some love today and brought our Carddit site down. That's what we call Wil Power.

Just before noon, my co-founder Sharleen sent Wil a Carddit deck that she made. It's an awesome deck. (She has many, you should check out her other decks. Sharleen's Decks).

Within minutes, our site went down, horribly. Attempts to bring it back was futile, the servers were dragged down like bloodied boxers in the final round of a losing match. Realizing we were running out of database connections, we took the servers completely offline except for a page just showing Wil's jazz hands. It was just the type of humor we needed in the office and for all the disappointed visitors to our site.

The problem wasn't that we weren't designed to be scalable. We had load balancers, multiple servers and redundant database service all hosted in a cloud. We already off-loaded all our assets to Amazon S3 a long time ago.

It was a question of finances. As a small company we could ill-afford to have a massively redundant architecture on standby. Frankly the popularity of Wil and the love his followers showed took us by surprise. But we were back up within the hour, with a much more powerful database server and 4 front-end web servers. Zero coding and a bit of reconfiguration. I'm particular proud of our team, Sharleen, Tony and John.

We pride ourselves as being an agile team. Today we showed it. Hopefully, more people will see our labour of love, Carddit. It really is the best way to collect the best of the web, and take it with you (today on your iPhone, iPod Touch), soon on your Android.

So tonight, for the first time many moneys, I've downed my dev. tools to reflect on this moment. It's a small but important validation of our work.

There is so much more to come.

The gods smile upon us

2011-08-02T00:41:00.002-04:00

About an hour ago, I was doing payroll, a very depressing activity given that we're bootstrapped (aka survival) mode. I'm very proud of our team, the sacrifices they've made in time and money. But worrying about our financial future is a perpetual state of mind. I deeply feel my responsibility as CEO to provide for our team and our families. Even the bravest and strongest have doubts in moments of battle.

15 minutes ago, I took a casual look at the iTunes Appstore. Our app Carddit made it to the New and Noteworthy section in social networking. We're featured in #2 spot. For many this may seem unimportant but for every app developer out (the many tens of thousands) to be listed in New and Noteworthy or Featured App area of iTunes is a holy grail.

I often wondered whether we took too long to develop Carddit. There's the quick and dirty approach of throwing a dozen apps and see what sticks. As a consultant, that's what I would have probably recommended. Instead, Carddit took the team 6 months to build. We fussed over every interaction, every screen. Debated every feature. We often joked, that this wasn't version 1.0 it was more like 4.0. And maybe, just maybe, someone saw the love and attention that went into the app and gave us back some of that love. We are truly, truly humbled and grateful to be recognized.

I think I know why. On Saturday I spent the day with the family at the botanical gardens. My daughter had her digital SLR and I had an iPhone. As we walked around, I decided to drink my own kool-aid and started to take a couple of pictures and make 1 or 2 cards. I ended up making over 20, totally voluntary. I shared my cards on Facebook, more activity in my account in one afternoon than in the last 6 months! I got lost in the moment. Today we heard that same comment from someone else. "I lost track of time playing with your app". I think we definitely did one or two things right.

Carddit isn't perfect, yet. Version 1.1 is already in testing with some added features and minor bug fixes. We've already have plans for 2.0. I hope the world sees why Carddit embodies everything we believe in about play.

Carddit is simply about favorites, our photos, our memes, our memories kept in a familiar paradigm, decks of cards. Allowing us to curate, collect and share. Tony, my wise friend once said, the true success of an app not whether we get a million downloads (that is for the world to decide), but whether we want to use it ourselves everyday. I do.

Our fate is in the Cards

2011-07-28T11:11:00.003-04:00

Finally I can announce the first (hopefully many) Play Project from Play Dynamics. It's called Carddit. You can find it here in the Apple AppStore

Why Carddit? Play Dynamics has always been about Play. We wanted to pick something that would embody our vision, culture and ideas. We chose cards because everyone understands how cards, decks, deals, and trades work. We weren't teaching a new concept. We also thought that photos today should be more than just a post with a filter. It should be about wrapping the photo in a frame (in our case it's a card). Add the stuff the matters, the date, a title, a description. And then to treasure that card in your deck. Finally to share that treasure with others and of course, collect it from others too.

Too often our applications are developed to make us more efficient, make stuff faster but we lose the moment, we lose the play. Imagine that last loving kiss on your date was just a peck on your cheek. Imagine eating lobster and steak at your fast food joint. Imagine ice-cream came in a pill. It's all efficient but what happened to the experience?

With Carddit, we took so long (maybe too long) obsessing about the experience. It had to make you feel good before you even shared the photo. It had to make you feel good receiving one. I hope we succeeded. The best test is whether we would want to use it. My co-founder Sharleen made 1,500 cards during our testing. They weren't just the same picture of a coffee cup but while it was for testing, each had some personal relevance. Some were there because it made her laugh (like the memes), some made her cry (because they brought back poignant moments in her life) and some made her sigh (like albums, um decks, of her children as they grew up.

So if Carddit doesn't make you smile, sigh or cry (not because of the bugs), please drop us a line and let us know because then we failed in our intent. They laughed at me at the beginning when I said my measure of success would be that every user touched Carddit at least once a day. If you could see our feature list for the next 3 versions, you'll realize despite how audacious it may sound, it is plausible.

My parents are in the 80's. This is the very first software product, I feel I can explain and load on their iPad and get them to use. I can't wait to show them. Perhaps that sentiment is all I validation I need, "did I do the right thing?"

