I’ve been thinking about the entrepreneurs whom I respect the most (based on their output rather than their interpersonal communication). Here are a few who come to mind:
- Steve Jobs (Apple).
- Todd Graves (Raising Cane’s).
- Harry Snyder (In-N-Out).
Well, those aren’t interactive media developers, are they? The closest is Steve Jobs, but the other two are… Fast food restaurateurs? I wonder why this is…
Let’s analyze: what do I believe to be the beauty of entrepreneurship? The ability to create products or services that make the world closer to what one wishes it to be. I’ve never been impressed with “market domination” or simply having a lot of money. Instead, what is most fascinating is the ability to carve out a small amount of space in the world that is closer to Heaven. The hope, then, is that these small spaces infect the rest of the world, having an impact outside of themselves.
Here’s the deal: With Steve Jobs, I believe that he made truly great products, and yet somehow they’ve been used for evil. That doesn’t mean the products themselves weren’t good. If it weren’t for short-form video, social media, pornography or predatory children’s media, I’d find iPhones and iPads to be quite brilliant. However, given their open ecosystems, some of these things just must exist.
And that actually brings us to a unique point: I also don’t find social media to be inherently bad. Let’s take Instagram as an example. When it was created, it was quite a useful app. Share pictures and add captions… And that was it. If I understand correctly, there wasn’t even an explore page at launch! If Instagram were still this, I’d be such a fan of it…
The problem — for me, not the market — is that it lost this focus. It became its own little sub-society in which I can watch videos, share “reels”, scroll, etc. etc. It became a tool for consuming your life rather than a tool for improving it.
Well, and in a way, this is what McDonald’s did as well. Hear me out: before Ray Kroc took over operations of McDonald’s, they served a similarly restricted menu. It was a place to go get a simple meal quickly when you didn’t have time for home cooking. It was notably not designed to be a viable option for every meal. Over time, however, the menu ballooned. Someone could realistically go to McDonald’s for every meal of every day and never get tired of the experience due to sheer variety. It, like Instagram, became designed to consume its customers.
All of the “good” entrepreneurs I mention designed tools. Once these tools became successful, what did they do? They improved on these tools. Did they add new features? Rarely, but if they did, they did so with extreme caution and intentionality. The “bad” entrepreneurs Started the same, creating a tool focused on a clear purpose, but then at some point there was a shift from products for consumers to consumers for products.
I simply hate that instagram has come to be so many different things. It is unfortunate that as a brand grows, one of the best strategies seems to be to generalize. I’m reading “Pour Your Heart Into It”, which is the story of Starbucks’ founder, Howard Schultz. While I would argue that Starbucks has avoided diluting its brand and its “tool” status better than many of the others mentioned, compared to what it was, it has become diluted. While reading this story, you can’t help but listen to Schultz as he reasons his way into brand dilution, consistently insisting that he is doing otherwise. However, as someone who does indeed enjoy a good PSL and generally finds the current starbucks brand appealing, I can’t help but imagine if someone like Todd Graves had been the facilitator of the Starbucks brand. I’d love to still hear jazz and learn about specialty coffees when I walked into a Starbucks… What a blessing to the world that would be. The sugary drinks are killing us!
To wrap all this up, I should talk about how I plan to avoid these same mistakes. For one, I want TABLEAUX THEORY to never go public. If you’re coming into this from a typical indie-game developer standpoint, it sounds a little silly that an indie studio would be thinking this way. It is not silly. I suspect it will be a viable option at some point for TABLEAUX THEORY to go public, but I believe that going public would hinder my goal of maintaining a “tool” status. A tool for consumers. In addition, always sticking to the core of “make video games literature” is essential. I also simply believe that my disposition naturally gives me the desire to stay lean rather than be abundant. If I want the business to live past myself, it would likely be necessary that I “duplicate” this philosophy to my successor. I really should look into how the Snyders kept purity intergenerationally…