So You Wanna Work at a Startup?

I remember talking to my friends about mmochi (seems like a lifetime ago), and they would say…”Yea, sounds like you wanna build a startup”. Startup? Did you just take 2 verbs and make it into a noun? What is that, another word for “business”? No, I quickly learned (but not quickly enough…never quickly enough!), that building a startup, which evidently enough, IS another word for a business, condensed under 5 words is kind of like: having a baby. Minus the fluids. But omg, that process is for another post.

ps – Run on sentences ftw.

So one of the first steps to building that startup? Find a partner. How? What can I offer? How do I explain how not fun it’s going to be and at the same time, get really motivated and smart people to join me in this struggle? Then I ran across this article all full of truths AND roflcopters and had to share. I couldn’t get permalinks and trackbacks to work so here’s the entire article (where you can read the comments too), QFT.

“Welcome to the first day of your new startup job! We’re so excited that you’ve decided to be part of our venture. You’re going to find that compared to your old job at a big, stodgy corporation, a startup is a totally different world.

To get you acclimated to the change, let me walk you through the perks and benefits of your new job while you settle in.

We have a Premium Coffee Service

Oh, you want to know where the coffee is?

We have an amazing service that offers premium coffees and a full assortment of cakes and snacks. It’s called Starbucks, and it’s conveniently located two blocks down the street. They aren’t around as early or late as we are, but if you can use the service, I would highly recommend it.

Your New Computer is Already Configured

No need to worry about setting up your new computer – you already own it. It’s the laptop you brought from home. The great news is that you won’t need to waste any time configuring your email client or figuring out your new bookmarks.

What’s even better is you are free to take it home with you and work throughout the entire weekend like the rest of us are going to.

Your Phone Number is Easy to Remember

In addition to your computer, your direct phone line is already set up. As it happens, you already know the number because it’s the same as your cell phone number. Why bother adding additional lines with money we don’t have when you have a perfectly good phone on you at all times?

You Now have Three Assistants

Maybe your last company thought you only needed one full-time assistant to handle your inbound calls, your calendar and your entire travel schedule. At our startup, we’ve got three. Their names are Outlook, iPhone, and Expedia.

Between the three of them they will handle all of the work that you thought only one full-time person could handle before. They will always be available to you and will never complain. Feel free to use them as much as you see fit.

You Set Your Own Travel Budget

No need to fill out any requisitions for travel or any expense reports. We’re too innovative to worry about all that paperwork. In fact, you can pretty much tell us what your travel budget is going to be. After all, it’s dictated by how much cash you have in your wallet and how much gas you have in your car. Assuming those two are full, you can go as far as they will take you.

Take as much Vacation as You Want

Not only do we not worry about travel budgets, we don’t even budget for vacation. Sure, your last company made you count the number of sick days you had available and kept you from taking as much time as you really needed. We’re the exact opposite – you can take off as much time as you need and never worry about it.

While you’re planning that vacation, remember that we’re working Monday through Sunday from sunrise to sundown. None of us have taken time off in the last three years, but we’d be thrilled to see you take a two-week siesta to relax after you’ve been hard at work for three months in a row.

Our Hours are Super Flexible

Aside from not tracking vacation, we don’t even track when you come or go. Maybe your last boss was looking at his watch when you showed up fifteen minutes late. Not us! We don’t care what time you show up or what time you leave. So long as you’re working every waking moment of every day of the week, the hours are totally up to you.

We don’t care if you come in on Sunday at 8:00 AM or 1:00 PM. We’re just so focused on getting this startup off the ground we can’t worry about things like normal business hours. Some of us haven’t slept in the last day and a half so we’ve lost track of time altogether.

You Call the Shots

We’re not about telling you what to do. That’s why we hired you, because we knew you were tired of having your boss lead you around like a puppy. At our new startup, you get to make your own schedule and call all of the shots. We hired you because we knew you wanted this type of responsibility, and now you’ve got it!

I’m sure by now you’re thinking this is simply nirvana. Not only do you get to run your own show, set your own schedule and enjoy all of the perks of a startup, you also get the opportunity to strike it rich with your new stock options.

Just don’t forget that you really aren’t going to get paid in cash this week. Or next week. Or next month. Isn’t a startup great?”

Board meeting? Get your potions ready!

I’m not going to be able to say it better so I’m just going to quote from the source itself and pepper the blog with my own thoughts. The topic is leadership, management and MMOs. Holy extrapolation?! What does one have to do with the other, you wonder? My friend, you have never been part of a raiding guild if you have to ask!

Although this line of thinking has been bandied about and postulated for a few years, a recent article sent to me by way of my friend Nesto, from Harvard Business Review titled, “Leadership Online Labs” seeks to dispel the notion that online games are merely simple play, describing them as “enterprises [are actually] where sprawling online communities in which thousands of players collaborate with and compete against one another in real time within a visually three-dimensional virtual world—one that persists and evolves even while a player is away.” Which makes a lot of sense, as these persistent worlds consists of real-time interaction between avatars controlled by humans, not AI. It’s always been worth it to examine the leadership and group dynamics in these games, but few people took it seriously. They don’t know that completing a mission or defeating a new boss often requires myriad levels of collaboration, on-the-spot decision making, morale building, and all sorts of problem solving. Not a task for the feeble-minded or faint of heart!

