Joel Augé

Best Valentines Dinner Ever! (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:50:19 -0500

Best Valentines Dinner Ever! (Taken with instagram)

brycedotvc: In the book I’m reading,The Talent Code, the author...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:04:04 -0500

In the book I’m reading,The Talent Code, the author showcases a 1997 study which asked why some kids make massive performance progress when taking piano lessons and some do not.

After looking at a wide range of variables- IQ, aural sensitivity, math skills, rhythm, sensorimotor skills, income level- the researchers stumbled on an answer in a question they’d asked the children before they ever slid their stool to the keyboard.

The question? How long do you think you’ll play your new instrument?

As you can see in the graph above, the correlation between long-term commitment and pace of improvement were eye opening. From the book:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Progress was not determined by any measurable aptitude or trait, but by a tiny powerful idea the child had before even starting lessons. The differences were staggering. With the same amount of practice the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400%. The long-term-commitment group with, with a mere 20 minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term-commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.

As in piano, entrepreneurship sees its fair share of tourists. Toe dippers, looking for a thrill, occasionally take the plunge yet continue keeping an eye on that safe and inviting shoreline. Inevitably, they all swim back via quick flips, acqihires or giving up once they figure out that being a founder isn’t nearly as cool as they thought it would be.

And I don’t blame them. This startups stuff is hard on every level.

But there are a group of founders with a long-term commitment to practicing the skill of turning small companies into impactful businesses. And they made the decision, before they ever started or joined a company, that the path of entrepreneurship was for them.

This doesn’t mean they’ll never give up on their current idea. Nor, does it mean they won’t work within a large company. It means that the decisions they make and the experiences they accumulate will be feeding that long-term commitment to honing their craft as entrepreneurs.

PS- you can read the whole chapter this graph comes from here.

Wow. Just… wow.

"Sometimes I look up from my iPhone And see the train tracks whistle by Observe the trees responding..."

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:17:41 -0500

“Sometimes I look up from my iPhone
And see the train tracks whistle by
Observe the trees responding
To the windy whirling whine
Of cars, and cool collections of birds
And leaves or snow
And wonder how much else I’ve missed
By glass and steely glow”

- Joel Auge

Our first family piano! YES!!! (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:46:56 -0400

Our first family piano! YES!!! (Taken with instagram)

Addy in the leaves. (Taken with Instagram at Memere &...

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:04:14 -0400

Addy in the leaves. (Taken with Instagram at Memere & Pepere’s Yard)

Michelle made me a birthday breakfast. (Taken with Instagram at...

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:41:16 -0400

Michelle made me a birthday breakfast. (Taken with Instagram at Home)

When you gotta get comfy, you gotta get comfy. (Addy’s...

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:59:11 -0400

When you gotta get comfy, you gotta get comfy. (Addy’s asleep in her stroller). (Taken with instagram)

My girls: Michelle & Addison, loved. (Taken with...

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:07:14 -0400

My girls: Michelle & Addison, loved. (Taken with instagram)

Dad’s homemade tomato sauce… And I helped! (Taken...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:49:29 -0400

Dad’s homemade tomato sauce… And I helped! (Taken with instagram)

My dinnertime fly-fishing bass catch. (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:39:02 -0400

My dinnertime fly-fishing bass catch. (Taken with instagram)

Ethan & Addy on Vacay (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:36:09 -0400

Ethan & Addy on Vacay (Taken with instagram)

"A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough..."

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:21:22 -0400

“A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.”

- John C. Maxwell

HitGrab Levels'up.

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:46:57 -0400

HitGrab leveled up to new offices in downtown Toronto today.

HitGrab Levels'up.

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:46:32 -0400

HitGrab leveled up to new offices in downtown Toronto today. They are stellar. Come visit!