It's a long post, but I need to make a quick shoutout to all the people who participated in the dream. Many have taken huge drops in salary to make it happen. Along the journey, I've picked up some of the smartest people I know. We've given 15 students an incredible insight of what it means to be in a startup and learn to write for web and iphones.

So many thanks to all my friends/colleagues/advisers at Play Dynamics. Sharleen (my co-founder), Tony, John, Bert, Emily, Ke, Emily, Robert, Tim, Javier, Roy, Aaron, Lily, Abbas, Sinthu, Zac, Mubushir, Sanghoon, Rajan. And yes to my family (Karen, Nick, Courtney and Mozart-the Carddit Cat), I will finally be home for dinner.

Now that the cards have been dealt, it finally feels Play Dynamics is on its way.

This is my favorite card of the day

Pi after midnight

2011-07-20T18:36:00.002-04:00

It isn't quite four score and twenty years but it has been a long time since I updated this blog. Elvis hadn't left the building. On the contrary, his lack of appearance was because he was building a skyscraper.

Frankly, I could have done with a 48 hour day but we make do with what we have. Since we launched our Play Dynamics website in March, we've been frantically building our first product. With a lot of help from my friends...

We grew from 2 to 13 during that time, put 13 co-op students through our company, did much consulting to pay the bills and still managed to finish our product. Finish may be the wrong word because it is just the end of the beginning.

Last night we did the obligatory all-nighter, finding last minute bugs and issues the defied our intelligence. There is some software law that says all software is shipped after 1am. We did it. Well after midnight, we submitted our first app under the Play Dynamics banner to Apple. I'm eager to share what we did but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.

From the get-go, we built this company in the most unorthodox manner. We run it the same way that we write our code. Serious play. We play hard. For many it will feel like work. Funnily enough, despite the 16 days, 7 days a week, we rarely call it that.

It has something to do with the way we interact and support each other. The way we brainstorm ideas. Involve and mentor students. We're in constant play, challenging each other, living in the flow. It can be done, we did it.

If you go out to build your skyscraper or follow your dream, surround yourself with the right people. The wise men who have done it many times before. The partners who aren't afraid to challenge or be challenged. People who love ideas, who dream, who are curious. People with energy and tenacity. People who don't know what "can't" or "won't" means. People filled with possibility. I'm blessed to be surrounded by such people.

This is a milestone not only for Play Dynamics but for my life. I've shipped many products for many companies. This one is both special and personal. I did it my way. We did it our way.

More to come but for now, it's time to do all the stuff that piled up, ignored because shipping was the most important thing.

And why Pi after midnight?

It seems appropriate at least for the geek in me, that we shipped at 3.14am, ergo, pi after midnight.

Win-win is always the best way

2011-04-30T11:06:00.004-04:00

Friday saw the last day of our current group of co-op students. On Monday, we have a new group starting their first co-op term with us. I'm particular proud about what we were able to do for these fine young men. Sure, they were raw, inexperienced but they were enthusiastic, smart and willing. In keeping with our culture at Play Dynamics, I think we succeeded in creating an environment that allowed them to learn, grow and play and in return we have over half-a-dozen prototypes waiting for integration into our new product.

So often, it's easy to look at the bottom-line and to wonder whether it was worth the thousands of dollars we invested in these individuals only to release them back to their studies several months later. But in life you have to look beyond the bottom-line. It's about giving back and investing in the system. To recognize that the past months may have been the most important in their careers, because beyond giving them great technical skills, we taught them by example the passion within startups, the hunger to write the best code possible and the agility we need to survive in the Internet world. Unlike school where often the problem is simply a restatement of a known and previously taught solution, startups are adventures in the unknown both in market and technology. Giving back has been our biggest payback. The fact we have significant more code ready to deploy is the icing on the top.

Most importantly we taught you can have fun at work. Play without work is pointless and work without play is meaningless. They played at work and worked at play.

Best of luck to Sinthu, Abbas, Rajan, Zac, Sanghoon and Mubushir. May you continue riding the momentum you found at Play Dynamics to be far more than even you could imagine.

Wear your PD t-shirts with pride because we are very proud of you.

Moving around a mess only makes a tidier mess

2011-04-16T11:29:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about social curation these days. Remember how blogs flooded the Internet and we then had blog aggregators to try and solve the problem. It succeeded to a certain extent but didn't do two things, remove the noise (albeit was less noisy) or the volume. For someone to read 100 blog posts each day instead of 1000 posts doesn't solve the problem and I'm not sure it even makes it better. In fact the illusion that it solved the problem actually causes you to waste time filtering the 80 out of the 100 you didn't want to read. So what did we end up doing, most of us pick the 10 bloggers we love the most and just stayed with them. Because fundamentally that's all we can handle. It's not wonder the long tail for blogs is a characteristic that has not gone away. We tried to solve the problem at TheGoodBlogs by random showing you blogs that never made it to your radar and we did manage to connect readers to interesting blogs that you would have never found.

Back to social curation. There are simply too many startups that claim to solve the social noise issue by following a similar strategy. Social noise is even worse than blogs because the dynamic here is very small soundbites but a lot more of them. Tweets will probably one day exceed the number of blog posts created on a daily basis, if it hasn't already. So if we attack social curation by simply grouping stuff and republishing it, we are not really solving the problem. At best it is a large bandaid just like it was for the blogs. So instead of having to follow a 10,000 tweets a day, you follow 500 and yes there are all the other pieces of social noise like Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates etc, etc. Essentially, after social curation (as it is done by many today), you have smaller piles of organized social noise.