What follows (in the article) is a discussion of what leadership means in-game, and how that can be different or similar to management in organizations. But this was not an article about how you can learn leadership techniques from awesome WoW raid leaders. What’s mentioned is “the tools and techniques they’re using will change how leaders function tomorrow—and could make them more effective today”. “Tools” being a state-of-the-art headset and “techniques” like withholding DKP points for latecomers. Just kidding!

What they imagine is: current virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Everquest may lend insight into the future of real-life organizational leadership. Imagine, we may one day face fire-breathing chimera in the elevator. Just kidding! But perhaps companies willing to adopt characteristics of game environments could exact some kind of leadership change. I think it’s very radical that an organization may consider changing their environment in order to support their leadership instead of finding the right people to lead in their current environment. It certainly would be in line with other progressive HR startup strategies that seek to retain human capital. Not the HR strategy of having a company sushi chef, although I heard that really helps with productivity too. And by “productivity”, I mean “getting fat”. What I mean is, we should all be so lucky.

My Daily Grind

“Yea, but what do you do all day?”, I get asked all the time.

When what you’re doing consists of working on the web, and you’re not actually coding anything…I can understand how ‘web working’ sounds like not working at all. Or maybe it just sounds like it’s all fun. But really, it’s a humongous exercise in self-management. And I have terrible impulse control. AND the web is chock full of enticing distracters. Examples: the siren’s call of celebrity “news” blogs gets particularly tantalizing around 6PM. Friend sends funny Youtube link or LOLcatz image. You do your part digging it or passing it along. Spam from shopping site tells you that they have new items for the season. Hmm…wouldn’t help to look. It’s Wednesday, time to stream new subbed anime episodes! Limiting playing time on WoW or Audition? Near impossible. “But it’s research!” the id cries, as you’re queuing for the 30^th Arena battle of the day.

So when do you start, and when do you stop? Should all your time on the web be devoted to ‘work’? Should you feel terrible for browsing Perez Hilton when you can be taking a walk outside? Is that really considered taking a ‘break’? How much guilt is motivational and how much guilt is paralyzing?

Anyway, no matter how you look at it, I spend too much time sitting in front of the PC and not much time doing anything else…My challenge is finding ways to amuse myself, de-stress, and keep (or get) healthy while staying true to my calling as Internet Wizard. Willing to take any suggestions seriously, just don’t tell me to start doing desk exercises! (I think people will look at me funny.)

I realized that I didn’t answer the question, but I’m hoping you didn’t notice. Besides, shouldn’t you go out and do something?

Just kidding! Go play some games.

Finally! Some recognition! Gawd!

So this bit of news made Digg front page a few days ago.

Two Warcraft 3 players (whose careers I followed with the rapt, vicarious attention of someone who has dreamt of doing EXACTLY what these two are doing and having failed completely at it) – XiaoFeng “Sky” Li and Jae ho “Moon” Jang have been awarded the prestigious honor of carrying the OLYMPIC TORCH as it goes through China on the way to Beijing National Stadium.

Sky is one of the best Human-class players and Moon is known for his Nightelf skills. I suck at both of those classes, only barely staying alive by unsummoning my ziggurats to hide them elsewhere. Sadly, the blight always gives me away…

Anyway, grats to these guys! Cybersports is an important part of the internet and gaming revolution and is here to stay!

Finally, WE gamers get the recognition we deserve! w00t!

Zomg big mess!

I was playing WoW the other day – and felt a rumbling…

So I picked up a bag of potato chips, none other than the delicious Cheetos. I was hungrier than usual, so I attacked the bag with a fervor normally reserved for the newest OK! magazine and expensive Apple products. Usually with messy (and smelly) snacks, I like to eat them with chopsticks to preserve the pristine-ness of my hands. But that was not to happen this day…Probably because if you’ve ever gamed (PC or console), you know you need to use BOTH hands. What a mess I made! Had to wipe down and blow compressed air through the keyboard. I thought it was fortunate that I had a black keyboard (and therefore the orange mess would not be easily seen) but instead, it just looked like my gaming setup was attacked by an angry Halloween ghost. Oh well!

Tilo’s tip for successful gaming# 1: Try not to eat something that will undermine the integrity of your keyboard/mouse/controller, anything hot that you can drop on your lap, anything that requires two hands, and anything that may make you run to the bathroom without sufficiently being able to warn your raid-mates. Remember, there are few greater crimes than passing along a greasy controller.

More skills than just finger control

Some of you know that I organize the NYC World of Warcraft Meetup Group http://warcraft.meetup.com/118/

This grew out of a need to find other like-minded individuals (to geek out with) and to further understand the gaming mind (besides my own). Well, now we are over 175 members strong and have two meetup guilds, one on Undermine (PVE) and one on Ursin (PVP) server. Maybe now we can finally put some old stereotypes to rest!