No One Cares About Making Cool Social Games Anymore

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:00:00 -0400

A country-life parable

Michelle and I bought our second house last September. When we were first engaged we would drive through the countryside around Oakville, Ontario (where she’s originally from) and marvel at the properties. We’ve always had this dream of buying a humble home in the country, having a huge plot for a garden and a beautiful green yard for our kids (currently just one, but we’re planning on having more. Kids, not yards.). We asked ourselves if it would be wise to make such a purchase at our young ages… but I didn’t want to wait. You only live once - and in the vision I’ve cultivated for my future with Michelle and our little ones, it was always pretty clear that’s how it would be. I’m a huge fan of how I grew up in Northern Ontario (I capitalize Northern because in my opinion, it’s a province all on it’s own ;) . Bugs, fish, wildlife, treks through the forest with my siblings. Always discovering, always learning something new. Very tactile. Very active. This vision I had for our home, Michelle had too - although she was a bit less sure we could make the step at that moment - but she trusts me, and once I set my mind to something it’s nigh-on-impossible to get me to give it up. I knew the limitations, the risks, the pros and cons, and we took the leap. Now we feel SO blessed to have this amazing spot in the country and we, and our friends, and families all love it. It’s paradise.

What is the paradise of Social Games?

I see it… and it’s the most amazing and inspiring potential ever. Right now, everyone is clamoring for DAU (Daily Active Users) and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and it’s all about audience size and making the most amount of money from them as possible with the next “sure thing”. It’s almost as if, the web-marketing world of ads and ROI had a baby with the gaming world and that baby’s cry is the loudest thing ever. And since no one likes to hear a baby cry, that baby is getting all the attention. But I’m okay with it. Because the paradise of social games is not a crying baby. And as long as everyone’s paying attention to the crying baby, HitGrab and I can focus on making a new baby. Uhm… not literally. My analogy might be weakening here… so let me move quickly to my point.

The Social Web and Games: A new baby

I had a conversation with someone from a MAJOR player in Social Games this past week at CasualConnect in Seattle. I asked him if his company (not Zynga) was focusing ANY of their resources on researching or developing new types of gameplay ideas and concepts. You know… the CREATIVE side of game design.

His Answer:

“No. We don’t want to divide our attention. We’re already chasing Zynga. We focus all our efforts on things we know will work”.

BOOM!

I could hardly contain my excitement when he said that. Opportunity strikes. As an entrepreneur, I can sympathize with the idea that “we need to focus on things we know will work” which in biz-speak is “we NEED to make money FAST”. Money is oxygen in business. You need money to pay your employees, invest in hardware and software and find more talented people to get your products out the door. There’s just one thing - after hearing so many people in the games industry saying that “games are a hit-driven business”, there are still so many competitors in our space who think there’s such thing as a “sure thing”. This contradiction confuses me - and personally, I think believing in sure things is complete BS.

The Catch about Sure Things: They don’t exist.

Simply put, MouseHunt did not succeed as a product because it was “a sure thing”. If you want actual statistical proof, here are a couple simple stats from our pre-mousehunt days in 2008:

Total HitGrab employees at HitGrab on MouseHunt Launch in March 2008: 4

Total number of game designers: 0

Total number of game developers: 0

Total number of people who thought they might be making games when they joined HitGrab: 0

Total number of people with any experience in the gaming field whatsoever prior to Mousehunt: 0

Total newbs to the game scene: 4

If my point is not clear, here it is: Fresh new ideas create the most opportunity. That is the only “sure thing”. The greatest leeps in life and business are not made by those who follow, they are made by those who lead. There are a plethora of examples. Here’s some food for thought:

1. Steve Jobs decides the cell phone is a crappy product overall - everyone’s experience on cell phones is sub-par to what it could be. He envisions a super simple 1 button device. Critics abound, saying that Apple would fail at making a phone: they have no experience in that market. Carriers are too hard to deal with. Other manufacturers have got decades of domain knowledge at their fingertips. It’s never going to work. The iPhone is released to fanfare and awe. Apple takes the mobile device market by storm. iOS becomes a new operating platform. A product ecosystem is born. 200 million iOS devices are sold. Billions of dollars are poured out to developers of apps for iOS. Google follows. Microsoft follows. The world is changed forever.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. The devil is in the details, you say? Perhaps. Here’s more…