So when you're faced with an ever increasing social entropy, you either end up spinning your wheels trying to keep up, stop being active in your least favorite accounts and probably resort to finding out what's happening from trusted sources at lunch or pub.

There's an interesting TV series on extreme hoarding, how people uncontrollably collect and hoard physical stuff. I would propose that digital hoarding is even worse because it is less obvious and far easier to fall into. Is it because we are fundamentally voyeurs who thirst to know what everyone else is doing. Not knowing simply drives us up the wall. Add to that, telling someone something they didn't know enhances our status and influence in our peer group. We didn't invent gossip, it is as old as time when Eve told Adam what the serpent told her, eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Like they say, money is not the root of all evil, it is the love of money. Well, knowledge is not the root of all digital evil either, perhaps it is the love of knowledge. Didn't someone says knowledge is power.

Creating your A-team

2011-03-27T14:56:00.003-04:00

There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about startups and hiring the smartest people you know and creating the A-team. Unfortunately 'A' seems to be always associated with smart and knowledge. I beg to differ. The A-player is package deal. Here's what I look for.

A = ability. That's a given, there must be some level of skills that you bring to the table. However, it is important to remember that in all likelihood, the skills that you have today are insufficient for tomorrow.

A = aptitude. My definition, the readiness and quickness to learn. Speed is everything, long gestation of talent eats up resources and opportunities.

A = attitude. In a start-up there is no job description, it's about getting the job done. I look for people who sees gaps and fills them on a regular basis.

A = agility. Being able to change course on a dime. What you are asked to do tomorrow may not be the same as what you are doing today. Markets, trends, products change on the Internet so rapidly, we require people who can react, retool and reinvent continuously.

Startups are in generally in a continuous state of reinvention

Balance is luxury not the norm. As I'm writing this, I realize what I'm asking for. People who are fearless, passionate and proud about what they do. People who love what they do. And the 'DO' part is not software development, or marketing or any of the extrinsic job descriptions. 'DO' means people who are continually motivated to create, challenge, refactor, discover, explore and in the course of their journey, they may just create milestones that are simply awesome.

Changing trajectories

2011-03-24T22:57:00.002-04:00

Just got back from Waterloo to recruit the next team of students for the summer. The current team is working out beyond my expectations. I only wish we started earlier. To say we are helping change the lives of some really smart young engineers may be a stretch but we're certainly have a hand in changing their trajectories.

Hopefully but the end of each work period, they learn about what it takes to be hungry, savvy entrepreneurs. Learning about problems that change even while you work on them. Looking at the world with incomplete lenses, finding solutions in the most unexpected places. Most of all, learning about working in teams and the synergy that arises from it.

Hang around young people and you can drink from the fountain of energy.

Building corporate culture from scratch

2011-03-15T09:40:00.002-04:00

I came across some interesting answers to how do you create corporate culture from scratch

The answer IMHO is that you never really build it from scratch. The company yes, the culture no. Why? Because the culture is something that is brought in by the co-founders. They set the tone of how the company is run, how the products are built and how the people who help build the company are treated.

The culture of the co-founder is read in books or taught in schools. It is deeper than that, it is how he or she thinks about things, how they build stuff and how they treat people. For the one reason, bringing in an enterprise seasoned CEO or VC may not be the best option, neither is keeping a serial entrepreneur at the helm when the company has over a hundred people. It is hard to find a man for all seasons. Only a few come to mind.

Start-ups require people to be agile because stuff happens. Which means check your egos at the door please. Listen to everyone around you but the buck stops here. Everyone is a resource and everyone must be multi-skilled. I happen to be the first one at the office every morning which means it makes sense that I vacuum the floors. You may wonder if that isn't a waste of my time. Actually no, I figured out how to make that a play situation. Instead of whistling while I vacuum, I think, prioritize my day or ponder about that elusive bug. Cray used to dig tunnels while he designed his supercomputers. I vacuum. Two hours later, I teach. In between that I code. Between coffee and and the next compile I pay bills.

I'm not the only one. Sharleen has taken over producing the graphical elements. When she isn't doing that she's worrying about the user experience of our prototype. Between coffee and the next photoshop graphic, you'll find her surveying the web. She is our eyes and ears, watching and listening to the pulse of the web. And she manages to squeeze in organizing our next batch of recruits. She is also HR. Creativity starts with her.

Tony will be fixing servers, working on customer projects that have fallen off my table, and mentoring our co-ops. He is our resident tech guru but is known to throw in some sharp insight that turns our product around. And if I don't watch him, he'll sneak by and wash my coffee cup.

This is a typical day at the Play Dynamics playground. There are no rules just people who love coming in and doing stuff that needs to be done. There are no egos, and no 'not my job' here. Gaps need to be filled and people step up to fill them. That's the culture. We're bootstrapped so everything is lean and mean but it buys us the valuable time to play without agendas, without borders. We have super advisors but none who demand that we make a dollar by some arbitrary date. They understand the need for us to find our path and get the train on the right set of rails.

The longevity is not in our products but our band of heroes. I'm pragmatic enough to know the internet is fickle and often success comes by way of a heavy dose of luck. What we do agree on around here that the game may and will change but the players remain the same. That's what our investors should be investing in.