I think the prevailing one has been that “gamers” are by nature, loners, or definitely lacking in typical social skills. I always knew this to be false, because I played a lot of video games and I had many friends who did too. We were all surprisingly normal, and really adept at other (some would say higher) forms of communication. How gamers express themselves can be different, choosing conventions, LAN parties, forums, Ventrilo/Teamspeak, IM, etc. And if you ever saw what goes on in the WoW Meetup group, you’d know that it’s sometimes just hanging out over a pizza and beer too. It’s just that we usually talk about the games we play!

I’m not saying that all gamer stereotypes are false, but that’s another blog post.

Online games are a catalyst for a monumental change in how people identify themselves, and how they want to be perceived. It’s all about the avatar, be it your Second Life character, World of Warcraft shaman, or Nintendo Mii. It’s been over 20 years since I started gaming, and the industry is undergoing tremendous changes. I am not speaking exclusively about console or PC gaming; both have changed dramatically and the faces of “typical” gamers have changed dramatically.

And we want those faces on mmochi!

We Play Games Too

Recently, Forbes published an article about the fact that women play video games too. In fact, they are the driving forces behind such mega internet hits as “Diner Dash” and popular Facebook games (Scrabulous). In fact, these casual games are growing 20% year over year! It finally seems like game developers are clueing into this fact, developing casual “games for girls”. I mean, it’s something I always knew, it’s not that girls don’t play video games, they just play different types of games! But don’t be so quick to label girl gamers as just “casuals”, I know plenty of girls that can kick butt in WoW, Halo, and other “hardcore” games as well!

Oh, and Happy Easter from mmochi!

Processes

We are going through the super rigorous process of trademarking right now. If anyone has thought of a cool slogan or name and wanted to trademark it, a cursory search on Google makes it seem like it can be done by in 5 minutes. This is not so.

But anyway, when coming up with our tagline, we wanted something that sounded cool (of course), made sense (semantically), and conveyed mmochi’s mission, or reason for existence. What we came up with is: Know Who You’re Playing With.

I know that when I used to PVP grind, there were certain people from certain guilds that I would run into again and again. Some were awesome players, and they kicked my @$$ handily many times. I always wondered who they were – where they were from, how they looked like, what kind of gaming setup they had, stuff like that. There were also extremely terrible players that I got to know (and avoided), and I wondered what was up with them too, lol. And I just hated how all of the guilds had their own websites, but they were all scattered, and a bit messy, and you had to register with the site to participate in the forums. There were also sites that had pictures of WoW players, but you couldn’t chat with each other! Like, if you recognized a screen name of someone you played with, you couldn’t email and say, “Hey, good run at (insert instance name) last night, let’s make a static (insert instance name) group!” So mostly, I made this site for myself, and for people like me, the MMO enthusiast who is passionate about games but doesn’t have as much time to troll the net for people who also play the same games! Hopefully, this will become the site where gamers come to meet each other!

 

Dailies

This is the start of a day at mmochi, with a double shot of caffeine and a healthy dose of can-do attitude. You try reading over 50 blogs a day! Thank you, Google Reader, your feed aggregator has made me twice as productive and at least 100x smarter. Reading is fundamental and Google Reader is fundamental to my reading.

Right now, we are working on deadlines. The programmers are supposed to tell us very shortly how soon mmochi will be able to beta. And almost surely, we will not be happy with their time line so I’m prepping for a cyber fight with them! More soon…

Press Start

Hi and welcome to mmochi! You must be wondering what the name means, and maybe even how to say it? It’s “mo-chee” and traditionally, it’s a yummy, ice cream dessert. But in this case, it’s my internet dream and I’ll tell you the start of it all.

I used to PVP grind for about 40 hours a week. Give or take 15 hours, if you included raiding. Work/life/game balance was just a pipe dream. Sometimes I’d play with my guild, sometimes alone, and I got to know many, many people on my server really well, and many people who played the game in general – I mean, how can you not, considering how many hours I was logged on? And yes, I knew them; I knew how their character had the awesomest gear, whether they were alchemists or fire mages, and how they were gathering materials for a new sword. And during breaks in the game (occasionally, there were some), we’d get to know more about the team members. Like, who needed to afk midway during the raid to cook for the family, who had to take off for a month to prep for finals, who was between jobs, etc.

And when we weren’t playing the game, we were chatting on the forums. And of course, the posts with the most threads were usually the posts regarding “Real Life” info. Like, real life photos, real life meet ups, real life advice for real life problems,etc. And I definitely partook in those conversations. I wanted to get to know my in-game friends. But our guild and clan websites were always kind of lame, they didn’t allow us to host as many pictures, FRAPS videos, and the private messaging kind of sucked. And worse, only guild members ever went to our site! If we wanted to talk to other people from the game, we would have to go to their guild website (and sometimes you couldn’t even find it on google) or convene on a more well-known public forum.

So a light went off in my head and mmochi was born.

The first three letters of mmochi stand for “massive multiplayer online”, in case you didn’t get it by now. I thought that if I could create a cool and interesting website, that gamers would come, create a profile, and stay awhile. We’d all hang out and get to know each other – in a Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood kind of way. “If you build it, they will come.” So whenever you have comments or feedback, please let me know here.

We can be the best gaming community on the web.