2. Henry Ford decides the horse and carriage are too laborious for city-folk. Envisions a horseless town. He designs the model T production line to create cars en masse. He builds the first Ford factory. Ford becomes the first car manufacturer in the world. Chevrolet follows. Volkswagen follows. Everyone follows. An ecosystem is born. Millions of jobs are created worldwide, the oil industry absolutely explodes onto the scene, the world is changed (for better or for worse).

“Wait a second”, you say. “These guys had TONS of resources to work with to get their stuff out the door!”. Read on:

3. James Dyson, down-on-his-luck inventor, envisions a bag-less vacuum that doesn’t lose suction after several other inventions and no prior invention with any real market success. With the financial support of his art-teacher wife, Dyson spends years working on 5,127 different iterations of his vision before the Dyson G-Force is complete. The bag-less cyclone vacuum is born. Dyson product after Dyson product is released and Hoover, Electrolux and every other vacuum manufacturer tries to replicate the technology. Now worth well over 1 billion dollars, James Dyson still invents new things in his workshop - including the Dyson blade hand dryer and blade-less fan called the “Air Multiplier”.

Vision is essential to capitalize on opportunity. When someone tells me I can’t do something, or that my vision won’t work, it fuels the fire of that vision even more. Vision is also a whole lot more fun. It’s also worth working for. I was telling one of my team members the other night that I don’t want them to just see HitGrab as a step up to wherever else they might go… I want HitGrab to be a signpost in their life, pointing in the direction of their passion. That may not be HitGrab as it currently exists, but that’s my vision for it. I certainly can’t deliver on HitGrab’s vision alone. I need good people to help make it happen.

So, in summary, since sure things don’t exist, and the greatest opportunities come from fresh new ideas, why the heck does everyone keep doing the same stuff in social games? Because it’s making a lot of money? Sure. It’s making a ton of people rich and although that’s not entirely bad, it’s not entirely good either. Here’s the rub; When the motivation in business goes away from solving people’s problems, or making people happy, and turns to making money and focusing on the bottom line… something strange happens: The money starts dwindling because the people start leaving, because you’re not paying attention to them, you’re paying attention to the money. It’s a phenomenon that Jim Collins researches and documents quite well in his awesome little book “How The Mighty Fall”. It’s a great read. Go buy it.

HitGrab is focused on people. “To build deeply connected communities with games as the connection”. That’s what we’re going to focus on.

Alright. So here we are. The light at the end of the tunnel. Here’s my encouragement to you. Go out there and kick some ass. It hasn’t all been done yet. Just because something is making a lot of money, doesn’t mean it’s the best version of itself. Eliminating the bag in vacuums made north american distributors nervous about the Dyson. They were making good money on those bags. People HATED the bags. Not one north american company signed on to distribute Dyson products in 1985. The Dyson vacuum became an instant success in 1992, 7 years later when it was released in the UK. With devoted fans all over the world and a product that is seriously awesome, Dyson is still killing it. Let’s force ourselves to take deep risks and make huge strides. If you don’t do it, someone else will take the lead and leave you in their dust. In fact… never mind… don’t to it. I’ll do it. ;)

New Game on the Way...

Thu, 26 May 2011 12:55:00 -0400

I’m sitting here at my little corner desk at our Oakville, Ontario, Canada offices - just a few short weeks away from releasing our first major product in many many months. While some might say we’ve moved too slowly in our space (I’m assuming, though I’ve never heard anyone say that. Call it self-criticism if you’d like), I’d like to think we’ve made calculated moves on a bootstrapping budget. Regardless, we’re about to do something that statistically beats the odds; we’re about to launch a new game. Only 1 in every 5 games in production ever make it to market. We have every hope in the world that this game will find it’s own audience. It’s fun and simple to play, and challenging to master… and we’re going to make sure as many people get to play it as is possible under our guidance.