Today my thought is:

Our possibilities are only limited by our own imagination

How Co-op Programs Can be a Win-Win

2011-03-14T23:29:00.004-04:00

In January we took a huge leap of faith and employed 6 co-op students. Half the motivation was we had too much to do and very little budget to do it. But the overwhelming reason for doing it was I had heard so many horror stories about what co-op students (especially first year students) actually did for their employers.

Co-op work terms are meant for students to get real-world exposure of what they could expect when they graduate. Often their experience ends up being menial jobs like testing, making coffee, filling in forms and other mindless, boring tasks. The reason is twofold, either the employer sees this as an opportunity for really cheap labor but often it is because they are so busy, they have very little time to plan or train what these students should be doing when they arrive.

What it really boils down to is a waste of a pool of highly intelligent individuals in too many circumstances. At Play Dynamics, we have a philosophy that the more we give to the system, the more we will get back. We believed that we could take a group of really smart individuals and despite their lack of experience, they could contribute meaningfully to our cause. In return, they would receive the best work experience possible, something that they would be proud to put on their resumes and help them in their studies and in finding other jobs in the future.

The recipe is so simple.
1) Respect. They are inexpensive because they are co-ops but they are also smart. Treat them like peers, not second class citizens.
2) Train. The fact that they are inexpensive means you can afford to spend time training and mentoring them. You'll be amazed how fast they can be once you take the time to show them how.
3) Culture. Use the opportunity to teach them not just the technical aspects of the business but give back to the system by teaching them about business, marketing, sales and decision making. Most can be done as informal 5 min chats. They are like sponges waiting to absorb everything you have.
4) Motivate. Show them how much you love what you do and they will eagerly follow. Energy is infectious.
5) Challenge. Breed the culture of never giving up, inspiring and helping others, being curious and thinking of what is possible instead of lamenting the impossible.

The results can be amazing.
1) They will give back everything you give them and more.
2) They will tell their colleagues and friends about you making it easier to get the next batch of students.
3) They are an inexpensive way of buying you time, to do the things you don't or never had the time to do.
4) The best of all, you leave every day knowing that you can give back to the system that will one day benefit everyone. And maybe, just maybe one of them may turn out to be the next software billionaire or the Nobel prize winner.

At Play Dynamics, our students love coming to work, because they come to play. Play is work and work is play. Play is learning and while they learn, they do the tasks that we need to run the business. In 6 weeks, they have learnt to configure Apache servers, write PHP code, create SQL database, program iPhones, research tough technical issues. Most probably they have already done more in that time than many other co-ops in two terms or more. And during that time, they have helped us achieve stuff we simply have no time to do.

Win-win is possible, if we only took time to invest because that investment buys us time.

The Way of the Bamboo

2011-03-04T08:32:00.003-05:00

Bamboo is the fast growing plant on earth. There is a species called Moso which can grow up to 119cm (47 inches) in 24 hours and 24m (79 feet) high in 40 days. It is actually a grass although most people do not think of bamboo as such.

Ironically, during the first few years (3-5 years), there is no visible growth and then magically, it starts its astronomical growth spurt as described earlier. Unseen by most of us during the time of 'dormancy', it is actually building a vast root system in preparation of the growth phase. A great description of the bamboo lifecycle can be found here.

It describes the path of Play Dynamics. For over 4 years, Tony and I founded and ran TheGoodBlogs. TheGoodBlogs was not a financial success, but we carried on regardless because I believed in 2 things. Firstly, unless you participate you will not find opportunity. Secondly, every part of the journey has some learning and that learning prepares you for greater things to come.

Learning about Moso bamboo has given me hope that the last 4-5 years has been just that, the preparation phase. We learnt first hand about building scalable websites, dabbled in mobile applications, built an incredible network of people who continue to serve as advisors and sounding boards.

I believe most startups never make it past year one simply because they are unprepared. Bamboo would not be able to grow rapidly and to great heights if it not for the giant root network they established. The same is true for startups. It is rare that someone hits it out the park in their first try. We only see the superstars not the other 99.9% that never make it for whatever reason.

Play Dynamics was conceived in November last year with my good friends Sharleen and Tony. Being old and scarred (in Internet years), we were hesitant to pull the trigger, plus the fact we were bogged down with an intensive consulting contract. As the New Year unfolded, we decided this was the time. In hindsight, it was not so much the product ideas that intrigued me, it was the fact that collectively this group had three incredible ingredients: experience, creativity and energy.

Moments like this come often only once a lifetime.

In the space of 3 weeks, we moved offices, built a team of 10 and was up and running without missing a heartbeat. After month 2, we are still rocking, with product ideas and prototypes to boot, at the same time managing our consulting revenue to pay the bills. Four years ago, we would not have been able to move as decisively and quickly as we have this year. Most decisions and knowing what to do came naturally and when we didn't know, I knew who to call.

Bamboo groves are often called colonies because like grass, they never grow alone. As in the previous blog post, I really believe all that preparation paid off and now we have the right to play. So far, we're growing as group in leaps and bounds, hopefully our root network of people and knowledge will be able to sustain us.

At the end of the day, I am realistic, some of our ideas will tank and others will succeed wildly. That is business reality. But I'm convinced that longevity is not in the products but the people who create them and who can't wait each day to come to work to play.

This is the Way of the Bamboo.

