A fun cultural remixing story: Don Quixote (a discount store in Japan) selling “American Hero” costume made by a Chinese company which is going all the way up to Japan’s trademark enforcement envelope for Halloween.
“Why isn’t it Superman?”
Because then it would be $50+ not $30 and price out the clientele of Don Quixote kids’ costumes. You can certainly find actual Superman in Tokyo, too.
(Isn’t it fascinating that Superman’s American-ness is considered a central and compelling part of the value proposition here where it is treated as a punchline or embarrassing historical detail by custodians of the brand in the U.S.?)
Ruriko: “Wait it isn’t Superman?!?”
Me: “Well it is in the style of Superman.”
Ruriko: “But fake?!?”
Me: “Well yeah.”
Ruriko: “And you’re sure?”
Me: “I stake all of my American cred on that glyph being wrong.”
Ruriko: “... %{*}^{ it China!”
Me: “Merchandise buyer knew, too.”
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Sometimes I wonder whether equity for startup employees, particularly later stage startup employees, isn’t an improvement for much the same reason that automatic (opt-out vs opt-in) 401k enrollment is.
“OK so I’m going to explain equity ownership to you.”
“Uh I don’t understand or want to understand that.”
“OK in that case I’m going to assert that you are going to be long tech companies for a double digit percentage of your compensation automatically. Thank me later.”
(There is an inflection point somewhere around Series B where equity ownership stops being speculative and starts being closer to “deferred compensation with wider error bars than most forms of it.”)
An observation: one of the reasons I enjoy Hades so much is that it feels, in so many ways, like a game made for a core gamer who is not at the "traditional" core gamer life stage.
You might call it "games for dads":
* ~30 minute core experience pauseable anywhere
* guaranteed progression
* an actual story which involves some themes that would play less well with teenagers (it's not *just* a story of a son's rebellion)
* forgiving difficulty curve
* absurdly high skill cap
* "off-table" play
(In poker, off-table play is work that you can do when not at the poker table to strengthen your poker game. Hades rewards certain forms of this, such as building strategies and decision trees, which you could do e.g. on an iPhone on way to work when not playing.)
Lillian, attempting to start a campfire at the park by striking stones: “Why won’t this work?!?”
Me: “It has to be two specific types of stone, not just any two stones. It isn’t based on friction specifically.”
Lillian: “Making a fire is too hard! TV makes it look easy!”
Me: “You have now learned one major lesson from Boy Scouts.”
Speaking of which: matches! What an invention! Have you ever read about the gigantic fortunes made in match manufacturing, because of the tremendous societal wealth created by predictable fire on demand?
It only happens rarely but I get a kick out of it at work when I get to say "Thanks for asking for an expert opinion on our strategy on X. That expert is probably me. Here's what we should do on X and why, in substantial depth:"
Imposter syndrome only partially alleviated by sometimes really, really knowing what I'm talking about, but every once in a while there's a question which is just perfectly shaped.
(There are a surprising number of things that will eventually become professionally relevant where 2 weeks of Googling and execution back in the day on a topic most people will never either Google nor execute makes you member of a club of 100k people w/ exactly one in your org.)
My goal in raising children is to inspire the kind of love for reading which will inevitably result in spurious accusations of plagiarism by teachers with very low expectations.
"Spurious is not grade-level appropriate, Patrick." "... OK, so that would be 'specious.'"
Additional words that were supposed to be hidden in the English teacher cupboard: pseudonym (which was doubly suspicious because I pronounced it "pues dough nym", having never had occasion to hear it aloud), taciturn, baleful, and rectitude.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Several years later: The valedictorian of my high school class, immediately after the SAT, to me:
"Patrick help me: baleful."
"$NAME you're going to cure cancer someday but you would be hopeless in the Temple of Elemental Evil."
"Oh so it was C. *phew*"
A model which is more successful is no-permission-required integration against a popular ecosystem, getting traction via your own efforts, *and then* getting the ecosystem to promote you via their mailing list and/or other platforms. (Ask for the email. Get the email.)
Note that there have been a lot of wonderful SaaS businesses, particularly in bootstrapped land, built by "integration marketing."
You're spending limited marginal engineering investment to get a population of users with a need created by a product gap in an adjacent platform.
Note that this product gap is often exposed by Google searches and that no one and I mean no one should care more about owning the SERP for "How do I [foo] with [platform]" than you do.
This built Zapier, etc, and you can do it in a very scalable fashion.