The Computer Game Bill Gates(and other billionaires Play To Become Billionaires: Let me tell you a story. A narcissistically prone,but financially constrained,friend of mine introduced me to a game when I was shambled in the throes of unproductivity.Somehow,I think Im sarcastically basking in the aura of idleness(and boredom).This happened 2 years ago in Port harcourt.He brought this game to my attention because he knows that anything of that sort,the billionaire sort of thing would catch my attention at warp speed.He started with a capitalistic game called Monopoly. Now,he touted a strange,but technologically laden computer game.It was called Spaceword Ho!(go download it to your phone,research shows that 56% of tech billionaires play it 30% of the time,Im teetering on the brink of downloading to my....Yakise,bring my Samsung Galaxy). So,this nerdy guy brought this game and I played it to satiation.Now this feeling of satiety marinated exceedingly in my psyche that I got addicted to play it in this guys phone till it came to a point where we seemed to co-own this slicky Nokia N series something. Spaceward Ho! required you to compete with the computer, or other players, to develop your technology and explore (read: exploit) the universe via colonization and strip mining of the various planets you discovered. It was a wonderfully capitalist game. Keeping general pace in Ho! required a great deal of patience and orderly management of your resources (planets) and capital, which you could deploy in a variety of research projects. One of the categories you could spend capital on was your radical researchers. The graphic for them still makes me crack a smile. Big craniumed scientist with googly eyes dressed in a white lab coat whos head is exploding with radical ideas. You could just see the senior management of the Galactic Conquest Corporation going out of their way to park their new BMWs as far away as possible from the radical researcher facility, from which evil cackling laughter, strange sulfur like smells, purple smoke and the occasional violent explosion emanated. Actually,this is of good use to use when I will pitch to Investment bankers when I travel dryly from Ukanafun to.Port harcourt(hopefully Lagos) to find partnership opportunities for a Big firm Im analysing:Investco. I think the firm is entrenched with cornucopia of problems that smells foul.It smells in a way that makes me restless because I know good investors constantly shop for this opportunity to capitalize on. So here is my open mini-letter to Investco: While your other internal projects would show slow, incremental gains consistently turn after turn, your radical researchers would return nothing for 5-10 turns at a time. Often you began to wonder if they were doing anything at all. (Today, I can easily see some middle manager doing a IRR calculation on them after 3 years of nothing and sacking the entire division). But then, out of nowhere, when you had almost given up, they would announce a radical discovery. Perhaps 15 turns worth of progress in terraforming or something. You never knew what they would find, but you knew it would take a while and be very interesting. It strikes me that the Investco has failed to grasp the radical researcher concept. Venture capitalists are the crazy lab coat types. Try to rein them in and saddle them with paperwork and corporate policy and they will not only flee, but thereafter they might work tirelessly on inventing a deadly anti-Investco device as well. Just for spite.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 19:49:39 +0000
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