The Right to Play

2011-03-03T08:39:00.004-05:00

The Idea Dude didn't leave the building, he was in the basement... yet again. Play Dynamics is officially underway. New offices, new team and a new vision.

What do I say after a 3 month blog hiatus? Where do I start? There's a firehose of thoughts and emotions and some of it is too early to say or tell. So here's an attempt why I'm so excited about NOW.

The Right to Play
The first part of my career was about developing software development skills. It's akin to knowing the basic principles of cooking. What ingredients to use, when and how to use them.

The second part was building teams and business development. I was learning how to create environments that made people exceed their own expectations and, in doing so, help you exceed your goals. I was learning about product design and working with people who didn't code but sold products. In a restaurant, it's called hiring your sous chefs, the front of the house staff, the managers, the waiters and dealing with customers.

The third part was running your company no matter how small it was. Doing the accounts, taxes, paying rent, insurance and all the stuff, like oxygen, isn't the meaning of life but necessary for survival. This was like owning your restaurant.

All of the above wasn't the holy grail. It never was. I didn't even know what it was myself. In hindsight, it was preparation for this moment. The moment I can truly say, I have the right to play.

The State of Play
This is what we do at Play Dynamics, from the running of the company, building the team, creating the products, it's done with a pervasive culture of play. It's an on-going experiment where we run fast and fail fast. Re-invention and pivoting isn't an event, it is an on-going process from day one.

We're proving work and play are not opposite sides of the coin. The energy every day is just overwhelming. The only regret is there are only 24 hours in a day. Even in sleep, we dream of play.

It feels good, it feels right. I love our team, our mission, our culture, our energy. It feels like the planets are aligned. And shortly, the rest of you will be able to see the first fruits of our play.

Everybody deserves the right to play sometime in their lives. We've just arrived at ours.

We're currently in our labs in a constant State of Play.

Stay tuned

Looking at the world with new eyes

2010-12-14T10:46:00.003-05:00

34 weeks ago, I published the following quote on my miniblog.

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. (Marcel Proust)

I look at the microwave oven, the yellow sticky note, someone looked at the problem with new eyes and found new applications. I could be argued that Google, eBay, Groupon could be defined the same way, they didn't invent search, auctions or coupons but they looked at them in a new way, with new eyes.

I wondered about how often we drive down the same road day after day, talk to the same people, eat the same food, to a point it becomes routine, done subconsciously. Our favorite neighborhood becomes a blur, a part of our peripheral vision.

Familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, but it dulls the edge. If a sunset was 24 hours long we would stop looking in wonder. If we lived on a beach all year around, we would start complaining about the sand in our shoes.

So where is this going? Just a personal realization, we stop looking at ourselves and the people around us with new eyes. They stop amazing us. At some point our relationships become commodities... it is an insidious process that catches us unaware.

That's what play does for us, it allows us to be delighted, to be amazed, to be surprised. We explore and often we discover. Things and people taken for granted through the passage of time offer new gems. We start to marvel at the hidden grain of weathered wood, the crease of a smile that shows not age but love, the kindness behind a gentle voice.

This is the Christmas to look around us with new eyes and be grateful.

Why developers play?

2010-11-30T09:00:00.002-05:00

Dan Pink in his book Drive! talks about motivation and what drives people to be self-motivated. His three pillars of motivation is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Given all three, participants tend to be in the state of flow, a concept pioneered by Csikszentmihaly. Basically when you're in the flow, your engagement is so high, time is no longer linear or relevant for that matter.

It occurred to me that this is what drives software developers and why we labor for long hours, often forgoing food and sleep in our quest to fix that bug or implement that feature. All the elements Pink talks about are there.

Autonomy. Software developers are pretty autonomous. Generally, there are guiding principles, good software practices and patterns that we abide by. But mostly, software developers are left to their own devices to write the code as they see fit. You define the goals, a feature or bug fix and that's it. Beyond the programming language of choice, we generally do not dictate how the actual code should be written. There lies the creativity. Developers are generally given a destination but seldom told how to get there.

Mastery. Writing software can be considered infinite play. We never stop getting better. The permutations of what can be done is infinite. Of course, as we better, we rely on past libraries, patterns etc to help us get there faster. But the destinations change and we learn along the way by our own mistakes, insights and looking at other people's code. There is always a better way, an opportunity to refactor and perhaps even a different way next time. Mastery gets better but never complete.

Purpose. This is always clear. No developer sets out writing code with no goal in mind. Better still even if the product is extremely large, we learn to break the problem down to small manageable chunks. We narrow it down to a single feature, a bug that needs to be fixed and then we focus our entire energies to achieve that small goal. In short, we learn to create reachable milestones that reinforce our motivation along the way. Each milestone becomes an achievement. The feedback is direct and immediate. It either works or it doesn't.

For many of us, software development is a game even though the deliverables are real. And here is the rub. We often view playing is all fun and no work. No goal and no pain. But truth be told, there is pain. Ask the gamer who battles a boss for 2 days while dying a thousand times. Ask a developer who is frustrated by bad documentation, buggy API or bugs that defy logic. There is defintely pain in play. But here is the point. If you have autonomy, mastery and purpose, you WANT to play even though there is a cost (be in time or mental anguish). You are engaged and self-motivated.

Perhaps software development is the ultimate and infinite playground.

It is Serious Play.