I have great respect for small developers who come into the social gaming space and commit their time and resources to doing something that moves the field forward. I try to instill that sense of ever-creative forward thinking to my team. It might just be the way I’m made, but I have this internal desire to break down some of the conventions presented to me in the social gaming field. I may not single-handedly tear them down - but I do my best to present the mountains to our staff and ask them to scale them in willful disobedience to said conventions.

An example: In nearly every single flash game on facebook (or anywhere else for that matter), the world you play in is tiny. Flash as a game engine is limited, in that it doesn’t easily allow a lot of animated information onscreen at once - at least not without hacking it. This has resulted in plethora of games without a sense of depth. We wanted a large, dynamic map with lots of animations and a world that stretches beyond the confines of the player’s viewing pane… so our flash team put their heads down, and under the demands of the game design, crafted an engine that can render hundreds of thousands of animations across a massive map with no noticeable performance decrease. To me, this is inspiring. A technical challenge is presented, and a solution is delivered that defies convention.

And just because I love this stuff, here’s one more example: A shared world. We have to admit it, most of the play in social games isn’t very social. It’s actually kind of insular. We approve the app in our profiles, start playing the game, and as a rule, are pressured to add friends because of either built-in game pain-points or because the game incentivizes us to distribute it to our friends. In reality, few of the features of most social games are actually social. As a money-making venture, and a distribution methodology, this is hard to avoid entirely. One of the goals of our design was to help players feel like everyone playing the game, is on the same game surface. We didn’t want to force players to be online at the same time to enjoy the social elements of the game, but we did want to build a shared experience in which players can inform each other about the state of the world. Our hope is that this helps them feel like there is a real reason for their friends to play. Here’s what I mean: One player needs to catch a fish… but that fish only comes out when it rains in a specific area. Sure, a tad bit frustrating… but it’s a shared frustration since you’re not the only one with that problem. EVERYONE in that zone, trying to catch that fish, has the same problem because it’s not raining there… for anyone. We’ve tried to make even the frustrations (and every good game has them), social. That’s different. It’s not conventional. It attempts something new. It also provides an opportunity for our players to go and actually communicate with other players. It might sound a little experimental, but until game developers actually try something different, the creative toolset we use to make social games will never change.

I wouldn’t even be building games if I didn’t think it was an extremely potent creative outlet. I’d be off somewhere touring and making music. Somewhere in the business of social games (which, to clarify, I absolutely love too…) there’s this immense opportunity to make something new. That’s why HitGrab exists. I believe that’s why people love to work here. I sure love it. I hope you love our next game > the HD trailer is here: (follow the little youtube link below…)

Sorry. It’s been a while. Here’s a post.

Tue, 24 May 2011 22:18:19 -0400

Sorry. It’s been a while. Here’s a post.

Homemade Maple Syrop

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:50:48 -0400

Well… I’m officially as Canadian as the clichés will allow. I have geese on my hockey pond, and my first batch of homemade maple syrup made from the trees in my yard on the counter. Pretty awesome eh?

alexanderfairchild: So my good friend Brooks Reynolds,...

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:14:17 -0400

alexanderfairchild:

So my good friend Brooks Reynolds, photographer, director, and vegetable enthusiast, told me to write a song and perform/record it all in one night at the studio (with the help of my able-bodied friend and co-producer David Kuwabara). So I did, and here’s the song, from the upcoming release of Alexander Fairchild’s fourth LP.

LOVE.

AF

Vacation time: 1 week. Goal: Learn a new skill (while loving...

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:27:00 -0400

Vacation time: 1 week.

Goal: Learn a new skill (while loving family time).

Status: successfully learned to juggle.

Bonus points: entertainment for family ;)