Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations

For an understanding of what Valve are doing, here is a 1 hour talk by Gabe Newell (CEO): Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations ▶ this video TL;DR: * The most skilled workers are the most undervalued * Make products to serve the customer * Management is a skill, not a career path * The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.

So the first thing is the meta learning. Looking at companies like Valve and Wolfram, they provide a template of another way of running companies which seem to consistently produce the best kind of software and incredible wealth for all those involved. The two things you look for when running a software company. Next, Stephen livestreams his day to day as a CEO. This is so significant. I know the HN trope which dang warned about earlier, but I actually love it. Imagine if you could get detailed logs about how Steve Jobs lived his life. Not from books others write about him and make up fake stuff to make it sell more, but straight from the horse's mouth as they say. That is what his meticulous logs and streams of his life provides. Gabe Newell of course does much less of this, but he still has some incredible videos which go so in depth in how he runs the business and what he thinks about. Look, we are nerds. To learn business, we go online and try to piece together information. For example, I know for a fact a bunch of YC companies (both in this batch and earlier) have fallen for scammers like Alex Hormozi because he has a massive Youtube presence and just spews nonsense which sounds like it should make sense. So in that world, to learn as close to first hand from people who actually run some of the biggest and most interesting business on the planet is just incredible. --- Live CEOing link Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of C

Agreed! I think it kind of goes to show that a game often needs a nice cocktail of interesting game state changes (eg: "mechanics") mixed with nice feelings. Audiences vary in how they like the two (eg: Chess compared to Mario Kart), but the right fit is really important to a successful product. Valve had a nice way of describing "player acknowledgement" [1][2] for cosmetic things like bullet holes or lighting affecting our lizard brains. On the other hand, a close friend of mine really enjoys the "Star Wars: Rebellion" board game. [3] The decisions and mechanics gives the sense of excitement he feels when he watches a Star Wars movie. I don't blame Garfield for making the kinds of games he likes though. His clout probably helps makes new trails for other ideas to take shape and be improved on. [1] link [2] ▶ this video [3] link

For those interested, here is a really interesting video of Gabe Newell at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs talking about some of the in-game economic problems Valve has faced in the past few years. I think he briefly mentions Yanis somewhere in the middle of the video. ▶ this video