The future is irrational

2010-11-09T09:13:00.002-05:00

I'm reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. His premise is that the world will solve a lot of the issues of the future which to many seem unsolvable. He claims to be a rational optimist because he looks back on human history and sees how we have become better and better overcoming economic disasters, plagues, wars and other points in our history when seemingly our future looks bleak. He says he is a rational optimist because he has arrived at his optimism in a rational manner based on evidence and not temperament.

Here's the paradox. He can be rational only because the future is irrational. As humans we like to look at the past as indicators of what the future could be. Hence the need for warnings when buying stocks, trying new medication and so forth. Yes we will run out of oil in the future which may change the world as we know it. But who's to say we will be still driving cars and building factories the same way as today?

We look to the past as predictors of the future. Couple hundred years ago, this may have been acceptable where technological innovation and industrialization were slow. You could probably predict 10 to 20 years ahead with reasonable reliability. Today, it may be years or even months. A year ago, Apple seem to be on a path to world dominance in mobile. A year later, Google Android is outselling the iPhone IOS. Jesse Schell says that in the next few years, our ability to predict the future may be days and weeks and not even months or years.

In short, with the rapid pace of technology advancement, the future is becoming increasingly irrational. Remember when having a 100MHz computer was considered a physical improbability as well as having a terrabyte of storage. Remember when Yahoo Search was king and Google was the sum of two young scientists? I remember reading how the search wars was won and yet Google dominates in every way unimaginable. Remember Facebook had less than 10 million users in 2006 and MySpace had over 100 million. The future is not linear nor is it rational. Today, we glibly say the social network war is over and Facebook has won.

Human evolution and advancement has leapfrogged not because of linear improvement but through unpredictable singularities. Ridley's observation that many of these advancements and innovation are because of human cooperation and collaboration. People who challenge each other and build better mousetraps. There is the saying that 90% of all inventions happened in the last 100 years. With the connectedness that the Internet has created, perhaps we will say in the next decade or two, that 90% of all inventions will happen in some 10 year span. That is not entirely unbelievable.

Even 20 years ago, you never knew about scientific discovery except through the publication of papers and conferences. These generally happened several times a year. Today, there is unprecendented transparency. What you say today may be heard a million times within a week. 1% of that million will have thought of 10 different ways to take your idea and make it different or better. Ingenuity grew in a week when it may have taken 1 year in the past few decades or years in the past few centuries.

So for all would-be entrepreneurs, the future is irrational. The biggest jumps in technology advancements are black swans, i.e. they are not predictable. That is the opportunity. That should give rise to rational optimism that you could be the next person to change the world.

Footnote: Google and Facebook are not going away any time soon but to make the bet that they will forever dominate the Internet, you have to believe that some 10, 20 or 50 years down the road, the Internet will exist as we know it today.

Who decided we should not mix play with work?

2010-10-27T15:24:00.008-04:00

I'm not sure of the answer.

I sent my kids to Montessori school when they were too young for school. I didn't want daycare. I wanted them to flourish and grow at their own pace and into things that made special in their own way. Then school came, and they assimilated into the 'classroom system'.

Every day 20 children all dressed the same, facing the same way in each class. Education became industrialized. Of course, this was efficient. We graded them each year and promoted them to the same level. There is a curriculum. No-one, least of all parents, questions whether we are teaching them the right things and should all children learn the same stuff at the same pace.

Somehow modern education is about training, 12 levels, you get a diploma. Another 4 years in college, you're hopefully equipped for the real world. But it all seems so contrived, so regulated. Occasionally, a small percentage, break out of the system and become leaders, inventors, artists. But the rest, well, they sort of relegated to the monotony of boring jobs. Our goals become making the rent payment, paying of debt and looking forward to 2 weeks vacation after we have toiled for the other 50.

I called this the industrialization of mankind. I wonder what would have happened if we gave children the latitude to explore, discover, invent at their own pace. Without giving them rules that if you learn this 10 things, you proceed to the next level. Where would they be?

I'm pretty sure the inventors and innovators broke all the rules to discover what was seemingly illogical and impossible. We revere Galileo today and yet in his time, he was forced to recant his beliefs which ultimately proved to be correct. But at the time, it didn't jive with the what everyone was taught and expected to believe.

Somehow for most, we lost our sense of play by the time we reached our teens. Or rather we taught our children play and work were parallel paths and you couldn't do both at the same time.

Work is often characterized by doing the right things at the right time for a specific purpose. Over and over again. Play is about engagement, contribution, curiosity, exploration, discovery. Yet play is seen by most as time wasted, irrelevant, self-indulgent, unproductive... perhaps only because we made it so.

I wonder why?

Ray Ozzie's last post had an amazing quote..."And so, the first step for each of us is to imagine fearlessly; to dream."

Update: I found this wonderful presentation by Sir Kenneth Robinson an hour later after doing this blog post.

if you recalibrate your perspective in life, it's amazing what you can see.

2010-10-24T15:54:00.003-04:00

I mentioned the buzz about gamification to someone at lunch the other day. He replied that his father was a teacher many years ago and he took the unorthodox approach of making every lesson into a game. Not just give points for good behavior but literally created a game in such a way kids never thought of it as learning.

This conversation was interesting because the current hype of gamification has it's own set of critics, from "this is not a new thing" to "another case of the Emperor's new clothes". However, this man's father did things the same way I ran many of my development groups in the past. I figured that if people bought into a cause and felt an affinity to each other in the group, 90% of my battle was won. People would work beyond the call of duty and people would volunteer to help each other for the great cause. In the end, we all climbed the same mountain.

So I would agree that the folks from the gaming world wasn't privy to some hidden secret in the virtual world that was lost to the rest of us in real world. What they did do was figure out what were the important things to keep people buying games and playing them. In the gaming world (unless it is gambling), there is rarely a financial reward so game designers had to figure other ways to attract and keep players and get them to spread the word. Out of necessity, they figured many of the keys to successful user engagement.

It's an art that has been lost in the real world. It's either have fun or work hard. Indeed we were brought up that way. Remember the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" saying. We were taught hard work was the oxygen of survival and we should not have fun doing it. So life (usually at the onset of adulthood) became work, chores and maybe a bit of fun. Sure there were others, like my friend's father who believed otherwise. So did the creators behind Lego's Serious Play. But they were among the few, like lost prophets in the desert.

So my point is that play like work is a fundamental part of our lives since the beginning of time. Society at some point decided they were two different things. The rise of social networks like Facebook and online casual gaming has help blur the line once more. So there is much we can learn from the gaming world, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, why we play, what engages us. There is also much that the gamification folks need to learn about the real world, i.e. they need to undo decades of prejudice, perception and cultural bias. Take a poll of any top 500 business CEO's and I'm sure that they will tell you jobs are to achieve a purpose not to have fun.

So I spend my days now looking at my life and work in a totally different way. So much so, I am about to start another venture with a few like minded friends. If something looks like a chore or is unpleasant, I step back and think about what this context should like as a game. All of a sudden, I'm in control. I'll plan a couple of strategies and predict the outcomes. I'm constantly reevaluating, like the monk constantly regaining his balance in a fight (that's another post). Each failure, is only a setback not an indictment on me or my team. I focus on the prize, the epic event. Yet at the same time, I don't lose sight of the fact, the journey should be as pleasurable as the moment of reaching the end.

If you recalibrate your perspective in life, it's amazing what you can see and accomplish.

Hell has no fury like a user scorned

2010-10-08T09:16:00.002-04:00

I was watching a YouTube video given by Randy Farmer. He explained why the rating system on YouTube was broken. When you looked at many video ratings, they either had 5 stars or none. It seems logical now that he explains it. If you watched an entire YouTube video, chances are you liked it and would rate it highly. You would never waste time watching the entire thing and give it a single star. At least not many people do. Ergo, the proxy for the 1 star was implicit, i.e. anyone who didn't finish watching was essentially giving it a single star or a thumbs down.

There's as much to learn about what was not said or not done when analyzing user interactions. We get excited about the pages where we get million clicks, but we never ask ourselves (rarely) what happened to the pages that got 1 click. Surely there is as much to learn from that, because that actually makes us better. But we don't because it points to our failures and we hate those.

Women have already figured this out. If two men are unhappy, they go outside, have a yelling match, maybe throw a couple of punches and then make up and go have a beer. A woman scorned will slowly kill you with her stare and her silence. It's a slow dagger that gets twisted with every second, driving you nuts because you don't know what she's thinking and how long the pain is going to last. Of course, this is said tongue-in-cheek, but you get the idea.

Ronan Keating has a song with lyrics I'm going to repurpose. It goes like this.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all

When do chores cease to be chores?

2010-10-05T11:03:00.002-04:00

Watching kids play Farmville and Restaurant City, I asked myself why these kids are happy to plant vegetables, wait patiently for them to grow and harvest them. Why are they happy to cook, clean toilets and mop floors in the virtual world. Yet we cannot get them to pick up their socks or make their beds.

So when is a chore, a chore? and when is it fun?

I have two observations. Firstly, it's to do with self-motivation. When we are told to do something, there's a part of our brain that rebels. If there were no speed limits, most of us would self-regulate realizing speed kills. Nobody drives down an old country lane with no signage at 100 miles an hour. Yet, when there is a limit posted, there is desire to exceed it by 10 or 20 or just enough not to get caught. Being externally motivated (you must do this) vs self-motivated (I want to do this) is a key to that understanding.

The second observation is when you do something with someone, it's never seems to be as bad as doing it yourself. Try this with your children. Get them to go around the house and pick up stuff by themselves. Trust me, inventing perpetual motion is much easier. But make it a game, like treasure hunt and play it with them, everyone has fun and the job gets done.

Self-motivation and playing with others are keys to engagement. Same reason why people have personal trainers, it's hard to be self-motivated to exercise at home. Much easier to do it at the gym when you see others with equal purpose. The mere fact that you are in the same room doing a common task is sufficient.

My son refuses to buy games that are single player games anymore. His argument, he can finish the game in a couple of days and it sits on his shelf. Network games however allow him to play the game forever because each game is different with new participants. Note, often he doesn't know these people beyond their code names and most times, he'll never meet them again.

However, when we undertake journeys that are important, we prefer to do it with people we know, because they become part of the story, they become part of your history.

Why not?

2010-10-05T00:23:00.003-04:00

This weekend, my daughter wanted to make Green Tea Ice Cream for a friend as a birthday gift. I argued that we didn't have the time, recipe or ingredients to make it. Besides, the local Asian supermarket had a delicious brand on sale. We could buy it cheaper than we could make it.

She looked me in eye and asked why not? At the moment, all my excuses why we shouldn't seemed pretty silly. We made the ice cream and it was delicious.

Adults ask why in the hope we find enough excuses not to do something. Children in their quest to explore ask why not? For them the journey is as important if not more so than the destination.

Our sense of possibility dims with age. We should learn from our children.

Lost in Translation

2010-10-02T10:09:00.002-04:00

The more I think about gamification, the more excited I get. If the average teenager spends as much time playing games as he does in high school, there is a parallel universe that is untapped. Currently it is a universe that is tolerated rather than leveraged.

The fear I have is that when people get excited, it's like you have a hammer and everything looks like nail. Age brings the benefits of experience having lived the history instead of reading it. I saw the fads of AI, B2B, CRM, ERP, millions of dollars spent inappropriately because everyone wants that silver bullet, the holy water, the miracle cure. Many of these technologies thrive today because they are useful and strategic where they should be. Hundreds of casualties and dollars are littered on the way because they weren't.

Bringing new ideas into any company or life is by definition traumatic because they threaten the norm, they make you uncomfortable, they change your beliefs and they potentially make you look stupid when you see what you have done in the past.

The problem why ideas don't stick or don't apply is that something got lost in translation. Usually it is the intent, the core of the idea. We sometimes get caught up in the mechanics, the rules. We argue about the how instead of the why. Logic is at arms with the illogical. We forget that logic is often not a product of mathematics in our lives, it is a product of our culture, teachings and learnings. We forget these were created in the context of time. But time passes, so should cultures evolve, new discoveries lead to new learnings.

Be definition, at least mine, an expert is someone who knows when to apply something and what to do in that context. It is a generic principle. We should take heed as we go down the path of making business fun. Before of technology and ideas that get lost in translation.

My mission, making sure "making business fun" should no longer be an oxymoron.

My epiphany of the day... Progress is learning from the future not from the past. Is that not the definition of imagination?

Shall we play a game?

2010-10-01T17:55:00.003-04:00

10 years ago, I had this weird and wacky idea of making games on the Gameboy so that kids would play in class as part of the act of learning, or is it learn as part of the act of playing. Several years later, I thought Serious Play, a Lego initiative was just as important, introducing play into the workplace as a serious tool to problem-solving. So much so, I made it a practice to buy small Lego kits for all my team members. The whole premise was that if they learnt to 'play' at work, they would come up with some pretty unique solutions and have fun doing it.

Fast forward to 2010 and gamification as a concept is the latest buzzword on the Internet. The wikipedia describes gamification as the integration of game mechanics or game dynamics into a website, service, community, campaign, or application in order to drive participation and engagement. There's a whole bunch of folks in the gaming world who have realized that there is a lot of learning we can glean from the gaming world. We have created games that make people spend inordinate amount of time without coercion or incentives to play games. Games that involve problem-solving, coordination and collaboration. The argument goes as follows... If we have successfully created environments that are so immersive and engaging, why can't we do the same in the real-world.

With every new technology, there is undoubtedly a tremendous amount of hype, think artificial intelligence, push technology, yes even blogging. But that doesn't necessary mean it's the Emperor's new clothes scenario. I kept thinking how often we create gaming type scenarios because it took the drudgery of daily chores. Recently, my daughter and I were left for a number of weeks to fend for ourselves. Cooking would be the number one dread and concern. I decided that fast food was not the answer and my daughter and I set off on a quest. My daughter was my recruit. There is no epic event other than survival but each day was a mission, define a goal (what we are going to cook), forage for food (finding the best price and freshest produce), locate a recipe (look up the rules), cook (complete the mission). In short, 6 days out of 7, we complete our mission. It was fun not to mention healthy. Looking back it was a game. And that is probably the difference, we didn't set out to cook and find the fun in cooking, we set out to have fun together, cooking happened to be activity and delicious food the by-product.

I call it fun with a purpose. Think of those who do spinning (cyclists who ride in a group in a health club). The leader most often has a narrative, e.g. we're climbing up the mountain - tightening the tension, or we're coasting on the shoreline - relax. If cycling was a list of mechanical rules, i.e. ride hard for 2 minutes then relax for 1 minute etc, I would propose it would have never garnered the same kind of following it has today. Basically, there is a moderator, there is a theme or a narrative, a group of people with a common purpose, this is actually a game.

BTW: The government has already found a way to gamify taxes, it's called the state lottery.

So why do I think gamification is not just the next fad? Because we already do it subconsciously or in an unstructured manner. e.g. there are 21 traffic lights from home to work, to cut the tedium of the daily commute, I often try to make it home without stopping at any light. If I succeed, it gives me an incentive to repeat that success. It is a game. Whenever, there is a task I don't particularly enjoy, I create a story around it, add a goal at the end, break up the task into mini tasks. I'm creating a game to play in my mind to move my psyche from a context of resistance to one of participation.

Like any tech geek, I would love to write the next Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. I never do. I always feel whatever I do should be useful, productive and make a difference. Ergo, I always wanted to change the world, not just entertain it. Perhaps gamification may be journey that will allow me to do both.

Is this the next big thing? My friend Sharleen has convinced me it is. She covers this in tremendous detail and insight on her blog. It is becoming the de facto source on gamification on the web.

My passion has always been to inspire people, encourage them to imagine and explore the possibilities, to initiate and be the cause rather than be the result, to exceed their own expectations. If I can get them to do all that and have fun doing it and become better and more productive employees, it would count as my part of changing the world.

One man can only change so much. How much more can he change if he is able to inspire others to the change the world too?